On the occasion of the 118th anniversary of the birth of Pastor Martin Niemoller Jan. 14, 1892

First they came for the Palestinians with knives and guns in Deir Yassin and Kifr Qassem and we didn’t speak out because we were commies and the Labor Zionists were building a workers’ paradise

Then they came for the Palestinians with laws and set up a system of apartheid but we didn’t say anything because Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East

Then they decided – what the fuck – let’s just take the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan and be done with it and because we were Judeo-Christians before we were leftists and secretly believed that God told Moses that he could have the whole place anyway we averted our eyes but quietly murmured to ourselves “Yessssssssssss!”

Then they refined the concept of extrajudicial murder and killed Palestinian poets Ghassan Kanafani and Kamal Nasir but it escaped our notice because we were fashionably absorbed in protesting Vietnam

Then they decided to get their proxies to kill the Palestinians in Jordan and Lebanon and we kept our mouths shut tight because we were busy working on our MBAs

Then they went after anyone else who might support the Palestinians and got America to invade Iraq and they even got off their own fat asses to try to go after Hizbullah but we were mute because by then we had all become feminist Islamophobes

Then they decided to throw everything they had at Gaza and not only killed and burned hundreds of living human beings but even went after the dead, tearing up cemeteries so that the bones were scattered to the four winds but we didn’t speak up because Chomsky told us the most effective action was to write to our senators begging them to please, please, PLEASE not support Israel quite so much

Finally they came after our posse comitatus, our first amendment rights, our stock market shares, mortgages, retirement accounts and our precious standard of living and we tried mightily to open our mouths and speak but by then our vocal chords had dried up from lack of use and all that came out was a choking, death-like rasp

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J.A. Miller is a grandmother activist from the Middle West who spent many years traveling and studying in the Middle East. She has published essays on Counterpunch and DissidentVoice as well as poems in the manner of the Burma Shave highway signs of her youth at www.PoeticInjustice.net, some of which will be included in their upcoming anthology, Poets for Palestine. Miller is currently writing a book on the Protestant origin of the Zionist project. She can be reached at jsec_miller@hotmail.com

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