We All Come From There

The promised "next post," regarding the over-achieving cohort of Indian college students and its relationship to the sky-rocketing suicide rate of this same cohort, will have to wait. Israel has suffered another suicide bombing and so, as is their wont, they are bombing Gaza again and, as is their wont, the Palestinians are throwing rocks again.

OK, okay. That is a very bad attempt at self-deprecating humor. The Palestinians have protested more mightily than by lobbing stones; they are firing rockets. Some have even landed. Ok, okay. I'm just trying to point out that there's a reason the Israelis were able to successfully evict a majority population of Arabs from the land of Palestine and herd them, along with their armies, into two tiny and unproductive plots of land in the fifties. The Palestinians, no matter how Israel tries to depict them as desperate threats, don't really have a credible, well-operating army. How could they. They're basically prisoners, in their own country.

On a completely serious note, what is happening right now is that following the terrorist attack on a bus in Southern Occupied Palestine aka Israel, Israeli soldiers chased the perpetrators (minus the two who blew themselves to pieces along with the Israeli bus driver and several passengers) to the nearby border shared with Egypt and right over that ever-precarious line in the sand into the Egyptian Sinai. In the course of their pursuit they shot, depending whose news source you read, Haaretz or El Jazeera, three or five Egyptian patrolmen on duty at that border.

I would like you to think for just a moment what Israel's government might order if Egyptian officers pursued Israeli citizens across the border the other direction and (oops!) inadvertantly shot and killed, say, offhandedly, three to five Israeli soldiers who were not offering any resistance. I don't think there's anyone over 18 and literate on this whole planet who does not know this reverse situation would be the tipping point of a major, resumed armed conflict.

So instead of talking about brighter than bright Indian students who are sent to American universities to bring home all the honors, I would like to doff my figurative cap for a minute of silence and offer a couple of poems.

"I Come From There"

by Mahmoud Darwish

(translator unknown)

I come from there and I have memories

Born as mortals are, I have a mother

And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.


I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up

To make a single word: Homeland.....

and here's another one, from a Palestinian American woman, Naomi Shihab Nye:

"Blood"

"A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"

my father would say. And he'd prove it,

cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn't have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
"Shihab"--"shooting star"--
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, "When we die, we give it back?"
He said that's what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?