J'Accuse
by Aharon Shabtai

Explosive poems by an Israeli accusing his country of crimes against humanity.

Playing on Zola's famous letter denouncing the anti-Semitism of the French government throughout the Dreyfus affair, Aharon Shabtai's title can be taken literally: it charges his government and his people with crimes against the humanity of their neighbors. Here we find snipers shooting children, spin-masters trying to whitewash blood baths, ammunition "distributed like bars of chocolate," and "technicians of slaughter" for whom morality is merely "a pain in the ass."

With a splendid lyrical physicality that accentuates Shabtai's terse immediacy and matter-of-fact scorn, the poems cover a period of six years—from the 1996 election of Netanyahu as prime minister through the curfews, lynchings, riots, sieges, and bombings of the second intifada. But at the heart of J'Accuse is the fate of the ethical Hebrew culture in which the poet was raised: Shabtai refuses to abandon his belief in the moral underpinnings of Israeli society or to be silent before the barbaric and brutal. He witnesses, he protests, he warns. Above all, he holds up a mirror to his nation.

About the Author & Translator
Aharon Shabtai, born 1939, is one of Israel’s leading poets. He studied Greek and Philosophy at the Hebrew University, the Sorbonne, and Cambridge. He currently teaches Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, and English translations of his work have appeared in numerous journals, including the American Poetry Review, the London Review of Books, and Parnassus in Review.

Many of the poems J’Accuse were first published on the weekend literary pages of Israel’s daily paper of record, Ha’aretz—the equivalent of their being featured in the New York Times Book Review—and were met with angry letters to the editor and threats of cancelled subscriptions. Lines like the following have gotten Shabtai in trouble steadily throughout the thirty-five years of his publishing career: “You read the Haggadah / like swine … / Passover, however, / is stronger than you are. / Go outside and see: / the slaves are rising up.”
The poet’s primary responsibility, Shabtai makes clear, is—at least on the level of literature—freshness, attentiveness, and surprise. And when things fall apart, the responsible writer can’t but apply these values to the least likely and perhaps most slippery of literary subjects—politics and public affairs.

Acclaimed poet (Rifts and Hymns, Qualm) and translator Peter Cole has won many awards for his work, including a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Jerusalem, where he edits Ibis Editions.

Reviews
"In this provocative collection, Israeli poet Shabtai, author of more than 15 books of poetry, confronts what could be described as a collective identity crisis in Jewish culture, particularly in Israel. Having suffered immense persecution throughout history and learned to identify keenly with the dispossessed, Israeli Jews are now in a position of dominance over another people. Shabtai condemns Israel's role as occupier and military power, distancing himself from his country ("I'm a disciple of Shakespeare, not Ben Gurion") and identifying explicitly with the Palestinians ("I'm a Palestinian Jew"). While there are occasional glimmerings of personal struggle here-"O my country, my country,/ with each sandal,/ with each thread / of my khaki pants, / I've loved you"-for the most part, the book is a relentless polemic, elegizing innocent Palestinians and demonizing Israeli soldiers: "Idiotic soldiers of lead, / was your father a knife/ that only knows how to chop?"

Plumbing modes familiar from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet's subtle eroticism, Shabtai veers into sexual and violent shock value: "In the morning she sucks off a sniper in uniform,/ and at evening he returns/ and proudly displays/ the X he etched / into the butt of his rifle,/ after he'd terminated/ a young woman, age 19,/ who was hanging up laundry/ on her roof in Hebron." Titled after Emile Zola's impassioned defense of Alfred Dreyfus, these poems seem particularly designed to provoke a Jewish audience, using images of oppression drawn from Jewish liturgy and history. The book compares Israeli soldiers to Pharaoh's troops in ancient Egypt, refers to "pogroms" against Palestinians living in "ghettos" and explicitly likens present-day Palestinians to Jews living in 1930s Germany. What role this book will play in ongoing debates about Israel, the West Bank and Gaza remains to be seen, but it could prove even more controversial than Mahmoud Darwish's recent (and much more nuanced) Unfortunately, It Was Paradise."
- Publishers Weekly

Aharon Shabtai's letter to the Yitzhak Eizenberg Shalom Fifth International Poetry Festival in Jerusalem

Thank you for your invitation to participate in the international poetry festival in Jeruslaem in 2006 and the details. I would like to take my name out of the list of participants. I read these days on the barbarism in the Qalandia checkpoint. I oppose an international poetry festival in a city in which the Arab inhabitants are oppressed systematically and cruelly imprisoned between walls, deprived of their rights and living spaces, humiliated in checkpoints and the international laws are violated. I think that even poets were not allowed in the past, and not in the present, to ignore persecutions and discriminations on a racial or national basis.

Yours,
Aharon Shabtai