People Not Places

[Verse 1]
Prepare for take off
Touch down Ben-Gurion
Strict search make sure nobody enters with bombs
Blue white flags
For the Birthright Tour I’m on
Never mention three villages the airport is on
Recent history buried
But it speaks through the sand
All Jews: Law of Return
I don’t seem to understand
"A land without a people for people without a land"?
But I see a man standing with a key and a deed in his hand
First stop: museum of the Holocaust
Walking outside–in the distance–saw a ghost throwing a Molotov
Houses burnt with kerosene
Mass graves
Couldn’t bear the scene
It wasn’t a pogrom–it was the ruins of Deir Yassin
Next stop: shopping at the Kenyon Malcha
Built it on the back of the town Al-Malha
Wishing we could call it its name;
Appalled by the change;
And now a mall full of chains
Is all that remains.

[Hook]
My Ima misses people not places
Has she seen the towns with names in Arabic the Hebrew replaces?
The policies are evil and racist, deceitful and heinous
You’ll never be a peaceful state with legal displacement

[Abeer]
Remember the names of our cities before you came and replaced it
Remember and tell me how am I supposed not to miss a nation living within us?
[Translated from Arabic]

[Verse 2]
At the Wailing Wall I’m rolling a wish
Then stick it in between the hole in the bricks
I’m feeling more than melancholy
This used to be the Moroccan quarter
Until we stopped em short and
Now their grandkids is the ones that’s throwing rocks at borders
I ain't one to play and I don’t pray often
So I’m AWOL'n
While you making native sons
Feel like a stranger in they own land like James Baldwin
This ain't about a Qur'an or a synagogue or Mosque or Torah
The colonizer break it into acres and dunums
Erasing the culture
Changed Haifa to Chaifa
Changed Yaffa to Yaffo
The old city left to haunt
Hummus pronounced chumoos, we ate in a restaurant
Next hit the discotheque
Yes we on the list of guests
Palestinians can't get in
Its blatant disrespect
Cops stop em for speaking they language
Its dangerous
To repeat it when
With history we disconnect

[Hook]

[Verse 3]
200 year old olive trees
Uprooted the groves
To build a wall
Now their future enclosed
Settlements spreading like cancer and toxic sewage polluted the roads
Now full of checkpoints
I superimpose the truth and it shows
Village ruins overgrown with planted trees
Who’d have thought the "desert blooms" and Tu Bishvat
I can't believe
This ain't environmental
Disguising lies, extincting lives like manatees
Calling it a transfer? Please–
More like a catastrophe!
Birthright tours recruiting em, confuse em into moving in
Claim its only names and words but denying the root of them
Power been abusing it
Our past never excusing them
60 years since 48 and 40 since Jerusalem
My boy Shadi wanted to visit it so badly
He lied he’s diabetic to see it for five seconds
One Nine Four ruled the courts in the case
Mom, you can’t disconnect a people from the importance of place

[Hook]