-Analysis-
BEIRUT — The Israeli daily Haaretz published a recent article about the poetry anthology, I Am Here, published by the Israeli military with poems written by soldiers fighting in Gaza.
The anthology was compiled under the supervision of the poet Eliaz Cohen, who is described as an “artist-settler,” and has been calling since October 7 for the establishment of a refugee camp in southern Gaza until the army ends “the military operation.”
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Cohen has said that the project came from his admiration for the morals of Abraham, who called for preserving the lives of innocents, and discussed with the Lord’s plans to destroy “Sodom.” The word of the Lord, as the biblical story tells us, is stronger.
From the Book of Genesis: “And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord. Then he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain; and he saw, and behold, the smoke of the land which went up like the smoke of a furnace.”
After the invitation was launched on Oct. 8 in cooperation with the “Restoring the Soul” foundation, hundreds of entries arrived. That led to publishing many parts of the anthology, the first of which arrived ten days after the invitation was provided.
The eighth installment of the anthology sparked serious controversy, ultimately leading to the withdrawal of its copies. Some poems were delayed in a reprinted version, because they “do not represent the morals of the Israeli army,” and included “a call for revenge.”
The poetry anthology has been highly politicized in Israel, as it was officially issued by the army, and some feared normalizing the “culture of revenge.”
Under military supervision
It turns out that the Israeli army doesn’t actually mind the spreading of the “culture of revenge,” and even favors it given that Telegram channels that broadcast pictures of naked, humiliated Gazans under the military’s supervision.
The poem that raised the matter was in the eighth part and titled “Tunnels of Destiny,” by the reserve First Sergeant Masher Shaz. Haaretz didn’t report the deleted passages, rather it used other less provocative ones.
Who chose to have his name in the grave of hell.
An account on X platform (formerly Twitter) @ireallyhateyou, published the verses, and the translator noted the play on the similarity between the words “God is great” and “God is a mouse” in Hebrew:
As you say
This God, in whose name you slaughter, is a mouse
Big mouse, great mouse,
A mouse running into a hole in the mud
A spear,
A spear, to pound the road beneath,
The territory that trucks cross
It revives the name of the mouse in whose name they smuggle weapons
A spear, to stab murderers
“Elite Forces” in the ditches,
In the temple of the great mouse with gold and hemorrhoids
Who chose to have his name in the grave of hell.
The translator comments that “the big golden mouse” is a reference to the false god similar to the golden cow. We are not commenting on the value of the poem, as it’s written by a soldier constrained by national and religious ideology.
The same goes for the poem “Gaza Waits for Us” by soldier Perry Chaim Schwartzman:
Another messenger of fire
On your walls is Gaza
Much will be said
About all your monuments
But every child’s head will be broken on a stone.
Haaretz noted that all poems with Jewish religious references, and insults to the Islamic religion were deleted, especially those referring to Israel’s war on Gaza as a religious war.
Soldiers’ texts are not a new literary genre. In 2022, a book was published of texts Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) wrote when he was on the frontline in World War I. The book includes personal diary: poetry, sarcasm, reflections, and advice. In one text, he says the sole way of survival in the military is to read Leo Tolstoy and masturbate.
We will be mines and human bombs.
There are also poems by Syrian soldiers on the front, whose exact source remains unknown:
“And if the cruelty increases, we will pledge to Assad Bashar… we will be mines and human bombs.”
There is also the Jihadi poetry. Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who was a spokesman for the Islamic State (ISIS), once said: “But we will annihilate them, O Knight/We will raise the foundations of our edifice of faith.”
The value of poetry here is more emotional than aesthetic — and the ideology is very clear. However, (theoretically) the word “poetry” protects the text because we are faced with “imagination,” no matter how ideological it is, and imagination has no restrictions.
In his “Making of Poetry” lectures, Jorge Borges said that poetry is “emotion and pleasure,” and the reader must also have the skill of understanding the metaphor.
It has nothing to do with poetry!
But how can this theory be applied to texts where we know exactly how they were born and what they refer to?
Understanding the metaphor and treating what is written as a “truth” threatens the reading of “all” poetry, and turns it into “speeches.”
Here we are not defending those who carry arms to kill, rather than the word “poetry.” For the question about anthology is purely political, and has nothing to do with poetry or poetic imagination.
It’s all about the image of the Israeli soldier, but to whom? The anthology was published in Hebrew and distributed within Israel. Its audience is specific and well-known. Also, who would read trivial, low-quality poetry written for extremist soldiers who celebrate murder?
It is clear that the problem then lies in the “military doctrine” and the “soldier image,” which turned into a fetish affair on dating apps, according to Haaretz.
The soldier is also not merely obeying the orders of others. He alone must bear the consequences of his actions.
The problem is not in the poetic text and “metaphors,” but rather in the soldier himself as a material manifestation of the state’s military authority. The soldier has his finger on the trigger and has the decision of death and life. As a result of this situation, it is assumed that the “soldier’s poetic imagination” has a performative value, which means that he has the “authority” to implement what he says on the terrain of war.
This should be a reminder that the soldier is also not merely an individual and a citizen obeying the orders of others. He alone must bear the consequences of his actions. Carrying a weapon (either by choice or by force) is linked to the authority of the state itself, and perhaps when we are faced with the act of killing, the speech turns quickly away from “poetry” to action. It is no longer a metaphor; but becomes a future promise.
The more tangible question is: when you are a fighter and describe the killing you committed, is your “text” considered evidence of guilt?
An officer told Haaretz that the poems were deleted because they portray the war on Gaza as “religious war.” But, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself said that the soldiers fighting in Gaza are descendants of the soldier Joshua bin Nun, who, according to the Hebrew Bible, God stopped the sun at the heat of the sky on a Friday upon his request to end his battle and reach Jerusalem.
The case of Radovan Karadzic
In the case of poetry and its relationship with crime and conviction, there is the Serbian “poet” Radovan Karadzic who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity during the civil war that followed Bosnia and Herzegovina’s split from Yugoslavia in 1992.
Karadzic stood next to the Russian poet Eduard Limonov on the Terbevec hill overlooking Sarajevo and recited poetry.
At that time, with the sounds of bullets behind him, Karadzic spoke about a poem he wrote in 1971 in Sarajevo:
“I hear the misfortune threads
Turned into a beetle as if an old singer
Is crushed by the silence and turned into a voice.The town burns like a piece of incense
In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.
Empty suits slide down the town.
Red is the stone that dies, built into a house. The Plague!
Karadzic said he was predicting war when he wrote that poem, and that his poetry at that time was full of violence, murder, and the vocabulary of war.
After he finished reciting his poem, Karadzic and Limonov opened fire from the top of the hill at the homes of civilians in Sarajevo.
The problem of Karadzic and the Israeli “soldier-poets” falls under what the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, describes as the “warrior-poet syndrome.”
In 2005, lawyer and researcher Jay Surdukowski referred to that syndrome in the Michigan Journal of International Law in a paper entitled Is Poetry a War Crime?
Surdukowski discusses Karadzic’s case as a “warrior poet,” whether his poetry can be used as legal evidence in a court to prove “committing massacres,” “intent to commit massacres,” and “involvement in committing a massacre.”
Surdukowski said that poetry is fit as evidence, arguing that conditions for accepting evidence at the International Criminal Court are open to many possibilities, including: “any form of words or actions that can express a pattern of actions with a specific goal.” But no case was found in which poetry has been used as evidence in international or national courts.
A holy war
What is avoided when talking about soldiers is the concept of religious extremism, whether they are Israeli or otherwise, although the pictures and quotes (and this time poems) expose this matter.
For the soldiers to be religious extremists means that war is sacred, at least from their point of view. And that contradicts the concept of a secular state!
Turning the war into the “sacred” threatens Israel itself.
“Censorship” of the anthology can also be linked to an attempt to recruit ultra-Orthodox Jews who are exempt from compulsory military service. So, the anthology could be a kind of warning: recruiting extremists means that the Israeli army may turn into an ideological army that fulfills religious prophecies, not a “defense army!”
To avoid describing the military institution as “religious extremism,” is an attempt to exonerate soldiers from following the path of biblical prophecies, to make the Israeli army different from its “enemies,” the extremist groups and oppressive regimes that employ religious militias. This is exactly what one of those in charge of the army education unit said. The officer thinks that the problem with the anthology is that it appeared while Israel was waging a war against a “radical Islamic group.”
Turning the war into the “sacred” threatens Israel itself and enforces the rivalry between the “secular” and “extremist” trends.
For the army to be “ideological,” means that the army’s mission is to protect the extremists and their way of life, not the citizens who served in the military. And most importantly, it means that the current state of war will not end with the elimination of Hamas, but rather the fulfillment of a prophecy whose precise limits we will never know..
