Check Out My New Song ‘O Palestine’, Released to Support Vital Humanitarian Relief in Gaza

With just two days to go until the unforgivable second anniversary of the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and with hopes diminishing that the ‘Peace Plan’ pushed by Donald Trump will actually bring the grotesque and seemingly endless murder of Palestinian civilians to an end, the timing seems appropriate for the release of ‘O Palestine’, a new song of mine, which I wrote in the early months of Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, and opposing the genocide and western support and complicity.

The song was recorded as a collaboration with my son Tyler (beatboxer The Wiz-RD), on which I play guitar, Wurlitzer piano and Hohner Bass 2, with Tyler beatboxing, and it was produced by the great Charlie Hart, best known for working with the late Ronnie Lane, who also produced The Four Fathers’ last album, Songs of Loss and Resistance.

I’ve played ‘O Palestine’ live, on several occasions and in various formats, with The Four Fathers, although this particular sonic departure, credited to Andy & The Wiz-RD, is new territory, and might best be described as pop reggae protest music.

All proceeds from the online sales of ‘O Palestine’ will go to the Sameer Project, set up by Palestinians living in the global diaspora, and facilitated by brave Palestinians on the ground in Gaza itself, who source and distribute aid to displaced families all over the Gaza Strip, who are skilled at locating supplies despite the severity of Israel’s ongoing siege, and who “provide support in the form of shelter, medication and treatment, food, water, diapers, formula, and more.”

As they explain, “Our ethos is to promote resilience, maintain dignity, and provide agency for the families we serve. We are proactive and adaptable based on priority needs at any given time, implementing urgent and emergency response as needed.”

However, as they wrote in a recent post on X, “The last few weeks have been so difficult for the Sameer Project team having to decide where to allocate funds. Food to battle the ongoing famine, water to quench the thirst during the heat, tents as shelter for those displaced or medication for patients who need them to survive. Our hearts break daily with all the requests we get and sadly over the last week donations have been extremely slow. Gaza is suffering and all mutual aid work is needed. We beg you to keep donating and sharing our work.”

I hope you appreciate the song, and will help me raise as much money as possible for this extremely worthwhile project. The basic cost for a download is £1.50, but you can pay as much as you want. You can listen to it for free, but I hope you’ll help me help the Sameer Project continue their urgent and necessary work by buying it.

For more on the Sameer Project, including details of how you can donate to their work independently, see here and here, and also see their page on X.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.