I spoke with a mixed Ashkenazi-Mizrahi Israeli as he worked through his thoughts of the past and present, about Israel and the Nakba. I tried to capture the depth of his introspection with some poetry.
The conversations that don’t happen, as if dead on arrival,
Traveling in circles through the markings of a past reality.
The climate of taboo, turning knowers into self-censorers,
Hearts racing at ghosts, who linger because unseen.
He gets it, acknowledges the central question:
How does one explore another’s suffering when they don’t wish you well?
When your acceptance could fan fires of demonization?
He walks the streets of Haifa and Jaffa, nostalgic
About the what-could’ve-been, Jewish peoplehood integrated in a wider Semitic world,
Beirut, Damascus vitally interconnected with Jewish-Palestinian streets,
With a Tel Aviv that never rotted Jaffa away, but rather loved and married it.
A yellowing phonebook shows him vibrant shops of Levantine merchants, far and wide.
It’s but an artifact now, ever-eroding into sand and urban, industrial dust.
He ponders:
Does the suffocation of his tiny country have century-old roots?
To kibbutzniks who toiled for egalitarian utopias,
For something more progressive than Europe herself, at the interest-bearing cost
Of connecting not with the indigenes, sewing the seeds of a War of Independence?
The flow of this history perhaps so inexorable
That even his Eastern grandmother stowed away her name,
Which if cherished could’ve instilled in his father a curiosity to know his neighbor.
A project that washed away the bridges to Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine itself,
Ensuring the apple falls not so distant from the tree.
The Medford Pact 