Leader: From the river to the sea,
People: Palestine will be free!
The rubble piles ever higher, Palestinians trapped between rock and rebar and earth. Those who are able move through the wreckage, piece by piece, knowing they may find their loved ones’ broken, decomposing bodies, but “In order to move forward, I have to convince myself that I don’t know whose body this is. In fact, it could be my once neighbor or friend.”
Leader: Viva viva
People: Palestina!
Basil is asleep in Ibn Siba Hospital in Jenin. He is a Palestinian militant. He has been injured for three months. A dozen people, apparently civilians, enter the hospital. Three seem to be women and two seem to be medical personnel. They are concealing assault rifles. They are, according to an analysis by The Economist, committing a war crime. The Israeli soldiers do not arrest Basil but kill him and two others as they sleep. As for everyone else in the hospital, those whose place of healing and protection has been breached by violence and deception, “One can only imagine [their] terror.”
Leader: One, two, three, four,
People: Occupation no more!
Israeli protesters block aid trucks bound for Gaza, saying to drivers, “I’m the master here, you’re the slave” and “the lives of my friends [IDF soldiers] outweigh the lives of the citizens of Gaza.”
Leader: Five, six, seven, eight,
People: Israel is a terrorist state!
A six-year-old girl named Hind is trapped in a car between Israeli tanks, surrounded by the dead bodies of her aunt, uncle, and cousins. “Will you come and get me? I’m so scared,” she says through the phone to Rana at the Palestinian Red Crescent. Rana’s team sends an ambulance to rescue her. A week passes. No word comes through from Hind or the ambulance crew.
Leader: Netanyahu, you will see,
People: Palestine will be free!
It is 1988. Hamas leaders offer Israel a truce and demand that the settler nation “first acknowledge the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and right of return to their land.” It is 1996. Hamas offers a ceasefire. It is 1999. It is 2003. It is 2015. Hamas offers a ceasefire. It is last year. It is last month. It is last week. Israel chooses to more violence.
Leader: Biden, Biden, you can’t hide!
People: You are funding genocide!
Too cowardly to face his colleagues and due process, US President Joe Biden bypasses his own Congress, twice, to authorize a weapons sale, which Israel can pay for using the roughly $3.3 billion in military aid that the US supplies to Israel each year. “Thousands and thousands of bombs will be going to Israel” to add to the more than 29,000 bombs Israel has already dropped on the 141 square miles of the Gaza strip.
Leader: Ceasefire now!
ALL: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
“The suffering of children in this conflict is unimaginable and even more so because it is unnecessary and completely avoidable,” yet every day, amid the bombing, gunfire, starvation, lack of shelter from harsh weather conditions, and unmanageable spread of disease in a place with little to no access to clean water or antibiotics, more than ten of Gaza’s children have at least one leg amputated. Every day. They often endure the procedure with no anesthetic, nothing to temper such intense, life-altering pain.
Leader: Free, free
People: Palestine!
Displaced Gazans, their homes destroyed, the UN shelters inaccessible, their tents and temporary shelters nearly useless in the cold and rainy winter months, find protection in chicken and turkey coops, where “The air is stuffy, unclean, and we live with a constant feeling of suffocation. Kids are complaining of itchy skin and rashes, and some are now having eye infections. It’s torture.”
Leader: Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry!
People: We will never let you die!
The beauty of the Gaza that was, “the most beautiful city that I have ever seen,” contrasts with the Gaza that is now in the wake of Israel’s wholesale destruction of homes, beaches, cultural sites, religious institutions, commercial areas, roadways, more than half of all buildings in Gaza. The daunting question looms: how do we “imagine a future where […] Gaza is rebuilt again?”
Leader: From the sea to the river,
People: Palestine will live forever!
