December 27, 2023 at 2:00 a.m. EST
Hany El Hamzawy plays the oud at a recent Palestinian solidarity performance at the Sheikh Imam Society in Cairo. (Sima Diab for The Washington Post)
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CAIRO — The oud player had strummed only a couple of notes when a flicker of recognition spread across the faces of Egyptians who gathered on a recent evening in a historic quarter of Cairo.
Together with the musicians on stage, the audience sang the famous opening words: “O, Palestinians!” By the second verse — about the dead and displaced — they were clapping to the drumbeat, voices at full volume, a communion forged in heartbreak over one of the Middle East’s oldest and deepest wounds.
The song, “Ya Falasteeniya,” emerged more than 50 years ago as a rallying cry after the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. The mostly young audience that night sang it to honor newer casualties — the more than 20,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, after Hamas militants killed 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7.
The classic song is part of a rich musical tradition that gets passed down — and added to — with every iteration of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Lyrics about exile and resistance have endured because the conflict has endured, each generation finding new resonance. At violent junctures, music has been a reminder of street-level solidarity, a record of past grievances and an outlet for fresh anger.
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“All the Arab countries sing these kinds of songs,” said Hany El Hamzawy, an oud player in the ensemble that night. “They penetrate your soul.”
Fans of the legendary Egyptian folk singer Sheikh Imam sing his famous pro-Palestinian songs at a cultural event in Cairo. (Video: Hannah Allam)
Playlists with names such as “Palestine Sounds” and “Palestine Forever” have sprung up on social media and music-streaming apps since the war erupted, blending decades-old standards about dispossession with newer, more militant expressions of outrage.
“They’re basically saying eff off to the occupation,” said Andrew Simon, a Dartmouth University historian of pop culture in the Arab world. The in-your-face style, he said, “is quite different than [the Lebanese superstar] Fairuz singing in the ’70s and ’80s about the history of a bridge that Palestinians were expelled across.”
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In the past two months, artists from the region have released a wave of Gaza-themed songs in a variety of genres. Media-savvy youths quickly add English subtitles and spread them on social media, hoping to scoop up new listeners in the West, which has seen large pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Washington, Paris and London.
But the main target audience remains the Arab world, especially younger generations who don’t remember earlier confrontations.
The Egyptian rapper Ganainy dropped a single last month that’s crammed with references to occupation and geography, “conveying some of the map and pieces of history, even if it’s just a song.”
Another theme of recent hits is perceived double standards by Western politicians.
The Egyptian rock band Cairokee, with more than 3.2 million YouTube subscribers, released a mournful track that opens with a line about saving sea turtles but killing “human animals,” a reference to an Israeli official’s dehumanizing language about Palestinians. The accompanying artwork shows a two-faced Statue of Liberty, with one side a devil.
The theme also runs through the lyrics to “Rajieen,” meaning, “We will return,” a collaboration of 25 Middle Eastern artists from different genres. In one section, a rapper pushes back at the blanket labeling of Palestinians as terrorists and another raps in Arabic, “Sorry that I’m not from Ukraine. Sorry that my skin isn’t White.”
“The older songs were more melancholic. The newer ones are more rebellious, more critical of the system in general,” said Ghada Eissa, a 26-year-old Egyptian who was wearing a necklace of a tiny Palestinian map that she bought recently.
Eissa was at a cafe with a friend, Yassmina Orban, 25, who’s been digging out older Palestinian songs to listen to. The war in Gaza, she said, has made her “relate on a whole different level.”
“I can imagine the words because I’m seeing what’s been happening,” Orban said, her eyes growing wet. “We’re watching our people get killed every single day.”
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Songs about the Palestinian struggle stretch back to the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” the term Palestinians use for the forcible mass displacement that occurred during the creation of Israel in 1948. Old folk tunes about parting lovers took on new meaning as families were separated from their lands, said Louis Brehony, a U.K.-based academic whose book “Palestinian Music in Exile: Voices of Resistance” was released last month.
The Nakba also interrupted a more cosmopolitan Palestinian music scene that took inspiration from the era’s Egyptian stars next door, he said. Little remains of that movement today.
“The recordings of these artists were looted in 1948,” Brehony said. Some were kept in Israeli archives. “Others were scattered, like the people themselves.”
A historic quarter in Cairo plays host to musicians singing songs about Palestinian exile and resilience. (Video: Hannah Allam)
As the conflict unfolded, and Palestinian militants took up arms, the musical themes evolved from tragedy and longing to steadfastness and resistance. Arab artists who championed the cause were often persecuted by authoritarian regimes, nervous about talk of rifles and rebellion.
That was the experience of Sheikh Imam, an iconic Egyptian singer and composer of the classic “Ya Falasteeniya.” Banned from the radio, the songs spread through informal cassette recordings made by Imam and his longtime collaborator, poet Ahmed Fouad Negm. The two were locked up repeatedly for subversive lyrics that are still sung by Egyptians today as a way around the government’s ban on protests.
At the same recent performance, musicians from the Sheikh Imam Society also sang “Nixon Baba” — a scathing commentary on President Richard M. Nixon’s 1974 visit to Egypt — but revised one line to “Biden Baba,” a jab at the U.S. administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
“With the atrocities happening … I found myself returning to Sheikh Imam,” said Mahmoud Ezzat, director of the society dedicated to the singer’s legacy. “Gaza is in the hearts of Arabs.”
Two widely shared TikTok videos illustrate how music is being weaponized in this round of fighting.
One video shows an Israeli soldier playing a guitar amid the rubble of a home in Gaza, belonging to displaced Palestinian musician Hamada Nasrallah, a member of the band Sol. On Instagram, Nasrallah said the guitar was a gift from his late father, a treasured souvenir he wasn’t able to carry when he fled.
“Isn’t it enough that they take away our loved ones, our homes, our families, and even our music and memories? Where does the injustice stop?!” Nasrallah wrote.
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Another clip shows doctors and medical workers in October outside the besieged al-Awda Hospital in Gaza. Standing together in scrubs, with smiles on their faces, they sing, “We will remain.”
Other Arab creatives — painters, playwrights, novelists — have also reflected on the Palestinian plight over the past 75 years, but historians say their work hasn’t had the same mass appeal as music. Where books were banned and statues smashed, songs endured through oral tradition.
“We’re on the fourth generation right now, so memory is the fuel for it all. If you do not hold on to the memory, there is no cause,” said Kegham Djeghalian, a Palestinian Armenian creative director whose grandfather opened the first photography studio in Gaza in 1944.
A couple of years ago, Djeghalian curated an exhibition of his grandfather’s photographs, focusing on what he called the “ruptured archive,” the absences that remain after years of war and displacement.
A trove of fragile, irreplaceable negatives remained in Gaza with the brother of his grandfather’s apprentice, who inherited the studio. That man, Marwan Tarazi, died in October along with his wife and granddaughter in an Israeli strike on a church where they were seeking shelter.
More lives lost, Djeghalian said — another rupture in the archive.
When asked whether there was a song that encapsulated such experiences, Djeghalian paused for a moment then reached for his phone. He scrolled until he found a video taken last summer during a family barbecue in Bethlehem.
The clip shows his elderly uncle, white-haired and cane in hand, leading relatives young and old in a chant they’ve sung for generations at weddings and parties. With their voices raised in unison, Djeghalian said, “We’re not even thinking we are occupied.”
“I’d pay a lot of money to go back to that moment,” he said, his voice catching. “We were happy. There was hope. And now I don’t know when I can go back.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report.