Where Are The Peacemakers?

I cannot bear to look at the images from Israel and Gaza yet I cannot bear to look away.

A dead child does not judge. Whether her last moment came at the edge of a Hamas blade or at the white heat of an Israeli rocket explosion is meaningless. When one precious child is lost, revenge, belligerence and corrosive hatred won’t restore life. Those things will take - are taking - more lives. This is the way of wars - men’s wars.

I’ve read 100,000 words about this war. They are all true. Hamas is an evil monster. Israel’s repression of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere is immoral and has nourished the Hamas beast. Neither of these things justifies the other. And yet they have been used and will be used to justify each other until the last dwellings are crushed and more children are sacrificed in the name of “winning,” a pathological male preoccupation. This is the definition of a vicious cycle. The men will fight until there is nothing left to fight over.

Among the thousands of words, not a sentence explains how the continuing violence will solve anything. Hamas terrorism will not loosen the stranglehold Israel has on Gaza. The Israelis will tighten their grip. The bombing or ground assault on Gaza will not eliminate or discourage rabid terrorists - it will inevitably breed more.

Not a word explains how a child’s dead body - Israeli or Palestinian - will soften a heart or invite deeper understanding. And for those children who survive, what peace lessons are learned? How will a next generation learn to live and love together when their streets are reduced to rubble and they hear nothing but the whistling of bombs, the wailing of their mothers and the hot war talk of the men?

I’m not naive. There will be no immediate peace. Too much blood has been let. No lone peacemaker, like the brave soul in Tiananmen Square, will stop the madness.

But war will not bring peace. Poets and musicians will bring the peace. There is a language of love that can cross the political and religious divides. There are peacemakers in Israel and Gaza. The United States provides billions of dollars of war machines but not a dime for the peacemakers. Are we all complicit through our silence or our stubborn intellectual insistence on who is right?

The only words with moral strength are “No,” “Stop,” “Peace,” and “Love.” There are voices in Gaza, Israel, and a growing number of countries around the world that are singing and chanting these words. All anyone can do is join this chorus and hope the sound eventually overwhelms the calls for revenge and victory.

At times like these I revisit the eternal truths offered by the late poet and acquaintance Grace Paley. We must all cry out like Cassandra.

Responsibility

It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet

It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman

It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners

giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets

also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at

because of the screaming rhetoric

It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy

to hang out and prophesy

It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes

It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory

towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C

and buckwheat fields and army camps

It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman

It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman

It is the poet's responsibility to speak truth to power as the

Quakers say

It is the poet's responsibility to learn the truth from the

powerless

It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no

freedom without justice and this means economic

justice and love justice

It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original

and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems

It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it

on in the way storytellers decant the story of life

There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no

freedom unless

earth and air and water continue and children

also continue

It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on

this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be

listened to this time.