My Friend Greg

My friend Greg was a teacher

He showed me how to bandage a foot in the middle of the street

And which public spaces are best for naps

Greg taught me how to roll my first cigarette

And recommended I didn’t have second

He didn’t speak often

But he had a lot to say

Like how we Americans apologized too much

Embellished every accidental bumb with an unnecessary sorry

When there’s no need to ask forgiveness when no one’s hurt

A month and 5500 miles away

I wonder if he’s apologizing now

Saluting sorrys as bombs shudder on the Gaza strip

Load his rifle with regrets

As he patrols Israel for incoming rockets

When you put on that uniform, Greg

Do you wonder what the letters IDF really stand for?

You know what they’re calling us

We’re used to worm, plauge, kike

But Mass Murderer never came to mind as the next trendy anti-semitic slur

And now you must be wondering why I’m saying we

Because I’m in America

I’m in American

The cardboard box and all its layers I’m supposed to call home

But when you're Jewish, your revolutionary war started 2000 years ago

Today 119 rockets plummeted towards our villages

Our homes

Our children

Today there were 119 attempts to murder us

Yesterday they found that a terror tunnel destination was a dining hall

That the underground passageway’s machine guns led to dinner

The media starves for stories of the attacks of civilians

but fails to venture past the strip

The other night I found one of my old notebooks

engraved with anti-gym rants

My fastest mile was 15 minutes

You know that’s all we have 

15 minutes

sorry, my facts are skewed--

I meant 15 seconds

To scurry to a bomb shelter or be obliterated

Become one life closer to Hamas’ mission

Not to #freepalestine

but #killallthejews

I guess what sounded good in their charter

Doesn’t sound as nice on Facebook

But because Israeli 5th graders are faster than me

They don’t die

Just apologize

I’m sorry I survived

that my life doesn’t balance the statistics

that the New York Times, CNN, BBC

Can’t make me the sob story

I’m sorry my splattered skin will not decorate a call for humanitarianism

That my father built shelters for me instead of the weapons

That it was more important for us to live

Than to make you die

Is that what you’re saying Greg?

Are you the soldier who doesn’t thank God for breath

But exhales apologies, losing bits of your lungs with each victory

Because Jews are not allowed to win

We’re only the good guys when you can feel sorry for us

America doesn’t find us so cute when they’re not scooping up our bones

If we grow strong

Clenching never again in our hearts

We’re committing a genocide

But last time I checked

Wounded civilians left the Nazi’s hospitals

Not the other way around

They drenched us in lethal gas

Not evacuation warnings

We sweep up ashes hoping to hold our grandparents for the first time

And I know that I’m not supposed to talk about the Holocaust

That this is not about the Holocaust

Or pogroms

Or the exiles, inquisitions, the denial or degradation

Because that is the past

That is ancient history

But last time I checked

Night wasn’t written by Moses

I know this is about today

the middle east

facts

Emotions weaken my argument

This is about numbers

But what are digits than how we count pages in the story of us

the text is out of context

I know that

But I also know that 8 year old me

Shouldn’t have bragged about her blonde hair

Because it meant survival in the next Holocaust

Palestinians call Hamas freedom fighters

Who believe homosexuals should be exterminated

Women should be subjugated

when 3 Jewish boys younger than Travyon Martin 

were abducted and murdered

they handed out candy in the streets

like it was 9/11

a national Holiday

I wonder how my classmates who post pictures of the violence of Syria

Linked to articles of about a massacre in Gaza

Would feel if they knew who they advocate for

Toasts to the death of their parents

But it’s not terrorism if the people you are trying to kill

Don’t have the right to be alive in the first place

I know that Palestinians are dying

That we are killing them

Do you know

when we notify an area to evacuate

Hamas orders

run to the target

Degrading bodies to rocket shields

valuing casualties

devouring off statistics

Each corpse an increase in legitimacy

The people you are giving legitimacy to

Are the 1%

The 1% as in billionaires

1% inside bomb shelters

bound in fresh food and warm fabric

wrapping the Palestinian struggle

Which is every bit as painful as ours

In an hateful, anti-semitic, murderous blanket

I’ve walked through the crematoriums in Birkenau

Examined claw marks stained on gas chamber ceilings

But when I read about burning temples

bomb proof playgrounds

or blood drenched kosher supermarkets

I wonder if this is the existence my grandparents survived for

I don’t understand using the oppression of one people

To crucify another

I know that we don’t look like the good guys

That we have an army

mowing down their child calvary

I know they deserve every breath

But when I think of Greg putting out that cigarette

I can’t see a baby killer

I know Gaza’s civilians are falling

And it’s not the same as the loss of our soldiers

But do you know my friend Greg?