Antelias, Lebanon 1956 – Beirut, Lebanon 2025 I am yet to mourn the passing of the great Lebanese composer, lyricist, playwright, and political activist Ziad Rahbani (1956-2025). For another, I knew Ziad personally, after we met in Beirut in 1998. We even enjoyed a four-hour productive jam session in his studio, thanks to Subhi Ben …
I was about to begin my performance in Salisbury last Saturday 2nd November when I heard the shocking news of the arrest of Haim Bresheeth, a child of Holocaust survivors and the founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine. The performance came at the end of a conference on Palestine hosted by the Muslim Institute, …
Many of you might be rather surprised and disturbed by the difficulties we encountered in the organising of my concert in Bath last month. Without the dogged and determined efforts over several years of a local community group, Bath Friends of Palestine (Bath FoP), it almost certainly would not have happened. The extremist Israel lobby …
Poetry: Refaat Alareer (1979-2023); Music: Reem Kelani Whilst I was in hospital over Christmas and New Year, I kept on reading aloud the last poem that Refaat Alareer wrote before he was assassinated by Israel in Gaza. The melody would not come, no matter how much I tried. When I got back home, I sat …
If you support genocide, you have no right to complain about people disliking you for it. If you support genocide and you happen to be Jewish, you have no right to weaponise anti-Semitism against your critics. You bear responsibility for the views you express. We all do!
It’s no longer a “retaliatory attack”. It stopped being that before it had begun. It’s a genocide, no longer plausible nor probable. A genocide: pure and simple. For seven long months, the killing has been without relent. It’s no longer about the hostages. It never was, and it won’t stop until Gaza is no more.
Our existence as Palestinians is a statement in itself. When you say you don’t want “overt” politics, you question our olive oil. You question our songs. You question our poems. You question our very being. Last time I checked, all people have the right to exist. Yes. All of us, Palestinians included!
My father, Yousef Kelani (1925-2016), joined UNRWA in 1953 upon his graduation from Alexandria University in Egypt. He was the physician in charge of UNRWA’s mobile clinics for Palestinian refugees in Irbid and the River Jordan Valley. This culminated in him becoming the assistant medical director of St Luke’s Hospital in Hebron (al-Khalil). My father’s …
From the release of my EP “The Singer Said: Bird of Dawn” in 2022 and my research-based concert “A People by the Sea” for the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the first half of 2023 http://tinyurl.com/mu9c9y9c, the latter half of 2023 saw me move forward with the next phase in my This Land is Your …
At a time when we are watching the mass transfer of the indigenous Palestinian people from their ancestral homelands in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, I’ve decided to post a few clips from this outstanding series. I will start with the opening credits. The lyrics were taken from a poem called Al-Fidaa’i [The …