Correction, Boethius! 1,000,000 years plus:
Tiberius in Galilee
on the Jordan’s Chinnereth
Her name, one moment’s grandeur
for Empire, but one breath
in the million years of passage
since Man first strode this shore
Each generation humbled
through what has come before
While on the beach, at Tel Aviv
we bask in an evening sun
Still dry in late November
with a winter still to come
For whereas in a former time
October brought the rains
Now, as be fitting for this desert rim
we be on a cusp, for climate change
Are the eyes now opened?
Do we begin to understand?
How in each and every corner
here: We walk upon a land
haunted through deception
Through false narrative of war
that be travesty for justice
and doth crucify our poor
A land wherein a powerful
would purport to hold as right
Some ‘right of distant Empire’
that through triumph, sought to fight
Sought impose, through insurrection
Seeks to damn: the common heart
for false dream, remit with honour
For false dream. To live apart
For Tiberius? Was one of the first ‘Nakba cleansed’ settlements in 1947 – when Mandate Britain’s armed forces assisted ‘militant Zionist insurrectionists’ in expelling the non-Jewish resident population. Altogether contrary to her White Paper of 1939 (a policy paper issued by the government under Neville Chamberlain) re-affirming how any creation of a Jewish state would indeed be contrary to both the interest and to past promise made to the peoples-as-a-whole. (The 1939 ‘White Paper’ limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next 5 years – ruling that beyond that date, any such immigration levels were to be determined by the Arab majority.)