June Jordan’s painful apology for US complicity in zionist terrorism in Lebanon, and against the Palestinian people.
If you have not yet read Marina Magloire’s stunning essay “Moving Towards Life,” you should. It is a lucid, eloquent, and fantastically-researched piece on June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and the politics of friendship and Black solidarity with Palestine. Magloire demonstrates in jaw-dropping fashion the efforts of certain so-called progressives to quash criticism of zionism. She also does an incredible job of recovering for readers the righteous but neglected voice of the late, great poet and essayist June Jordan, especially when it comes to Jordan’s unwavering support for the Palestinian people.
“Moving Towards Life” references a number of Jordan’s writings demonstrating this support, including the poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon.” “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” was first published in the Village Voice on 20 July 1982. The following March, it was reprinted in the feminist journal Off Our Backs. As Maglioire demonstrates, Off Our Backs was one of the venues Jordan bristled against. It regularly exhorted support for zionism, even as the zionist entity was massacring Palestinian and Lebanese people during its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. And in fact, as the title of the poem suggests, Jordan’s “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” responds to the invasion by pointing to the terrible complicity of the US in the massacres.
While zionist terrorism against Palestinians has been ongoing for 76 years, Lebanon has also suffered from its brutality. In fact, the zionist terrorist entity’s “military strategy” – which entails employing “disproportionate force,” targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure and causing damage and mass destruction – is called the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine is named after the Dahieh neighborhood in Beirut where the zionist terrorists, in the words of Jordan, “blew up your homes and demolished the grocery/stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors/to jail…/cluster-bombed girls and boys/whose bodies swelled purple and black into twice the original size/and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby and then/…said this was brilliant/military accomplishment…”
It is also important to note that since the beginning of the zionist terrorist’s campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people in October 2023, the resistance forces of Lebanon have been one of the most stalwart and powerful supporters of the Palestinian resistance. In no small way, the resistance in Lebanon has diverted the zionist entity’s attacks, forcing even the displacement of thousands of settlers from the northern part of Historic Palestine. As a result, Lebanese populations in the border towns have suffered from the zionist terrorists’ frenetic and frustrated reprisals. Because the zionist terrorists, rather than ending the genocide, prefer another attack on Lebanon as well as a wider regional war, they have been provoking the country with increasingly brutal bombings and other terrorist acts. They will keep pushing until they try to inflict on Lebanon what they are inflicting on Palestine.
As we approach the beginning of a second year of the US-funded zionist genocide of the Palestinian people—and as another invasion of Lebanon seems imminent—“Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” seems painfully relevant. As does so much of June Jordan’s writing. We reprint “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” below.
Apologies to All the People in Lebanon
June Jordan
Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?
Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family
But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad
You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV
You see my point;
I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.
June Jordan, “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” first published (without the epigram) in The Village Voice (20 July 1982). Reprinted in Off Our Backs (March, 1983) and in Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
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