March 4, 2023

I was way too sick to join the protest tonight, so I started writing a poem about it.  I had been listening to old Pete Seager records again and realized that no protest will ever be as clear for me as Salma.  Years ago, when I heard on the radio that a politician named Smotrich was complaining about how his wife should not have to give birth in the same ward as an Arab woman I didn’t write him a hate letter or protest in the newspaper or anything.  Hey, when I gave birth almost half a century ago, the nurses were on a break and I couldn’t get past the information counter.  There was a Beduin woman in the same situation and we comforted each other.  I don’t know how I would have managed without her, and didn’t think for a moment that she and I did not deserve the same accommodation.  Yet I did nothing to try to stop Smotrich’s advance.   I thought that no one would agree with a crackpot like that.  

And later, when the law was passed declaring Hebrew the only official language of the country, making Arabic a secondary language, I should have spoken out.  So what if I began again to study Arabic in protest?  It was just a ruse to comfort my conscience.