Abe Louise Young: New Seeds for Old Stories

When I was a child, everything I heard & read about Israel was aspirational. We saved our quarters in cardboard boxes emblazoned, “Plant Trees In Israel!” People said, “Next year in Jerusalem!” to mean goodbye, to celebrate New Year’s Eve. We sang of Yisrael in plaintive prayers that seemed older than petrified wood. Being connected to something ancient made me feel more real (and when you are a little girl, many things conspire to make you feel unreal.)

Now, I understand that this Israel I learned of is a myth. Yisrael is a timeless spiritual space–the holy core, the center of everything. But Israel was built like a physics equation spliced into a river, a laboratory sent into a bloodstream. An equation with an error. A country built on top of another country, another culture it tried to bury, thinking the world too busy or guilty-feeling to care about the human beings living there; naming the Holocaust’s collective loss reason enough—good reason—to move in, to push out, with carte blanche.

An example: Today, I learn that the editor of the Jerusalem desk for the New York Times lives in a house built above a house stolen from a Palestinian editor and BBC Arabic Service journalist named Hasan Karmi. Hasan was forced under threat of death to leave his home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world. The Karmi family became refugees from Palestine in 1948 so a Jew fleeing Nazi Europe could move into their house (free of charge), could call it his own address and refuge: Israel. 

Did he use their plates? Their artwork? Did he keep or destroy Hasan’s library? Where are their family papers and embroideries? Their birds and their dog, Rex? The children’s clothes and toys? The president of Hebrew University inscribed his name on the facade. When the New York Times bought the new home built on top of it, the Karmi family had been erased. 

I cannot celebrate or sing about this plot. The words that rise up are unfair, unjust, unholy.

I spoke to my father yesterday. He said, “There were very few Arabs in Israel when it was founded. Just a few, and they left willingly.” I said, “Dad, you’ve been lied to. Have you heard  of the Nakba?” “What is that?” he asked, “propaganda?” I order an oral history collection about the expulsion of 750,000 Arab people from Palestine to be sent to his doorstep, a Hanukkah present. He sends me Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. A miracle for whom?

Israel today denies that the people of Palestine exist as people. They are called dogs, human animals. How else to pretend that you did not steal their beds, their roofs, their gardens, doves, foods and dances, make them flee barefoot, execute them in lines against a wall? How else to pretend you do not confine them in prisons and a concentration camp, fly drones overhead that shoot bullets at anything that moves?

But people are not easy to erase. They write poems, keep archives, have children to tell stories to. They wear iron keys to the stone homes their great-grandparents built around their necks, even as they starve in plastic tents in the rain.

They share videos on Instagram of white phosphorus, made in Arkansas, burning through the legs of infants. They share videos of singing together while bombs drop, of baking bread on a metal plate held over burning paper as Israel starves them. They share videos of people they love dying, of mothers mourning, of babies and bodies pulled from rubble; they write new endings, they cry on camera. We hear the voices of Motaz, Plestia, Bisan around the globe; we read poems by Mosab, Rafaat, Naomi out loud.

What can we do? What can we do? How do we turn the hands of history, interrupt the seige? Around the world we call and plead with politicians to stop sending money and bombs to Israel, we hang ceasefire signs from buildings and overpasses, boycott, mass in millions to march, we watch our glowing phone screens and retch as we see Israeli snipers execute Palestinian children, soldiers press buttons to bomb mosques, bakeries, hospitals  and universities. We cry out as we see the apartment buildings fall with families inside them, rage as we see Israeli soldiers laugh and dance with the lace underwear from dead women’s dresser drawers.

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All this for a myth. For stolen land. All this for a myth. For stolen land. To make a place for Holocaust survivors and atone for European crimes, to help Western presidents control the Middle East, and again, again, for white people’s “safety” at the expense of brown people’s lives. Again.

Israel, this is not the way home. Israel, we must look in the mirror. Yes: descendants of a holocaust immediately created another holocaust: oh painful, terrible truth. Oh repetition compulsion. Oh catastrophe. Truth tribunal, please commence; help us into a true story.

Those who continue to slaughter must be restrained by all nations of the world working together. The sacred, battered place must become one where people of any faith and race can live in freedom, without violence or apartheid, with equal rights to enjoy bread, love, children, the sea and the sunset, stories and buying tomatoes.

Each stolen home, each stolen acre of Palestine must be returned and every prisoner freed. 

To tell of the lives stolen, of murdered fathers and mothers, teachers and bakers, fishermen and painters, newborns and toddlers, schoolchildren and teenagers, their hopes, skill, love and humor, will take many generations. This telling must be done. Each name of a soul taken must be spoken, engraved and gilded, embroidered with tatreez; each life must be grieved.

I was taught as a child to save money to plant trees in a desert called Israel, an imaginary place where a people without land discovered a land without people. Now I understand the killing myth, an anathema to faith. I want the money Jewish children save to go to the people of Palestine for five hundred years. I want all the years of the U.S. payments, $318 billion to Israel, to pour into Palestinian hands as reparations. We must return what was stolen, heal what was harmed, apologize for every life ended. Let the next trees planted be peace groves, be olives and oranges watered by indigenous hands; protected by safe, loving, hands, tree-tending hands.

Let us learn from them how to live again on holy land.

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Copyright 2024 Abe Louise Young

Abe Louise Young’s work has been published in Poetry, The Nation, Narrative Magazine, The Abbey, New Letters. She’s the author of several books, including Heaven to Me: Poems and Magical Foods & the Mason Jar Life. She lives in Austin, Texas and works as a writer and creativity coach while advocating for unhoused people.