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Shoah & Nakba
One tragedy
Introduction
Though the words ‘Shoah’ and ‘Nakba’ are Hebrew and Arabic respectively, they both mean ‘catastrophe’. ‘Shoah’ is often preferred to ‘The Holocaust’ because it better, and more specifically, describes the trauma of the Jewish people under the Nazis. Please read the footnotes if any part of this poem makes you feel uncomfortable.
Shoah and Nakba, they are the same word
One can’t be forgotten, one cannot be heard
Harvested separately, plucked from one tree
One seeks to control, one yearns to be free
One trades in its olives, the other in guns
One steals from its neighbours, both weep for their sons
One lives under oppression, both love, laugh and cry
One candidly says “let the other one die”
Catastrophe is as catastrophe does
Excuses itself with a simple “because…”
Because we are this and because they are other
Though history says you are sister and brother
Separated by politics, joined in a fight
In which justice is bulldozed by power and might
A nakba in progress while shoa is used
To justify killing, its methods excused
