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Last show at the Sderot Cinema*, or
How to IDa lynch mob.
Rasha
Abdulhadi
The glee alone should tell us something:
alight with violence,
at ease with bullets
fired, their lawn chairs set
against a border ridge to catch
the carnage, watch all
the bombs fall
with open beer cheers
on couches dragged
to a cliffpoint overlook.
Know a lynch mob
by how they fire first, so
far back in the timeline
they want it forgotten.
Notice how they start
the clock when the target
raises a hand, a rock,
a house, a clinic, a kite,
or razes a razorwire fence.
They shoot to end,
take as souvenirs what
endings can’t be sold
as their own injuries.
Behold the momentum maintained!
By a perpetual retribution machine!
Run on pogrom promenade chants!
Sanctified as self-defense against!
Self-knowledge of horrors caused!
They will march a litany
against responsibility, and
that's how a crowd hangs
a hook of genocide.
*This poem is an ekphrasis of a July 2014 photograph and article, in which apartheid settlers cheer for the 2014 bombing and siege of Palestinians in Gaza from a clifftop overlook. Read a free, archived version of the original article, with picture on the Internet Archive. Sderot was one of the first colonial settlements Palestinians entered on October 7, 2023.
By Rasha Abdulhadi
Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you, dear reader, to join them in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people. Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it's a handful, throw it. If it's a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way. The elimination of the Palestinian people is not inevitable. We can refuse with our every breath and action. We must.
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