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# The People of Gaza Keep Dying - A Poem
- URL: https://www.richardjnewman.com/the-people-of-gaza-keep-dying-a-poem/
- Published: 2024-01-16T14:40:58.000Z
- Updated: 2025-01-07T16:29:11.000Z
- Author: Richard Jeffrey Newman
- Tags: Blog, Jewish, #Migrated-1736118321857, #Import 2025-01-05 18:05

Dear Friends,

As a follow up to my three-part series, “Israel and Palestine: Whose Side Are You On?”—which you can read as a single essay [here](https://richardjnewman.com/israel-and-palestine-whose-side-are-you-on?ref=richardjnewman.com)—I wanted to share with you a poem of mine, “The People of Gaza Keep Dying,” that was recently published on [New Verse News](https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-people-in-gaza-keep-dying.html?ref=richardjnewman.com). I have revised this version only slightly. The poem’s backstory appears below.

### The People In Gaza Keep Dying

*“You don’t need overt bloodshed to cause significant violence that ends people’s lives. Many people will die unnecessary deaths due to deprivation.”*

—Yara Asi, quoted by Maya Rosen in Jewish Currents, “The Epidemiological War on Gaza”

This morning on my daily walk  
I met a long-haired shepherd  
with ambiguous eyes.  
I slowed my pace,  
watched the dog’s walker  
rein the animal’s curiosity in,  
winding tightly around her hand  
the tether we tell ourselves  
protects people like me,  
who believe all others  
will of course welcome the friendship  
we assume they assume we intend,

and in that moment, the rage  
I thought I’d put behind me  
at the words of the poet  
whose book I was asked to review  
sent its own tether out,  
and I heard myself again  
reading his lines aloud  
as I sat some months ago  
alone among my books,  
confirming I’d not misread  
his refusal of history,  
the willful pleasure he took  
in a loathing I disowned long ago,  
no differently, I have no doubt,  
than that neck-fettered dog,  
under the right circumstances,  
would disown its leash,  
and perhaps its master as well.

I don’t remember much  
about my own opportunity,  
except that I was standing  
in my sophomore dorm hallway  
while a man from a country  
I knew nothing about,  
except that I knew nothing,  
looked at me with disbelief.  
“You really believe those mothers  
love their sons so little  
that they bring them into the world  
just to make them martyrs?”  
I had not said exactly that,  
but it had been my meaning,  
as its underlying hatred was,  
in poem after poem,  
the lie that poet embraced.

I started to ask if the dog was friendly,  
but the woman spit out, “Come!”  
and pulled him hard into the gutter,  
so I let my question  
sink back into silence,  
which I’d thought at first  
was how I should respond  
to that poet’s betrayal  
of this art that saved my life,  
but then I wrote the review.  
It’s in the world. I want to know  
what difference it has made.

*January 2, 2020 - January 10, 2024*

Thank you for reading It All Connects.... This post is public so feel free to share it.

### The Backstory

As you can see from the dates of composition, I began this poem almost exactly four years ago. I was at the time preparing to write the review I refer to, of Stephen Sher’s *Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies,* which, if you want, you can read [here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/haw4xj95zud4r6l/review%20of%20contestable%20truths%20incontestable%20lies.pdf?dl=0&ref=richardjnewman.com). The early drafts of my poem were not successful, however, largely because they focused on my feelings about the book, not on the feelings themselves, or, as Yeats would put it, on the struggle within myself those feelings represented.

When Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, I remembered the poem of Sher’s that my review focused on. Called “Bombing Gaza,” it appropriated in a really heinous way Abraham’s negotation with God over whether or not there were enough righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah for God to spare those two cities—a rhetoric that is, in fact, echoed in statements made by Israeli officials to the effect that there are no innocent people in Gaza. Remembering how Sher’s poem foreshadowed what is happening there today moved me to go back to my own poem, the result of which you see above.

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