Protest, of the adamantine kind in Galway against Israeli Blood Diamonds

When Dusk Falls to ... Palestine?

Last Saturday, the nationwide IPSC campaign against Israeli Blood Diamonds was alive and well in Galway with activists from the Irish Centre for Human Rights and Malaysian medical students from the University College Hospital Galway doing their duty behind the info/petition table.

The peak experience of the day was an encounter with an Israeli woman from Jerusalem and her Irish boyfriend. From the outset, she abjured and contemned the criminality of her government towards the Palestinians, but when she eventually got our hackles up with the biblical claim of Israel to Palestine, there was no acrimony; for some 30 minutes, the argument ebbed and flowed, one side agreeing to disagree, the other, disagreeing to agree until finally one of us offered to "bate the shite out of her boyfriend and take her over as his Shulamith" and so it ended with us trading first names, good vibes and quotations from Solomon's, Song of Songs.

More's the pity, we didn't get around to Paul Celan's Death Fugue, that howl of agony against Nazism and the Shoah, it would have been the perfect ending to an almost perfect meeting, but I'll venture it here as it is the perfect ending to an imperfect posting. Both of Paul's Jewish parents died in Nazi death camps with his mother shot dead after being exhausted by forced labour and he himself only escaping by the advance of the Red Army only to drown by suicide in the Seine in 1970, the horror of his experiences dragging him to the bottom.

If, what was visited upon the Jewish people in the Holocaust was an "unprecedented visitation of evil" (Martin Gilbert), surely, what is now being visited upon the Palestine people is a precedented visitation of (Zionist) evil?.

DEATH FUGUE

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair
Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he
whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair
Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there
one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now
and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the
dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from
Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke
you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black day of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we
drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with serpents and daydreams death is a master from
Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith

Students from the Irish Centre for Human Rights in NUI Galway

Cheek by jowl, the SWP and IPSC reinforced each other