“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

The shelling is from the land, sea, air
Gaza's children take the brunt,
the clocks stop on so many young lives
the twelve circles of hell await their tormentors 
those well-scrubbed, expensively educated girls
with their American accents who trot out the poison
that infects the airways - blame the victim,
Victors' 'justice'.

Children's broken bodies on the wooden floors of smashed up buildings
a sweltering concentration camp, a fucking rat trap, 
Children's hair sticky with sweat and blood
Children die. Die in rooms,
die under the roof or die underground in cellars and tunnels,
die in the steets of Gaza 
whilst above them Israeli pilots
conduct target practice 
Like a video game.
The Palestinians have no planes.
nothing to fight back with excapt the truth.
תתבייש ישראל
Collateral damage is inevitable says the well-scrubbed PR woman of the IDF
- so long as it's not our collateral damage  (sotto voce), because that's murder.

Poetry cannotv silence this sorrow within me
Not in my name, never in my name,
this terrifying bullying. 
I imagine Manchester as Gaza, besieged, surrounded 
destroyed by the best killing machines money can buy:
repeatedly murdering people dispossessed since 1948.
Even with their faces ground into the dust,
their land stolen, their children murdered,
the Palestinians resist, resist, resist.