Seen at the War Protest, April 20, 2002

I believe there is no place for two people in our country… Palestinians are like lice. You have to take them out like lice.
---Rehavam Ze'evi, Israeli Minister of Tourism, assassinated by Palestinian extremists in October, 2001.


Someone has removed the Star of David
from the center of a
light blue-on-white Israeli
flag, and replaced it with a Nazi
swastika. Accustomed as I am to
the gruesome inversion
of Palestinian cobble-slings
and the underdog King
of the Jews --- Goliath now
a battalion of Israeli tanks ---
this new semeiotic
violence succeeds
in shocking even
me.

Certainly,
certainly, I tell myself,
there must be a difference of degree
and kind
between the exterminations of
the Master Race
and the depradations, universally
denounced, of Sharon's
invasion of the West Bank.
Not just
the numbers,
smaller a thousand times,
not just
the culpability of terrorism's
provocation,
not just
the lack of any attempt to kill in-
discriminately.
But attaching to this Hitler and Auschwitz
the atrocity
of the Shoah.

But the facts of the matter,
the revanchist facts
on the ground, testify
with cartographic eloquence,
from Ma'ale Yisrael, Ma'ale Adumim,
Givat Ze'ev, Kiryat Safer, Gush Etzion,
and Har Homa where 90%
of Umm Tuba/Sur Bahar has been
disappeared, settlements
spliced to mesh net into noose.
With holocaust
survivors rising in the Knesset to denounce
the use of identity tag tattoos on
Palestinians being mass arrested,
while the XXX pornography
whip-pans from satellite to TV screen,
jump-cutting the whirlwind
scene to obscene
from the Passover massacre in Netanyu
to the rubblecadaver that once was
Jenin, I keep asking,
why? Why, why, why, why does it take so much
slaughter, to continue to lie,
to yourself?

Cut down in high feast
as the shards of their self-
detonating assassin
penetrated them at their Seder,
what in the hell were they
celebrating? The deliverance
of Moses? The Divine
infanticide of the first born
of Egypt?

What type
of Promised Land
is this? AB-? O+?
Or Texas light sweet?
I am tired of having my collar tailored
with the blade of Abraham.
I am tired of having Jerry Falwell and John Ashcroft
play George Orwell's Big Brother.
I am sick to death of having Never Again
being used to excuse
it Never Ends.

Isn't it time,
hasn't that midnight tolled,
aren't we too old for that pumpkin
to still be a carriage?
Isn't it time
for the horses of this apocalypse to turn
back into mice?
Isn't it time
to admit that the One True God
with the Three True Multiple
Muslim-Christian-Jewish Personality disorders
needs to be worshipped freely
in any way
that isn't
literal,
or lethal?

There is no more room
for faith based initiatives
launching passenger jet missiles
into the occupied territories
of downtown Manhattan.
There is no more room
for faith based initiatives
bombing gay night clubs
and family planning centers.
There is no more room
for faith based initiatives
engaging in pre-emptive retaliations
to colonize the land of God.
And there is absolutely no more room
for faith based initiatives
launching bunker busting nukes
from Dimona, Lop Nor, Islamabad
or the nearest B-52 to service
the insatiable 4x4 god of
Iraqi-Kuwaiti-Iranian-Sa-udi-Arabian
Caspian basin crude.

Somebody has replaced the Star of David
with a Nazi swastika,
my God my literalist fundamentalist God
I say from the protest in Washington,
I wonder who.