Palestinians Channel Their Grief Through a Song for Solidarity

posted on: Nov 8, 2015

“My Homeland” was once a triumphant military song, played with drums and trumpets, long the anthem of Palestinians. It has since transformed into a lament of a tumultuous region.

In Gaza on Saturday, Palestinians gathered to sing it in communities across the territory as part of a social media campaign organized through a Facebook page as a “call for solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for their freedom and rights.”

The campaign urged Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza to take part in similar performances, and it also reached out to Palestinians living in the West, including in Norway and Washington.

But even as the campaign sought to cast a wide net and reach a broad audience, the Palestinians in Gaza seemed to be singing mainly to one another, an act less about political solidarity than about the comfort of reassuring voices during a time of turmoil.

The event came weeks into an uprising of demonstrations, stabbings and vehicular attacks against Israeli citizens and soldiers, and against the backdrop of a nearly decade-old split between Hamas-ruled Gaza and Palestinian communities in the West Bank governed by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, of the rival Fatah party.

In Gaza City, about 300 people, many wearing the black-and-white checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh, gathered in the hall of the Qattan Center for the Child to watch a children’s choir perform the song. Adults held up cellphones, zooming in on their children.

One mother, Inas Abu Shaban, 42, the former chief of the Palestinian women’s police force in Gaza, held her son as she sang, “My homeland, glory and beauty, sublime and splendid.” Another woman giddily waved an enormous Palestinian flag.

The Palestinian poet Ibrahim Touqan wrote the words to “My Homeland,” or “Mawtini,” in 1934, during another time of rebellion. The words posed a question: “Will I see you/safe, beautiful, victoriously honored?”

The song became Iraq’s national anthem about a decade ago, and since Islamic State militants poured into Syria and northern Iraq, Christians in those two countries sometimes sing it in churches, often accompanied by the oud, the saddest of Arab musical instruments.

“When you see the Arab homeland, we are all suffering, we are falling apart,” Ms. Abu Shaban said. “Even when children sing it, they feel they have lost something,”

After the Gaza event, Palestinians from the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Salfit and Jenin posted their own flag-waving renditions of the song on social networking sites. A few Palestinians in Washington also performed a version near the White House.

Yula Bader, whose two teenage girls sang in the Gaza choir, said, “In a time of forced divisions and fighting between Palestinians, we stood to unite our homeland.”

“We need feelings and love, we need people to see us as humans.”

Source: www.nytimes.com