This poem, “Hore, O Israel”, written by German Poet, Erich Fried, now deceased, was a German Jew, a friend of Gunter Grass. This poem speaks even more eloquently to Jews and Gentiles with a heart and tear ducts now than it did in 1967, when it was written. Mr. Fried’s widow, name to follow, referred to the fact he was a Jew, that he had been expelled by the Nazis from Austria in 1938, that later when he became critical of Israel and wrote many poems about the Israeli/Arab conflict, that he had been followed by the Mossad, and himself scapegoated by Zionists, in a letter to the Guardian 4/8 in which she commented on the irony of Grass being pilloried because he had been enrolled in the junior SS when he was 17, and her husband because he was a Jew!
Hear, O Israel!
When we were the persecuted
I was one of you
How can I remain one
when you become the persecutors?
Your longing was
to become like other nations
who murdered you
Now you have become like them
You have outlived those
who were cruel to you
Does their cruelty
live on in you now?
You ordered the defeated:
‘Take off your boots
Like the scapegoat
you drove them into the wilderness
into the great mosque of death
whose sandals are of sand
But they did not take upon them the sin
you wished to lay on them
The imprint of their naked feet
in the desert sand
outlasts the traces
of your bombs and your tanks
Written in 1967, After the Six Day War, name of translator to follow
