Prioritising Jewish pain while Gaza is in ruins
Published
by
Leah Levane
JVL Introduction
Michael Rosen has written another powerful poem for this moment: this moment when Trump is talking about creating “the riviera of the Middle East” (I think that Beirut was the major holiday destination until the 1975 Civil War). This is a moment when we are seeing the intense suffering of Palestinians and yet Jewish pain gets the attention. We are in a moment where the allegations of antisemitism are still being made about those of us who support justice for everyone and recognise the Israeli occupation and siege as at the heart of this “conflict”. A moment when creating analogies between what is happening to Palestinians and the terrible things done by Nazis to Jews is considered antisemitic while calling those who oppose what Israel is, and has been doing, Nazis is somehow OK.
Of course, as a poet, Michael explores this and more, much better than this writer’s prose. We thank him for permission this poem, that he originally shared on his Facebook page.
LL
Rudyard Kipling
best known for the Jungle Book:
Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, Akela and the rest
and (with the help of Disney)
the Bear/Bare Necessities,
also wrote about the White Man’s Burden
a poem that urged America to
colonise the Philippines.
The burden in question was the moral duty
of the white man to civilise brown people
who, as he put it in the famous poem
about this ‘Burden’
were ‘new-caught, sullen peoples,/
Half devil and half child.’
The phrase
‘white man’s burden’
has also been used mockingly
to jeer at the ‘burden’ of pain and distress
the white man has carried
as he enslaved, exploited and genocided
his way across the world.
It’s a phrase that has occurred to me
over the last year
as the death toll in Gaza has mounted
and the pictures of flattened apartment blocks
rows of shrouded dead bodies
naked prisoners
and limbs lying amongst air-raid rubble
have reached us,
and, more recently
the images of thousands of people
on long marches home
to homes that don’t exist
while here there are some journals,
media shows and social media accounts
which have ignored this destruction,
mass killing, maiming and orphaning.
and focussed entirely on
Jewish pain,
which in theory, should be my pain too.
I have followed threads which
have meticulously reported on the personal strain
of being a Jew in London
the horror of reading signs that say
‘from the River to the Sea’
the shock of seeing
the amalgamations of Stars of David with swastikas
the terror of knowing that
Jeremy Corbyn is free to speak in London,
the factual evidence in graphs that show a line
slanting upwards like the face of the Matterhorn
showing the increase in antisemitic incidents
(though whether these do or don’t include
people swearing about Israel is not clear).
I’ve read articles
pleading the case that when the Chief Rabbi
referred to the Israeli army as
‘our heroic soldiers’
we should most definitely not take that as reason
to blame him or anyone other Jew in Britain
for anything that the Israeli army is doing wrong
– not that the Israeli army is doing anything wrong,
they often add.
It’s obviously antisemitic
they point out
to say that supporting Israel here
means we are responsible for anything
over there.
The old principle that antisemitism
is hating Jews because we are Jews
has slipped away.
Antisemitism now includes
hating Israel
or indeed caring too much
about the victims of Israel’s army and airforce.
I’ve even checked myself
when I winced watching Israeli security forces
beating up ‘Torah Jews’.
I realised I was unknowingly showing latent antisemitism
towards those security forces.
So I return to the newspaper columns
and social media posts
carefully mapping the pain of being Jewish
telling of the analogy
with what it was like to be Jewish
in Germany in 1938 at the time of Kristallacht
when 267 synagogues in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland
were destroyed,
over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed,
and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.
and between one and two thousand Jews
were killed or committed suicide.
When the hostages from October 7th emerge
I read that this is like the survivors
from the concentration camps
and there is an audible shudder
at the analogy
with those pictures from Belsen, Auschwitz,
Buchenwald and the atrocious rest.
But then, as we can,
at the touch of a key on my computer
I can read, see and hear of the thousands of
mangled and incinerated bodies
in Gaza,
even if these don’t appear on the social media
posts that talk of what should be my Jewish pain.
Then,
if I voice this,
a stern correction comes
which explains that these deaths in Gaza
are the people of Gaza’s fault.
They are responsible for their own deaths.
And other people chip in explaining that
they’re not really from Gaza anyway
and that they should all fuck off to Egypt.
Given that these posts are full of talk of
Krystallnacht
(or Tsarist pogroms that my father says
his grandfather used to play out on the kitchen table)
I look back at how the Nazis
in 1938
sold German families
lovely children’s board games
where the pay off for your winning counter
was to send the Jew in his fur coat
‘nach Palestäna’
‘to Palestine’
so Germany could be ‘judenfrei’ (Jew-free)
or ‘judenrein’ (clean of Jews).
And there was a beautiful teutonic vision
of a pure Aryan ‘Übermensch’
(super-people),
cleansed of the congenitally mentally or physically
disabled
cleansed of ‘gypsies’ and ‘Jews’,
and cleansed from German history too.
‘No Felix Mendelsohn or Mahler now, grüss Gott’).
And over the top of the thousands of corpses in Gaza
comes the voice of Trump and Netanyahu
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich
and indeed
the calm media voices explaining the nuances of meaning
in Trump’s plans to ‘clean out the whole thing’
(meaning Gaza)
and this glorious vision
of Jewish lands stretching
from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river
(not at all like that racist image of
‘from the river to the sea’, please God)
and people explain on social media
that there never was a Palestine,
the ancient mosques and churches
were just some kind of arbitrary
incursion by Ottomans or Crusaders
and now that they have been
(or will be, thanks to Trump)
flattened,
they will slide from history
like sandcastles in the sea.
My analogy with Rudyard Kipling is wrong though.
His ‘burden’
I should remember was the pain of civilising brown people.
Now, I read,
that’s not the task in hand.
Now,
the pain is having to hear people
going on and on about Gaza.
I read and must understand
that every photo of a dead Palestinian
is really Jew-hate.
With that sentence
I read that
the suffering of that Palestinian person’s family
(if by luck or chance that family has survived)
is wiped away
and it’s replaced by my suffering
of having to look at the photo.
Michael Rosen
February 2025
ORCHESTRATION
Let’s keep things simple
The Israeli hostages evoke memories of Auschwitz
The Palestinians probably did something
And therefore needed to be imprisoned
Without a trial or evidence, to be tortured
And humiliated in order to redress a moral imbalance
There is no equivalence between a soldier
In an army legitimately protecting settlers from settling
And a child buried accidently beneath the rubble
Of a school or hospital being used for criminality
Israel is supported by Britain and America
Palestine has no friends in the Western media
Dear Michael
Your phrase ‘the calm media voices explaining the nuances of meaning’ is a description that I have been searching for in my barely contained anger about the reporting of Palestinians’ suffering, for which I thank you.
Thank you also for never cowering before the purveyors of the Israeli narrative. I hope that your words are read widely.
I have friends in Deir Al Balah, Al Mawasi and Jenin and elsewhere in Israeli occupied Palestine. In my view the need to support Palestinians and their right to plan their future in Gaza and all of Palestine including an end to the barbarism of nigh on 77 years of occupation has never been more necessary.
Thank you Michael. Thank you for expressing and exposing the doublespeak, the twisted thinking, the distortion of humanity, the distortion of Judaism, that we are now witnessing in the politics and media of the Western world. A continuation of the colonial mindset.
Israel is certainly not supported by me, or indeed the majority of people in the world.
nor me nor by people many I know. Bless Michael for a brilliant exposure of THe MSM and Israel.
The part at the end moved me to tears
This so clearly describes the agonies of
Palestinians.
Wonderful if horrific
Dear Michael – Thank you for expressing my feelings so much more clearly than I could do, hardly bearing to look at the photos or read the accounts of what is clearly an ongoing genocide committed supposedly in my name, and that of “all Jews”. Not this one! We march, we sign petitions, but the massacre goes on. May the torment of the Palestinians cease forthwith.