RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian teenagers who came one after another into the True Love gift and music shop on a recent afternoon all had the same request: nationalistic songs — the new ones.
The proprietor quickly handed over the CDs that he had just started keeping at the checkout counter, like “Jerusalem Is Bleeding,” featuring the track “It’an, It’an” — “Stab, stab” — with its ominous backbeat.
“When I listen to these songs it makes me boil inside,” said one customer, Khader Abu Leil, 15, explaining that the thrumming score has helped pump him up for near-daily demonstrations where he hurls stones at Israeli soldiers.
Inspired by this month’s wave of Palestinian attacks against Israeli Jews and deadly clashes with Israeli security forces, musicians in the occupied West Bank and beyond have produced scores of militaristic, often violent tunes. Published and shared on YouTube and Facebook, they form something of an intifada soundtrack, illustrated by videos that include gritty clips from fresh events.
“Stab the Zionist and say God is great,” declares one, a reference to the spate of knife attacks since Oct. 1. “Let the knives stab your enemy,” says another. A third is called “Continue the Intifada” and comes with a YouTube warning — the video shows the Palestinian woman who pulled a knife at an Afula bus station surrounded by Israeli soldiers pointing guns.
“Resist and carry your guns,” the song urges. “Say hello to being a martyr.”
Adnan Balaweneh, the singer-songwriter behind “Continue the Intifada” and four other songs uploaded in recent days, said that when he “saw the soldiers shoot at the girl in Afula” on television, “immediately I felt I needed to write something in order to charge up the Palestinian people.”
Palestinians have a tradition of protest music dating to their uprisings against the British in the 1930s. There are mournful poems about liberating the land, and booming anthems for political parties blared at rallies and funerals. During the war in 2014 between Israel and Gaza Strip militants, pulsing celebrations of rocket attacks on Tel Aviv poured from car radios across the coastal territory.
Several Palestinian musical experts said the scale and style of this new oeuvre were nonetheless unusual, fueled — as the uprising itself — by freewheeling social media. Some praised the songs as a constructive and creative form of resistance against Israel, while others said they were weak musically and only give the enemy more fodder for claims of incitement.
“For me, throwing stones in the first intifada was a way of expression,” said Ramzi Aburedwan, who was famously photographed as a boy throwing a rock in 1988, and now runs music schools in Palestinian refugee camps. “The tool was the stone in the first intifada, and today it’s music.”
Some folks here suggested that Netanyahu was correct for naming a Palestinian as the “author” of the Holocaust. Nothing could be further from the truth actually. There is just nothing like a gang of angry young men to keep things stirred up. In this case, “stirred up” could easily mean death.
Palestine has a great many angry, unemployed young men with lots of time on their hands. That could spell lots of trouble for Israelis, especially when accompanied by music.
Music suggesting violence or uprising is very powerful. Look at what rock ‘n roll did to change America. It didn’t exactly overthrow a government but it did seriously change society and American mores. There was really nothing that adults could do about the music that inspired so many of us growing up. Strong argument could be made that music was the soul that lifted up the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement. I still remember the words to most of more popular songs. When we were kids we had 45’s, transistors, and guitars. These kids have cell phones, computers, and Youtube.
Netanyahu needs to do all he can do stop settlement growth and to not fan the flames of fear. Youth with too much time on its hands can cripple a society. Wars have been fought over less.
“Palestine has a great many angry, unemployed young men with lots of time on their hands.”
Can we redirect some of the military aid money to an NGO that will hire all these children to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed with bombs? Putting the older kids to work in labor intensive construction jobs seems win-win. It makes them too tired to riot, it provides improved standards of living for their community, and costs the same as bombing them.
I know this is naïve because such a simple solution surely has already been tried. Anyone know why it hasn’t worked? Is it like most 3rd-world building projects an opportunity for graft and corruption? Perhaps Israel also wants to keep the Palestinians in poverty.
I would say that some of them are far from being children.
The fact that there is no state of Palestine means no army. The army (and other branches of the service) takes many young people and rechannels their aggressions.
What kind of social change has happened in our own country because of music?
Music can be a powerful tool.