An essay in poem form.

American Independence Day, late at night.

I learned today – or was it yesterday? – from a book of fiction about a fact I didn’t know. In April of 1948 there was a strategic and planned offensive against the native inhabitants of Haifa, orchestrated by the Zionist so-called “militias” and supported by the British. It was called, in Hebrew, Operation Passover Cleansing, the Palestinians being the ones “cleansed.” This operation in Haifa was just one part of a much larger and wide-spread offensive – a descriptive word – across the region designed on purpose to expel and/or exterminate – the Zionists clearly didn’t care which – the Palestinian people from their own land so that it resembled, if you squinted, the lie of “a land without a people” for the Israel about to be born.

But here’s the thing:
all these years I have been carrying
Grandma’s story
in my body, its beating heart
being those four months from wedding day to frantic flight.
And though she told me of her fear,
of the acts of terrorism she witnessed or heard of or experienced,
as tragic as it all was, I always
imagined those acts as haphazard.
Terrifying, yes.
Inexcusable, yes.
Cruel and horrific, yes.
But done by men in banded groups who lusted for land and power
guided and motivated only by their own personal greed.
Of course, in the past 24 hours I can see
how naive
that thought was.
Even well-organized and well-armed
bands of Zionists
bands of terrorists
would have never, could have never evicted
hundreds of thousands of people bound
to their ancestral lands by the cords of their own heartstrings.
If I had thought about it more, the truth
would have been obvious to me. But I hadn’t
until yesterday. And today,
reading about the precision with which the powerful
men of the Zionist cause purposefully
routed my family
my people
from their homes – the true horror of it sank in
heavy and profound, weighing deeper down even to my left big toe.

These powerful people were arranging and fighting a war
complete with battle commanders, tactics and strategies
offensives and operations.
And my people, my poor people, were their enemies,
their victims doomed
to lose because they didn’t even know they were being attacked
until it happened,
until after it happened,
until never.

I always wondered why my grandparents fled when they did>
Why that moment,
that month,
that day.
I never really asked her that question outright but I don’t think
she knew
even to her dying day. But I know
now.
Things felt too tense, too scary, too risky too dangerous, too threatening
that day because of Operation
(ethnic) Cleansing
because men in offices somewhere had pointedly decided
to turn up the pressure in the first weeks
of April in Haifa,
to increase the attacks, the bombs, the random murders
of the innocent in their homes,
the explicit threats.
Grandma felt more scared than ever before precisely because
she was meant to feel that way.
And I learned today
that my grief over what happened to her, to them,
to us,
could still grow,
that my indignation could still raise up its head,
heartbreak like heartburn,
that must be swallowed again, re-digested,
metabolized in that long, long process through my brain and chest
and gut again to reach a place of love and forgiveness,
to choose these things over hatred and
the thirst for revenge.

After October 7, the writing of my grandma’s book
allowed the metabolization to happen, to make the anger
digestible
but this new knowledge has brought it all up again.
And what story is left for me to write?
Especially now, when our own country, this country where
Grandma finally found her belonging
is on the brink of its own catastrophe
a nakba that still impacts Palestine in increasingly horrific ways –
terror and trauma
version 12.0
even as it threatens our own land, too.
From sea to shining sea.
From the river to the sea.
None of us is free.

None of us is free
from these old men, these
old, dysfunctional, delusional white men
with their lust for power and their greed,
sitting in their offices in Moscow and Tel Aviv,
Jerusalem and Mar-a-Lago and Washington DC,
making merry
war against the innocent poor who are too distracted by
their daily striving to survive
to know or notice that they are being systematically
attacked
evicted, exterminated.

And me? What do I do
but sit here with my blue pen that writes so smoothly
across the blank page?
What do I do
but sit here with my beautiful children, as bonny and blithe
as an English summer’s day?
What do I do
but sit here and pray
and pray and pray?
Pray that my God’s righteous anger burns at least as bright
as mine.
That karma is as much the bitch that she is reputed to be.
That these old men in their offices
the evil-doers and yes, even the ones whose evil deeds
are plastered over with good intentions
will suffer heart attacks and strokes, or an aggressive
cancer like the ones they have been in this broken, battered world.

These are not Christian thoughts for a priest, some might say.
But what I know of God is that He or She or They
is not put off by our honesty. That prayer is the place
for our hottest anger, where it can be absorbed,
metabolized, digested,
by God’s all-consuming love.

And so I pray for these old oppressive men.
That their evil may somehow disappear and do us no further harm.
For I am full to bursting of the harm they have done.
And I pray
that when they are gone – however that may be –
that we are strong
enough, courageous enough, generous enough to ensure
that they will never again be replaced by so much more
of the same.

And I pray
for my grandmother whose dust sits still
and quiet in its cupboard-like grave.
I pray
for the girl she once was, for the grief she knew and the fear
she so faithfully faced.
I pray
for the woman she became who weaved her tale
to me, unearthing all the treasures that remained,
indelible markers, the gifts of her pain.

I wonder now
if perhaps she knew, after all,
I was only twenty-one
when I sat before her on her couch, recording
her laughter, poring
over albums and photos in their frames,
a legal pad perched upon my lap and a blue pen
gliding smoothly over the page.
I was then
nearly the same as her own age on that terrible day when
she boarded the boat and sailed, nauseatingly, away
from Haifa,
“cleansed” from her home. Maybe she saw me
in all my naivete
and chose to tell the story in
just a certain way – not a falsehood or a fiction –
but haphazardly
leaving out the old oppressive men
preserving for just a few decades longer my faith
in the goodness of my fellow man.
And if that is the case,
if she knew,
then maybe there is hope
for me, too, to regain that faith
as she did in the end.

Or so, at least, I pray.