Prominent Canadians speak out against the war on Gaza - Judith Weisman - Jan 08 2009

I listened the poem which Judith Weisman said on the end of her speech and I found the transcript so I offer it to you it also :

Transcript of video:
DAVID ORCHARD: Our next speaker is Judith Weisman. Judith Weisman is a Toronto psychotherapist, a member of Independent Jewish Voices, and a founding member of Not In Our Name, Jews for a Just Peace and the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of Palestine.

JUDITH WEISMAN: Thank you.

I think everything that's important has already been said, except for one thing, and that is that this didn't just start when Israel began to invade and bomb Gaza. This didn't just start when Israel invaded Lebanon. This didn't just start when Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza and the Golan Heights. And it didn't just start in 1948, when Israel ethnically cleansed over 700,000 Palestinians from their own homes and homeland and killed many of them in the process.

It started at least in 1897. And what started it was the virus and the horror that I now consider is Zionism. Zionism is the scourge of the Jewish people. It is Zionism that has created all of this. It is the Zionists with their nationalism and with their rejection of all that is good within Judaism who have created a horror in this world.

I came today — actually my arm had to be twisted, because I have not been that well — but I had to speak out once again. I had to say what is in my heart because I, a Jew and a former Zionist, who was a committed Zionist and wanted to live my life in Israel, as a supporter of Israel, wanted to live in a Kibbutz, where I would live on the land of another people, not knowing and not understanding what it was about. It took me many years for the scales literally to fall off my eyes and to see what Israel had wrought among the Palestinians, and the influence that Israel now has around the world, and the power that Israel and the United States together are using to control so much of what is happening in the world.

I'd like to end by reading a poem that came to me and is written by Lawrence Boxall, who is an anti-war activist and a member of Jews for a Just Peace in Vancouver.

Lamentations

Listen, O Israel, for the dull, dim thud
of your hard'ning heart, drained of joy.
Amidst dying embers of compassion
for the orphans and the widows
whose protruding round eyes
stare from starved faces
at your abundant good fortune,
you offer the sulphurous fumes of arrogance
as comfort.

Hear, O Israel, the stunned, dull tones of the father
wresting his dead baby from the cold arms
of his dead wife.

Your soul, O Israel,
hardened-immune to the suffering stranger,
chills my blooded veins, for you forget
"you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt"
was a reminder to take pity on the stranger.
Instead, you have become as Pharaoh and his hosts,
to escape the pain of the stranger that stares accusingly at you.
Your young, full-bellied army tortures the stranger
even as you delight in the stranger's humiliation
and witness your cruelty with banal calm eye, businesslike,
efficient, sophisticated, consummated.

My tears, O Israel,
flow hot and flow cold
as ice and fire dance, prance, tear through my mind
maddened, maddening to watch the soldiers of Pharaoh
emblazoned with Magen Dovid, the Star of David, hardened like steel
against the vulnerable soft flesh of your victims,
all the while
oblivious to the lapping sound of the waters of the Red Sea.
I choke on the fear of what you have wrought
to open the flood of this sea
that will consume both you and me.

Hear, O Israel, All is Vanity and we are all one;
Humanity is all one.