By Button Poetry
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Zach Goldberg performing at Rustbelt 2019 in St. Louis, MO.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:06
Hello, everybody, and welcome to “Birthright Israel,”
00:09
where we take young American Jews
00:11
and give you a free guided tour of the Holy Land.
00:14
So come on board the birthright bus.
00:16
This is it, folks, Israel, your birthright.
00:18
This is what you got your foreskin chopped off for.
00:21
Isn’t it funny how you don’t even have to know that something is your property
00:24
in order for it to be true!
00:26
So, here we go.
00:27
If you look out the window to your right here,
00:29
you’ll see the Golan Heights.
00:31
Beautiful, isn’t it!
00:32
Now, we can’t actually go there.
00:34
Golan is more what you might call “aspirational territory,”
00:38
meaning we all know it’s Israel, but everyone else just calls it Syria.
00:42
Anyways, if you look over here to your left,
00:44
that’s the Sea of Galilee.
00:46
Have you ever seen a map of Israel,
00:48
our symphony of borders, cease-fire lines,
00:51
disengagement zones?
00:53
We’ve ceded our land to so many foreign invaders over the years
00:56
that now our borders ebb and rise like the tides of the Galilee,
00:59
overflow onto our neighbor’s lands.
01:01
We had to learn from the imperialists.
01:03
Your home means nothing if the British don’t give you a mandate and a rifle.
01:07
If you keep watching here, you’ll start to see the West Bank barrier.
01:10
Now, we built the wall beyond the border.
01:13
That way, we can settle in the gray area without fear of retribution.
01:16
You know, it’s nice when we get to be the guards
01:18
at the checkpoints for once.
01:20
After all, we have broken out of enough cages
01:23
to know how to build a good one ourselves.
01:26
Careful, or someone might think you’re being ungrateful.
01:29
We did build this for you.
01:31
Oh, I bet you know how to speak to your grandmother
01:34
in her first language, huh?
01:36
I bet you know the Hebrew prayer for safe passage.
01:39
I bet you know our country’s national flower.
01:41
Bird? Bullet?
01:43
Up ahead, you’ll see the Old City of Jerusalem.
01:46
Call it annexed, call it occupied, it is your inheritance,
01:49
and that’s why we call this “birthright.”
01:50
It’s not as catchy to say,
01:52
“biblical guilt trip,” “ancestral gaslighting.”
01:54
This bus ride is about more than a bottle of Dead Sea sand
01:57
you can take home to show your parents,
01:59
you diaspora Jews.
02:00
As if your namesakes didn’t die in Poland,
02:03
weren’t buried in congregations.
02:05
I’ve seen this country climb from a graveyard of its own dead names,
02:08
and you’re still afraid to leave a few more bodies on the road?
02:11
What have they been teaching you about ghosts in America, huh?
02:14
What have they been telling you about your own home?
02:16
That someone else used to live here?
02:18
You think this is a haunted house?
02:20
You think a Ouija board ever spelled out “Palestine”?
02:22
Go ahead, turn the lights off and say “Gaza” three times in the mirror.
02:26
See if any spirit comes back to haunt you.
02:28
Look to your right, look to your left.
02:30
By the time your plane landed here, you were already complicit.
02:33
So here is a bottle of sand from the Dead Sea.
02:37
Here is a prayer for safe passage.
02:40
Here is a map of Israel.
02:43
Now point to it.
02:45
Show me where you live.
02:49
(cheers and applause)
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video