Robert Frost | Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

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Corruption is corruption, no matter in which community. We have had enough!

Salman Masalha ||

Of Turbans and Turbines

The country was in a frenzy last week due to the protest by Druze in the Golan Heights against the start of the construction of a farm of wind turbines on lands that belong to them. This protest elicited considerable solidarity among the Druze in the Galilee and on the Carmel as well, unleashing the suppressed rage among members of the community going back to the days of the despicable Nation State Law passed in by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in 2018, a Basic Law, which has quasi-constitutional status, that defines Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” with no reference to equality, democracy or minority rights, as well to the passage in 2017 of the Kaminitz Law imposing harsh punishments on illegal construction, aimed particularly at non-Jewish locales.

At the outset, it is necessary to distinguish between the Golan Druze and the Druze in the state of Israel within the Green Line, the 1948 Armistice Line, on several parameters. With few exceptions, the Druze in the Golan Heights, an area Israel annexed in 1981 but which is recognized by the United Nations only as Syrian territory under Israeli military occupation, do not see themselves as citizens of Israel. However, the Druze in Israel proper are citizens who fulfill all the obligations citizenship entails, including military and civilian service. The solidarity of the Druze in Israel with the residents of the Golan Heights is only natural, just as has happened in the past with the Druze in Syria or the Druze in Lebanon or anywhere else in the world. This solidarity is comparable to the Jewish solidarity with Jews  who suffer from persecution in some other place, and all the more so, as in the case of the Druze now, when the injustice is just around the corner.

I have followed the claims raised on the pages of this newspaper and many of them are justified, beginning with the absence of a master plan in Druze locales to shaky infrastructures and ever-increasing population density and overcrowding. The rate of natural increase in a situation in which there are no approved plans for construction of additional housing is impelling young couples to build their homes on lands privately-owned by their families and wherever possible, without permits. Thus, everyone becomes a lawbreaker who, under the Kaminitz Law, must repeatedly pay heavy fines.

The protest by the Druze in the Golan is a completely different story. For years now the Golan Druze have been in conflict with the global renewable energy company Energix, which is supposed to operate the turbines. They are struggling against a small number of landowners in the community who were lured into leasing lands upon which to erect the turbines. At Energix, they claim that they have advanced the project over many years in coordination with the “spiritual” leader of the Druze community in Israel, Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif. Sheikh Tarif is now saying that the spiritual leadership of the community “supports the struggle of the Golan Druze, and the claim by the Energix company that the entire project was advanced in coordination with him is incorrect.”

A look at the succession of events indicates that apparently the sheikh’s statements would not pass a polygraph test. It turns out that since 2015 the “spiritual” leader himself was acting to promote the establishment of the wind turbine farm in the Golan Heights, and in an interview to the Hebrew-language news site Ynet he said that the state was discriminating against the Druze in the Golan Heights in that it was not permitting them to establish a wind turbine farm. “Instead of making positive use of the situation at this difficult time and helping the Druze in the Golan Heights, the state is creating more discrimination and more alienation,“ charged the sheikh. He expressed anger at the fact that only Jewish businesses were being allowed to establish wind farms. He apparently wanted to urge Druze entrepreneurs to take up the project as well.

It turns out that Energix not only worked in coordination with the sheikh himself but also employed an associate of his and member of his family. We learn this from a manifesto published in 2019 by Druze inhabitants of the Golan Heights against the plan for the turbine and the people behind it. It was published as a response to a statement published in Arabic and directed at the inhabitants of the Golan on behalf of the Energix company and signed by two people: The one signatory was its CEO Asa Levinger and the other, who boasted the title of president of the company, was none other than Saleh Tarif, the former Knesset member and minister without portfolio, who was forced to resign in the wake of a corruption scandal – a cousin of Sheikh Tarif, who since then has been following the sheikh around in Israel and abroad, like a shadow.

In that statement signed by Saleh Tarif, he tried to indicate the turbines’ great benefits for the inhabitants of the Golan Heights. Among the many lures he enumerated: “Taxes that will be paid to the local councils and scholarships for Druze students.” He was also able to add that the project will lead to “strengthening of the connection to the Druze tradition.”

Spiritual leaders with turbans on their heads are supposed to deal with spiritual matters and saving souls, and not with winning converts on behalf of their close associates and turbine entrepreneurs destined to rake in profits at the expense of destroying the lives and villages of the Druze in the Golan Heights. Corruption is corruption, no matter in which community. We have had enough!

Haaretz, June 29, 2023

For Hebrew, press here

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Amos Noy|| CYCLAMEN

Amos Noy ||

CYCLAMEN

 
Wondrously I grew in a little house by a big wood[1]
In a world, far, far away,[2] with no law or anger
On a planet where no fathers stood.
 
My mother nursed me on milk of wolves
To be big, strong and wary of strangers,
All of them dangers, and not err in loves.
 
No cry baby, I never wept against my will.
My mother, the engine that knew she could[3]–
Pulled her lov’d boy,[4] flew us o’er dale and hill,[5]
 
Not hoping for superfluous miracles or omens.
No rain fell on the dusty earth, no cloud burst
And in corms among untrodden stones, fair[6] cyclamen
Withered in their hidden thirst.
 
Haaretz September 25, 2022

Translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden
 
---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_in_the_Big_Woods
 
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXDnFYu91vY
 
[3]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2EhWYGbi5o
 
[4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44455/on-my-first-son
 
[5] https://poets.org/poem/midsummer-nights-dream-act-ii-scene-i-over-hill-over-dale
 
[6] https://poets.org/poem/she-dwelt-among-untrodden-ways

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Natan Zach || The End of the World

Natan Zach ||

The End of the World

                                    translated by Vivian Eden

Completely at random, the world ended.
Trade in shares was lively, the weather splendid.
Lovers lay in beds and some on the sand.
Artists painted nature, if not the lay of the land.
Professors wrinkled brows and wrote of weighty things.
The season was any season: fall and also spring.

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W. H. Auden || Refugee Blues

W. H. Auden ||

Refugee Blues

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

*

Source

For Hebrew, press here

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Fady Joudah || Two Poems

Fady Joudah || 

Two Poems

  Sleeping Trees

Between what should and what should not be
Everything is liable to explode. Many times
I was told who has no land has no sea. My father
Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story
Of a sycamore tree he used to climb
When he was young to watch the rain.
 
Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being
Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.
 
My brother believed bad dreams could kill
A man in his sleep, he insisted
We wake my father from his muffled screams
On the night of the day he took us to see his village.
No longer his village he found his tree amputated.
Between one falling and the next
 
There’s a weightless state. There was a woman
Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree
In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand.
When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew
Could turn anyone into one-half reptile.
I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being
 
The only one left. When we woke my father
He was running away from soldiers. Now
He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs
About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king
And tried not to stop. He flew
But mother woke him and held him for an hour,
 
Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward.
Maybe if I had just said it.
Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe
I don’t know much about dreams
But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead
Know about the dying and sometimes
Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree
My father used to climb
 
When he was young to watch the rain stream,
And he would gently swing.


SOURCE
***

The Tea and Sage Poem

At a desk made of glass,
In a glass walled-room
With red airport carpet,
 
An officer asked
My father for fingerprints,
And my father refused,
 
So another offered him tea
And he sipped it. The teacup
Template for fingerprints.
 
My father says, it was just
Hot water with a bag.
My father says, in his country,
 
Because the earth knows
The scent of history,
It gave the people sage.
 
I like my tea with sage
From my mother’s garden,
Next to the snapdragons
 
She calls fishmouths
Coming out for air. A remedy
For stomach pains she keeps
 
In the kitchen where
She always sings.
First, she is Hagar
 
Boiling water
Where tea is loosened.
Then she drops
 
In it a pinch of sage
And lets it sit a while.
She tells a story:
 
The groom arrives late
To his wedding
Wearing only one shoe.
 
The bride asks him
About the shoe. He tells her
He lost it while jumping
 
Over a house-wall.
Breaking away from soldiers.
She asks:
 
Tea with sage
Or tea with mint?
 
With sage, he says,
Sweet scent, bitter tongue.
She makes it, he drinks.


Source

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Vivian Eden || WANDERING JEWS

Vivian Eden ||

WANDERING JEWS

            
Uncle Mendel, who had hair like
David Ben Gurion, was a payntner,
walls, not pictures. Afraid
of heights, he wouldn't climb ladders
or paint above the second floor. In New York.
 
Short on dollars, he saved a dime.
One Jewish New Year, Roish Hashona,
Mendel circled around the very big table
(eight aunts, eight uncles and Zaydeh remained),
dunking the one teabag into seventeen
yahrzeit glasses, not china cups,
of freshly boiled water.
 
Eppis, gezint, nu, takkeh, schoin
they'd chatter, and clink the glasses,
after dinner, Lishona toiva tikasevu,
as the younger cousins played team-tag
in English in the second-floor apartment
that smelled of mothballs and kasha,
keeping strictly out of The Boarder's room
while the older cousins
“went out for a walk,”
coming back smelling of smoke.
 
Aunt Rosie, who had hair like
Golda Meir, took in foster kids,
ninety of them in forty years. One made
money – In business? In crime? – died
young and left her a legacy in his will
 
so with bundles of kosher pots (dairy, not meat),
teabags and kasha, Rose and Mendel wandered,
by ship, not plane: Liverpool, Lisbon, Gibraltar,
Haifa, Marseilles, Buenos Aires and back.
Eppis, gezint, nu, takkeh, schoin,
Lishona toiva tikasevu.
*

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Salman Masalha ||

Death Retouched

All around pain is aflame
From the desert to the sea.
Here my blood is now fair game,
This land, an abyss for me.

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A government of poetic justice

 

Israel election results: Letting Gantz form Israel's next government would be poetic justice

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W. H. Auden || Funeral Blues

W. H. Auden ||

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

source

For Hebrew, press here

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Reaching Gandhi in Our Times

I re-read Gandhiji, but the texts did not translate into painting. How to retrieve him from his busts and statuary on the road side corners, city squares, from postage stamps and rupee notes?

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