.
The Gaza War
The Gaza war goes on and on
With death and ruin in its wake.
A war hard fought but never won;
Like sifting water from a lake.
And yet a war that must be fought,
War born from war from war from war,
The price to pay if peace be bought;
Forever war forever more.
Immoral moral snares and traps
That may or not be worth the cost
Of war that can’t be won, perhaps,
But can, most certainly, be lost.
.
.
Hamas—The Creed
“You cannot kill an idea with bullets.” —Old Saying
The Intifada’s for one Palestine, not two.
__To kill Israelis, even one,
Is worth the cost of martyrs’ blood—the price that’s due
__Until, at last, jihad is done.
Kill forty-thousand we’ll birth forty-thousand more
__And forty-thousand yet again.
Young girls will grow to birth new children trained in war;
__Young boys will grow to die as men.
From Gaza’s smoldering ruins Hamas will arise
__To live and fight another day.
For from the midst of death and suffering, the cries
__For justice are our hope and stay.
For Israel can’t kill us all, they never will,
__Our martyrs’ blood will bring reward;
And from the river to the sea, we’ll fight until
__The whole of Palestine’s restored.
.
.
Peace Plan
The paths to Middle Eastern peace are clear.
The first: For Israel to disappear
Once more into the dust of history
So Palestine can celebrate being free,
Rejoined as one from river to the sea.
The second path would be, so I believe,
If all the Palestinians would leave,
Evaporate, and vanish in thin air.
In short, there’s little hope if both are there.
But if no path to peace is there? Then where?
.
Poet’s Note: My poetic response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel can be found here: “A Psalm of Lament for Israel”
.
.
James A. Tweedie is a retired pastor living in Long Beach, Washington. He has written and published six novels, one collection of short stories, and four collections of poetry including Sidekicks, Mostly Sonnets, and Laughing Matters, all with Dunecrest Press. His poems have been published nationally and internationally in both print and online media. He was honored with being chosen as the winner of the 2021 SCP International Poetry Competition.
How dark and desultory!
Excellent if bleak poetry, James, which express some difficult truths. I don’t agree that peace is impossible between the Jews and the Arabs. The fact is, Israel is home to 2,000,000 Arabs who enjoy every benefit of Israeli citizenship from serving on the Supreme Court to being president of hospitals and who serve in the IDF. Peace between these two peoples is entirely possible. But those radical fundamentalists who refuse to accept Israel’s existence are a different matter. They’ve been attacking Israel over and over since before the UN Partition and they simply cannot abide a non-Muslim state in the Middle East. They’ll torture history, engage in the worst kinds of defamation and they’ll promote genocial antisemitism rather than even contemplate the justice of Israel’s existence. As Golda Meir famously said, there will be peace when the Arabs decide that they love their children more than they hate the Jews. As has also been said, if the Arabs put down their weapons there would be peace. If Israel puts down its weapons there would be no more Israel. And lastly, how simple it would be for Hamas to release the hostages, surrender and allow the people of Gaza to receive the enormous amounts of food that they have stolen. Hamas is 100% responsible for this war and 100% responsible for the suffering of Gaza. Most people who aren’t burning with an irrational hatred of Jews can see that.
James’s three poems are courageous, since they touch on issues that are bound to ignite flareups of anger and resentment. The three issues are the seemingly endless course of the current war in Gaza, the explicit genocidal fanaticism of Hamas, and the now exploded hope that there can ever be a “two-state solution” to a dispute that has been going on since 1948.
I agree with Brian Yapko that there can be peace between Israelis and Arabs. If Egypt and Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states can live with the existence of Israel, then the possibility is shown to be viable. But as Tweedie’s last poem asserts, it’s not an issue of Israelis versus Arabs, but Israelis versus Palestinians.
It may be true that you cannot kill an idea with bullets. But I recall how William F. Buckley answered that argument: “Perhaps you can’t kill an idea, but you can certainly kill an ideologist.” I recall reading how someone high up in the Czarist secret police told government ministers in the 1890s that a young radical propagandist and activist called Lenin was extremely dangerous, and should be assassinated. The government did not order the killing, with results that were catastrophically tragic for the entire planet.
The brainless governments of France, Spain, Ireland, Canada, and the U.K. have recognized or are about to recognize “Palestine,” a non-existent state that will never exist. This is posturing and virtue-signalling of the sort that does nothing except cloud the real issues of race, religion, and culture.
The issues are complex, but that is why poetry can be so powerful: your first poem is extremely cogent – in its simplicity, and yet complex in its ambiguous resolution of ‘cost’ with ‘lost’. Excellent work.
So much truth is here so succinctly expressed in three short poems. I really liked the 6-4-6-4 metrical form in the second one.
Evyatar David. Need I say more?