By Haidar Eid 
It’s been a year since Israel’s brutal aerial bombardment of Gaza, in which hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, were killed by Israel’s war machine.
At the time, the Gaza-based Civil Society issued a statement calling on international supporters to escalate #BDS campaigns to isolate apartheid Israel’s murderous regime of oppression! This song was supposed to be released as part of the #IsraeliApartheidWeek ‘s activities last year, but due to the spread of Covid19 and the Israeli attack, it didn’t see the light.
It is a song calling for a boycott of apartheid Israel, and states the demands of the Palestinian people, which happen to be those of the BDS movement: “We want freedom and return.”
It goes on to celebrate the culture of boycott from “Haifa (1948) to the West Bank (1967.)” That is the desired “firebrand” that needs to be “ignited” and the “fruit of the tree that needs to be watered by the coming rain to tell the tale of revolutionary heroes with grand ideas.”
The lyrics are based on a song performed by the great Palestinian singer Walid Abdussalam and written by Palestinian poet Yacoub Ismail, which we have humbly modified in order to adapt it to BDS demands.
The aim is to capture the essence of BDS activism and eloquently articulate them in the realm of words. We dedicate this to our late comrade Samah Idriss who would have celebrated it and whose spirit is flying with us in the skies of Gaza, Palestine.
You can also listen to the full song here ..
– Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the Al-Aqsa University, in the Gaza Strip. He is a research associate at the Center for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
