Poetry · speech · song
The poem is different in the breath that made it. Begin with the poet’s voice when it survives; when it does not, name the reader and keep the written record beside the sound.
Hala Alyan, in the poet’s voice
A poem that begins with a diagnosis of fear and ends as an instruction for living: whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.
The recording index
Each item names the publication or uploader that carries it. Hosted players are loaded only when you ask for them.
Brian Cox reads Refaat Alareer
Written in 2011 and shared again weeks before an Israeli airstrike killed him in December 2023, Alareer's final poem became a global testament — a request to be remembered as a story, and a kite, bringing hope.
Firqat al-ʿAshiqin
The funeral song for Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir, hanged by the British at Acre prison on 17 June 1930. It went out with their funerals and never stopped being sung — in the camps, at commemorations, and inside the prisons.
Suheir Hammad, in the poet’s voice
From breaking poems — Hammad's hip-hop-fused book of war, women, and survival — a meditation on cluster munitions and what they leave behind: do not fear what has blown up; fear the unexploded.
Dareen Tatour, in the poet’s voice
The poem that put a poet on trial: posted online in October 2015, it led to Tatour's arrest, conviction, and imprisonment — before an Israeli court ruled on appeal that the poem was not a crime.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, live reading
Written during Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, Tuffaha's poem answers the phone call no one should receive — the one that says your house is next — and asks what courtesy means in a prison by the sea.
Rafeef Ziadah, live performance
Ziadah's answer to a journalist who asked if Palestinians would 'just stop teaching their children to hate' — a spoken-word poem that became one of the most shared performances of Palestinian poetry ever recorded.
Palestinian-produced conversations
Two episodes from Tarwida, a Palestinian podcast about arts, culture and heritage. Audio plays through Tarwida's own publisher player; FALASTEEN does not copy the files.
Tarwida · 8 June 2026 · 48 min
Noora Baker · El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe
Open the episode record (opens in a new tab)Tarwida · 21 July 2025 · 49 min
Rima Nasir Tarazi · composer and pianist
Open the episode record (opens in a new tab)One artist’s shelf
Contemporary songs published on the YouTube channel Jabhawee - Topic. The first is tied to the archive’s record for Sidra Hassouna.
Written for Sidra Hassouna; the published artwork is Sidra with her twin sister. · Open her record · Open at source (opens in a new tab)
Jabhawee · Open at source (opens in a new tab)
Jabhawee · Open at source (opens in a new tab)
Jabhawee · Open at source (opens in a new tab)
Follow the sound outward
A field guide to 15 artists and ensembles: a revolutionary chorus in the camps, an art-song band in Jerusalem, a rap group out of Lydda, and singers carrying Arabic into arenas. The links go to the artists and publishers themselves.
The ensembles, composers and singers who made a repertoire out of exile, and the ones who went back for the songs before they were lost.
Formed in exile — a PLO ensemble based in Damascus, its singers drawn from the camps
A chorus of men and women with dabke dancers, performing in fidaʾi dress, who turned the revolution into a repertoire that travelled the camps faster than any record label could have carried it. Their “Min Sijn ʿAkka” is Nuh Ibrahim’s 1930 lament, which this archive holds as a poem. Their composer Hussein Nazek died in Damascus on 25 May 2023.
Listen for: “Min Sijn ʿAkka” (From Acre Prison)
East Jerusalem — formed 1980, based in Sheikh Jarrah
Oud, qanun, buzuq and kawal set against guitar, bass, drums and cello — jazz and rock arrangement over Arabic modal writing, which in 1980 was not what a Palestinian band was supposed to sound like. Still constituted as the Sabreen Association for Artistic Development, which publishes its own full discography with personnel for every record.
Listen for: Mawt al-Nabi / موت النبي (Death of the Prophet), 1987
Nazareth, Galilee
She went and found the lullabies and children’s songs that were going out of the language, recorded them, and then set modern Palestinian poetry beside them so the old and the new were held in one voice. Later work reached out to Norwegian and electronic collaborators. WAFA reported her death on 24 March 2018, at 51.
Listen for: The Mirrors of My Soul / مرايا الروح (2005)
Nazareth (al-Nasira) — the brothers between Nazareth, Ramallah and Paris
Samir, Wissam and Adnan Joubran, out of a Nazareth family of instrument makers, playing taqsim as a trio — which the oud, a solo instrument by tradition, was not built for. Touring through 2026.
Listen for: The Long March (2018)
Amchit, Mount Lebanon
A Lebanese composer whose settings of Darwish became Palestinian standards. “Ummi” is sung at gatherings by people who have never thought to ask where the composer was born, which is the truest measure of what he made. In 1999 a Lebanese court acquitted him of insulting religion over a piece quoting a Qurʾanic verse in a Darwish setting.
Listen for: “Ummi” (My Mother) — his setting of Mahmoud Darwish’s “Ila Ummi”
Born in Manchester to a mother from Nazareth; lives in London
A singer who is also a researcher: she collects the songs first, from the people who still have them, and performs them second. That order is the whole point, and it is why her records carry provenance the way an archive entry does.
Listen for: Sprinting Gazelle — Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora
Arabic rap that started in a housing block in Lydda and ended up as a form other people had to learn the name of.
Lydda (al-Lydd)
Tamer Nafar, his brother Suhell, and Mahmood Jrere, out of the Arab neighbourhoods of Lydda — the first Palestinian rap group to be heard outside Palestine, and the reason there is now a scene at all. Sources disagree on their founding year; the group itself dates the work from the late 1990s.
Listen for: “Meen Erhabi” / “Who’s the Terrorist?” (2001)
London, to a Palestinian family
Her own site dates her start to 2002, as a schoolgirl in London singing at a rally against the occupation. “Al Kufiyyeh Arabeyyeh” — the keffiyeh is Arab — was made with the producer Sandhill and carries M-1 of Dead Prez; it is aimed at the brands selling the black-and-white scarf as a pattern. She raps in Arabic, in a thobe.
Listen for: “Al Kufiyyeh Arabeyyeh” (March 2010)
Amman — Palestinian-Jordanian, now between London and Palestine
They named their own genre and it stuck: dabke rhythm and mijwiz lines run through synths and a sound system, which turned out to be what the Bilad al-Sham diaspora had been waiting to dance to. Shadia Mansour appears on “Border Ctrl”.
Listen for: “Intro to Shamstep”, Shamstep EP (17 June 2015)
The artists carrying this to the largest audiences Palestinian music has ever had — arenas, festival main stages, and streaming numbers in the hundreds of millions.
Khan Younis refugee camp, Gaza — born in Misrata, Libya
He got out of Gaza to reach the Arab Idol auditions in Cairo and won the 2013 season, and “Ali al-Kufiya” became the song a whole region already seemed to know. The EP Tales About Palestine followed in 2021.
Listen for: “Ali al-Kufiya” / علي الكوفية (21 June 2013)
Nazareth (الناصرة); now Los Angeles
She sings in Arabic and has not switched — which is the notable fact, given the size of the rooms she now plays. Her debut album WOLEDTO came in April 2024.
Listen for: WOLEDTO / وُلِدتو (12 April 2024)
Born in Jerusalem; raised in Gaza, then Amman
He moves between three languages inside a bar, which is a fair description of the life the songs are about. From Gaza, With Love arrived in 2023 and the album DEIRA in June 2024.
Listen for: DEIRA (7 June 2024); From Gaza, With Love (2023)
Occupied East Jerusalem — raised in Sheikh Jarrah
A Jerusalem pop singer who makes his own videos and uses them to say things about gender and occupation that Palestinian pop had mostly left alone. The Hatari collaboration came out of the 2019 Eurovision held in Tel Aviv.
Listen for: “Klefi / صامد” with Hatari (21 June 2019)
Ramallah; based in Amsterdam
A singer who is also a flautist and composer, trained in the classical Arabic tradition and working outward from it rather than away from it. “Li Fairuz” is her reading of Fairuz’s “Li Beirut”.
Listen for: “Li Fairuz” (2024)
Nazareth (al-Nasira), inside the 1948 territories
A neuroscientist as well as a singer, working the Palestinian and Levantine heritage repertoire and the Sufi tradition. She was detained by Israeli police in Nazareth in November 2023 over a social-media post and later released.
Listen for: “Ehna Flestinia” / احنا فلسطينية (2021); Nur (2017)
Follow them, buy the records, go to the shows. Every link goes to the artist, publisher or documented archive named on the page; none is an affiliate link.
From the wider Arabic shelf · Listening note 001
An Arabic voice-only performance published by Mohiuddin. This is not filed as Palestinian poetry; it sits in the listening room as a work from the wider Arabic elegiac tradition.
The story carried with the performance. The verses are transmitted as Khālid ibn al-Walīd’s lament for his son Sulaymān in a conquest narrative set in Egypt. Mohiuddin cites Futūḥ al-Shām, a work traditionally attributed to al-Wāqidī. In the cited text, grief turns into praise, then a vow of vengeance.
Both that attribution and the narrative’s historical reliability are disputed. FALASTEEN therefore presents the account as a received literary tradition—not as a verified eyewitness record. The creator describes the video’s visuals as artistic interpretations, not historical depictions.
Mohiuddin · 4 January 2026 · 2:41
No video, thumbnail or YouTube request is made until you press play. Recording ℗© 2025 Mohiuddin. The creator prohibits reuse of the video and visuals; FALASTEEN embeds the publisher’s player and does not re-host the work.
On every recording
FALASTEEN does not re-host these recordings. Each player stays with the named host, the credit remains visible, and the written page carries the context and sources.
Know of a poet reading their own work, an oral-history tape or a performance with a clear publication route? Send the recording and its provenance.