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Gaza

POETRY

HARD QUESTIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read689 views

The incense trade route transported frankincense

and myrrh, saplings as well as resin,

aromatic and medicinal,

from what is now part of the Yemen

northwards along the Red Sea coast

and then north east across the Negev

to the port of Gaza and the Great Sea.

It was a twice yearly sixth month journey

for a millennium and a half.

As empires shifted the trade moved elsewhere.

 

***

 

The fabled Queen of Sheba and her

fabulous entourage of courtiers

and of camel trains carrying gold,

and spices, and precious stones,

followed most of the route on her way

to Jerusalem to surprise Solomon

in his royal citadel. She disbelieved

the tales she had heard about the king’s wisdom

and his wealth, and intended to ‘prove him

with hard questions’. He answered so well

that she gave him all of the gifts she had brought.

‘And she said to the king…the half was not told me’.

Perhaps she had just found out about his

‘seven hundred wives…three hundred concubines’.

 

***

 

Dispensing some self-righteous, PR version

of King Solomon’s ‘judgement and justice’,

and each worth considerably more than

any king’s bounty, a ballistic missile

will take ten minutes or so from the Yemen

to Israel and vice versa. Though empires shift,

and death smells of TNT and rocket fuel,

each apocalypse comes with smoke and fire,

and no answers.

 

 

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POETRY

THE APPLE ORCHARDS OF BEIT LAHIA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read463 views

‘The Carpet Bombing of Hamburg and Dresden’,

‘The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki’, ‘October 7th

and the War on Gaza’, might be chapters

in a book of moral tales, concerning

human ingenuity and indifference.

 

***

 

After the Pharaohs came the Romans, and later

the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British.

The orchards remained untouched – fruited each year

abundantly. High dunes protected the trees

from the winds off the sea, the sandy clay soil

nourished the roots, and families tended them,

harvesting each apple as if it were

alive and crystal. Now, in no time at all,

not any time at all, they are gone

under rubble and dust – aeons wasted

of sunshine and nurture.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

DO NO HARM

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read5.8K views

Dr Hassam Idris Abu Safiya,

paediatrician and neonatologist,

Director of Kamal Adnan Hospital,

Beit Lahia, Gaza, was kidnapped.

 

He was summoned by loud hailer. Someone –

a colleague perhaps – photographed him,

in his white coat, walking carefully

and decisively through rubble

towards an IDF Merkava tank.

 

Since then he has been imprisoned without charge;

savagely beaten; malnourished; denied

medication; and a change of clothes.

 

***

 

Will history judge these times as a

categorically defining moment?

The dichotomy, disjunction seems clear:

are you for humanity or hatred?

There are those who care, and those who do not;

those who try do something, anything,

to make a difference; and those who

trim, lie, exult. The Talmud tells us –

and the Koran echoes the sentiment –

‘Who saves one life saves all’.

 

 

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POETRY

ONE WEEK IN JUNE: FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read6.1K views

 

News agency photographs are frequently,

by chance, unacknowledged legislators.

 

In the first – singly or in family groups,

some on foot, others in donkey carts –

displaced people are travelling north

along the shoreline. To their right, our left,

is a bombed-out multi-storey apartment block.

Beyond, seawards, are what might be tents.

In the far distance are the tall white chimneys

of the coal-fired power station in Ashkelon.

 

In the second photograph five children

are playing on the beach building sand castles –

two young boys, two young girls, and an older girl.

Behind them, perhaps fifty yards away,

is the Al-Baqa Internet Café.

 

The third is taken from the Israeli side

of the border fence – two rows of razor wire.

Beyond them are hectares of building rubble.

 

In the foreground of the fourth, two young men

are carrying humanitarian aid –

one in a wheelbarrow, the other

in his arms – from a UN centre

in Bureij refugee camp, which was

established in 1949.

 

Since the photographs were taken – not quite

two months ago – a 500 lb bomb

has been dropped on the cybercafé,

and ninety two children have been starved to death.

 

 

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POETRY

CLUELESS IN GAZA

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

For Drew Steele

 

Two old men, one with a raggedy spray tan,

the other an industrial comb-over,

sat facing representatives of the world’s

media outlets, who appeared to believe

that public pronouncements by the one

with the orange face and the white hands

were to be understood literally.

 

Behind them a high-banked

coal fire appeared to blaze and crackle

in the hearth of a mantelpiece laden

with gilded objects. The older man

had – to ‘Stupéfaction Mondiale’,

as the headline in Libération put it –

just outlined his real estate plan

for one hundred and forty square miles of land

in the so-called Middle East, a plot

about the size of Las Vegas but with

a population two thirds the size.

 

The younger man smirked briefly. Few noticed

that, in the proposal for the final

solution to Gaza’s long history of

mayhem, the number of Gazans cited

was at least half a million fewer

than the estimate fifteen months before.

But, anyway, the whole lot would be cleansed.

 

Neither of the senior citizens

mentioned then, or subsequently, that beneath

the rubble-strewn and charnel house surface

of the Strip, and its contiguous seabed,

are extensive, untapped and unfracked

reserves of oil and gas.

 

 

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POETRY

PROMISED LAND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.8K views

A small group of Jewish Israeli settlers

has built sukkot – temporary tabernacles,

as the Talmud ordains, to commemorate

harvest time and Exodus – on a rise

not quite two miles from Gaza’s border fence.

The shelters have been built from steel frames

and tent tarpaulins bought at a camping store.

 

***

 

‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’

is the initial clause of the contract, the deal,

the covenant. The neighbourhood then was teeming

with gods and goddesses all vying

for obedience. Yahweh’s USP

was the promise of the land between the sea

and the river, the driving out of natives,

like the Hittites and the Canaanites,

– plus milk and honey, of course – in exchange

for unquestioning adoration.

 

Unmentioned in the covenant is one

of geophysics’ unintended

ironies. The land is placed where, in effect,

the different climatic systems of

Africa, Asia and Europe meet.

Consequently, winds are unpredictable.

 

***

 

Many of the peoples of the Book seem

particularly prone to war – Christians,

Jews, Muslims – so, in this small family camp,

all the men feel obliged to carry Uzi

machine guns slung on straps from their shoulders.

Not more than eight miles away black smoke

from the latest bombing begins to rise

on the urban skyline. Occasionally –

while the children are blowing bubbles,

for instance – as the wind shifts, the air

is briefly acrid. The settler families

are waiting fervently for God’s promise

to be fulfilled, and millions of people

be driven from their land.

 

 

 

 

 

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