June Jordan on Israel and Lebanon: A Response to Adrienne Rich

- By June Jordan

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?

       —June Jordan, Moving Towards Home

Editor’s note: June Jordan wrote this poem in 1982, after Sabra and Shatila. This week, as the world marked the forty-second anniversary of Sabra and Shatila, Israel carried out two terrorist attacks of unprecedented horror on the people of Lebanon. Today we share an open letter by June Jordan, also written in the wake of Sabra and Shatila, and first published in full by the New York War Crimes. The Massachusetts Review is a proud endorser of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
 

October 10, 1982

First, let me be clear. Neither the word “holocaust” nor the word “genocide” was invented to describe the loss of Jewish or European life. Both of these words mean what they mean whether the victim is Jewish or not. Accordingly: Israel has created a holocaust in Lebanon entirely consistent with its genocidal aims as regards the Palestinian people. Indeed, the issue of the Palestinian people is the issue of the value of human life, per se, and, more specifically, the issue of the value of human life that is neither Jewish nor European. As the majority of the peoples of the world is neither Jewish nor European, it should amaze no one that we, Black and Third World people everywhere, attach fundamental importance to the question of Palestine.

When the 1982 invasion of Lebanon began I was stunned to learn that Off Our Backs carried a statement signed by Adrienne Rich on a subject even vaguely related to that developing holocaust.[1] The Israeli slaughter of Lebanese and Palestinian men, women, and children, did not, after all, primarily raise issues of sexuality, or of nineteenth-century women writers.

I had not recently seen Adrienne affix her name to so much as a poem or a petition regarding the evils embodied by South Africa, El Salvador, Nicaragua, nuclear armaments, ten percent American unemployment, police violence in Black communities, and the resurrected compulsory military draft.

Surely, then, her emergence outside the most narrowly conceived white “feminist” realm must announce a very welcome, and urgent, broadening of her feminist grasp of this real and scarified and unequal world. But did she, in fact, condemn that Israeli campaign of massacre? Did she, in fact, identify the obvious nature of the Zionist state and its anti-Palestinian goals? Did she in fact, mourn for the non-European victims of her money, and my money, and our American monies (7.2 million dollars a day) poured into Israel—a state smaller than the state of Connecticut? Did she, in fact, scream aloud for her people—the people she dares claim as her own—to stop the cluster bombs and the phosphorous burning of children and the mutilation of women and then devastation of homes and schools and hospitals, as the Israeli armed forces thrust themselves forward and forward and forward into the ravaging agony of their creation? Did she, in fact, join the Israeli Peace Now dissidents who, as early as June, 1982, bravely put their white bodies on the line against this massacre committed in their name? Did she, in fact, claim responsibility?

She did not.

Does she now, after Sabra and Shatila, does she now claim responsibility? She does not.[2] Does she now, after 400,000 Israelis plunged into the streets to demand a tribunal to investigate Israeli function in the massacre of the people of those miserable refugee camps, does she now join that outcry with her own? She does not.

Does she tell you why the Palestinian people live and die in refugee camps? Why they don’t “go home”?

Does she remind all of us of the Israeli standards established in the Israeli trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, to wit: That you cannot say you did not know. That you cannot say you never pulled the trigger. That you cannot say you did not turn on the gas. That you cannot say that you were only one among so many?

She does not.

This is what she does and she does it after Sabra and after Shatila: She repeats that she is a Zionist. She wonders why is there so much fuss about this because evil is not a new phenomenon in the world. She emphasizes that she will join no “protest activities” to stop the evil done in her name. Her name, she says, is Jewish. You are anti-Semitic, she says, if you criticize anything and anyone Jewish. What, she says, by the way, about anti-Semitism, she says. What about that?

I now respond: I claim responsibility for the Israeli crimes against humanity, because I am an American and American monies made these atrocities possible. I claim responsibility for Sabra and Shatila, because, clearly, I have not done enough to halt heinous episodes of holocaust and genocide around the globe. I accept this responsibility, and I work for the day when I may help to save any one other life, in fact.

I believe that you cannot claim a people and not assume responsibility for what that people do or don’t do. You cannot claim to be human and not assume responsibility for the value of all human life.

To Adrienne, I make this public reply: Your evident definition of feminism leaves you indistinguishable from the white men threatening the planet with extinction.

Where you raise the accusation of anti-Semitism I accuse you: I accuse you of being anti-Palestinian. More, I accuse you of being anti-life.

I refuse to assume responsibility for your actions and your inertia. I do not accept you as my people.

JUNE JORDAN (1936 - 2002) was a poet, activist, journalist, essayist and teacher. She was active in the civil rights, feminist, antiwar and gay and lesbian rights movements and the author of more than twenty-five major works of poetry, fiction and essays, as well as numerous children's books.