Brehony, Louis. “Music and the Gaza Genocide: Palestinian resistance and sumud in the face of Zionist Liquidationism.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2024, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv7n1a227
Louis Brehony
The material presented here extends the methods and arguments developed in my monograph Palestinian Music in Exile: Voices of Resistance (2023). This ongoing work has focused particularly on the grassroots and communal nature of music-making in broad regions of Palestinian exile and displacement. Following Lena Meari’s definition of sumud, or steadfastness, as a “revolutionary becoming” and “a Palestinian anticolonial mode of being” (Meari 2014), I argue for the enduring relevance of sumud and resistance-based narratives that I see as linked to questions of aesthetics and musical form generated in contexts of Palestinian displacement. The material in the book focused on geographically and historically discrete case studies of Palestinian music making: in Kuwait, Bilad al-Sham, Egypt, Turkey, and the homeland itself, which—we should constantly remind ourselves—represents a place of exile for hundreds of thousands. Indeed, Edward Said (1986) once wrote that, among the vagarities of dispossession and memory, “Palestine is exile…” (30, emphasis added). This sometimes finds illustration in mixed narrations of belonging. Expressing loyalty to Gaza, refugee musician Umm Ali nevertheless added the reminder that “Ana mish ghazzawiyya”—I am not a Gazan—having grown up in Bureij refugee camp but coming from a family ethnically cleansed from al-Qubeiba village in 1948.[1] In 2024, the slogan “We are all Gaza” graced Gaza solidarity mobilisations from Tunis to Paris and Oakland, California. The concept of exile, or Arabic terms like ghurba (literally “estrangement”), may conjure up notions of vast geographic distance from the homeland. But, as shown in two chapters in the book on musical life in the region, and as illustrated viscerally by events since, Gaza is the most concentrated location of Palestinian refugee displacement. Palestinians in Gaza experience multiple layers of exile, both from regions of historic Palestine and within the Gaza Strip, with a startling majority displaced from their place of refuge by genocidal Zionist violence into rubble, tents, or makeshift shelters, all of which have been targeted through impulsive murder. Marches of return and waves of armed resistance spring from oppressive conditions which mould collective identity.
In this context, due to its now perpetual location as the frontline of liberationist struggle and genocidal repression, and Gaza’s example as the besieged incubator of communal culture, this essay revolves around what is at stake in the current confrontation. While remaining with music and its messages, the analysis here also draws on the process of translation and discussion that shaped Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (2024), a new publication I had the privilege to lead alongside Tahrir Hamdi. Kanafani was a prolific writer of stories, novels, and political texts, the latter including his epochal Marxist studies as a leading political light of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The seventeen translated texts written by Kanafani contained in our book, along with concise chapter introductions by international contributors, offer invaluable lessons on politics and culture, showing enduring relevance and sometimes prophetic reflections in Kanafani’s writing. The latter is certainly true in the sense of how he saw Gaza. This includes short stories, where Gaza is a site of acute suffering at the hands of a violent Zionist occupation, as in A Letter from Gaza (1956; Kanafani [1962] 2013); the novel All That’s Left to You ([1966] 2013b), depicting social frustration and restraints on freedom of movement; and in political studies written by Kanafani as a PFLP leader, where Gaza appears as the region representing the vanguard of the armed resistance (Kanafani 2024, 126; PFLP 2023, 134). Kanafani visited Gaza in November 1966 and, after meeting with those involved in local activism, expressed unworthiness at his own renown in a territory facing a life and death struggle (Samaan 2023).
The arguments made in this study are grounded in the same materialist, Marxist method studied and Palestinianised by Kanafani. Taking a broad historical view of the chronologies of colonisation and resistance to Zionism and imperialism, the basis of this understanding recognises the origins and sustaining mission of the Zionist entity upon the land of Palestine. Having presented the first draft of this paper at the University of Edinburgh—where the Arthur Balfour sat as chancellor while he issued the infamous Balfour declaration—Britain’s pernicious role cannot be overstated. Indeed, the movement to colonise Palestine in the name of Zionism was backed by British imperialism, for it would “form for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism,” according to Ronald Storrs, colonial governor of Jerusalem (Abrahams 1994). This position in defence of imperialist interests underpins ongoing western support for Zionism and the Israeli state today, in spite of the occupation clearly being out of its backers’ full control. Forming an alliance with Arab reaction (Kanafani 2024, 101–3, 186), the historic mission of these forces is to liquidate the tendencies and capacities for the Palestinian people to mount an effective and, particularly, a revolutionary fightback. Charting this history, however, also forms an exercise in showing a total inability on the part of those backing Zionist colonisation, whether through genocide, dispersal, economic, and other means, to liquidate a culture of indigeneity and resistance. The experience of music shows that at every juncture, we find those who answer back to this colonialist project through the assertion of Palestine, through a recognised diversity of means, and traditions springing up in many divergent experiences of exile.
The concept of sumud is woven by Meari (2014) through political prisoner ethnographies, which led her to conclude that its revolutionary anticolonial potential is realised through a refusal to cooperate or surrender to colonial authority on the part of the samidin (those practising sumud in their confrontation with the jailor). To this, I add that sumud is also inclusive of the critical capacities of the most oppressed, whether in often scathing attacks on Arab bourgeois rulers or the collaborationist Palestinian Authority (PA), or in the critiques by grassroots musicians of NGOisation,[2] of imported European methodologies, or of the compromised positions of celebrity singers. After describing a 2012 PA attack on songwriter Basel Zayed, who satirised the authority’s UN statehood bid in his song “Doleh” (“Statehood”), I wrote:
The sentiments expressed in Basel’s work were counterpoints to grassroots anthems like “Mawtini,” “Leve Palestina,” “17 October,” and many others standing starkly in the face of the officialized rigmarole of PA “diplomacy” and outright repression. Even the seemingly apolitical are enlisted: Fairuz’s “love song” “Raj‘in ya hawa” as a song of return, and the instrumental messages of “Ghurba” and “Wa-ba‘dein?!?” Sumud-as-critique is expressive of mass disaffection and revolutionary potential. (Brehony 2023a, 238–239)
The durability of “Mawtini” (“My homeland”) should be unsurprising in light of all that Palestinians have endured since its composition. Set to music by Lebanese composer Muhammad Fleifel from the anti-imperialist poetry of Ibrahim Touqan in the period of 1930s confrontation with British imperialism and Zionism, “Mawtini” holds aloft the ideals of Palestinian national restitution through imagery of the flag, pen, and sword. In a context where the PA, led by Abbas’ Fatah party, plays a repressive role in tandem with the genocidal occupation and pledges to continue its collaboration with imperialism, the significance of an anthem more popular and meaningful than the PA anthem “Fida’i” speaks to “Mawtini”’s broad meaning, instilling sumud among the displaced and transmitting its message globally. Among the many examples of its use over the course of the genocide, “Mawtini” was sang by kuffieh-wearing children at schools housing displaced families in northern Gaza, by students and staff of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM), by medical workers in scrubs outside al-Nasser hospital in besieged Khan Younis, by activists at the May 2024 People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, and at solidarity concerts by Irish vocalist Ríoghnach Connolly, who learned the song from Gazan oud player Reem Anbar.
My homeland
The youth tire not
Their pursuit is your independence or death
We will drink from death
and never be to our enemies as slaves.
We do not want eternal humiliation nor life of misery
We will return our eternal glory
My homeland.
The committed literature of Touqan is inherited in the resistant content of Palestinian music produced in the wake of October 7th, 2023. Reviewing the Palestinian musical experience over this period involves recognising, of course, that the history of this confrontation did not begin with the heroic resistance operation of October 7th. The Nakba of 1948 must always be kept in view but, with Kanafani, we must pinpoint the emergence of this crisis at the moment of British imperialist occupation in Palestine in 1917 and all of its results. These included the immediate administrative division of Palestine and its cities along sectarian lines, the elevation of Zionist political and cultural claims to official status, and most crucially the brutal suppression of the Palestinian revolutionary movement from 1936–39. I will return to this history later with reference to the timelines of Palestinian music.
Artists and performing musicians were among the first to be killed in the genocide, including visual artist Heba Zagout and actress Inas al-Saqqa. A painfully incomplete list of musicians killed by the Zionist state in its occupation of Gaza since October 7th would include the following performers:
Religious singer Hamza Abu Qaynas
Keyboardist Hussein Abu Sarakh
Oud player and intellectual Omar Fares Abu Shawish
Percussionist Akram al-’Ajl
Violin student Lubna ‘Alyan
ESNCM employee Amani al-’Amari
Percussionists Hilmi and Sherief ‘Afana
Guitarist Sha’ban al-Dalu
Guitarist Yusuf Dawas
Rapper Saree Ibrahim
Vocalist Mahmoud “al-Nabatshi” al-Jbeiry
Producer Sa’di Madukh
In the case of injured and four-times displaced student Sha’ban al-Dalou, Zionist warplanes bombed the tent refuge at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah on October 13th, 2024, burning him alive as he screamed and fumbled for help. He was tied to an IV drip. Beyond this list, chronically diabetic singer Arafat al-Khawaja was tortured to death at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in early September 2024 after being captured by occupation forces in Khan Younis. On May 5th, 2025, child singer Hassan Ayyad was killed by a Zionist airstrike on Nuseirat camp.
Naming them is not to paint those involved in music as exceptional or to highlight certain individuals over others during daily waves of massacres. In fact, the opposite is true, and it is a recurrent point of my research to show how cultural actors are themselves embedded within the Palestinian masses, including musical artists, cartoonists, filmmakers, writers, dancers, and many others. While it is a reality that some artists are driven by a desire for commercial success, Rim Banna’s words from 2004 ring true, that Palestinians on the whole remain “far removed from commercial music of the Arab world due to the political situation and our historic struggle” (Brehony, 2023a, 1). The sha’bi or popular nature of this music and role that it plays in Palestinian struggles and intifadas is immediate and clear. A video circulated in October 2023 of Al Jazeera journalist Wa’el al-Dahdouh, then working in Gaza, gathered around a campfire with his family after dark, singing “Bektob ismik ya biladi” (“I write your name, my country”), a song of ghurba originally by Lebanese songwriter Elie Shwery. Al-Dahdouh would lose his wife, daughter and two sons to the Zionist bombing.
In one of a very limited number of video messages I received from Abu Maher in Hayy al-Naser, Gaza City, as the internet blockade was aggressively imposed, his children smiled while singing in the dark and sang “Sawfa Nabqa Huna” (“Here we will stay”), the same song, to poetry by Adel al-Mashiti, sung by doctors outside al-Awda hospital on October 26th, 2023:
Here we will stay
Until the pain goes away
Here we will live
And the melody will be sweet
My proud homeland
The final line is the word mawtini. There are similarities here to the defiant poetry of Tawfiq Zayad, “Huna baqun” (“Here we shall stay”), set to music in Arabic before the 1987 intifada by Firqat Jouqa Yu’ad women’s choir in Galilee and in English by Alexandria-born Gazan Zeinab Shaath in the early 1970s. Abu Maher had prefaced his children’s singing with the assertion, in Gazzawi accent, that “We are not moving” (ga’din mish mzahzahin).
Allied to the musical sumud of the grassroots were a number of musical and artistic contributions focusing on the optimism that the resistance had created. This most steadfast region of Palestine was being pummelled by the fascist planes but October 7th, 2023 had already shattered the myth of Zionist infallibility.[3] From Nazareth, Rola Azar released “Ajras al-’awda” (“The bells of return”) on October 9th, in a call for urgency. In summer 2024, she released “Ikhla’ na’luka ya Musa” (“Cast off your sandals, Moses”), composed by Lebanese communist songwriter Fadi Zaraket. Zaraket explained that he was influenced by seeing from afar the brutality meted out to Palestinians in Gaza, as well as his own experience of Israel’s bloody incursions into southern Lebanon. Zaraket relates his contribution to a point in Lebanon when, “the standpoint of the resistance was clear and true, and they fought with everything they had left. The people did not sell the cause but fought through their mothers, children, martyrs and their remains. Is there a miracle greater than this?”[4]
With the occupation war machine intent on totally destroying the Palestinian resistance factions, it is significant that bands and musicians directly linked to them have continued to record and disseminate songs in dedication to the al-Aqsa Flood battle. Shared on Telegram and other platforms that fall somewhat outside of the control of the dominant social media corporations, which most viciously censor Palestinian content, international supporters share and access material promoting armed resistance. Among many ensembles recording new material since October 7th were Islamic Jihad-affiliated Sada Palestine Band, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade-linked Ezar Band, and Hamas’ al-Qassem Brigades Military Choir. Alongside songs exalting the operations confronting the Zionist armies in Gaza, activists shared older examples commemorating specific occasions and figures, such as PFLP founder George Habash, the subject of “‘Alamna al-Hakim wa-qal Amrika ra‘s al-haya” (“al-Hakim [‘The Doctor’ or ‘The Wise,’ a well-known moniker for Habash] taught us that the US is the head of the snake”), sung by anonymous, PFLP-supporting vocalists. Showing the swiftness by which new bands are formed or repackaged according to shifting realities, Firqat al-Sayyid al-Shahid—or “band of the martyred master,” referring to assassinated Hizbullah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah—released “Nashid al-darab” (“Strike anthem”) as the organisation hit back with strikes at military installations in occupied Haifa, calling on fighters to “Strike, with your blood, the heart of the Zionist beast,” and “liberate the souls of al-Aqsa.” The majority of these songs were quickly produced, using electronic beats, synthesisers, and layered voices, but there is a notable diversity of means. Whereas “Nashid al-Darab” and other examples in the Islamic resistance canon are melodically monotonous, recordings of “‘Alamna al-Hakim” draw on electro-dabke, with instrumental breaks on keyboard and electric oud that decorate the sung verses in maqam bayati.[5]
Palestinian musicians formed part of the mobilisation of Palestinian culture that confronted the Zionist genocide on Gaza from October 2023, taking to international stages and recording music in solidarity with resistance on the ground. Itself the most concentrated region of Palestinian exile, Gaza continued to contribute musically in the face of daily Israeli massacres and atrocities. Throughout the genocide, Sol Band wrote, recorded, and led music sessions among the displaced, before leaving Gaza in Spring 2024, while young oud player Samih Madhoun also garnered support on online platforms, performing for other displaced people and singing soulful versions of classical and folk songs. Having lived through previous onslaughts on Gaza, oud player Reem Anbar toured internationally as a soloist and with Gazelleband in a campaign to support family in Gaza City, while songwriter Ahmad Haddad recorded new material in Turkey, and Sirab Alsersawi played oud with an Egyptian-based Palestinian Maqam ensemble. Other Palestinian musicians actively performing over this period included oud players Clarissa Bitar, Ahmad Al Khatib, Nizar Rohana, and Saied Silbak, vocalists Reem Kelani and Christine Zayed (also a qanun virtuoso), pianist Faraj Suleiman, and bands including 47 Soul.
The prevalence of music in Gaza and a level of prominence of musicians raised in Gaza among globally active Palestinian musicians is important. For, while the genocide is undeniably debilitating and destructive of socially organised culture and its infrastructure, there is every indication that the desire of Zionism to quash Palestinian resistance culture has had the opposite effect. The historic centre of resistance, as recognised by Kanafani and many others, Gaza’s continuing position as the sharp point of colonisation and popular, anticolonial struggle explains its ongoing contribution to revolutionary thought and musical renaissance. I note elsewhere that youth play a particularly critical role in this cultural insurgency and redefinition of turath—or heritage—developing and rethinking aesthetic practices (Brehony 2023a, 208). At the same time, the reclaiming of sumud as a collective concept of resistance—“for people, not individuals,” as Khaled Barakat sees it[6]—sets a challenge to the individualism promoted during the Oslo “peace” process and its aftermath. This vision of sumud is fought for by a range of musical means, including the anonymisation of performers and band members that finds reference in Kofia, George Kirmiz, and earlier iterations of Palestinian resistance music (Brehony, 2023b).
Questions of what is represented in cultural production are undeniably shaped by the confrontation between the struggle for Palestinian national self-determination and its threatened liquidation by imperialist-backed Zionist colonisation. I refer here to both the cultural effects wielded by the oppressed and the materials called into service of the oppressing Israeli machinery. How, then, are these diametrically opposed narratives given cultural grounding? What is revealed in the cultural effects of those seeking to defeat and colonise Palestine? And what is expressed in drive to perform, seen in Gaza even at the bloodiest height of the Zionist genocidal onslaught? In seeking answers to these questions, I will next examine the musical narratives wielded by the Zionist enemy in its war campaign.
On March 26th, 2024, a mural of the London-based Heroes of Palestine posterising Dr Ezzedin Lulu, then trapped in the siege of al-Shifa hospital, Gaza, was defaced by Zionist Yoseph Haddad in Brick Lane, London. The culprit daubed Stars of David and “Fuck Hamas” all over the painting, along with the word “liars.” Curiously, he also scrawled the threat: “We will dance again.”[7] This provocational juxtaposition of the methods of erasure and fascism with cultural language warrants some thought. As Kanafani wrote in his groundbreaking 1966 text On Zionist Literature, the refutation of intellectual and cultural Zionism would be played out in the written and real life struggle, but to this end, a study must also be dedicated to fulfilling “that exacting principle: know your enemy” (i’rif ‘aduk; Kanafani 2023a, 6).
With this in mind, I have collated a few examples that demonstrate the musical and cultural accompaniment of the genocidal aggression since October 7th. Before I list these examples, I want to make two brief points. Firstly—and this concerns Palestinian music and poetries more broadly—the naming of the Zionist Other has, in recent decades, been avoided in Palestinian song itself. Unlike in the 1930s, where the British imperialists and Zionist colonisers are named openly, much of Palestinian music is affirmative, rather than directly referential to recognising their oppressor.[8] Secondly, the focus of my research is not Israeli music, and I have always resisted academic pushes towards “balancing” my work in this direction. I will return to the theme of liquidationism and resistance in Palestinian music after this section.
How, then, has Zionism expressed itself musically over the preceding period? The following list of examples is far from exhaustive but is largely representative of the key tenets of cultural Zionism since October, 2023, voicing the racist, mainstream ideas of the occupying society.
Autumn night falls over the beach of Gaza
Planes are bombing, destruction, destruction
Here is the IDF is crossing the line
to annihilate the swastika-bearers
In another year there will be nothing there
And we will safely return to our homes
Within a year we will annihilate everyone
And then we will return to plough our fields
Contemporaneously in Gaza City, away from this partying and chest-beating, Sol Band percussionist Fares Anbar wrote:
I had not slept until this moment. Bombs from the east, west, south and north did not stop firing at us from all kinds of military weapons… A party with the world’s number one DJ, Israel, and the party’s financier, the Arab world and the Europeans, and the primary beneficiary, the US.[10]
I offer in the following three initial reflections on what is represented in the examples selected above. Firstly, that musical iterations of Zionist colonialism are bound up with the weaponisation of seemingly diverse forms, forcibly enlisted in the armoury of the war itself. The latter includes music resembling transatlantic rave and electro sounds, pop, and rock, on the one hand, while we see on the other evidence of the perennial drive to claim regional music cultures—from the qanoun and oud to electro-maqam—as being somehow Israeli. Secondly, that the theatre of performance is the scorched earth of a massacred, ethnically cleansed, demolished, and colonised Palestine. This is bound up with the narrative of these examples, my third point. Musical and cultural aesthetics here become vessels for the historic mission of Zionist colonialism itself, expressing the wishes of these performers and audiences for expansion of a “Greater Israel.” The latter, of course, may never be realised, with the greatest obstacle to the expansionism inherent posed by the Palestinian resistance itself. When these “singers” voice the ambition of “returning” or “resettling” Gaza, behind these words is the recognition that this may be the only solution to the failure of them and their ruling class to destroy the Palestinian struggle.
We find no wishes for extermination, erasure, or xenophobic overtones in the canon representing the music of Palestine—I use this phrase deliberately to recognise the contributions of non-Palestinians. Allied to recognising the need for armed liberation, there was inclusivity in the songs of Fairuz and the Rahbani brothers, focused on returning and rebuilding in 1967’s “Zahrat al-Mada’in” (“Flower of the cities”): “By our hands, peace will return to Jerusalem.” During the same period, Palestinian youth choirs led by Abdullah Haddad promised to “build you on the shoulders of the moon,” with the children of Lebanon refugees singing optimistically about future Palestine. This contracted with, for example, “Jerusalem of Gold”, which became the anthem of the victorious Israeli occupation in 1967. Born to Lithuanian kibbutzist parents, its singer Naomi Shemer voiced the racist assertion that Jerusalem, Jericho, and the Dead Sea were lined with empty biblical marketplaces waiting to be reclaimed. At a time when former Zionist prime minister Golda Meir was announcing to the world that the Palestinians didn't exist, there were no subtleties in this movement's musical output—yet today's cries of “Gazza sharmoota” (“whore”) by Israeli musicians give a comparatively civilised veil to this earlier, colonialist “folk” music.
Such extreme Zionist assertions made through the medium of music are given voice in different ways in Western academia. To give a recent example, the work of Michael Figueroa, City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (2021), is a startling example of how a colonised city may be painted for the world in ways that totally erase not only Palestinian claims to their capital, but their very existence in the first place. In over 250 pages, no Palestinian musicians or songs are included in Figueroa’s text, which serves as an apologia for Zionist colonisation, playing its own role in silencing Palestinian music, as existence, let alone resistance.
This brief survey of Zionist musical and political narratives offers more than a hint of the aims of the Israeli project: to colonise and control the land for the benefit of the global powers sustaining Zionism. Doing so means a constant drive to liquidate the cause of Palestinian liberation, militarily, politically and through the genocide upon Palestinian culture, which is inherently political culture in the context of the confrontation. Attempting, but ultimately failing, to set in motion another Nakba, Zionism pummels cultural institutions alongside schools, universities, and the whole social infrastructure. We will further emphasise below how this mission has compelled those in Gaza to revoice their commitment to the cause in the face of this campaign. Before returning to the theme of music, we may find further relevance in the works of Kanafani, where the question of the threatened liquidation of the Palestinian cause and a wider resistance against imperialism forms its own index.
The aftermath of the June 1967 defeat of Nasser-led Egypt saw the direct Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, along with regions of surrounding Arab countries. Accelerating the rebuilding of the Palestinian revolutionary movement and armed resistance, the defeat also precipitated intense debate on the way forward. In the 1967 article “Resistance is the Essence,” Kanafani warned against a mooted Palestinian statehood being used as an “excuse for international public opinion to liquidate the Palestinian cause” (2024, 58). In the same text, he argued that the biggest crime committed against the Palestinian people was their enforced separation from their revolutionary movement, enacted by the British occupation from 1936–39. Kanafani further elaborated on what this meant in the new context in the 1970 PFLP pamphlet “The Resistance and its Challenges.” The PFLP warned, via Kanafani’s pen, that the exploitation of divisions and contradictions in the Palestinian movement threated to create “an opening for the lurking enemy, which realises that this is, in practice, an open door for an attempt at final liquidation, which it tries to execute against the revolution” (Kanafani 2024, 142). Elsewhere, Kanafani saw liquidationism at work in the post-1967 Rogers plan by the US to pacify regions of colonised Palestine (Kanafani 2024, 180–181), and in the imperialist mission to liquidate the revolutionary republic of South Yemen (Kanafani 2024, 253).
The “Tasks of the New Stage”, drawn by Kanafani from discussions at the third national conference of the PFLP in al-Baddawi camp in March 1972, argued that:
The danger of liquidating the Palestinian problem has been in existence since June 1967 as a probable result of the big military defeat of the Arab regimes in that war. This danger has become clearer since the Security Council resolution of November 1967 and the acceptance by Egypt of this resolution. The danger of liquidating the problem during the present period is clearer and more immediate because of the weak situation of the resistance movement since [Black] September 1970…. (PFLP 2023, 181)
The primary task was therefore of winning the right of Palestinians to regain their land, while the liberation movement must be capable of putting “an end to the process of oppression and slaughter,” to ally itself to the overthrow of pro-imperialist regimes, and be represented in the right to arm itself (PFLP 2023, 183).
Liquidating the Palestinian cause was the aim of the tripartite enemy defined by Kanafani and his comrades: of imperialism, Zionism, and bourgeois Arab reaction. The latter included the Palestinian bourgeoisie which would eventually come to form the Palestinian Authority, in direct collaboration with the coloniser and its backers. In order to guarantee the interests of imperialism in the region, the mission of liquidationism meant neutralising the threat of a liberation movement that had taken on revolutionary forms, alongside a political culture based on those who are the most oppressed. Despite historic and continual waves of slaughter—and, it must be added, the attempted decapitation of the Palestinian resistance movement in a wave of killings that spans Kanafani in 1972 to assassinated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in 2024, and many other key figures in between—this liquidationist mission has failed, and its proponents remain mired in crisis. The culture that both sustains and springs from Palestine’s anticolonial confrontation is constitutive of a historic thread which has yet to be effectively severed by the forces of liquidationism. Before I conclude, I want to briefly illustrate this point through musical examples.
On March 10th, 2016, Firqat Dawaween, fronted by vocalist Rawan Okasha, performed a concert at the now destroyed Said al-Mashal theatre. Billed under the slogan “Tall slahi” (“I draw my weapon”), in reference to a well-known song of armed struggle and strength, the group performed to an enthusiastic crowd a selection of both well-known and little-known songs from the Palestinian tradition. “Hizz al-rimh” (“Shake the spear”) was one of a number of Palestinian resistance songs sung by Rawan and the band. Its lyrics reference Jenin, Nablus, Beit Imrin, and many sites of historic struggle, and it appears in Kanafani’s classic, 1972 analysis of the 1936–39 revolution (Kanafani 2015, 414), showing its continuity with a generation that grew up during the al-Aqsa intifada, having been performed over eighty years prior. With the call and response vocals, Rawan and vocalist Ra’uf Bilbeisi trade lyrics in the song’s chorus, with Rawan, who was pregnant at the time, taking on the role of Mother Palestine (for more discussion of this concert and its reception, see Brehony 2023a, 186–194). Among this generation of musicians from Gaza, the durability of “Mawtini” has similarly withstood the test of time and was sung at the show.
The setting of the performance is as significant as the performance itself. “Mawtini”, “Tall slahi”, and many other popular resistance songs have been performed on the streets of Gaza, along with more recent contributions by Julia Boutros and Fairuz, and original tunes written by local musicians. There is a particular impetus towards performing in the streets in the aftermath of Zionist bombings, or in the tents and locations of local displacement. And, returning to the idea of instruments of liberation, the oud and other musical instruments appear constantly in these settings; a wider point here could be made of the adoption of instruments existing in Palestine prior to the Nakba—as well as the songs—by a new generation.
The thread between the revolution of 1936–39 and the intifadas of recent decades is remarkable. Muhammad Jamjoum, ‘Ata al-Zir, and Fuad Hijazi were hung by the British at Akka prison in 1930 following their involvement in the burgeoning anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist movement. The three resistance heroes became symbols of the revolutionary struggles to follow. Remembering their depiction in the Nuh Ibrahim song “Min sijin ‘Akka” (“From Akka prison”), refugee singer Umm Ali told me: “Those songs let you move, make you feel something because they are singing about your country and about your history, your everything. You can taste every word” (Brehony 2023a, 105). This compulsion towards transmitting Palestinian culture and resistance narratives is enabled by what I call a musiqa marbuta, or an “entwined music”, in terms of the ongoing link to historic Palestine engendered by its performance. The “cultural siege” analysed by Kanafani ([1966] 2013a) in his discussion of literature under occupation after 1948 (14) is broken by new generations singing across the divide separating Palestinians with a heritage that is inherently political and anti-imperialist. The continual rebuilding of this cultural movement goes beyond memory and the acts of repetition observed by Said, whereby Palestinians reassert their presence in the face of international attempts to “overlook” their case (Said 1986, 56). Though they draw deeply on history, Palestinian resistance repertoires contain anti-nostalgic qualities, recognising that the fight is of the present and the future.
This historic connection, and with it the “revolutionary becoming” seen by Meari in the practice of sumud, is hacked at desperately by a colonial occupation fearful for its own future and foundations. Its genocide aims at the liquidation of the Palestinian cause and, though the international backers of this regime may differ mildly on the methods that this pacification may entail, it lashes out horrifically in an attempt to scorch the roots of a culture of resistance. In doing so, however, the history of Palestinian music suggests that the generational commitment of the dispossessed masses to their cause is only strengthened, akin to Marx’s description of capitalism creating its own gravediggers in the working class. This process is not merely spontaneous: maintaining a level of popular knowledge of historic songs, for example, has relied to some extent on the energies of musicians who are also archivist-activists:—Abdellatif al-Bargouthi, Abdullah Haddad, Shafiq Kabha, Reem Kelani, Sana’ Moussa, and Dalal Abu Amneh.
The word ‘ashiq, or lover, has been a leitmotif of Palestinian literary and political history. Kanfani’s hero in his unfinished novel of the same name, al-Ashiq, is a fida’i guerrilla, and I think the band al-’Ashiqeen (“The Lovers”) had the same idea—the lover is not some wandering romantic but a fighter on the path to free the land. Indeed, George Kirmiz sang in the 1980s, “Yallah ya ‘ushaq al-ard, nkammil hal-mishwar,” or “let’s go, oh lovers of the land, and complete this journey.” In another arrangement, Kirmiz included Arab political prisoners among al-‘ushaq (plural of ‘ashiq) in setting the words of Egyptian poet Ahmed Fuad Negm to music, in “Kitaba ‘ala al-mazruf” (“The writing on the envelope”).
It should go without saying that the ‘conflict’ did not begin on October 7th, 2023. Palestine’s supporters correctly point out that the mass ethnic cleansing of the Nakba was a defining point of origin for the current Zionist drive to colonise the land, but Kanafani saw the war on Palestine originating not in 1948, but in 1917, with the British occupation which set in train the colonial Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour declaration. To his mind, the revolution of 1936–39 was the point at which the Palestinian people were robbed of their cause, as British forces and Zionist gangs laid siege to the movement for independence (Kanafani 2024, 56). The decades since show that the mission to liquidate Palestinian Arab civilisation, and particularly the revolutionary, anti-imperialist culture that emerged over this earlier period, consists of a civilisational confrontation. Eschewing colonialist racism and hate, al-ashiqeen or al-‘ushaq[11] are “motivated by great feelings of love,” as Che Guevara ([1965] 1967) saw was the duty of true revolutionaries.
Since the launching of al-Aqsa Flood, Palestinian musicians have once again stood in the rubble to perform and sing, as Mohammed Okasha did in the ruins of the Mashal theatre when it was bombed in August 2018 (Brehony 2023a, 207). All of Gaza’s theatres and specialised music spaces have been destroyed or severely damaged in the latest Zionist aggression. Generations of musicians—from Ziad al-Qasabughly, Salam Srour, and other elder maqam authorities to young musicians like vocalist Najlaa Hmeed, Sol Band, or the Okasha family—have been forcibly displaced, their homes destroyed. This war of cultural extermination has not, however, succeeded in silencing Palestinian voices of music and resistance. As we have seen here, a review of the Zionist musical activity attached to the occupation and its forces since October 7th shows what is at stake in the battle itself. The alternative to rampant, murderous, colonial racism is shown in the life-affirming nature of many varied examples of Palestinian musicianship, both under siege and in exile from Palestine.
[1] Discussion with the author, Spring 2015.
[2] In the period following the Oslo “peace” deal in 1993, funders including the European Union have placed specific constraints on the political orientation of projects they support. In the musical sphere, there has also been a marked prioritisation of European classical music over indigenous forms. For more on the contradictions of this process see El-Ghadban and Strohm (2013) .
[3] I refer here to the swiftness with which Palestinian resistance fighters were able to break out of the Gaza prison and launch what was arguably the most comprehensive counteroffensive on the occupation. Zionist fallibility was again emphasised clearly with the public displays of mobilisation by Hamas-led resistance forces in Gaza following the January 2025 ceasefire agreement, showing that the mission to destroy the same forces had resulted in their multiplication.
[4] Conversation with the author, May 2024.
[5] Maqam (roughly “scale”) refers to the traditional modal system upon which classical and traditional musics are based in the Arab region, with bayati being a popular maqam in Palestine and its surrounding area.
[6] Interview with the author, December 2020.
[7] The material in this section was gathered from social media postings of individuals and groups of the occupying forces, along with video reportage of their activities. I do not include links here due to the perennial instability of social media and in order to avoid promoting these platforms, but these links are available on request. I thank Kareem Azab for his support with the translation from Hebrew to English.
[8] Examples from this earlier period included the mocking of colonising figures and the inclusion of phrases like “Oh Zionist” or “Oh [British] high commissioner,” sung by vocalists like Nimr al-Naser and songwriters including the British-assassinated Nuh Ibrahim.
[9] Readers should not be shocked at this borrowing of the language of north American racists in the racist, Zionist settler-colonialist context, expressing as it does the dehumanising supremacy of a dominant ideology backed to the hilt by US, European and British imperialism. There are of course many parallels in Palestine with the internally-oppressive ideologies characterising the most ‘advanced’ world powers, who subject migrants and ethnic minorities to rafts of racist laws and paramilitary policing measures. Akin to Gaza, it is the potential for resistance and steadfastness among the most oppressed that frightens the oppressor. As Black Panther activist and martyred prisoner George Jackson wrote from Soledad Prison, California, in 1970, “They've been ‘killing all the niggers’ for nearly half a millennium now, but I am still alive. I might be the most resilient dead man in the universe” (Jackson 1994, 131).
[10] Correspondence with the author, October 2023.
[11] Both words are plurals for “lovers,” with ashiqeen also applicable to two lovers rather than a larger group.
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