Solidarity تضامن
We are with you in Gaza
Where UN resolutions are good for nothing
But stitching into tents for your refugees
Where schools and museums and family homes
Are legitimate targets
Because this is a war on history
A war on all memory
Of Palestine
We are with you in Gaza
Where the free world spends more money
On weapons aimed at you than it spends feeding Africa
Where waterless, powerless streets
Are crammed with ghosts
And throng with the spirits of millions
Of Palestinians living now in exile
But whose hearts are with you in Gaza
We are with you in Gaza
Where the West’s unblinking eyes
Still see no apartheid beyond the wall
That 430 mile concrete wall
Segregating rights-bearing citizens from the unpeople
Never mind Mandela, that canonised freedom fighter
Who said the war on apartheid was still on
Until freedom for Palestine too was won
We are with you in Gaza
Where your family grew as old as the olive grove
Until the tanks came, and the branches
Were crushed as quick as human bone
As the UN, which once owned
And gave away half of Palestine
Now inquires and condemns
And draws green lines
We are with you in Gaza
Where your babies are born at checkpoints
And called terrorists before their mothers name them
Where they inherit their grandparents’ nightmares
And the monsters they draw are real
And have no trouble sleeping
Safe in the knowledge that they fight for democracy
(A democracy which ignores elections, draws borders round its majority
And beats its own citizens for protesting Zionist brutality)
We are with you in Gaza
Where you see this man here, he talked liberation for sixty years
Put flesh between hope and bullets for sixty years
Held his dignity like a shield but died in poverty
Without justice or autonomy
Leaving children who dream only
Of a brother returned from the cells
The silent, unaccountable cells that
Read no rights and appoint no lawyers
And need no jury to sanction suffering
We are with you in Gaza
Where Western weapons roar
While Western leaders her no evil
Speak no evil – speak only of a peace process
Which mocks the term
What peace without justice?
What process between Gaza and Goliath?
Double speak, double speak,
Is ‘peace process’ just UN speak for ‘well-mannered genocide’?
We are with you in Gaza
Unlike the liberal media
Where a hundred years of oppression
Is redacted and sound bitten
We are shamed by our anger
And angered by our shame – explain?
Ashamed to rage at Goliath when his banker lives in Westminster
Anger at the atrocities bankrolled in our name
We are with you in Gaza
Where a monsoon of shells flood
The alleys of Al Shujaya with civilian blood
Where the children are coming home legless
Or headless, were helpless
As you feel now, curled up like a child
As the grief pours in,
As we feel now, beyond the sea,
Standing with our candles
As we cry
We will not let Gaza die
(Not that Gaza is waiting on us to fight
For her survival
But we are with you in Gaza
We have been every day
Since 1948
Gaza, we are marching
Gaza, we are chanting
Gaza, we are divesting
They said the old would die and the young would forget
But we still read the names of your dead
Nidal aged five
Mohammed, fifteen
Riad, fifty
Hussein, thirteen
Salah, six
Ali, only yesterday, only eighteen months
And what of the killers, of the IDF?
They traumatise and maim and kill
But they regret
Almost with the vigour they forget
Civilian death
Oh, but the moment every Palestinian’s gone
Or bends the knee
Then, they say, there can be peace!
How simple
How civilised things might be…
Solidarity
Is not something you discuss over dinner
It is not a hypothetical position to be
Defended on theoretical chessboards
It is not an artful argument
It does more than merely ‘strike a chord’
Solidarity
Is not the sum of its facebook likes
It is not painting your face for the day
We Were All Palestinians
Then pressing play on real life
And pause on the siege
Till the next time Gaza bleeds
Solidarity
Lives in blood and bone
It’s the calling of another land your home
Just because it’s here on planet earth
The calling of another’s brother kin
Just because he’s here on planet earth
And we have some power and freedom here
For what it’s worth
And if there be such a thing
This killing is a sin
And so is silence
Solidarity
Is a reflex that can’t be curbed by convenience
Feet that march till the tanks stop
Voices chanting till the lies stop
Eyes still open till the killings stop
A full, heavy silence for the naming of the dead
Then no justice, no peace –
Hands off the Middle East!
For Ali Saad Dawabsheh
Voice
The movement moves
Quickly
There’s a patchwork of placards
And a river of marchers
Flowing by the Thames
And the endless succession
Of classrooms and basements and bars
Where we devised the making of a new world
‘Stronger together, shoulder to shoulder’
Impeccable logic
But sooner or later
You also have to stand alone
And suddenly everything’s slow
Heart thunders in my ears
Utterly legless but pulled up by my
Grandmother’s hands and jostled
By the ghosts of my class to SPEAK!
To say something, point somewhere,
Anywhere but backwards
In the face of all this savagery
The manifestation of all they warned
Capital would be
And already seeping into the bones
Of the Next Generation
Hate to say it because, you know,
“Pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will”
But it probably isn’t never too late
For the Beast to be killed
So we sort of need to move on this…
And it’s not like I had nothing to say
(How can anyone who’s seen any of this
Have nothing to say?)
So I stood
And my Nanna’s invisible shoulder
Kept me upright
“We’ve had enough of the bombing
And the lying and the thieving
And of living in a world where
Nothing is held sacred
Nothing is free
From the mechanised grip
Of the Company
Of the politics of hate
And the economy of madness
That consumes all matter
And tosses it like so many
Dead bodies on the
Altar of Infinite Growth
The Priests of Progress
Gather around their acronyms
And their projections
(Which never go down)
And perform voodoo
Against the body politic
Feeding the market on human flesh
Chanting constantly
About the End of History.
We’ve had enough of that too
What an insult!
This, the end of the line?
This violent, garish,
Poisonous mess,
This all-encompassing apartheid
Of all people from all people
And the planet
And from knowledge?
This carnival of spiteful caricatures
That calls itself a ‘discourse’
Little more than a
Chorus of slogans masquerading as
Free expression?
Enough of that too
Don’t talk to us about freedom
From the Penthouse Suite on the 43rd floor
You, who climbed up there
On the backs of blacks
And the dreams of great women
And the fingers of the factory kids
And kicked away the ladder
Now you’re going to talk about
‘Natural inequality’?
Ten thousand years of darkness dispelled
By… ‘equal opportunity’?
And opportunity to what?
Climb over each other to kiss the ring?
Trade ipods for the right to sing?
Drop democracy for the right to vote?
Settle for this
And surrender hope?
The prince of Wall Street
His Priests of Progress assure us
History is ended and we have no choice
But not
While we still have a voice.
