The Arts

Until the early twentieth century, the different forms of Palestinian art were heavily influenced by artistic work in the Arab world. The negation of the Arabs of Palestine by succeeding phases of foreign occupation meant that all art became a means to express national identity and ever the fight to try to preserve it. Theatre, cinema, painting, music and literature, all rooted in living tradition, oriented themselves towards a culture of resistance based on popular education, by expressing the suffering and the struggle of the Palestinian people.

Music

Palestinian musical art finds its sources in contemporary Arab music, both classical and traditional. The main musical centers (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq) which continue to dominate the musical field, have imposed their mark. After the 1967 war, Palestinian musicians reoriented their music and production towards traditional and rural music. This helped to advance the creation of many folkloric groups which mixed music, dancing (dabka) and resistance music.

Palestinian Folklore

Music and popular songs belong to the oral tradition and are usually learned on the occasion of ceremonies or in special evenings. A Bedouin or peasant sha’er (poet, composer and singer) combines two musical genres, in which traditional music is mixed with improvisation. The long and repetitive singing about nostalgia for the past, love, or homesickness is sometimes accompanied by the rebaba (a sort of violin – a rectangular box with two strings made of horse-hair played with a bow).

The syllabic chant has short verses and a refrain sung first by the sha’er, then by the audience. This often accompanies traditional dancing and wedding ceremonies. Hand-clapping and percussion (darbouka or tabla) keep the rhythm of the song lively. Sometimes, there are other musical instruments such as the shebaba (a small flute with or without a mouthpiece), and clarinet with double reeds of two types: the mijwez (two tubes of equal length) and the yarghoul (where one of the pipes can be as much as two meters long, to produce a humming sound).

Literature

The distinctive characteristics of Palestinian literature developed under the British Mandate and during the Great Revolt of 1936. A number of Palestinian and Arab writers were involved in this popular uprising (1936-1939), amongst them Bishara al-Khoury. The adoption of prose written in verse form was a hallmark of the new generation of Palestinian writers such as Ibrahim Touqan, Rashid Hussein, and Abdel Rahim Mahmoud.

After the Nakba, deep sorrow over the loss of the land and the separation of its people dominated Palestinian literature. Beginning with the Sixties
and especially after the defeat of 1967, literature became “self-criticism” (Samih al-Qassem, Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Touqan, Ghassan Kanafani) and then documentary or historical record during the first Intifada. Fadwa Touqan published The Martyrs of the Intifada and Ezzet Gazawi The Letters that Never Arrived, where they describe the torture and life in Israeli jails. With the “Oslo Peace Process,” the literary movement was first stifled, but then it was influenced by the feeling of defeat and frustration specific to the “peace process.”

Painting and Drawing

In the beginning of the last century, some icon painters, portraitists and even landscape artists, influenced by orientalist painters in the West, initiated painting as a new Palestinian art form. Emphasis on painting grew during the Sixties, taking its inspiration from themes of exile and the loss of land. Paintings tended to evoke either a sense of nostalgia or a call to resistance.