Music & Song

Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association

Addameer

Addameer supports Palestinian political prisoners held by Israeli authorities and campaigns against administrative detention and torture.

Ghayath al-Madhoun

1979–

A Palestinian poet of two exiles — his family fled Palestine for Syria, and war later drove him from Damascus to Stockholm — al-Madhoun writes prose poems of siege, asylum, and a longing with the mass of Einstein's equations.

Fathi Shaqaqi

1951–1995

The physician from Rafah refugee camp, son of a family expelled from Zarnuqa, who founded the Islamic Jihad Movement and was shot dead by Mossad agents on the island of Malta on 26 October 1995.

Khalida Jarrar

1963–

The Nablus-born parliamentarian and Addameer director, arrested five times and held for years in administrative detention and solitary confinement — denied even her daughter's funeral — who emerged from each imprisonment restating the same demand: freedom from colonial domination.

Le Trio Joubran

2004–

Three brothers from Nazareth, sons of an oud maker, who built an ensemble out of three ouds alone — and who accompanied Mahmoud Darwish on stage until his death.

Reem Kelani

1963–

Palestinian-British singer and researcher who has spent three decades collecting, reviving, and performing traditional Palestinian song, blending it with jazz.

Rim Banna

1966–2018

The Nazareth singer who went looking for the Palestinian children's songs that were being forgotten, recorded them, and set modern Palestinian poetry to her own melodies.

Red Tuesday — the executions at Acre prison

1930

On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir at Acre prison for the events of August 1929. The day entered Palestinian memory through the songs sung for them — above all the funeral song from Acre prison that is still sung a century later.

Dabke

The communal line dance of Palestine and the Levant, performed at weddings and celebrations, with stamping steps that shake the earth.

Palestinian Music

From the improvised verse of zajal and the laments of the mawwal to the hip-hop of DAM — a music that carries memory, celebration, and defiance.

I Can't Attend

Ghayath al-Madhoun

The exile's litany of excuses: a Palestinian poet safe in Stockholm explains — with black humor and survivor's guilt — why the road between his poem and Damascus is cut off.

From Acre Prison

Traditional — sung by 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.

Morning Song

Naomi Shihab Nye

Written for Janna Jihad, the child who began documenting occupation with her mother's phone at age seven: the 'tiny journalist' sees everything — and 'she's bigger than you are.'

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

Mosab Abu Toha

Addressing the surgeon who opens his ear, Abu Toha catalogs what is stored inside — his mother's voice, songs, and the sounds of drones and bombs — memory as an archive that must be put back in order.

Fellahin

society

The peasant cultivators who made up the large majority of Palestine's population before 1948 — the class whose villages were destroyed in the Nakba, and whose dress, food, songs and calendar became, in exile, the national culture.

Al-Damun

Acre

Al-Damun was a village on the Na'amin River southeast of Acre, home of the Zayadina clan before they rose to rule the Galilee. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and razed, its people became mostly internal refugees in nearby Tamra and Kabul; its cemetery and ruined waterworks remain in the undergrowth.

Nahr el-Bared Camp

North Lebanon

Lebanon's second-largest Palestinian camp, founded in December 1949 for refugees from the Galilee, was destroyed in 2007 in four months of fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. Nearly 6,000 homes and businesses were wrecked or badly damaged, and the camp has still not been fully rebuilt.

Yarmouk Camp

Damascus, Syria

Eight kilometres south of Damascus, Yarmouk was the capital of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria — its streets named for Haifa, Safad, Lubya and Jerusalem, home before 2011 to some 160,000 Palestinian refugees. The Syrian war emptied it — Al Jazeera counts some 160,000 forced to flee over its course — and those who stayed endured siege and starvation.

Salwa Naser

Six years old when her family left Jaffa by boat in 1948, and a refugee for the second time in 2012 when the war in Syria destroyed her home in Damascus.

El-Funoun

dance

Palestine's pioneering popular dance troupe since 1979 — preserving and performing dabke and folklore, founder of the Popular Art Centre.

Lajee Center

arts

A community cultural center in Aida Refugee Camp running a music institute, library, kindergarten, and arts programmes for a new generation.