What is the sound of Palestine? For those in Gaza, the hum of Israeli drones permeates a soundscape punctuated by air strikes and the cries of children. Then there’s the sound of songbirds providing respite to embattled families, creatures whose ability to freely fly across man-made borders has been a motif of Palestinian literature for decades. But above all, Palestinian music in its rich history and diversity has remained a crucial thread knitting together a people in exile. Popular muses like Mohammed Assaf, rural folk traditions like dabke, militant resistance singers hailing the fedayeen, and diasporic innovators all display different articulations of Palestinian resistance and sumud (steadfastness).
Contributions from musicians in solidarity have also been crucial in influencing the sound of Palestine. Since the early 20th century, artists like Fairuz, the Rahbani Brothers, and Marcel Khalife (Lebanon) as well as Sheikh Imam and Umm Kulthum (Egypt) have been hailed as champions of Palestinian freedom and important influences; as quoted in David McDonald’s 2013 book My Voice Is My Weapon, Mahmoud Darwish honored the death of Assi Rahbani in 1986 by asserting that Rahbani’s songs became the “reference point” for the hearts of many Palestinians.
The notion that culture can transcend boundaries has become a bit of a truism, but in the case of Palestine, the fugitive, ephemeral nature of music has become a crucial tactic for connecting to one another and the land. Each Palestinian enclave is surrounded and separated; a system of city-specific IDs prevents Palestinians from moving freely within their own territory. Some Gazans have never left the Strip. In August 2023, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented a total of 645 physical obstacles to movement in the West Bank alone; Israeli peace organization B’tselem has documented over 100 new checkpoints erected after October 7th, 2023. Meanwhile, the region’s roughly half a million Israeli settlers, whose occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal under international law, are given the benefit of military protection, settler-only roads, and unfettered freedom of travel in a system of segregation enforced by military violence that makes South African apartheid look like, in the words of historian Rashid Khalidi, “child’s play.”
Palestinian musicians continue to find ways around these barriers to assert their presence and identity: according to Ramallah rapper Muqata’a, musicians from the occupied territories have been accustomed to collaborating online long before the pandemic, flouting the physical borders that prevent them from meeting in person. Radio Alhara, Palestine’s preeminent online radio station, casts the net even wider, having become a hub for international musical, academic, and artistic solidarity since its inception in 2020. And for those that are able to navigate the colonial borders, events like Ramallah’s Palestine Music Expo (PMX) bring together a global network of Palestinian musicians like Jowan Safidi, Bashar Murad, and Rasha Nahas who are navigating the boundaries between underground and pop.
But it’s also important to recognize that the Palestinian identity is not without its internal divisions. While the web is an important conduit for communication between Gaza, the West Bank, and the wider diaspora, internet access continues to be a crucial focus of mutual aid in Gaza after the enclave was largely cut off from the web after October 7. Less than a hundred kilometers away, however, is “five-star prison” Ramallah, which has a large university-educated, middle-class population compared to refugee camps like Nuseirat in Gaza. The blockades, wars, and economic deprivation of Gaza has created an enclave lauded for its spirit of resistance. Ramallah, on the other hand, is the seat of the Palestinian Authority (PA), an entity some argue is propped up by Western investment and carries out repression as proxies for the Israeli military. Sociologist Lisa Taraki critiques Western commentators that hold up Ramallah’s cosmopolitan cultural output as “proof of the resilience of the middle class, the victory of globalization, the defeat of the resistance, or of the PA’s ability to assure normalcy in a time of conflict and strife.” But Gaza is also a hub of culture, albeit one that may not be as easily accessible to us in the West; that’s precisely why the enclave’s numerous cultural institutions have been systematically destroyed by Israeli bombing, including the Eltiqa Gallery recently featured at contemporary art exhibition documenta fifteen. While they may not be on Bandcamp, Gazan artists like Sol Band and Osprey V are an important part of the Palestinian sound as well.
With an ear to the context of the economic, cultural, and social divisions within the Palestinian territories, largely caused by Zionist occupation, settlement, and militarization, perhaps we can connect the dots between a nation and culture in exile. This edition of Ley Lines highlights artists from Gaza, Haifa, New York, Lyd, Vienna, Ramallah, and more, working in genres as disparate as electro-dabke, ambient, modern classical, and post-hardcore. These are the sounds of Palestine, ringing louder than ever.
El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe
“Folktronic Mafraq Haifa”
Founded in 1979, El Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe have long been leaders in resistance through culture. Associated early on (though never officially affiliated) with the leftist politics of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, El-Funoun continues to be a pillar of cultural action at the grassroots level, teaching dabke in refugee camps and impoverished neighborhoods around Ramallah/al-Bireh.
In the midst of the ongoing erasure of Palestinian identity, a steadfast adherence to tradition in revolutionary music by arts troupes like El-Funoun elicited severe repression during the First Intifada. El-Funoun’s focus has since shifted, however, with the group embracing modern musical elements in the ’90s. “The group found that preservation and survival were no longer sufficient—to create and participate in forging a contemporary cultural identity became more urgent,” writes El-Funoun choreographer Omar Barghouti. Their recent contribution to Rise Up: BDS Mixtape Vol. 2, for instance, combines a malfuf folk rhythm with rippling sawtooth synths and vivacious call-and-response vocals. But as stewards of the Popular Art Centre, an NGO established in 1987 in al-Bireh, El-Funoun remains an important force in the preservation of Palestinian folk tradition.
Maya al-Khaldi
عالم تاني – Other World
Jerusalem sound artist and vocalist Maya al-Khaldi used the archives at the Popular Art Centre in creating her 2022 album Other World. The fuzzy mijwiz (bamboo reed pipe) recording that opens the record is sampled from El Funoun’s archive; so is the rababa (bowed string instrument) that darts in and out between snatches of conversation with Tata Fatima Al-Khalidi.
Al-Khaldi is masterful in her interpretations of tradition. On “Zaghritu,” al-Khaldi begins with an awiha (also known as hahawi), a type of folk music sung by women at weddings and other celebrations. According to ethnomusicologist Ḍirghām Ḥannā Sbait, awiha typically consist of four lines of improvised or written praise for the groom and bride, followed by celebratory zaghrouta (ululations). For “Zaghritu,” al-Khaldi sings of the particular connection of Palestinian women to the land, extending the closing zaghrouta in hypnotic cascades.
Zeinab Shaath
The Urgent Call of Palestine
7" Vinyl
Archival efforts in the Palestinian diaspora have also been important. Since 2020, London’s Majazz Project has been uncovering recordings from earlier decades. The impetus to start the label came in 2020 when founder Mo’min Swaitat purchased over 5,000 cassettes from a family friend in Jenin who used to run a record label, uncovering a trove of Palestinian music like the 1987 resistance tape The Intifada.
But the story behind Zeinab Shaath’s The Urgent Call of Palestine reveals the extent to which Palestinian culture remains subject to colonial control. Recorded in 1972 with the help of the PLO, the masters for the record were seized by the Israeli military in 1982. Israeli researcher Rona Sela found the masters in 2017 while conducting research for Looted and Hidden, a film about stolen Palestinian archives in Israel, though she too was unable to recover the materials. Circumventing Israeli restrictions of access to these archives, Majazz Project and Los Angeles-based record label Discostan worked with Shaath to remaster the EP from personal copies.
Shaath draws from both the anti-war folk of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez as well as the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. “I am an Arab” sets the words of Darwish’s 1964 poem “Identity Card,” which has also been used in compositions by Salvador Arnita and Ahmad Kabour. The poem is a scathing critique of the occupation that reduces Palestinian life to an identification number: “Write down: I’m an Arab/ My card number is 50,000/ I have eight children, the ninth will come next summer/ Are you angry?” The lyrics ring with grim relevance today. But as Shaath’s voice rises from the depths of colonial archives, the Palestinian identity once again thwarts attempts at its erasure.
George Kirmiz
From Ansar to Askalan
In tandem with restrictions on culture comes the imprisonment of actual people: Last month’s bombshell whistleblower report of repeated abuse in the Sde Teiman prison compound was just the latest in a sordid history of unjust detainment and abuse of Palestinians. Thus the prison has also become a well-explored theme in Palestinian literature. One such prison, Ansar, referenced in the title of George Kirmiz’s 1980 album From Ansar to Askalan, was the site of a massacre in 1982 when an Israeli soldier shot 15 detainees, killing three. Dedicated to the struggle of those locked in Israeli cages, including the 3,660 held in administrative detention without charges, the record was re-issued by Majazz this year on Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, April 17.
Born in Jerusalem, Kirmiz was a member of ’70s rock band al-Bara’em, playing songs by the Rahbani Brothers and Mustafa al-Kurd, before moving to Michigan where he recorded this cassette. The record largely consists of melancholic piano and guitar songs, completed by Kirmiz’s haunting croon intoning poetry by the likes of Mahmoud Darwish, Rashid Hussein, and Tawfiq Zayyad. Elements from Arabic music also appear in the baladi folk rhythm of “Every Time it Rains,” or the lengthy oud improvisations of “Storm Birth.”
Sabreen
Death Of The Prophet
Vinyl LP
Active around the same time as Kirmiz but based in the Palestinian territories, Sabreen was a seminal band whose influence is still felt today. Formed in 1980 and playing primarily Western instruments, the band was inspired to write using Arabic instruments in the wake of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. “We wanted to reach ‘the street’—simpler songs, more down to earth,” composer Sa’id Murad said in a 1993 interview. According to ethnomusicologist Issa Boulos, they did so by setting the words of poets like Hussein Barghouthi to music, using a combination of rural dialects and political rhetoric meant to appeal to a pan-Palestinian liberation front. For this record, however, they adopt more of the urban dialect used in cosmopolitan, university-educated Palestinian circles, set to a complex blend of jazz, indigenous folk styles, and Western rock. “Improvisation on Moondance,” for instance, appears to interpolate the Van Morrison hit with virtuosic oud, qanun, and buzuq performances. Today, Sabreen’s influence can be heard in the music of diaspora iconoclasts like Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (founder of online magazine Ma3azef) and Huda Asfour, both of whom were mentored by Khaled Jubran, brother of Sabreen’s lead singer, Kamilya Jubran.
Haidar Eid
Tyrants’ Fear of Songs خوف الطغاة من الأغنيات
In a recent interview, Nuseirat-born literary critic Haidar Eid sharply observes the current contradiction of international discourse around Gaza: “Gaza has become the centre of the universe! But ironically, we are never heard from.” Professor at Al-Aqsa University, which has been badly damaged in Israeli bombings, and author of Decolonising the Palestinian Mind, Eid provides an important voice from Gaza City.
Tyrants’ Fear of Songs brings songs composed during the First Intifada into the present, including a medley of Kirmiz’s “Oh Jerusalem” and “Patience.” Eid’s compositions are redolent of the resistance songs of decades past, fusing a sharp critique of colonialism informed by secular socialist theory in much the same way that the Fatah-linked Firqat al-Markaziya did in the 1970s. Yet rather than draw from the same militant marches that drove the PLO’s cultural wings, Eid’s sound might be closer to popular bands like al-Ashiqeen (The Lovers’ Band) or Baladna, playing renditions of songs by composers like Sheikh Imam and Marcel Khalife that have been popular for generations.
Gazelleband
Rihla #2 / رحلة ٢
Also from Gaza, oud player Reem Anbar is the heart of Gazelleband, a duo of Anbar and ethnomusicologist Louis Brehony, who plays buzuq. Now based in Manchester, Anbar is a part of a new generation of Gazan musicians that includes Said Fadel of Sol Band (of which Anbar was an early member) and Dawaween frontwoman Rawan Okasha. Here, Anbar and Brehony (who recently published an ethnography of Palestinian music) perform seven instrumental songs informed by Palestinian and Arabic styles like muwashshah (a classical Arabic poetic form found in “Salla Fina al-Lahza Hindiyya ”) and taqsim (improvisation). Brehony’s Irish background comes into play here too, with traditional jigs and reels providing the basis for the melodies in “Irlandiyat.” The song indexes a longer history of Irish-Palestinian solidarity that stems from both regions’ histories of colonization by the British Empire. But on “Nazih (Displacement),” Anbar’s own sound shines through in her musical reflection on the ongoing destruction of her hometown. Poignant without dipping into melancholy, “Nazih” remains a powerful expression of sumud in the face of terror. Influenced by older intifada songs as well as the music of Umm Kulthum, Farid al-Atrash, Fairuz, and Marcel Khalife, Anbar represents a new instrumental sound of resistance.
Reem Kelani
Sprinting Gazelle – Palestinian songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora
For decades, Reem Kelani has been one of the foremost researchers and performers in the Palestinian diaspora. Born in Manchester, Kelani’s family hails from Jenin and Nazareth, though she ended up in London by way of Kuwait. A visit to her mother’s family in the Galilee in the 1970s sparked her interest in the traditions of Palestine. Not so coincidentally, she is another artist who has taken inspiration from the mountain gazelle, the national animal of Palestine and an important symbol of Palestinian connection to the land. The title track, a wedding song she learned in 1999 from women in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp, is also a nod to her own name, which means “gazelle” in Arabic.
Drawing from the folkloric research of Tawfiq Zayyad, Kelani spins Palestinian Christian folk traditions into ethereal songs like “As Nazarene women crossed the meadow” and “The Cameleer tormented my heart,” while “Yafa!” and “Qasidah of Return” riff on the Arabic improvisatory tradition. “Mawwaal (Variations on loss),” on the other hand, is an original song composed for a 1992 documentary on the Israel-backed Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, using a Mahmoud Darwish poem that alternates between classical Arabic and colloquial Palestinian.
Simon Shaheen
The Music Of Mohamed Abdel Wahab
Vinyl LP, 2 x Vinyl LP
In 1936, Radio Jerusalem became the first broadcast radio station in Palestine. Though a British colonial enterprise, it nonetheless provided a platform for Arab musicians across the region, broadcasting music from stars like Asmahan, Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Karem Mahmoud, and Zakariyya Ahmad alongside local musicians like Wasif Jawhariyyeh. After the Nakba in 1948, both Radio Jerusalem and Near East Radio shut down their operations within the occupied territories. The musicians scattered too, and a burgeoning scene was dispersed; as Issa Boulos puts it, “We inside Palestine feel that in 1948 that we lost the connection with its path towards progress.”
But Simon Shaheen, a Palestinian oud and violin master whose composer father Hikmat remained in Haifa and the Galilee after 1948, is part of the living legacy of that age. Based in New York since the ’80s, Shaheen has been a key figure in the Arab music scene in the city, winning a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. This record is a reissue of Shaheen’s 1990 interpretations of music by Egyptian artist Mohamed Abdel Wahab, one of the many artists that participated in Jerusalem’s pre-Nakba musical culture. These songs feature Shaheen’s virtuosic violin soaring alongside evolving folk rhythms; “Al Hinna” incorporates masmoudi, maqsoum, and malfuf in a dynamic exchange between strings and percussion.
Rim Banna
Mirrors Of My Soul
Christian Palestinian singer Rim Banna, who passed away in 2018 from breast cancer, is another important ‘48 Palestinian artist whose songs were directly political, gaining popularity through underground cassettes released during the First Intifada. Released in 2005, Mirrors Of My Soul has a gentle sound that nevertheless addresses the occupation head-on. “Sarah” and “Fares Odeh” commemorate children shot and killed by Israeli forces: the former honors a one-and-a-half-year-old girl killed in Nablus in 2000, while the latter is dedicated to a boy shot in 2015. Songs like “Top of the Mountain” take cues from soft rock as well as folk styles, its bright steel guitar tones offering a bit of hope for the future. And “Masha’al” adapts a popular folk song about a defector from the Ottoman empire’s compulsory conscription, filtering it through Western pop idioms.
A lifelong vocal advocate for Palestinian culture, Banna was a singular voice that aimed to reach not just others in the diaspora, but a wider audience in Europe as well. Even as Banna lost the use of her voice, she persisted in making music, collaborating with experimental electronic music collective Checkpoint 303 on Voice of Resistance to transform the noises of her CT scans into liberatory vibrations.
Checkpoint 303
Checkpoint Tunes
Active since 2004, Checkpoint 303 was launched by Tunisia-based SC MoCha and Bethlehem-based SC Yosh. The group is named after Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, a part of Israel’s illegal separation wall and notorious for being overcrowded with Palestinian laborers commuting to work in Israel; in 2019, Al Jazeera reported that it takes up to three hours to cross the checkpoint during rush hour, with workers often suffocating and fainting during the crush. Just as their name reappropriates a major symbol of Palestinian apartheid, Checkpoint 303 specializes in recontextualizing sampled sounds toward avant-garde electronic compositions.
Here, they work with field recordings from demonstrations, military checkpoints, political figures like Edward Said and Che Guevara, and Egyptian composer Sheikh Imam. Spanning hip-hop, breakbeat, IDM, and electro shaabi, Checkpoint 303’s productions are the sound of a generation of Palestinians growing up on the internet and wielding the potential of networked music to draw connections between time and space.
Muqata’a
Hayawan Nateq – حيوان ناطق
Another group that made its name on sampling is hip-hop collective Ramallah Underground, founded by Muqata’a (Boikutt) and Asifeh/Stormtrap when they were in high school. Formed in 2002 during the height of the Second Intifada, RU started off as a bedroom operation by necessity, with Israeli tanks roaming the streets and long curfews keeping people shut inside. Their sampling ethos is in opposition to the daily erasure of Palestinian identity caused by the occupation; “[It’s] about creating the right image of our collective memory, which has been really tarnished and is being destroyed, bit by bit,” Muqata’a said in a 2021 interview. This entails not just their “sound catching” of the everyday Palestinian soundscape, but also nodding resistance music of the past: “Where are the millions?” Muqata’a raps in the RU track “Sijen ib Sijen,” calling back to the First Intifada anthem written by Libyan composer Ali al-Kilani and made famous by Julia Boutros’s rendition.
Asifeh
Datura
Compact Disc (CD)
While Muqata’a and Asifeh both operate within the experimental fringe of hip-hop and electronic music, the former works with noisier sounds where Asifeh’s style is a bit hazier and more spacious. Both pioneers in Ramallah, where they have been active since 2000, they’re credited as being godfathers of the city’s hip-hop and electronic music scenes which, in recent years, have grown into a burgeoning ecosystem of labels like Bilna’es and BLTNM with artists across the territories and the diaspora: techno DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi, rappers Daboor, Haykal, Shabjdeed, Makimakkuk, Al Nather, Dakn, Julmud, 970, Firas Shehadeh, The Synaptik, ODDZ, and many more.
DAM
BEN HAANA WA MAANA
When it comes to the occupied territories, however, Lyd’s DAM is considered the first Palestinian hip-hop group. Meaning “blood” in Hebrew, “enduring” in Arabic, and standing for “Da Arab MC’s” in English, DAM set a precedent for Palestinian hip-hop in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Their 2001 single “Min Irhabi” (“Who’s the Terrorist”) flipped colonialist logic on its head in a sharp critique of the violence of the Israeli military. While DAM’s early efforts to introduce hip-hop sometimes encountered difficulties, carrying all the baggage associated with an “American” genre, today the hip-hop scene flourishes in the ‘48 territories; Haifa’s Jazar Crew carries on the torch in the underground with Kabareet as their stomping grounds.
But DAM themselves continue to evolve. In 2013, Haifa-based singer-songwriter Maysa Daw joined the group. Their latest record BEN HAANA WA MAANA features electro-dabke elements, displaying a sound more indigenized than the U.S. West Coast sound characteristic of their early work. “Milliardat” combines trap build-ups with the swaying cadence of the saidi folk rhythm alongside the occasional zaghrouta.
Rasha Nahas
Amrat امرات
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Daw also performs in the band Kallemi with Berlin-based, Haifa-born Rasha Nahas, who is an accomplished solo artist of her own. While Nahas’s first album Desert was a dark cabaret journey through the annals of the Berlin immigration system, Amrat introduces folk rhythmic elements alongside expansive rock arrangements. She leans into her roots lyrically as well, singing entirely in Arabic instead of English. With contributions from Rami Nakhleh of TootArd, singer-songwriter Terez Sliman, and multi-instrumentalist Rimon Haddad, Amrat represents a cross section of Palestinian indie artists asserting their own sound.
47SOUL
Shamstep
Dabke, a folk dance genre from Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria), has been the site of contested cultural claims, long used by Palestinian resistance movements to symbolize their connections to the land but also appropriated by Israeli settlers who looked to indigenous rural dances as a way to imagine what their Biblical ancestors were doing thousands of years before. With the ’80s came the electrification of dabke, a form made popular worldwide through Syrian singer Omar Souleyman’s breakthrough in the late 2000s via Sublime Frequencies.
Electro-dabke, shaabi, shamstep: Nowadays, this combination of popular folk tunes and electronic synths takes many names, and Palestinian diaspora band 47Soul claims ownership of the third term. Here, the group draw connections between Jamaican dancehall and darbuka rhythms like malfuf and khaleegy, incorporating cosmic synths and aspirational lyrics: “From Africa to Palestine the sunlight will shine.” Their lyrical transnationalism mirrors the band’s scattered geographic locations in Jordan, the United States, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Omar Ahmad
Inheritance
Cassette, T-Shirt/Shirt
New York-based Omar Ahmad meditates on the heaviness of inherited grief with Inheritance, an oasis of ambient cello and synth pads. Ahmad’s family fled from East Jerusalem to South America before ending up in New York in the ’60s/’70s, where Ahmad grew up being told by an elementary school teacher that his ancestral homeland didn’t exist. Dedicated to his grandmother, Inheritance tells a personal story of exile: “Gesso” samples sounds from old home videos that served as lines of communication to his grandparents in East Jerusalem.
Correspondence is also the theme of his latest mix for Palestinian online radio station Radio Alhara, which traces connections between Palestinian artists and those in solidarity, weaving personal voice notes in between tracks. It’s a striking portrait of his own slice of the world, drifting from the contemplative piano melodies of Faten Kanaan to poetry from Farah Barqawi.
NØ MAN
Glitter and Spit
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Perhaps the furthest from any sort of preconceived “Palestinian” sound, D.C.-based post-hardcore outfit NØ MAN channels generational rage into cathartic screamo anthems.
Fronted by Maha Shami, the child of refugees from Jaffa and Beit Ur al-Tahta, NØ MAN has been active in D.C.’s storied scene since 2017. While most of the record makes oblique lyrical nods to the conflict, the closing track “Demaar” (“Devastation”) directly references the violent dispossession of Palestinians by sampling the hum of Israeli drones that have invaded the Palestinian soundscape.
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This article has just scratched the surface of Palestinian music; from instrumental masters like Akram Abdulfattah, Marwan Abado, and Saied Silbak to free jazz mavericks like Dirar Kalash and diaspora MCs like Palestinian Japanese rapper Danny Jin, there are scores of other artists crafting their own version of what Palestine sounds like.
