REPLANTING THE JEW

                                                        Painting by Felix Nassbaum

 

 

When the Nazi’s

Killed off the Jews and argued that they

Were a separate nation

And after the war the American’s

Taking up the same argument

Moved towards resettling all of them in Israel  
                                                                           Felix Nassbaum ,1943 

Murdering very many on the transit

Nobody thought of whether the Christians

Could be so resettled in a homeland,

Or for that the Buddhists, Sikhs, or Jains.

Would the Hindus who would rush off to America

At the first chance like to stay back

Thinking that India was their homeland?

The Palestinians who were the traditional settlers there

Sometimes Muslims, Coptic Christians or Ashkhenazi Jews

Were displaced from their land                                                                   
Creating tensions 

In the region                                                                    

And huge walls were built that were difficult to scale

The Nazis must have laughed

Because they could easily replant the war

And the murders no more affected them.

 

The hegemony of monoculturalism

And its dirty ‘Weltanshauung’

Argues for this tragic episode

Of genocide, witch hunting and unending conflicts

While the real question

Was how to deal with a minority

In each country                                     (Palestinian artist Baha Al-Qidra 

                                                              paints a large banner of Yasser Arafat)

In an egalitarian and just manner

Allowing for multiculturalism to flourish

A Jewish settler in India or elsewhere

Should have been allowed to live there

If they so preferred.

The majoritarian Fascisms of any sort

Would like the other to perish.

And could not see that people from Their own community

Could be a minority somewhere else.

 

This is the tragic dilemma

Faced now by the Israelis and the Palestinians

Or Indians and Pakistanis-

The internal and external wars

The weapons build up

The boundary problems

How else can these be solved

Other than by the readiness

To accommodate difference in our midst

Forgetting pristine homelands

Meant only for one’s own kind?