Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music

Abstract

This article surveys the history of songs about Palestine from 1948 to the present, examining how the changes in musical style and lyrics correspond to the changes in the exigencies of the Palestinian struggle itself. Tracing the primacy of revolutionary Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, the central role of Fayruz and the Rahbani brothers in the wake of the 1967 war, and the emergence of Palestinian groups and singers as of the late 1960s, the article provides historical and political analyses of these songs as central features of how Arab popular culture has dealt, and continues to deal, with the Palestine tragedy.