Years ago I met a girl online named Michelle, and we fell in love, which really isn't all that new or exciting. She lived in New Jersey, and told me she was divorced, with three kids. Her pictures looked nice, but I never really knew for sure whether it was she.
She told me she was Jewish, had been born in Israel, and had lived there until she was eight. In New Jersey she had grown up to become a prostitute, and married a member of the Russian mob, which, after the break up of the Soviet Union, indeed exploded into international existence.
At the time I met her, she was 28 years old, and was working in a good secretarial job, her days of being a whore in the Russian mafia behind her. She and I talked about a lot of things, on the internet and the phone, including the situation in the middle east between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
To her the Palestinains were animals, pure and simple, no point in discussing it. I decided not to mention the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, and instead made the following observation:
Granted, the Palestinians are animals. And you are an Israeli-American and I am an American of German ancestry. Are we not also "animals?" If not, why not, and how not? Then I quoted my favorite line of poetry, from Bertolt Brecht, in a poem titled "Concerning Poor B.B."
I make friends with people, and I wear
A derby on my head as others do. I say
"They are strangely stinking animals".
And I say: "no matter, I am too."
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