(Netanyahu: ‘God Has Given’)

How do you do it?
How do you persuade yourself
That it’s right
To give the order
Which will see the crushing,
The tearing apart,
The shattering,
Of so many living human beings?

How do you feel, thinking about
How they must feel,
The horror of what they see
Happening around them
To their children,
Their mothers and fathers,
Their friends and neighbours;
The confusion of flesh and metal,
blood and stone,
brick and bone,
The stabbing terror of knowing
That their own existence on this earth
Will end an hour,
A minute,
A second from now,
The constant shock of the noise
Hammering into their brains,
The explosions,
The screams,
And the longing
For it all to stop, just stop, just stop?

How do you persuade yourself
That what you are doing is right?

Actually, I think it’s easy for you.
You just don’t think about these things.
You don’t care.
You’ve placed yourself
So far above these people
Who are not you
That when you look down
You don’t see human beings,
Sharing all the human passions
And all the human hopes.

You don’t see men,
The husbands, the workers, the craftsmen,
The traders, farmers and shopkeepers,
Looking after their families
Sharing their lives with their friends.

You don’t see women,
The wives, the workers, the mothers,
Tending to their crafts,
Tending to their homes, their sons and daughters,
Full of hopes for what these might become.

You don’t see the children,
Just learning the lessons of what life means
And what they want from it,
Living in the worlds they imagine,
Discovering the power of dreams,
Hope and trust
Their chief instincts.

And nor do you see the newborn
Whose lives will not only be short,
But will be nothing but pain;
Babies:
Fragments of sudden
And inexplicable anguish,
Loveless, joyless,
Lonely in their absolute dread.

No,
You see microbes, germs,
dangerous in their insignificance,
Needing to be cleansed
From your world,
Your world of bitterness, of hate,
Of arrogance, of greed,
Of supreme self-regard.

I wouldn’t expect any of this
To mean anything to you,
Even if you did ever read or hear it.
Although you live in my world
What you do not do is live in my world.
You hear the word compassion
And it is just a sound,
While to those you are killing
It is everything,
Because they now long for it
With their entire beings
Even knowing
That it is too late
And they will never find the relief,
The soothing,
That comes from the kindness
Of those who wish to help
To transform their suffering into peace,
But cannot
Because you will not let them.

I don’t usually hate,
Because I,
A Jew like yourself,
Was always taught that hatred is wrong
Destructive of humanity,
Damaging to the soul,
But now I can’t help it:
I hate you,
You, the absolute master of hate.
For that, and for all else,
You have my curse.

When your time comes,
And you feel your own life dribbling to a pointless end,
May you look upon your life,
And realise
That your death robs that life of its reason,
That you have lived to no purpose.

May you in your last moments,
Hear each and every cry,
Each and every scream,
Raining from the bloodied mouths
Of every-one you murdered,
And so feel in your flesh,
Your blood,
Your bones,
Every pang they felt
In the hours, minutes and seconds
Before their deaths.

May you see the ruined faces of
Each and every one of those souls;
May these souls load you down
With the whole burden of their infinite pain
And may your last agonised thought be,
Even as their endless anguish
Burns its way through you,
That you should have lived a different life.

Then may you realise,
In a single scorching flash of despair,
That the God whose name you were given
Didn’t even know you existed.