Michael Jackson, Palestine, and the Erasure of Solidarity

In 1993, Michael Jackson penned a song for Palestine. But it was never recorded. Sherry Zane asks why and explores the policing of Jackson's politics.

A few months ago, my Instagram feed lit up with a surprising piece of news about the late Michael Jackson. On his return flight from a 1993 concert in Tel Aviv, Jackson had written a song called “Palestine, Don’t Cry.”

I could not believe it. I needed to know if the lyrics were real. They are.

Somewhere mid-flight, high above the Mediterranean, Jackson took a sheet of British Airways Concorde stationery and began to write. He was coming off tour — exhausted, from a life he once described as “going through hell” on the road — and yet unable to turn away from what he had witnessed. On the page, in his own hand, appeared the lines: “Bomb shells are flying… see the children crying.” A plea drafted in transit, caught between departure and return, was preserved across two handwritten pages and later offered at auction. Whether a studio recording was ever attempted remains unknown. What exists, undeniably, is the paper trail.

I was shocked — not only that the song existed, but that it never entered the world as sound. If it was recorded, why was it never released? If it wasn’t, why not? I couldn’t help but imagine the impact: what it might have meant for those words to circulate beyond the cabin of that plane, to move as music rather than remain as a trace.

The search led me into a dense web of fan pages, TikToks, and threads that paired the lyrics with AI-generated versions of Jackson’s voice, completing what he never released. Within these spaces, fans attempt to account for the song’s disappearance by stitching together fragments of corporate history, media scandal, and organizational control.

What follows emerges from the accelerating flow of images from Palestine across digital platforms, converging with personal memory and archival research. How were Michael Jackson’s political positions were policed, managed and mitigated when they became threatening, especially when it came to the Middle East?

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