Invisible Eyes

 Invisibilise

To a one sided academic


invisibilise decades of trauma
plo massacres of school children
Israeli athletes castrated
by Black September murderers at Munich

invisibilise the psychic wounds
a synecdochal sample, one of many:  1979
samir kuntar crosses border,  murders Danny Haran, then smashes the skull of Danny’s 4 year old daughter Einat Haran, her baby  sister Yael Haran suffocates to death while the terrified mother tries to keep her from crying and revealing their hiding place.
upshot? upon release from Israeli prison, in prisoner exchange, kuntar awarded Syria's highest medal and honoured by Iranian President mahmoud ahmadinejad,

invisibilise the successful
torpedoing of the Oslo peace accords by
wave after wave
of hamas suicide bombings
blowing up teenagers at a
discotheque
leaving dancers armless and legless
or pensioners at a pesach seder,
hands trembling a little
as they navigate
spoon to mouth and then trembling no more
bits of flesh in the chandeliers

invisibilise
twisted buses, twisted bus stops
charred bodies, only dna
able to establish who they were
as they headed to market
to buy tomatoes and cucumbers

invisibilise the stabbings
teenagers taken to caves
their hands bound, bodies punctured
with knife wounds

invisibilise
bombs backed with rusty nails
and bolts to tear flesh apart

invisibilise 19 year old
Ori Ansbacher
raped and murdered while walking home
later the grove planted in her memory destroyed by Palestinian vandals.

invisibilise the psychological torture, the television threats
"we'll destroy you just as you were destroyed 80  years ago",
invisibilise the relentless cyber attacks
the gross caricatures, the demonisation, the dehumanisation

invisibilise the
pile on in western “progressive” democracies
by trade unions, professional associations, teachers, academics, artists, journalists, all suddenly and myopically focussed on their shadow aspects of self projected onto Israel. Safe. Easy. Convenient. How many Israel-lovers you gonna rub shoulders with at work or in your university or union or book club?

invisibilise the ecocide
the daily missiles from Gaza and Lebanon, thousands of them
setting pine forests, planted for the love of Zion, ablaze and driving
terrified jackals and hedgehogs and lizards who manage to escape the flames towards the illusion of safety
the fruit
rotting on the trees
farmers unable to attend to their crops

the ballistic missiles fired from Iran and Yemen
the size of buses, designed to maim and murder and terrify
stopped only by Israel’s commitment to protect its citizens

and by Arab ‘allies’,  who vilify Israel in public but quietly co-operate with it, recognising Islamists, not Israel, is the threat

  
invisibilise  the raped and then murdered 

On October 7 2023

the kidnapped,
a red haired baby and toddler bother, whole family
snatched out of their home
whereabouts unknown. 

Judih Weinstein Haggai, seventy years old,
English teacher, poet, peace activist who worked with children with special needs. Who used meditation and mindfulness techniques to treat children suffering from anxiety caused by years of rocket fire from Gaza that have plagued residents of the Gaza border area. murdered with her 72 year old husband Gadi Haggai on October 7,
along with Thai workers, Nepali students, Beduin, Russian, French, US, UK, Ukrainian  nationals, 

invisibilise
the high on Captagon crazed Islamists
shoving machine gun barrels up the bloody vaginas
of the women they've just gang raped
or towing dissidents roped behind motorbikes
around the streets of gaza
throwing homosexuals and political rivals off
rooftops, enforcing a terrible homogenity and
preaching mediaeval blood libels
and then
weave some kind of fairy tale that this
regressive barbarism
equals
"the resistance"

invisibilise the war in Sudan
8.5 million on brink of starvation
and Yemen, Xianjing, Tibet, Myanmar, Ukraine, Syria, gender apartheid in Iran, Afghanistan
no poems for them
no self righteous indignation
no resolutions in local councils, no condemnation at the UN
no marches in the street

close one eye
so you only see gaza
not the other side of the border
so you don't see the North of Israel
depopulated by more missiles than the blitz
150 000 more
pointing at you

or the corpses of murdered hamas captives

left to rot in Gaza, held as trading cards

and to psychologically torture their grieving families 
so that they cannot get closure

close one eye
so you only see the Al Jazeera curated and carefully edited snippet
not the before or after

close both eyes
so you don't see yourself
staring back at you in the mirror
preaching and sanctimoniously stealing
your cheap and easy rectitude

one thing I know for sure
if you sat where Israelis sat
compacent smug fucker
you'd be doing a whole lot
worse than them

___________