(This is a spontaneous, highly emotional, not very well structured rant from some time ago which takes as long to read as it took to write. I’m leaving it as it is however, because it says what I wanted it to say then and what I want to say now. It shows the anger I felt at the time I wrote it, and since I feel that anger even more passionately now, because much worse has happened in the months since I wrote it, I’d like it read now.)

This I am told,
That because I am a Jew,
I have a right
To drive people from their land,
And to kill them if they will not be driven.
I have a right
To live in house that was not built for me
But for the family who lived there till I threw them out
With no concern for what would become of them
I have the right
To build prisons for people who stand in my way
Because they stand where I want to stand.
I have a right
To shoot people
For people who dare speak out against me,
Who dare resist me,
Who dare to want to stop me from doing what I do,
To let people die through poverty and sickness
So that they cannot resist me,
Cannot stop me taking what I want from them,
Because, after all, I have a right.
And who tells me this?
Traitors tell me this.
Traitors,
Whose ancestors would weep at their cruelty,
Ancestors who were driven from their own lands,
Thrown out of their own homes,
Imprisoned for being in the way of their enemies,
Shot for daring to speak against their hardships,
Who lived and died
Surrounded by horror and inescapable fear.
What would they say,if only they could,
To their children, and their children’s children,
Who have with such bitterness, such arrogance,
Trampled on their heritage,
Spat on their history,
So sneeringly ignored the lessons so painfully learned,
Betrayed their unspeakable sufferings
By imposing a new and terrible suffering on innocents
In the name of the suffering of the innocents of the past.
Is this what it means to be a Jew?
If it is, then I am not a Jew.
And so the traitors tell me,
Because I am myself not a traitor.
But then I think,
It is my ancestor’s suffering that defines me as a Jew,
Because I was born out of that suffering.
I am a Jew
Because the only right I claim
Is the right to share this world with my neighbours
Who are as human as I am
And, if I am deserving of respect,
Are deserving of it too.
That is what makes a Jew.
This is what my ancestors have taught me.
This also I am told.