The first answer is Beckett’s
in another context - to “Mr Beckett
they say that you are English?”
he answered “au contraire”
- he didn’t say “I am not dot dot”
which plays their game
- in this case the ones who play the a-s card -
of death threats hate mail talking tough
the usual cynical Goebbels stuff
so I say the same
and say that peace it must be talked
re Palestine and re Iraq
- Israel has got the bomb
but that’s not why
no one in their right mind
says Israel should be swept into the sea
- historic guilt
is and must be always with us
- it knows the railway line to Auschwitz
went unbombed
it counts the refugees turned back
and sees that Nacht und Nebel track
they called the Himmelfahrt
the long unthinkable - must be always thought -
- go back
see England and Ireland
force the Jews out
watch the Crusaders
those mailclad terrorist invaders
making rivers of blood
in Palestine
(not Virgil via Enoch Powell)
recall the Dreyfus case
anti-semites packed
in Austria-Hungary and Poland
Croatia the Ukraine
- the list is endless
it turns one’s bowels
and must be made in every generation
as we count the sinister 15+ per cent
of Le Pen French
- but they hate black people Arabs
and constantly attack them
the Battle of Algiers they’re still fighting
they want the guillotine brought back
in a culture built on comme il faut
and quite unwilling
to admit its faults
- so taste the deep uneasy darkness
in our Enlightenment
savants and philosophes going down the rungs
of that tight unsteady Aufklärung
back into that bony stinking ragshop
whence they sprung
(we mustn’t though be mastered by De Maistre
who in his manner sees what’s wrong)
as Berlin - Isaiah - shows
who dying called
for fairness to all those
- those Palestinians
he never named them
who suffered Nakba
(catastrophe in 48)
and still suffer it
- the refugees it’s now their turn
to have that human right - return
sold at Oslo down the river

* Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, wrote of British support for Zionism that Palestine would be "for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism". This poem first appeared in the London Review of Books.