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.

#Palestine #Statement #poem #MiddleEast