On the Attitude Toward Children in Wartime.

• Author: Ravikovich, Dahlia
• Position: Poem

On the Attitude Toward Children in Wartime He who destroys thirty babies it's as if he'd destroyed three hundred babies, and toddlers too, or even eight-and-a-half-year-olds. In a year, God willing, they'd be soldiers in the Palestine Liberation Army. "Benighted children, at their age they don't even have a real world view. Anyway, their future would be shrouded, too: refugee shacks, unwashed faces, open sewers in the streets, infected eyes, a negative outlook on life." And thus began the flight from city to village, from village to burrows in the hills. As when a man did flee from a lion, as when he did flee from a bear, as when he did flee from a cannon, from an airplane, from our own troops. He who destroys thirty babies, it's as if he'd destroyed one thousand and thirty, or one thousand and seventy, thousand upon thousand. And for that alone shall he find no rest. translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

Author's note:

This is a variation on a poem by Natan Zach that deals [satirically] with the question of whether there were exaggerations in the number of children reported killed in the [1982] Lebanon War.

Lines 1-2, He who destroys: Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5: "He who destroys a single human soul, it is as if he had destroyed an entire world."

Lines 16-17, As when a man: Amos 5:19.

Dahlia Ravikovitch (b. Ramat Gan, 1936," d. Tel Aviv, 2005) was one of Israel's great poets, perhaps the...