Yehuda Amichai's "Jews in the Land of Israel"

This week's poem is Yehuda Amichai's "Jews in the Land of Israel."

This week I'm thinking about how, although Palestinian and Israeli poets do not always write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's easy to read that into their poems. With Palestinian poets, I find I often interpret conflict in a poem as being a reference to the occupation (I'm not saying such a reading is correct). With Israeli poets, like Yehuda Amichai, a wonderful poet who loved Israel and loved life, it's easy for me to see the conflict in the silence, the absence of reference to Palestinians.

So this week's poem is one I'm sure I read quite differently from its original intentions, with its "spilled blood."