Return Lyrics

I can't help it. I don't care how far you think the analogy extends itself. When I see you making that bus driver climb up and down, on and off the roof of his bus for your amusement, for hours in the hot sun, I think of how we once had to dance and sing for them while they shot our parents. When I see you keep that woman and her husband at the checkpoint while she's in labor and you stand there listening to her scream, watching as she gives birth on the back seat of a taxi, I think of the walls around our own ghetto and how we had to crawl through the sewers looking for rats to eat while we could hear their children playing on the other side. When I see you crush that house and kill that woman and her baby with your armored bulldozer because they didn't have a permit, I think of the way we were once forced to leave our homes at the point of a gun. And when I hear your general say that in order to deal with the intifada you must learn from the tactics of another general, one Mr. Stroop in Warsaw, I think of how they bombed our buildings, shot us as we fell from the roofs. And I remember how we wished we could kill their babies, too. And I feel sick -- sick of your displaced anger; sick of your self-deception; sick of your attempts to deceive the rest of the world; sick of your accusations of antisemitism; sick of your occupation; sick of your apartheid state; sick of Zionism. Because standing here in Auschwitz, Birkenau and Warsaw, I see Jenin, Jaffa and Rafah. And I think of our ancestors, the Jewish Palestinians, who spoke so eloquently in their Arabic language. But the dead cannot speak. And now I find myself again behind the wall of a ghetto, standing with millions of other Palestinians. And I find myself shouting, Thawra! Thawra! Hatta al-Nasser! Tomorrow in Jerusalem! Al-Awda. Return.