By: Judith Ferster

I am a good friend

If you do not want me to intrude on your worry for your son
fighting for Israel,
I won’t.
If you tell me on October 7 not to say the words
“settler colonialism,” to you I won’t.
If you want me to add traumatized Israelis to my list
of people who need healing from this war,
I will. Who is not suffering?

But some Gazans are eating the edible weeds
along the roads
because they know which ones nourish,
though lack of water hurts
as intended.

I do not repeat
Ben Gurion’s claim there could not be
a Jewish majority state with so many Palestinians in it
or recount his militias pushing
them out of Haifa and Jaffa
even before the Arab armies invaded and expulsion began in earnest.
I am a good friend.

Custodians of the best liberation story of all time,
we hate people being denied rights
in Birmingham or Vietnam. We walked with Rabbi Heshel,
John Lewis, and Martin Luther King,
made common cause with them,
but now we worship a state that puts supremacy into
its Nation State Law. Where there are two peoples
in one land, one must prevail.
Is perpetual resistance rather than rights for all
the way to keep Jews safe?

I have been a bad friend.
For all this time,
I have been a very bad friend

The Right to Defend

Israel has the right to defend itself.
We hear it over and over, a mantra every commentator
must say. There is no speaking until you pray it. pr
Every nation has it , even those born in colonial blood.
Would you take it away from the DRC because King Leopold wanted rubber,
ivory, cacao, and cobalt wrested out of heart of darkness by guns?

No.
Or would you take it away from Iraq
and Syria because lines were drawn on
a secret map by Sykes and Picot, to carve Arabia
out of the victory of World War I?
No.

Or you take it away from Israel, a gift of Lord Balfour, antisemitic
dispensationalist who wanted all Jews
out of England and into the holy land
to bring Christ’s return?
No.

But would you take it away from an
an occupier pouring more than
needed weapons on the occupied?
Yes.

Palestine should be free from the river,
as the Likud charter says, to the sea.

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Judith Ferster published Songs of the Ovenbird in 2022 with Hermit Feathers Press and poems thereafter with Literary Yard.  She is a retired English Professor who is an activist on the environment and Palestinian Rights.