The Chosen Poem by Bill Mitton

You who were the 'Chosen',
you who suffered long.
You who wore the yellow star,
The victims of great wrongs.
You who lost six million dead,
slaughtered for a creed.
You who for centuries have been
the whipping boys of greed.
You who watch the old ones come,
to scan the lists with dread,
with tattooed arms and memories,
to say kaddish for their dead.
Has the pain and grief,
your race endured,
stopped your ears and eyes.
Does the horror of the Holocaust,
Silence Palestinian cries.
Are the camps across the Jordan,
with their dying diseased and pained,
less real than those your fathers knew
and by which humanity was shamed.
Though you've never had the peace you crave,
and your children still are lost,
Can you really want to add the blood,
of other innocents to the cost.
The things we see your soldiers do
and hear your politicians state,
can they really be the deeds and words,
of refugees from hate?
Can oppression be the practice,
of those who bear its scars.
The use of fear and naked force,
when your history it mars.
How far apart Salaam - Shalom,
'Peace’, in both your tongues.
This land has held you in its palm
in truth you both belong;
Arab, Jew semitic both,
your histories entwined.
Can you not find a middle ground
with differences that fine.

To Arab, Jew, and Christian
this land has long held sway.
In Gods name, yours, theirs, and mine,
can peace never find it's way