Ruba Totah
Introduction
My heart goes out to the people of Palestine and all those who have fallen.
I am deeply saddened to discover that in a time where 'nature' has forced the inhabitants of this world to listen and has even encouraged us to re-find other ways to live, we still have not been able to change our nature to listen to each other and to find different ways to live together. (Akram Khan, 2021)
In April 2021, a video went viral on social media, depicting a young Palestinian woman named Muna El-Kurd in the yard of her home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem. She was arguing with an Israeli colonial settler, Yakub, who was attempting to take her home. She shouted, ‘You are stealing my house!’ He answered, ‘And if I do not steal it, someone else is gonna steal it’ (Middle East Eye). In the following days, the video sparked anger on social media towards the actions of Israeli settlers in Sheikh Jarrah. Then, another video of the settlers’ spokesperson also went viral. He announced, ‘We will continue to take house after house. … We [did] not finish the job. We will go to the next neighbourhood and the next’ (Jewish Voice for Peace).
Viral videos from the area snowballed in the following days. They created a storm of anger that led to an online campaign supporting Palestinians and the inhabiting families’ rights in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. Despite COVID-19 restrictions, the vast online campaign continued, accompanied by international street demonstrations, with academics, artists, and other influential voices combining to pressure decision-makers to end violence against Palestinians, hashtagging ‘#SaveSheikhJarrah’ to their acts of solidarity. From April to August 2021, streamed videos depicted residents and supporters on the neighbourhood’s streets, protesting at illegal Israeli-occupation military court decisions to evict several families from their homes. Calls spread through social media, petitioning against eviction and ethnic cleansing acts.[1]
This article examines how Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood came together during the neighbourhood community’s several months of uprising to stand against house eviction and inspired other gatherings worldwide. In particular, it explores how performing these gatherings challenges a dominant global understanding of decolonising performance practices. While scholarship has focused on the political implications of the uprising, it has dwelt less on its cultural and performative consequences and interpretations. Being directly implicated in the online campaign and engaged in ethnographic note-taking and interviewing protestors about personal and collective experiences in these gatherings in the neighbourhood and on global cities’ streets, I noticed how music was a significant tool for performing the protest and a primary resource for the rising resisters and the solidarity communities that joined the campaign. The neighbourhood street transformed into a platform that staged protest processes and content through a live art performance. The collective aspiration of these gatherings describes what Sara Ahmed calls the ‘intensification of collective feelings’ (‘Affective Economies’ 29), and in this case, the feelings of pain and refusal. Music became a tool to convey history related to these feelings, which brought about traces of the community struggle of Palestinians. Chanted songs that protestors seemed to know well reminded them of past encounters, cultural heritage, and human rights pledges, uncovering theatre’s relationship to other spaces of collective identity.
The paper, therefore, revisits the physical and virtual global impact of using music in Sheikh Jarrah’s public space throughout these gatherings, while contrasting this impact with that resulting from what Wiles calls ‘commodity theatre’, which explains how capitalism led the commercialisation of theatre genres such as ‘musicals’. Thinking with Dan Rebellato’s concept of ‘site-unspecific theatre’, the paper examines the contrast between the two performative phenomena. Utilising this concept in analysing the case of Sheikh Jarrah, it aims to reclaim performance’s agency as a tool for global solidarity by being both site-specific and site-unspecific or globally resonant at the same time. In a transcultural context, where transnational alliances and global solidarity with people enduring struggles are possible, solidarity entails a prolonged practice of learning and unlearning, where one surpasses the definition of the ‘Other’ based on geocultural differences. Such alliances help global solidarity by bringing a new understanding of citizenship (Totah and Khoury) that grounds cultural practices for transcultural dialogue and solidarity. Thus, if global solidarity relies on interdependence, shared values, struggle, and encounters (Erakat; Oosterlynck et al.), it is nurtured by joint engagements in diverse places here and now. As such, I argue that the cultural aspects of decolonising Sheikh Jarrah are essential to an influential solidarity approach.
Understood as art practised in a specific decolonising context, the Sheikh Jarrah gatherings represent an irreducibly local and geographically specific art, which nonetheless resonated in global spaces. While playing together, these contradictory features enabled an ethical global alliance with the gatherings’ rights-based plight. Performances in the neighbourhood during the uprising did not become generically transnational, in the way the viral clips of a commodity performance might aspire to, but instead proposed a form of solidarity that could hold and maintain specificity within a broader collective. An analysis of these performances thus offers a reconsideration of the connections between performance as a protest and solidarity. The analysis used grounded theory and an empirical approach to collect qualitative data from immersed observations of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood uprising and the online campaign.
The Sheikh Jarrah Gatherings as Site-Specific Performance
The Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, located north of the Old City in East Jerusalem, has been a site of settler colonialism since 1948. Due to its strategic location, Israeli settler groups have made persistent efforts to take over land and property to establish new settlements in the area (Hammami; Keinan; Turner). Since 1970, an Israeli court decision has threatened 28 families with expulsion from their houses in the neighbourhood. In 2020, the El-Ghawi family’s house was confiscated. In 2021, the El-Kurd family’s house and seven others were about to be seized, but a storm of anger broke out, pushing the Israeli occupation court to postpone its decision. Half of the El-Kurd home space has been occupied by settlers since 2009. In the neighbourhood’s main street, where the 2020 online campaign’s coverage focused its photo shots, the world witnessed the El-Ghawi family house being confiscated. At the same time, a group of colonial settlers held Israeli flags as they stood inside and around the house. Israeli soldiers could be seen gathered near the settlers to provide protection.
The El-Kurds’ house is across the street from the El-Ghawi house, where Muna El-Kurd now lives. Colonial settlers half-confiscated the house, and this is where Yakub, who was seen in the viral video, remains. The El-Kurd family uses their property’s entrance to enter their home, and Yakub uses the same entrance to cross to the half-confiscated part of the house. Palestinian protest groups have activated the entrance space for gathering, drawing, creating a library, and other events for children. It has also been used as a place of escape for protesters whenever the Israeli occupation forces used gas bombs, beatings, or ‘skunk water’ to control the crowd in the street. In April 2021, the protesters’ community built a tent to protect them from the sun and rain and placed chairs near the entrance. To spite protestors, the Israeli colonial settlers built another tent on the opposite sidewalk in front of the El-Ghawi family house. The tent on the sidewalk became the protestors’ gathering hub, which repeats similar gathering routines that Palestinians practice for protests in other locations in Palestine. Such gatherings are exclusive to the case of Palestine. Livestreams of these gatherings at Sheikh Jarrah broadcast chants and songs relevant to Palestinians and infused global solidarity protests. Protestors and settlers entered the street area whenever the situation heightened, and the Israeli police remained in the middle, claiming protection for settlers.
Portraying a theatre scene as I saw them, each livestream of these gatherings showed residents’ intense bonding with the place. This local particularity is fundamental to my understanding of these gatherings as site-specific performances. Space is fundamental in the sense that in this specific uprising situation, performing music became a resistive tool of the neighbourhood’s protestors, who had no other means to stand against eviction from their houses except for it. Wiles asserts this place particularity as a resistive component of theatre commodification in the global era, mainly aiming to undermine regional particularity. I understand the livestreaming of the performed gatherings not as an attempt to replicate them in other spaces but to amplify their effect and global connectedness. Thus, the Sheikh Jarrah gatherings cannot be replicated as commodities, but their universal value has inspired other communities in other places. Geographical particularity here feeds into global solidarity rather than resisting it. In this sense, the Sheikh Jarrah gatherings meet with how Rebellato explains ‘site-unspecific theatre’, maintaining the particular ethical value of the performance in a specific site but livestreaming it or replicating parts of its components in other places to stress its morals.
As such, these musical resistive gatherings revealed underexplored site-related connections between performance, global solidarity, and resistance. Several studies address performance in Palestine by exploring the participatory aspects of performance that generate political agency for cultural diplomacy and human rights (Massad; Mcdonald; Belkind). These studies focus on protest as a performative tool and sometimes address its theatricalities to reflect on the connection between performance and everyday life in public spaces. Drawing on these scholarly approaches to the specific case of Palestine, I take them to recognise that space is irreducible to performances produced. It signifies the non-erasure of a Palestinian identity within the place. Performing the gatherings in such a way identifies the relationship between theatre as a collective practice for change and public spaces of collective identities inside Palestine.
Beyond the spatial irreducibility, this study provides that this aspect of the Sheikh Jarrah performances sheds light on what it means to gather, in this instance. Departing from Shah’s argument proposing ‘that the theatrical encounter is a structure that prioritises the attentive over the declarative’ (2), the live performance encounters during the Sheikh Jarrah gatherings equally prioritise the attentiveness and declarativeness of the performing and the global audience communities together in a resistive context. While Shah relies on ‘listening, gathering, and the act of invitation’ (17) as elements which hold any performance, the Sheikh Jarrah gathering communities actualised listening to each other’s musical selections by joining the performance as a community, and by inviting global participation and audience encounters through the livestreaming. Participating and spectator communities outside Palestine practised listening for a specifically Palestinian way of narrating the events. Both gatherings and protesting international communities’ ways of participation achieved the attentiveness aspects of performance in this sense, providing that the aesthetic interpretation of the livestream coverage of the protests in Sheikh Jarrah is reminiscent of theatrical performance spaces on stage or in film musicals. In this sense, the gatherings reemphasise the cultural aspect and ethical value of the decolonising practices Palestinians have engaged with for decades, where the attentive can simultaneously be declarative. By adopting the Palestinian narrative about anti-colonisation, global solidarity acts detach themselves from Western standards and interpretations and become mindful of local narratives in the specific context of Palestine. A music gathering in such a context becomes a non-financed, grassroots, people-led practice that mobilises global solidarity acts. The following explains how the tent that gathered the crowds for singing, the road, the arrests, and the online movement have introduced performative aspects of the protest and mobilised a sense of solidarity.
Performing the Sheikh Jarrah Gatherings
The daily protest-gathering routine in Sheikh Jarrah begins with residents chanting, storytelling, and singing inside the tent in front of the El-Kurds’ house, aiming to break the court’s decision on eviction. Often, settlers across the street ask Israeli soldiers to intervene. At some points, the soldiers raid the tent, so protestors evacuate it through the entrance to the El-Kurds’ house. The soldiers break inside the house and call the crowd out, arresting a few protesters daily. Finally, when the protesters refuse to leave, the ‘skunk vehicle’ arrives, spraying putrid-smelling water over them. This routine lasted over two weeks and was accompanied by an online protest force for two months. The tent, the road, the weapons/arrests, and the online protesters were the main elements that formed the spatiality of the Sheikh Jarrah gatherings’ performances.
The Tent
The tent hosted the story of a community formation at the Sheikh Jarrah site, which performed its group identities theatrically. A one-hour livestream broadcast on the 8 May 2021 focused on the tent outside the El-Kurds’ house. The tent contained collective singing activities. Around 30 young women and men gathered inside a circle and began singing. The first song was ‘Men Sejen Akka’ (From Acre Prison), a popular song written by the poet Abdul Rahman Barghouti about the assassination of three prisoners in the Palestinian revolt in 1936 under the British Mandate. The song rhymes with the ‘Dal’ouna’, a folk song in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean area that belongs to the ‘Omahat Al-Aghani’ (The Mothers of Songs) melodic family. The song is sung chiefly in rural places among villagers (Jubran), and it descends from the Qaradiat tonal language long developed by people of the area through the collective processing of stories, traditional symbols, and tonal languages that mirror their societies. Qaradiat then evolved into a widely transmitted musical tone (Jubran). Easily explained due to their simple structure, these songs are full of social relevance. Further, Qaradiat-tuned songs in Bayat maqam[2] are well known as movement-based songs in the Palestinian countryside, usually accompanied by dabkeh and folk dancing (Jubran). ‘From Acre Prison’, performed for decades, became part of the Palestinian repertoire as a heritage song, extending its social and cultural relevance to decolonising Palestine by recurrently being recalled in almost all resistance events. The song holds tunes that bring emotional triggers for Palestinians, and its lyrics motivate them towards steadfastness—sumud—against ongoing oppression. The song’s style and lyrics were relevant to the context of the Sheikh Jarrah protest, giving it a sort of ingenuity and extended emotional connection in weaving dance and song. During the Sheikh Jarrah livestreamed events from inside the tent, when the song was delivered through chanting as the personal choice of one of the participants, it was collectively embraced by other participants and repeated throughout the livestream. The sound and emotional effect of the lyrics infused collective feeling and turned the tent into a micro-space exemplary of the Palestinian story of struggle. The collective singing of these heritage pieces combined protestors’ courage with the storytelling of specific moments of their history in a folk genre.
The second song, ‘Nzelna Alshaware’ (We Went to the Streets), by singer Waleed Abdul Salam and writer Asad Al Assad, comes from the 1987 Palestinian uprising repertoire. The song embraces street marches and the population’s steadfastness. It belongs to the political song genre that emerged in Palestine after the 1936 revolt and became widely recognised due to the spread of recordings (Shammout). The songs chosen next were from the repertoire of the diasporic Palestinian band Al-Ashiqin about resilience during the Israeli raid of the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982. Al-Ashiqin’s central vision is centred around reintroducing Palestine’s musical heritage so that it is not lost after Nakba[3] in 1948, ethnic cleansing, and the exile Palestinians have experienced for seven decades (Khoury). The livestream then showed a back-and-forth singing of Palestinian political and folk songs in an almost battle-like manner. A group chant eventually replaced the battle with lyrics against the occupation’s violence, during which protesters followed the chant’s leading voice. The singing and the conversations among protesters about the selection of songs became part of the performative acts in the neighbourhood, which invited a reading of the livestreamed events as a musical story. The story behind the collective singing and inspiration from musical heritage explains how Ahmad defines ‘community’ by emphasising a ‘common ground’ rather than ‘commonality’ alone, in that community ‘might not name all it is that we can do and can be when we “get together” … as effects of how we meet on the ground, as a ground that is material, but also virtual, real and imaginary’ (Ahmed and Fortier 257). As such, the collective singing formed a fundamental aspect of the specificity of the performance. It actualised the bonding of the gathering residents with the place.
Despite the varying singing preferences, the voices emerging from the tent did not stop. An unspoken collective decision was made not to stop using songs to convey their messages—an inherited technique among Palestinian protesters in their long journey of protest against the Israeli occupation. Similar collective decisions are described by some studies that demonstrate, for example, how communities used folk songs during the First Intifada to encode messages between resisters (Kanaaneh). Other studies attempted to both document and mythologise Palestinian history (Hamed), while some explained how the academisation of music aimed to resist through actualising music professionalisation (Dabbah; Scandrett et al.). In the Sheikh Jarrah gatherings, while the livestreams showed some colonial settlers moving along the road, the Israeli soldiers prevented the Palestinian protesters from moving. Despite that, the chanting lyrics continued, against imprisonment, espionage, relinquishment, and surrender, bringing a decades-long panorama of Palestinian protests and connecting the march in Sheikh Jarrah to the broader Palestinian struggle. Emotions embedded in the gathering are crucial to its performativity because it did not depend on erasing the specificity of individuals and subsites within Palestine. They reflect what Ahmed explains as how bodies ‘surface in relation to other bodies, a surfacing that produces the very effect of collectives, which we can describe as “felt” as well as imagined and mediated’ (‘Collective Feelings’ 39). The collective feeling forming inside the tent is shaped by histories of similar experiences that were formulated over decades and evoked a re-memory of musical heritage that sticks to the gatherings’ performance. At the end of the livestream, the protesters moved to the centre of the road with vehemence. The Israeli soldiers raided, and the crowd evacuated.
The Road
The road hosted the story of the encounter, where music actualised the culture of resistance, countering performance commodification in public spaces. On the 12 May, another livestream showed a similar routine. The protesters in the tent brought a loudspeaker and moved towards the neighbourhood street. They played the song ‘Ounadikom’[4] (I Call Out to You), a political song sung in several styles in Palestine and other Arab countries since the 20th century to help mobilise communities for protest. As protesters played the music through the speakers, the other side of the road was moving too. The settlers brought their loudspeaker, and they formed a circle of dancing and singing near the tent they built in front of the El-Ghawi house, attempting to establish the space as Israeli and, in this sense, adopting cultural mechanisms similar to those used by the Palestinians, such as singing and dancing, but without identifying with them, in a sort of commodified export of performance. Colonial settlers’ dances do not rely on repertoires cultivated over centuries, such as that of the Palestinian music heritage, which connected genres, maqams, and Palestinians’ practices. There are no similar moments in the Zionist movement’s history, where tonal language is instead exported to the settlements planted in Palestine from an original colonising culture. As argued by Israeli scholar Shai Burstyn, there are examples of attempts to form a Zionist music ensemble and a failed attempt to create an ‘Oriental-leaning folk dance band’ (133), aiming to create a specific musical identity that originated in the oriental tonal language but which did not succeed.[5] Instead, for Burstyn, Israeli dances were ‘the products of the international industry for international export’ (131). Their dance act was thus an attempt to become a collective group, but the heritage contained in this dance did not reflect the actual becoming of such a group. As Khalidi explains, the Zionist movement needed an allied metropole like the British or the US to actualise its settler colonial project. However, the metropole did not plant its residents there.
During the livestream, Israeli soldiers stood in the middle of the road, facing the El-Kurd house’s tent, reinforcing the militarisation of the confrontation from their side and allowing the performative practice of settlers. The music battle between the Palestinian protesters and the colonial settlers continued every day until the 14 May, when a livestream showed an Israeli soldier confiscating the loudspeaker from the Palestinian protesters’ tent. The protesters shouted and chanted against the loudspeaker’s ‘arrest’. While occupation forces feared the genuine, emotional acts of music, dance, and singing evolving through the use of the loudspeaker, the protesters’ personification of the loudspeaker exhibited how musical heritage is essential to their being and identity. Protesters shouted in the livestream that the speaker’s arrest was an attempt to break their voices. Viewers commenting on the video through social media hashtagged ‘#freethespeaker’, calling for maintaining the voicing of local narratives. Chanting against the confiscation of the loudspeaker in the middle of the street extended the singing with movement, highlighting that singing involves action that grows dramatically, inviting spectators/observers to move.
The Arrest
The arrests that coincided with the gatherings hosted the story of local attentiveness and declarativeness implied by the performance structure proposed by Shah. On the 15 May, a livestream of a mural-painting activity under the El-Kurd tent was interrupted by group arrests and the beating of residents. At the event, balloons with the colours of the Palestinian flag left the tiny hands of a child holding them and floated towards the road. Children and the crowd cheered for the freedom of the balloons. As the soldiers raided to evacuate the crowd, the balloons flew and got stuck to electric wires above the street, recreating the Palestinian flag. Several soldiers made serious efforts to take the balloons down. A video of the soldiers’ actions to ‘arrest’ the balloons went viral. Bashar Murkus, a theatre practitioner and director from Haifa, edited the video to include the Pink Panther theme song, adding another layer to the musical nature of the street protests. He turned from a spectator to a witness, a participant, in the performance. Other musicians beyond the space of the neighbourhood also joined the resistive narration. When the protests were tamped down in Sheikh Jarrah later in May 2021, other groups began protests in different locations in the city, primarily at the Damascus Gate, a few kilometres away from the neighbourhood. While demonstrating, Mariam Afifi, a musician and double bassist in the Palestine Youth Orchestra, was arrested by Israeli soldiers. The footage of her arrest was circulated widely, showing her handcuffed on the ground, speaking out to a soldier. The footage was juxtaposed with photos and videos of Afifi playing music at different times. She responded to her arrest with a spontaneous smile to a camera filming her being handcuffed, a performative response that went viral. In a video that emerged later, she undermined the handcuffs and questioned the solider: ‘How do you feel growing old to be on the side of the oppressors?’ (Days of Palestine). Contrary to its oppressive intent, the arrest highlighted Afifi’s bravery in using music’s connection to feelings in confronting the arresting Israeli soldier with a question. The question was about a feeling connected to practising the oppression of Palestinians. The clip in the story of the smiling face and the question about feelings garnered the vast attention of social media viewers worldwide, who re-shared the video of her arrest while commenting on the power of music and artists against the Israeli armed forces, encouraging millions of spectators to join the campaign and the marches.
The Online Force
The online global solidarity movement bridged the distance between the neighbourhood as a site-specific resistive performance and its global effect. The daily routines of protesters were captured by Palestinian journalists and protestors’ mobile phone cameras. They broadcast most of the events on the road, at the tent, and during arrests. Though the Palestinian musical heritage might be unfamiliar to the millions who watched, due to its specificity, the stories behind their use touched millions of online viewers[6] and invited them to respond. The widely recognised visual elements of Palestinian protest stories known for decades were present in every livestream—including the singing style, intergenerational dialogues, the keffiyeh (traditional Palestinian scarf), the peaceful crowd, and the continuous arrests of those smiling to the cameras. The cameras captured the style, ingenuity, and means of creativity in protest, transforming the performative protest act into a non-commercial art form filled with social and political relevance. Protesters worldwide reproduced many protest acts; they told stories about Sheikh Jarrah and recited the names and words of activists in city demonstrations, including the El-Kurds and Afifi. Solidarity marches played songs similar to those chanted by protesters about Jerusalem on loudspeakers—such as ‘En An’ (an allegory of reality and possibilities) (2021), ‘Sheikh Jarrah’ (2021), ‘Wlad Ods’[7] (The Children of Quds) (2020), and ‘Keffiyeh’[8] (2013)—and dabkeh dances were performed in circles. For decades, such musical performative acts of resistance have been locally performed in protest spaces inside Palestine—such as in the villages of Belin, Nabi Saleh, and Bab Al-Shams—where the wall of annexation confiscated Palestinian lands and where the Israeli occupation has forced the demolition of Palestinian houses (Scandrett et al.; Ross). In these protests, individuals and groups joined protesters in person in solidarity, and media agencies covered the protest processes on the ground. Most acts were similar to those performed in Sheikh Jarrah, drawing on similar Palestinian musical heritage and humanitarian messages. Adopting the Palestinian narrative and performances, the global marches turned site-specific performances into irreducibly local yet globally resonant ones.
Much of the online campaign material presented the musical resistive narrative as a dialogue against house confiscation in Sheikh Jarrah. Social media transmission of the musical dialogue granted the protesters agency to influence individual perceptions and mobilise transnational alliances towards broader means of confrontation. Acts of solidarity by supporters became the direct sharing and voicing of Palestinians’ narratives livestreamed from the sites of protests. Even though this form of solidarity is individually based, broadcast through a capitalist social media tool, it is centred on international solidarity that aligns with the local Palestinian narrative. The Sheikh Jarrah musical performatives—inside Jerusalem and internationally—navigated an entanglement of private (houses), public (street), and virtual spheres around freedom despite Israeli security measures (see Darwish). The musical gatherings enhanced solidarity with the Palestinian struggle by bringing a new bottom-up lens to understanding such an art form. It highlighted protesters’ personal lives, encouraging public interest and solidarity.
Musical Gatherings as Site-Unspecific Performances Reclaiming Solidarity
The Sheikh Jarrah gatherings counter-appropriated music theatre as a tool for reclaiming decolonial solidarity performance and decentred the narratives dominated by a White, Western understanding of citizenship and solidarity. The gatherings challenged the history of solidarity with Palestinians by contributing to the perplexing and conflicting views about its efficacy and contribution to land repatriation. Robert Ross emphasises how different forms of Palestinian solidarity—including both solidarity from within Palestine and international solidarity with Palestinians—have strengthened the understanding and practice of solidarity within and beyond Palestine and linked directly to ways of confronting and dismantling settler colonialism. Linda Tabar (421) examines how forms of solidarity contribute to an anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist critique of an emergent individualisation of solidarity with Palestinians. Tabar traces the genealogy of ‘internationals’ as a concept alluding to international solidarity groups and movements emerging during the Second Intifada in 2002 and beyond. Tabar centres on Palestinian perspectives by suggesting the idea of ‘internationals’ as a phenomenon of arriving international groups coming to Palestine to witness colonial violence. The phenomenon describes the disappearance of critical consciousness to challenge global power systems. Similar to Tibi’s understanding of hegemonic cultural approaches (‘European Identity Contested?’), Tabar concludes that instead of highlighting Palestinian perspectives, hegemonic depoliticised notions of transnationalism have prevailed in these solidarity acts, and dominant Western decolonising perspectives have shaped the notion of solidarity. These forms of solidarity have created humanitarian witnesses and individual civil missions that support an ‘ally industry’ (3), rather than political allies who could build a solidarity movement to overturn a system of oppression. An ally industry serves reconciliation with the coloniser’s guilt and complicity and guards its futurity. Considerable scholarship on popular resistance and solidarity with Palestinians has documented the cultural activism of Palestinian youth under the framework of ‘participatory politics’ (Carpenter), ‘anti-colonial participatory politics’ (Al-Azzeh; Dayyeh and Banat; Desai), and ‘symbolic creativity’ (Willis). This scholarship approach tends to standardise the idea of solidarity according to Western norms and, therefore, undermines the case that Palestinians are still fighting for rights. Further, Hill describes how citizenship’s limitations affect solidarity tendencies. He argues that decolonial solidarity politics rely on ‘showing up’ with struggles based on sameness and difference among communities under oppression. However, showing up continues to be part of humanitarian witness and civil rights missions, serving the status quo for Palestinians by diverging from confrontations to end settler colonialism.
By contrast, the Sheikh Jarrah music encouraged internationals to reintroduce popular music heritage as part of the decolonising attempt by using the narratives of Palestinians and their cultural heritage, not only witnessing them. Beyond the Jerusalem site-specific performances, the music performances of the Sheikh Jarrah gatherings as street protests and their accompanying online streaming enabled the reproducibility of the protests in other locations on main streets worldwide and over social media. As a specific resistive performance space, Sheikh Jarrah’s neighbourhood comprised protestors in the tent and the street while performing their resistive acts. As a multi-sited space, video footage from the neighbourhood spreading through social media reproduced the Sheikh Jarrah space on the phones and TVs of spectators of the protests. Furthermore, it also motivated people to gather in their spaces of protest worldwide to support the uprising. The Sheikh Jarrah global solidarity communities resume their alliance in the present day, standing up against the ongoing erasure and annihilation acts against Palestinians, relying on similar means and local narratives. Through the global solidarity movement with the uprising, music’s collective practices extended to mobilising collective identities beyond Palestine. The solidarity campaign aided the musical protests’ ability to spread and reproduce and encouraged solidarity participation beyond mere witnessing. Led by what is known as a commercial tool, social media enabled Sheikh Jarrah’s performance of resistance to become an effective vehicle for protest and a counter-example to commodity theatre. The uprising of the neighbourhood’s residents used music to counter-appropriate the theatre genre, bringing a new layer to understanding these gatherings as a decolonising theatre tool and challenging global solidarity perspectives.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. ‘Affective Economies’. Social Text, vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 117-39.
---. ‘Collective Feelings: Or the Impressions Left by Others’. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 21, no. 2, 2004, pp. 25-42.
Ahmed, Sara, and Anne-Marie Fortier. ‘Re-Imagining Communities’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2003, pp. 251-9.
Alazzeh, Ala. ‘Seeking Popular Participation: Nostalgia for the First Intifada in the West Bank’. Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 2015, pp. 251-67.
Arts of the Working Class. ‘A Letter against Apartheid’. Artsoftheworkingclass.org, 2022, artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/a-letter-against-apartheid.
Belkind, Nili. Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Aesthetic Production. Routledge, 2020.
Burstyn, Shai. ‘The Ethnomusicologist as Inventor of Musical Tradition’. Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online, vol. 13, 2015-16. pp 124-140.
Carpenter, Michael J. Palestinian Popular Struggle: Unarmed and Participatory. Routledge, 2018.
Dabbah, Ashraf. Contemporary Palestinian Music Culture. Birzeit University, Ramallah, 2018.
Darwish, Kareem. ‘News Consumption in Time of Conflict: 2021 Palestinian-Israel War as an Example’. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12844, 2021.
Days of Palestine. Mariam Afifi is trying to address the conscience of an Israeli soldier to convince him that he stands with the oppressors against the oppressed. Facebook, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=208061997583690
Dayyeh, Jawad, and M. Banat. ‘Palestinian Youth and Civilian Resistance’. International Humanities Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2017, pp. 15-26.
Desai, Chandni. ‘Shooting Back in the Occupied Territories: An Anti-Colonial Participatory Politics’. Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 1, 2015, pp. 109-28.
Erakat, Noura. ‘Geographies of Intimacy: Contemporary Renewals of Black–Palestinian Solidarity’. American Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 2, 2020, pp. 471-96.
Hamed, Qassam. ‘The Palestinian Political Songs: The Narrative and the Epic 1905-2015’. FADA Birzeit, 2015, fada.birzeit.edu/handle/20.500.11889/5535.
Hammami, Rema. ‘The Exiling of Sheikh Jarrah’. Jerusalem Quarterly, vol. 51, 2012. pp. 49-64.
Hill, Marc Lamont. ‘From Ferguson to Palestine’. Biography, vol. 41, no. 4, 2018, pp. 942-57.
Jewish Voice for Peace. ‘Israeli Settler Theft of Palestinian Homes is a “Continuation of the Zionist Project,” Said a Settler Spokesperson in #SheikhJarrah, Jerusalem’. Facebook, 2021, www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/videos/291974042501543. Accessed 24 September 2022.
Jubran, Khalid. ‘Songs of the Palestinian Countryside’. The Palestinian Museum, forthcoming 2025.
Kanaaneh, Moslih. ‘Palestinian Popular Music: How Popular Music Becomes Heritage’. The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, edited by Sarah Baker, et al., 2018, pp. 376-87.
Keinan, Adi Grabiner. ‘There’s a New Left in Town: The Politics of Solidarity in Occupied Jerusalem’. PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2016.
Khalidi, Rashid. ‘1948 and After in Palestine: Universal Themes?’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 4, 2014, pp. 314-31.
---. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. Picador, 2021.
Khoury, Suhail. ‘Palestinian Music’. Palquest, 1 January 1970, www.palquest.org/en/highlight/10526/palestinian-music.
Massad, Joseph. ‘Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music’. Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, 2003, pp. 21-38.
McDonald, David A. ‘Geographies of the Body: Music, Violence, and Manhood in Palestine’. Ethnomusicology Forum, vol. 19, no. 2, 2010. pp.190-214.
Middle East Eye. ‘An Israeli Settler’s Attempt to Justify a Forcible Takeover of a Palestinian Home in Sheikh Jarrah’. Facebook, 2021, www.facebook.com/MiddleEastEye/videos/299117858431799. Accessed 24 September 2022.
Murkus, Bashar. Facebook, 2021, www.facebook.com/Bashar Murkus. Accessed 24 September 2022.
Oosterlynck, Stijn, et al. ‘Putting Flesh to the Bone: Looking for Solidarity in Diversity Here and Now’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 39, no. 5, 2016, pp. 764-82.
Palestine and Praxis: Open Letter and Call to Action. ‘Palestine & Praxis: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom’, 2022, palestineandpraxis.weebly.com/.
Palestine Performing. ‘Calling on Artists of the World to Take Action’. Facebook, 2022, www.facebook.com/palestinepan/posts/4569540146392661. Accessed 24 September 2022.
Rebellato, Dan. ‘Playwriting and Globalisation: Towards a Site-Unspecific Theatre’. Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2006, pp. 97-113.
Ross, Robert. ‘Introduction to Special Issue on Spaces of Palestine Solidarity’. Human Geography, vol. 14, no. 3, 2021, pp. 317-21.
Scandrett, Eurig, et al. ‘Cultural Resistance in Occupied Palestine and the Use of Creative International Solidarity through Song’. Journal of Arts & Communities, vol. 12, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 41-56.
Shah, Rajni. We Are Capable of So Much More: Experiments in Listening. Lancaster University, 2018.
Shammout, Bashar. Digitale Erhaltung des auditiven und visuellen Kulturerbes Palästinas: Grundlagen und Perspektiven. Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag, 2018.
Tabar, Linda. ‘From Third World Internationalism to “the Internationals”: The Transformation of Solidarity with Palestine’. Third World Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2017, pp. 414-35.
Tamcke, Martin, et al., editors. Europe - Space for Transcultural Existence? Göttingen University Press, 2013. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2013-449.
Totah, Ruba, and Krystel Khoury. ‘Theater against Borders: “Miunikh–Damaskus”—A Case Study in Solidarity’. Arts, vol. 7, no. 4, 2018. pp. 1-14
Turner, Mandy. ‘Behind the Big Blue Gate: The Kenyon Institute, a British Eccentricity in Shaykh Jarrah’. Jerusalem Quarterly, vol. 83, 2020, pp. 139-51.
Wiles, David. A Short History of Western Performance Space. Cambridge UP, 2003.
Willis, Paul. Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Westview Press, 1990.
Footnotes
[1] See Arts of the Working Class, available at www.facebook.com/palestinepan/posts/calling-on-artists-of-the-world-to-take-actionwe-Palestinian-artists-and-arts-or/4569540146392661/>; Palestine and Praxis.
[2] Maqam is a melodic mode. The octave is divided into smaller microtones to the interval resolution of one-ninth of a step, called a comma.
[3] Rashid Khalidi elaborates: ‘For Palestine, there is almost no debate about when a new era in the lives of its people began: it was in 1948, with the shattering of Palestinian society and the expulsion and flight of more than half of the country’s Arab population of nearly 1.4 million. What has been inscribed as the catastrophe, Nakba, for Palestinians since immediately after the events in question is marked by Israelis as the independence of their national state’ (The Hundred Years’ War 314).
[4] A song by the Palestinian poet Tawfiq Zayyad and Lebanese musician and singer Ahmad Qabour.
[5] According to Burstyn, Edith Gerson-Kiwi, research assistant of Professor Robert Lachmann, who embarked on a mission to document oriental music practices in Palestine during the thirties of the twentieth century, became an ethnomusicologist herself on various pan-Asiatic musical aspects and especially on the ethnic music of the Oriental Jewish communities of Jewish Palestine and the Israelis. ‘In 1955, Gerson-Kiwi published a brief article in the non-academic Israeli cultural journal Ofakim (Horizons) entitled “The Israeli Village with its Instruments and Bands” (Gerson-Kiwi 1955). The title might raise expectations for a promising survey of an existing, thriving musical scene. However, whatever did exist in reality was far from Gerson-Kiwi’s aspirations.’
[6] At least one million viewers of this video only of Afifi’s arrest: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCIasDCtm7A&ab_channel=AJ%2B. The following two comments on the video were given by viewers: ‘What an amazing person! She should feel proud of herself!’, ‘Her smile overwhelms me with so much emotions.’
[7] ‘Wlad Ods’ is a song by Shabjdeed in which he reflects on how the situation of youth in Jerusalem is a response to their life under occupation and corruption.
[8] A Palestinian popular song which turned into a mainstream song in the Arab Idol TV show in 2013. The singer of this song is Mohammad Assaf, originally from Gaza.