The Grim Weather Ahead for Palestinians

 

Thomas Friedman’s recent piece (Aug. 13), in the New York Times, “A Geopolitical Earthquake Just Hit the Mideast,” is an almost complete survey of the various effects of the Israel-United Arab Emirates on featured players in the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Just go down the scorecard, and you see how this deal affects every major party in the region,” Friedman writes, “with those in the pro-American, pro-moderate Islam, pro-ending-the-conflict-once-and-for-all camp benefiting the most and those in the radical pro-Iran, anti-American, pro-Islamist, permanent-struggle-with-Israel camp all becoming more isolated and left behind.

 

“It’s a geopolitical earthquake.”

 

Well, maybe, but I’m thinking a geopolitical earthquake would be something more like a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement that included the creation of an independent Palestine sharing open borders with Israel. And a few other minor clauses that would redeem Israel’s biblical claim to be a light unto the nations of the world.

 

Ironically, Friedman’s scorecard showing winners and losers barely mentions Palestinians. Oh, yes, they dodged any further annexations of Palestinian territory for the moment.

 

Congratulations, all you lucky Palestinian exiles and refugees. It’s status quo for now. Worse, later, but I’m sure Thomas Friedman will get back to you about that.

 

Oh, wait. Friedman does assert that the UAE-Israel deal will force the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas to the “negotiating table.” Friedman is not clear about what will be served to Abbas when he gets to the table, but it’s probably more of the same old, same old. So, again, not a win for Palestinians, but nothing ever is for a people yearning to be free, right?

 

Anyway, Friedman’s scorecard does grind on, but ends in a happy place. “The UAE and Israel and the U.S. showed—at least for one brief shining moment that the past does not always have to bury the future, that the haters and dividers don’t always have to win.

 

“It was a breath of fresh air. May it one day turn into a howling wind of change that spreads across the whole region.”

 

Wait. What?

 

Oh, this just in. It’s not a geopolitical earthquake. It’s the eye of a hurricane. And it’s coming through Gaza and the West Bank.

A Universe Is Gone

I originally posted this poem, in July 2009 on my blog, In and Out with Jeff. At the time, I hadn’t yet set up Outdoor Poetry Season, my poetry blog. But a recent traffic report on In and Out shared the news that “A Universe Is Gone” had been visited by a viewer. I couldn’t remember what the poem was about, so I became its second viewer over some long, lonely, unseen, unread, unheard isolation.

 

It became immediately obvious after visiting the poem that I had not invested any energy in explaining why I had chosen “A Universe Is Gone” as the title. But the “why” of that choice is part of the message of the poem.

 

A Palestinian boy is caught in a crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian guerillas. He dies, the poem says. If it had pursued that fact further, the poem might have added, more crudely, his life is snuffed out. He is collateral damage.

 

And his father, Abu? He has lost everything. He holds his son’s limp body, but everything the boy was is gone. Every version of the older boy, the young man, the father, the old grey head that he might have become is also gone.

 

Two thousand years ago, during the heyday of rabbinical Judaism, some rabbi from yeshiva nestled in the hills around Jerusalem, interpreted a biblical passage to mean, in plain English (or plain Aramaic, anyhow) that whoever saved the life of an individual saved an entire universe. 

 

How’s that for an ethical principle? It means that to the Jews of the Rabbinical period the range of what any given person might achieve during a lifetime was pretty near infinite.

 

And so, when a Palestinian child is gunned down…

 

 

A Universe Is Gone

 

Remember the Palestinian child

caught in a crossfire, in a lethality of rage?

Crouching behind his father?

Crying with desperate faith

 

in his abu, his shield?

Moments later, the caption said,

the boy was dead,

his father forlorn

 

with wounds that will never heal.

Each day dawn comes with new grief.

Neither the garrison state

nor the tender virgins console Abu.