Pleading For My Land

For those of you who never read or heard it-because it was in french- here is a "poem" of Herbert Pagani. I translated it -as good as i know how.
Just Wonderful.

11th of November 1975

Yesterday I was in the subway when I heard two ladies say :
“Did you see those Jews with their stories at the UN, those trouble-makers!”

It’s true.
We are trouble-makers.
It’s been centuries that we’ve been harassing the world… It’s in our nature!
Abraham with his unique G’od,
Moses with his Tables Of The Law,
Jesus with his other cheek, always ready for the other slap.
Then Freud, Marx, Einstein,
they were all annoyers, revolutionists, enemies of the Order.

Why?

Because no Order, whatever the century, could satisfy them,
given that they were always excluded from it.

To reassess, to see ahead,
change the world to change destiny,
this was the fate of my Ancestors.
This is the reason why all supporters of all implemented orders hate them.

The anti-Semite of the right blames the Jews to have provoked the bolchevist revolution,
It’s true. There were a lot, back in 1917.
The anti-Semite of the left blames the Jews of being the owners of Manhattan.
It’s true, there is a lot of Jewish capitalists.

The reason is simple:
Religion, culture, and the revolutionary ideal from one side,
wallets and banks on the other side,
are the only transportable valuables, the only homeland to those who don’t have a homeland.

And now, that it exists,
the anti-Semitism is being reborn from its ashes
–sorry! From our ashes-
and it is called anti-Zionism.
It was applied to individuals, now it applies to a nation.

Israel is a ghetto, and Jerusalem is Warsaw

…the Nazis who besiege us talk Arabic
And if their sickle is disguised in a crescent,
it’s to better trick the Left, all around the world.

I, a Jewish left-winger, don’t give a damn about a left
that wants to liberate men at the expense of other men,
because I am precisely of those.

All right for class war,
but I’m also for the right of being different.
If the left wants to include me in, it can’t ignore my problem.

And my problem is that since the roman deportations,
in the 1st century after Jesus Christ,
we have been, everywhere, cursed, banished, stalked, betrayed, denounced, crushed, despoiled, burnt and converted by force.

Why?

Because our religion,
which is our culture was dangerous.
Yes, dangerous!

A few examples…

Judaism was the first to establish Shabbat, day of the Lord, an obligatory, weekly day of rest.
Imagine the “joy” of the pharaohs, always a pyramid too late!

Judaism forbade slavery.
Can you imagine the reaction of the Romans,
antiquity’s most important wholesalers of free working force!

It is written in the Bible: “Land doesn’t belong to men, it belongs to G’od”
From this results the law of the land which automatically reassesses the ownership of the land every 49 years.
Can you imagine the effect of such a law on the popes of the Middle Ages and the empire-builders of the Renaissance!

It was important that people didn’t know…

So they began by forbidding the Bible,
then there were the disparagements,
walls of calumny that became walls of stones, and that they called ghettos.
Then there was the Inquisition, the pyres, and later the yellow stars.
Auschwitz is only an industrial example of the genocide, but there were thousands other handcrafted genocides.
I could spend three days only naming the Spanish, Russian, polish and North African pogroms.

Fleeing, running away, moving, the Jew has been everywhere… and he is from nowhere.

We are amongst the countries, like a child in public assistance:
I don’t want to be adopted anymore.
I don’t want my life to depend on my owner’s moods.
I don’t want to be a citizen-tenant.
I’ve had enough of knocking on History’s doors and to await the “come in”.
I’m Coming in and I’m yelling!
I’m home on earth and on earth I have my land.
It has been promised to me, and the promise will be kept.

What is Zionism ?

It can be defined in one simple sentence:

“Next Year Jerusalem”

No, it is not a Club-Med motto.
It is written in the Bible.
The best selling and the most wrongly read book in the world.
And this prayer became a scream, a cry of 2000 years,
And the father of Christopher Colombus,
Of Kafka,
Of Proust,
Of Chagall,
Of Marx,
Of Einstein,
and even Of Mr Kissinger,
repeated this phrase, this cry, at least once a year, at Pessah.

So is Zionism racism?
Make me laugh!
Is “sweet France, dear country of my childhood” a racist anthem?

Zionism is the name of a liberation combat.

Each one has got his “Jews” in this world:
The French have the Bretons, the Occitans, the Corsicans, the immigrant workers.
The Italians have their Sicilians,
The Yankees, their blacks,
The Spanish, their Basques.

Us, we are the Jews of ALL

And to those who’ll tell me: « but the palestinians ? »
I say” “I’m a Palestinian of 2000 years.
I’m the oldest oppressed of the world”

I’ll debate with them but I will never give up my place.
There is space for two people and two nations.
The borders must be defined together.
But the existence of one country can’t by any means exclude the existence of the other,
and the political options of a government have never reassessed the existence of any nation.

So why Israel ?

When Israel will be out of danger,
I will choose amongst the Jews and my arab neighbors, who is my brothers-in-thoughts.

Today, I am united with all my alike, even with those I hate, against this big insurmountable enemy: RACISM

Descartes was wrong:
“I think therefore I am” means nothing.
It has been 5000 years that we have been thinking and we still don’t exist.

“I fight therefore I am”

Herbert Pagani

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4p9zl_herbert-pagani-plaidoyer-pour-ma-te_music