Resist, My People, Resist Them
قاوم يا شعبي قاومهم
The poem that put a poet on trial: posted online in October 2015, it led to Tatour's arrest, conviction, and imprisonment — before an Israeli court ruled on appeal that the poem was not a crime.
Watch
Recording: Dareen Tatour
Resist, my people, resist them. In Jerusalem, I dressed my wounds and breathed my sorrows And carried the soul in my palm For an Arab Palestine. I will not succumb to the “peaceful solution,” Never lower my flags
(excerpt — English translation by Tariq al Haydar)
About this poem
Dareen Tatour posted a video of herself reading this poem on YouTube and Facebook in October 2015. She was arrested days later and charged with incitement to violence, the prosecution resting its case on a police officer’s contested Hebrew translation of her Arabic. Convicted in May 2018, she was sentenced to five months in prison and released that September; in May 2019 the Nazareth District Court overturned the conviction for the poem, ruling that it contained no unequivocal call to violence and that “freedom of expression is accorded added weight when it also involves freedom of artistic and creative [expression].”
The poem mourns Hadil al-Hashlamoun, an eighteen-year-old shot by Israeli soldiers at a Hebron checkpoint in September 2015 — “As for Hadil, they sniped her in public, / Killed her in broad daylight” — a killing that had drawn international outrage weeks before Tatour’s arrest.