“Revolution of the Stones”
The hypocrisy of Albright and Barak:
deeming the throwing of stones,
by boys surviving under years, decades
of developmental curfew
to be violence!
When you cannot count
the number of Israelis
killed
murdered
maimed
by bits of rock,
because the number is less than one
(and less than one is nothing, is no one).
When you cannot count
the number of martyrs
on the side of our shabab,
killed
murdered
maimed
by the Israeli Occupation Forces
with all the digits on your body,
unless you count four times over
on your fingers and toes,
because the number is now more than eighty!
The arrogance and cowardice of Barak:
to give Arafat a 48-hour deadline
to stop the violence,
As if it weren't Barak's
Immensely Insane
Destructive Domination
Forces
that have gone berserk;
As if the Revolution of the Stones,
al-Aqsa Intifida,
is somehow the machination
of Yasser Arafat
and not the will of
the Palestinian people,
the masses of filasteeneen, struggling
to shake off
once again
(and again if necessary)
The weight
of Zionist settlements and occupation,
of Israeli shopping malls,
of Amerikan name-brand imperialism,
while badaween children play
amidst shit and piss running down the streets,
and live next to open reservoirs of sewage,
and walk hours to go to school
(if they make it to school at all);
while one minute you can be
in the rubble-strewn refugee camps of Rafa or
Dheisheh,
and half-an-hour later you can be
in the new Southern California
that Zionist “frontiersmen”
and U.S. tax dollars
transplanted onto Arab land!
Here is our fundamental problem,
we who uphold the Palestinian cause
while living in the belly of the beast:
We know in whose hands lays the true responsibility
for violence,
for violating U.N. resolutions
and human rights,
decade after decade.
But we do not yet control the message,
So our youth,
our self-sacrificing freedom fighters,
armed only with chunks of rubble
and chants,
are labeled
and criminalized
and dehumanized.
Our main task:
We must flip the script,
so that the real criminals
and terrorists,
those cowardly and violent
Zionists,
are exposed
and reviled
and sanctioned
and boycotted
and ostracized-
like their white brothers in South Africa-
until the last great bastion
of Apartheid,
modern-day Babylon,
some call it “Zion,”
nestled between the banks of the River Jordan
and the Mediterranean Sea,
is finally toppled.