and he would have condemned us for not doing likewise.
He would never have used the crimes of Stalin to
justify or just ignore the crimes of Reagan, Thatcher,
or Mitterrand. He would have denounced the French
murders in the Paci?c, the American murders through-
out the Third World.

Sartre knew, as all of us do, that the rich get richer
only because the poor get poorer; but unlike the rest of
us he would never have stopped shouting it at the top
of his voice. He would have asked us why we keep count-
ing and recounting the murders of Stalin, why we rarely
count the dead in Argentina (40,000), in Brazil (30,000),
in El Salvador (100,000), in Guatemala (100,000), in
Chile (60,000); why we do not denounce our own
country which has two million homeless. And he would

Covenant

have asked the rest of the world?s intellectuals why they
praise a country like the United States that offers no
health insurance at all to 27 percent of its people, why
they remain silent when their country allies itself with a
government that distributes more deadly drugs to US.
citizens through its of?cial agencies (the CIA, DIA,
DEA, NSC, and so forth) than do all the ma?as and
gangster governments of the world combined. Why,
Sartre would ask us all again and again, do you who, like
me, ferociously defended the right of Israel to exist, not
today denounce its policies against the Palestinians,
whose right to self?determination cannot be questioned?

No wonder Jean-Paul Sartre is the most hated con-
science of our century. El

 

Sharon Kessler

In the desert

where old legends
conspire, we

are making fresh
tracks in the sand,
carrying our burden
to some resting place.

Above
the black crest
of rock,
an arc of slow ?re
rises. Morning again.
We march forward,
a tribe of mute warriors,
daughters of a race
so lost
no legend tells of us.

We too heard voices in the wilderness
but we built

no tabernacle

to contain them.

The sign of the covenant
is not incised upon our flesh,

but deep in the one heart
of our body

the everlasting bush burns
and is not consumed.

66 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4