The hills rolled by like waves frozen in time
Dear Palestine
I sigh at the mention of your name, for it is the enigma of my mind
Many a civilization rose and fell
And it is just ourselves and ruins that have been left behind
And the powers still rise to this very day
This time, it is the settlements that eat your hills away
I see them now, high walls and red roof tops
Followed by gates, checkpoints and signs that tell me to “stop”
The message is clear, I’m no longer welcome here
These places house fanatics, and I’m not talking Al-Qaeda
But American Jews, dreaming of Judea and Samaria
Living in the Biblical era
They walk around with their Uzis and M-16s
Shouting in Hebrew, “mauvit l’Aravim!”
“Death to the Arabs” – that’s what it means
I stop my thought to find that we approach Jenin
A city green with life, of stone and mortar like any other
Only it is known as “the capital of suicide bombers”
Just another corner of history
Which makes the holy land the unholy to me
We are horrified by their ability to take innocent lives
But I think of how they lost the will to live
And gained the will to die
Desperate men who lost sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers
And then got preyed on by shady vultures
Saying “if you die for our cause, your family will never go without bread”
The choice becomes theirs, to watch their families starve
Or to embrace death
“Never mind” the bullets, bombs and bulldozers they faced
What they had was by no means an ignorant hate
And within a house in Jenin I saw a portrait
A son and a mother, both shot dead by an Israeli sniper
And I say in my head “O’ Palestine, you drink too much blood and not enough water”
Four year old child or fully armed soldier
You drink it all the same
Arab, Jew or the blood of any other
And I saw graves where this blood bore fruit
On the walls a sombre question, “what did we do?”
It was in Jenin’s refugee camp, I remember now
Of how the homes were once bulldozed into the ground
I dwelled a while before we continued our journey
To a friend’s newly built home, with beautiful scenery
At the balcony, I stared North into the distance
For just beyond that hill over there lay Tiberius
The Sun set in the East and rose in the West countless times
Until I was back to that fateful day
In 1948 when my family was driven away
My grandfather had just finished a home by the lake of Galilee
And I know that it is a place I may never see
I pictured all of them going to Lebanon and Syria
Among the mass expulsion, war and hysteria
To some, a war of independence, to us a catastrophe
Pride makes enemies
When it concerns race or nationality
That powers that be intervene, and interests meet
The boot stamps down on the neck of the weak
I’m tempted to simply say “such is the way”
Yet I persist in repeating “not today, not today”
And the enigma remains, Palestine, why can’t I let it go?
Why is it that people lust for you so?
And a gentle breeze took me back to the present
My journey, just for now, had ended
