Poems for Palestine - Chapbook (Publishers for Palestine)

Today we announce the launch of Poems for Palestine: Recent poems by nine Palestinian poets & actions you can take to stop genocide now. Publishers for Palestine have come together to create this free booklet of poetry, artwork, and resources for action, now available for both print and online dissemination. Please read and share as widely as you please!

 Immediately following the ICJ ruling that found that Israel must take all available action to avoid genocide, western powers are exposing the contradictions between their declared adherence to international law and their true adherence to US-Israeli economic interests. With the withdrawal of funding from UNRWA we see the dedication of what Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah now terms an “Axis of Genocide”: the US, UK, Canada, and other western states’ adherence to colonial Israel and imperial interests at the cost of Palestinian life. As we see in the regionally expanding aggression, this adherence also comes at the cost of the lives of Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, and Yemenis. Indeed, the expansionist greed of colonial states sees no human life worthy, if that life stands in the way of its hunger for land, resources, and power. This must be stopped.

So we must be ever persistent and ever louder.

We reiterate that the primary focus of our actions must be putting pressure on our governments: governments that are supporting Israel. The ICJ ruling provides yet another tool for us to increase that pressure, because we can now point to governments’ lack of adherence to international law by continuing their support for Israel’s genocide. We must continue to call, email, rally, participate in BDS, and place pressure on our cultural institutions. 

Our demands remain the same: permanent immediate ceasefire, immediate flow of required aid, arms and trade embargos, restoration of critical infrastructure, and policy changes across the board that reflect the will of all people of conscience to end the long occupation and affirm Palestinian right to freedom and self-determination.

From the introduction:

“Though few of us could memorize an entire essay or story, poems come readily to the tongue and can be chanted or read aloud at gatherings, shared and re-shared on social media. They vibrate between us, move between languages, and connect memory to memory. Yet they are not only our shared sonic landscape, but also a visual one, with poetry written on stickers and placed beside bus seats and on lampposts; written on cardstock and held aloft during protests; penned elegantly for signs in windows. Poetry can be composed as quickly as a news story, and yet it resists the language of normalized oppression, searching for ways to help us see past the dulled passive voice of contemporary news coverage.”

With poetry from: Refaat Al-Areer, Fady Joudah, Hiba Abu Nada, Olivia Elias, Samer Abu Hawwash, Maya Murry, Ahlam Bsharat, Basman Aldirawi, Ghassan Zaqtan, 

With artwork from: Jana Traboulsi, @bambiprikt, @sohilaakhaled_, Gabriela Araújo @mgabrielaaraujo, Rand Salim Hammoud @Zaafa_art, Eline Van Dam @zelootillustrations, Aly S.Elsayed @aly.selsayed, Hassan Manasrah @hassan.manasrah.illustrations