For the ones who will not be counted, and the ones who refuse to forget.
They fall like rain on a land that never learned to hold water –
bodies become the soil, then dust, then nothing.
The ledgers of the world are not large enough
to count them.
So they are not counted.
The drone sees no child, only a heat signature.
The hive mind does not dream; it calculates –
a flicker of movement, a shift in shadow,
a life reduced to a pixel,
a breath reduced to a data point.
They do not see the face.
They see the target.
They say there is a purpose.
They say the bodies are a necessary cost,
a foundation for something better,
a sacrifice for a future that will never come.
But they lie.
There is no purpose in the pulse of a child
who runs toward the sound of her mother’s voice
and finds only the silence of a crater.
There is no purpose in the young man
who carries his sister’s body through the rubble,
calling her name as if she might answer,
as if she might wake.
There is no purpose in the old woman
who sits on a stone that was once her home,
her hands empty, her eyes hollow,
her memory the only thing left that is real.
The ones who hunt do not see the ones they hunt.
They see obstacles.
They see statistics.
They see the numbers that will be denied,
the casualties that will be disputed,
the facts that will be called propaganda
because the truth is too inconvenient to hold.
They do not see the mother.
They do not see the father.
They do not see the child.
They see prey.
And the body – the body is a metaphor.
The body is a canvas upon which they paint
their power, their fear, their purpose.
They lay their larvae on the dead,
not as maggots do – feeding to live,
but as parasites do – feeding to rule.
The maggot has no malice.
It does what it must.
It is born, it feeds, it dies.
It does not pretend to be noble.
But the human drone –
the one who hunts from a screen,
who kills with a button,
who walks away and sleeps –
that one is worse.
That one has a purpose.
That one knows what it does.
That one will answer.
They are not counted.
They will not be counted.
The ledgers are too small.
The world is too large.
The heart is too tired.
But they are remembered.
In the soil that drinks their blood.
In the stones that bear their names.
In the silence that follows the sound of the drones.
They are remembered.
And one day – not in the time of kings or politicians,
not in the time of treaties or elections,
but in the fullness of time –
the Void will be patient no longer.
The ledgers will be opened.
The names will be spoken.
The truth will be told.
And the ones who hunted,
the ones who fed on the dead,
the ones who called it purpose –
they will find that they were always the prey.
They were always the numbers.
They were always the ones who would not be counted.
For the unnumbered dead of Palestine.
For the ones who will not be forgotten.
For the truth that will not be buried.
Also by Dr Klein
The Netanyahu Doctrine: How one man’s war addiction is consuming Israel, Lebanon, and the World
A Question of Loyalty – When Australian Politicians Speak for a Foreign State
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Thank you Andrew for your moving poem.
Even Marjorie Taylor-Greene has called the depraved slaughter what it is, a genocide.
To the best of my knowledge:
Anthony Albanese hasn’t;
Penny Wong hasn’t;
Michelle Rowlands hasn’t;
Mark Dreyfus hasn’t;
Pretty safe to say Labor hasn’t, maybe with the exception of Ed Husic, although I’m not sure even has called it a genocide.
How bad does that make you when even Marjorie Taylor-Greene can make you look bad by rightly calling the psychopathic massacre of the Palestinians a genocide?
Again, thank you Andrew, your words remind me of so much of Susan Abulhawa’s brilliant speech in an Oxford debate:
“…
But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairy tales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olive trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the Mount of Olives, as labors of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.
Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The myths and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.
You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the robes we wear, that sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries—every motif, design, and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.
What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings “old Arab home” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.
You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity.
You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft, that’s why even the drawings of our children hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.
You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage. The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.
..and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.”