Last week I went to a meeting where two members of Standing Together spoke. Standing Together is a grassroots movement of Jews and Palestinians in Israel working for peace, equality, and social and climate justice (website here).
At the meeting, organised by the recently formed Sydney Friends of Standing together, Shahd Bishara and Nadav Shofet gave personal accounts of their involvement in the movement. Shahd Bishara, a Palestinian Israeli medical practitioner, said, among other things:
The liberation of Palestine is inextricably intertwined with the security of Israelis. Two peoples both live in the land that both call our homeland. We need to fight for freedom of Palestinians and the safety of the Israeli Jews.
Nadav Shofet, an Israeli Jew, spoke of the absence of an alternative narrative to the genocidal one of perpetual war put forward by the Israeli right. Standing Together aims to fill that vacuum with a narrative that includes hope.
There’s much more to say. Standing Together has been attacked from the right in the USA and Europe, and from the left in Australia. My comments section isn’t open for that debate. The ABC covered the visit here.
Without wanting to in any way trivialise the struggle that was the subject of the meeting, I kept my ears open for an iambic tetrameter that could kick off an Onegin stanza. I got one. Nadav was referring to the narrative vacuum when he used the phrase, ‘In this environment of silence’. I have taken it somewhere else.
(The Emerging Artist says I should give links to W. B. Yeats, ‘Long-Legged Fly’ and Hopkins, ‘The Habit of Perfection’. Sadly I don’t remember the name of the Italian poet who inspired my last line.)
Verse 8: In this environment of silence
In this environment of silence
minds can move like Yeats’s fly
upon the stream, or can with violence
leave democracy to die.
Silence sings if it’s elected.
Silenced hearts by fear inflected
can’t or will not have their say –
stony, look the other way.
Silence thrives when life's unruly –
words as weapons, words as toys,
words as endless streaming noise
leave no room for words that truly
come from hearts that seek to heal
whose uvulas are made of steel.
Me fail? I fly! 