The Crown’s Khalid Abdalla releases ‘A simple song’ as a tribute to Palestine’s children
Khalid Abdalla, the British actor who played the ill-fated Dodi Al-Fayed on Netflix’s The Crown, has released a new song called ‘A simple song’, dedicated to “the children of Palestine, past, present and future” and to “all children of genocide”.
Abdalla, who also starred in the 2007 film The Kite Runner, has been a vocal proponent of the Palestinian cause. During the 2024 Emmy Awards, he wrote “Never again” on his hand in reference to the violence being perpetrated against Palestinians and wore two pins, a dove signifying the city of Bethlehem and scales representing the International Court of Justice, which, at the time, was hearing a case filed against Israel for war crimes in Gaza by South Africa.
The song he wrote and sung, shared on social media on Saturday afternoon, was accompanied by a caption that read, “May it meet this moment in hope, while the tide of global consciousness is changing, so the child born now grows up in a world with a free Palestine, and what that will mean for every child everywhere.”
The song itself has a simple refrain —?“This is a simple song, about simple things”. Those “simple things” include children being killed, an apartheid-like regime that has different laws for different people and politicians prioritising money over lives.
The video accompanying the song includes shots of Abdalla playing a grand piano as well as a single, continuous shot of children’s clothing lined up on Bournemouth beach. The shot begins with a slow closeup of some clothes and slowly starts panning out as it moves along the beach, eventually showing an aerial shot of an impossibly long line of clothes. The clothes likely represent all the children killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“They took our land, and then they occupied us, and when we fall, they call us terrorists,” Abdalla sings in the video. “And when they said never again, it was not for us. If you want peace give me justice.” The phrase ‘never again’ is associated with the Holocaust and the promise to never let such an atrocity happen again.
Abdalla said the full song will be out on other platforms soon, with a full release through Gu?lbaba Music, an Istanbul-based management agency with a sister label called Gu?lbaba Records.
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