My poetry pen has been frozen for months now, so I’m doing the best I can sharing what others have written about “The Palestinian Cause”  by posting on my Facebook page, and most recently by reviving the Peace Potluck and film showings I started following Sept. 11, 2021.

Last Sunday, six of us watched the 2014 film, “The Occupation of the American Mind” made by the Media Education Foundation, which delineated Israel’s public relations campaign to shape opinion in the United States about Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories and the IDF’s repeated invasions and bombings of Gaza. As I’ve said before, and say each time I read another Press Democrat article sub-headed Israel-Hamas War, history did not begin on October 7.

No living artist has better portrayed what has been going on with Israel’s colonial project than singer-songwriter David Rovics. Going back to his albums in 2003 and 2004, “Songs for Mahmud” and “Return” and continuing now through his various online channels, Rovics has been relentless in his output, often offering more accurate analysis in lyrics than on the evening news.

The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is by no means the only subject matter for Rovics’ imagination. Around the time of “Occupy Wall Street,” he came to Santa Rosa for a living room concert in my home and presented me with a “we are the 99%” baseball cap, after singing and firing up the crowded room for a good 90 minutes.

At that time,  his T-shirt message was about world-wide attempts to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza (begun in 2007) which continues to today in its most apocalyptic form.

If you follow this link, you can read Rovics’ description of another such sacrifice of a Polish Socialist’s ultimate protest to call attention to the slaughter of his fellow Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. (It was notable to me that two women at my peace potluck wondered how a people who had experienced a genocide during World War II could be committing one now, against another people they had dehumanized as vermin).

“The appropriate responses to a holocaust are whatever means might have an impact on stopping it, or raising alarms about it, regardless of how extreme they might be,” Rovics writes in his weekly message.

At this link, you can hear the singer bearing witness to Aaron Bushnell’s deliberate and conscientious self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on Feb. 25, 2024.

In my opinion, David Rovics is the political troubadour of this American century. His music is readily available online; you can support him and subscribe to This Week with David Rovics here.

Additional info: davidrovics.com/tour    davidrovics.com/palestine