What would Georg Trakl (d.1914) make of the horrors of Gaza 2024, as well as the illegal settlements on Palestinian soil? Gaza is in West Asia not the Occident, for ‘occident’ is a term for the West, traditionally comprising anything that belongs to the ‘Western world’, which Zionist Israel clearly does.

Occident- III – by Georg Trakl

You mighty cities

Built from stone

On the plain!

So speechless

The homeless one follows

The wind with dark forehead,

Bleak trees by the hill.

You widely dusking rivers!

In storm clouds

The scary afterglow

Frightens enormously.

You dying people!

Pale wave

Breaking on the beach of night,

Falling stars.

While Palestinians are being massacred, white supremacist Jews are ‘dying’ … in a very real sense … dying slowly … slowly … the rubble of Gaza an open grave for what was always a Zionist nightmare.

‘Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution’ – wrote C P Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ 1904.

1904 … 1914 … 2024 … ‘a kind of solution’! Really ! ‘And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer’ … Really!