National treasure Michael Rosen has a beautiful ability to mix humour and reality with intense emotion. And his new book – Words United – does just this, providing us with a powerful tool for reflecting on and resisting the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Profits to Palestine, ‘word-drones’ to its oppressors

Fascists killed members of Michael Rosen’s family during the Holocaust, and he has long sought to educate children and adults alike about the horrors of racist ideologies. That’s why, since the start of the genocide in 2023, he has stood consistently with the Palestinian people suffering their own Holocaust at the hands of Israeli fascists.

In his new book, he says he’s recently been trying to “find words to make the events feel less overwhelming”. And he thoroughly hopes words can “puncture the armour that surrounds our politicians as they engineer war, starvation and mass killing”.

Words, he suggests, may be able to “bring us together to help us fight the nightmare”. And they may “give people hope and strength to get up in the morning and fight on”. That’s why the book seeks to:

pierce the armour of lies, bias and misinformation peddled by politicians and the media as they engineer and support war, starvation and genocide in Palestine

Publisher Culture Matters describes the book as “a fleet of word-drones” aiming to expose Israel’s heinous war crimes and Western complicity in them.

Rosen will give the profits from the new book to Medical Aid for Palestine.

Michael Rosen: “freedom slips away” in silence

The book mostly brings together “poems, thoughts, sketches and performance pieces” that Rosen has written during the Gaza genocide.

Michael Rosen regularly warns of the dangers of the encroaching authoritarianism in many Western nations as their political elites seek to defend Israel’s genocidal crimes. In one poem, for example, he insists:

Freedom has no warning lights

when it slips away

it doesn’t flash red.

It quietly slips away, he adds:

When they start saying you can’t

speak your mind

It also slips away:

When they start locking people up

without giving them a fair hearing

He criticises liberal voices in particular for their double standards, saying in another poem:

…when it comes
to what the Israeli government and army do,
liberal opinion seems to sometimes lose its voice,
seems to sometimes fail to switch on the alarm bells
and warning lights.
Seems not to cry out from its
liberal heart.

Coming from a Jewish family, he also laments the thoroughly racist minimising of Palestinian pain and centring of Jewish pain during a time of mass murder and destruction in Palestine. He calls out genocide-apologists’ antisemitic words as they continue to cynically weaponise antisemitism allegations to try and silence people daring to display empathy. And he points to the absurdity of Israelis being free to call for control of lands “from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river” but Palestinians and their supporters facing smears for demanding freedom “from the river to the sea”.

What is power?

A potent image Michael Rosen creates is that of a Martian, who free from worldly propaganda sees the simple reality of two very different sides that face very different treatment – those who want peace and those who want war. Imagine the alleged or actual mistakes of the left in Britain in recent decades, he says, and then compare these to:

the death and destruction our leaders have brought
through bombs and guns,
either directly or indirectly.

He clarifies:

On the one side, words, demos, articles, social media posts.
On the other the most ingenious
and up to date ways of destroying
hundreds of thousands of buildings
and killing hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people.

The Martian would ask why the treatment of these two groups is so different “in the public arena”.

In another poem, the Martian ponders:

How come some people have power over
other people?
I ask
because it doesn’t always seem to work out
too nice.
I see that it’s nice for the ones
with the power
but not so nice for those without the power

It adds:

the ones with no power
have to do what the powerful ones tell them to do.
Seems like they have to work a lot
and don’t always have enough to eat
don’t always have somewhere to live
and I can see that they get bombs dropped on them
sometimes too.

That seems to be mostly OK with the people with power.
They like that.
They come on your screens and explain
why dropping bombs on people is OK.

And it points out that:

…I hear people with power saying
you’ve got to have people with power.
Well I guess they would say that.

But for the majority of people – those of us without power, things are bad.

The lingering question, then, is: why do we allow those with power to keep their power?

Michael Rosen shows us our voices are more powerful than we think

Things don’t need to be this way. We don’t have to let our governments and media normalise genocide. We can take their power away. And words play a key role in that. We can spread the truth about why the world is the way it is, we can inspire resistance to that right now, and we can spread hope for a better future.

Words United is an incredibly moving reflection on violence, power, hypocrisy, identity, language, and resistance amid the ongoing nightmare in Gaza. But it’s also typically Michael Rosen – accessible, clear, empathetic, relatable, rhythmic, and witty. And it’s an essential contribution to the battle against gaslighting genocidal governments across the West.

Words United is published by Culture Matters and available here.

Featured image supplied

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.