All Over the Place: Can a Jew Join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) against the State of Israel…

Or Can a Jew Be
Anti-Zionist and
Still Be a Jew?

By Michael H. Brownstein






Judaism is my mother – pure and simple –
not my ethnicity, my skin color, my nationality.
I never was a Zionist, but I was proud of Israel,
her history my history, her identity a piece of my identity,
and then I read a chapter in Carolyn Forché’s book
Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness¹ and everything I knew,
believed I knew, believed in, believed about me,
vanished into shadows of night. I tried to ignore it,
but a scab did not form, a scar did not make a permanent tattoo.
In the end you give in (I gave in) and then
you sleep and when you wake, there is no longer power to a myth.

There are always “ifs” in a rendering of history
and many sides to the same tale, even the same fiction.
The atrocities of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict –
The Nakba – have been documented, photographed,
displayed and archived – and still the great myth of Israel persists:

King David Hotel.²
The Christian village of Biram.²
Hula.²
Lydda.²
Deir Yasin.²
Safsaf.²
Eilabun.²
One hundred villages.
Two hundred.
Four hundred fifty.
A mother and her baby.²

We were the first terrorists, said Ben-Gurion, the leader of new Israel. The Jews were the first.²

This is why freedom of speech is valuable – this is why the written word is great –

this is why I, too, can join my Palestinian brothers and sisters and say enough is enough

no matter what the President of The United States claims – no law is greater than humanity’s –

so, yes, I offer my freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of choice

and join the BDS Movement with the blessings of Torah,

the moral lessons of my father and his father before him,

everything good within this world.

_______________

1. Full title: Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness , an anthology edited by Carolyn Forché. 1993 
2. A history of the atrocities performed by Israel upon the Palestinians can be found in my book, Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah, a Books on Blog^TM publication issued October 2012 by the Camel Saloon, from which this poem is adapted.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.