Maha Nassar
27 December 2023
On 31 October 2023, as Israel’s horrific bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip entered its fourth week and as its ground incursion into northern Gaza entered its fourth day, a music video was released. The video’s thumbnail picture depicted a red map of historic Palestine with dark skies and smoke billowing behind it. The map was overlain with the word Raj`in (we are returning) in white Arabic script; below it stood silhouetted figures. I started to see the picture every time I opened YouTube. Eventually, I clicked, not sure what to expect.
What I saw and heard was a rousing, eight-minute Arabic anthem that reflected discourses of the present moment while also containing refrains from the past. These discourses do not view Palestine primarily as a humanitarian cause but rather as an anti-colonial one.
Produced by Jordanian producer Nasir al-Bashir, “Rajieen,” as it is commonly transliterated, is a collaboration of twenty-five Arab performing artists, each a star in their own right. Palestinian-Jordanian singers Issam al-Najjar and Zayne are joined by artists from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Kuwait, all of whom bring a range of musical styles.
Marketed as an updated version of the 1988 pan-Arab hit, “The Arab Dream,” this latest song has struck a chord. Seven weeks after its launch, “Rajieen” has been viewed, in whole or in part, millions of times across various social media platforms and through private messaging apps.
Much of the track is dedicated to memorializing the tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza being slaughtered by Israel’s genocidal war machine. By 20 December, the recorded number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza stood at over 20,000, with nearly 8,000 of them children.
The children of Gaza—comprising about half of the area’s 2.3 million residents—feature prominently in the song; images of Gaza’s children flash regularly across the screen. Egyptian rapper Afroto asks: “What crime did the murdered child commit, who dreamt of only a modest future? And what of the child who survived, only to lose their family?”
But “Rajieen” is not a lamentation. The more I listened to the track, the more I heard echoes of the defiant, anti-colonial Arab discourses that animated much of the twentieth century. Those discourses have consistently upheld the principle of Arab national independence, rejecting Zionism’s exclusionary claims over Palestine as well as the 1917 Balfour declaration that committed the British government to supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine while denying Palestinian Arabs’ national claims.
Early in the track, Tunisian rapper Balti asks, “How can we declare peace when Balfour’s declaration stands?” By naming the Balfour declaration as the opening salvo in this “hundred years’ war on Palestine,” the track affirms the anti-colonial paradigm that has long animated Arab liberatory discourse on Palestine. It also rejects the dominant Western paradigm that seeks to absolve itself of its imperialist sins by positing Israelis and Palestinians as engaged in an interminable ethno-national “conflict.” The song returns the problem of Palestine firmly to its settler-colonial roots.
The “we” in that line is also a declaration that Palestinian political agency lies with the people themselves, not with the Arab governments or the Western-dominated international order. Seventy-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba, fifty-six years after Israel’s military occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and thirty years after the Oslo Accords revealed the two-state solution to be a chimera, the track affirms that Palestinian refugees and their descendants do not seek permission from hostile imperial powers to return home. Al-Najjar leads the chorus:
The key to my home remains in my heart
And I’m returning with my children in my arms
Even if the whole world stands against me
I am returning, O my country
I am returning.
The refrain is significant. As Asmahan Qarjouli explains in her comparative analysis of “Rajieen” and “The Arab Dream,” unlike the earlier song’s longing hope that Arab governments unify to end the Israeli occupation, “Rajieen” insists that it is the Arab youth themselves who are “united as custodians of the Palestinian cause despite their sense of powerlessness. And that there is no defeat or division, firm in their belief of return.”
By formulating their return through both the singular present progressive tense (“I am returning”) and the plural present progressive tense (“we are returning”), the lyrics also return us to the Arab liberatory discourses of the mid-twentieth century. As I show in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (2017), Palestinian cultural producers in the 1950s and ‘60s utilized the principles of politically committed literature (adab al-iltizam) to articulate and popularize anti-colonial discourses that located political agency within individuals, not governments.
Free verse poetry – with its short, rhythmic lines – played a key role in this struggle. Poets would declaim their poems at festivals in front of large crowds; their direct, intimate verses connected them viscerally to the audience, who quickly memorized the poems and shared them with others. The interplay between the “I” and the “we” helped foster a sense of collective spirit, while the poems’ explicit anti-colonial message engendered political mobilization. By eschewing the apolitical aesthetic commonly found in European and North American literary productions at this time, such resistance poetry played a key role in helping spread leftist, anti-colonial consciousness, not only among Palestinians, but among Arabs more broadly.
And what were the contours of this Arab anti-colonial consciousness? As Laure Guiguis explains, the major ideological movements of the period – Marxism, communism, socialism, Baathism, Nasserism, pan-Arab (qawmi) nationalism, nation-state (watani) patriotism, and Third Worldism – all coalesced around a “transregional and even transnational, though diversified, universe of meaning and values,” that was “structured by debates on the best ways to lead the Arab/Palestinian revolution and achieve economic, social, and political emancipation” from Western hegemony.
The transnational aspect of this consciousness also linked Palestine to activists across the Global South at a time when they, too, were fighting to rid themselves of Western colonial and imperial domination. As Palestinian poet Hanna Abu Hanna declared in 1962, “My struggle embraces every struggle / and encompasses the world from pole to pole.”
Some cynics say that such anti-colonial discourse carries little weight in the face of Western military and economic hegemony. But this view ignores the power of discursive frameworks to grant legitimacy to (or withhold legitimacy from) those in power. Imperial regimes have expended much energy on waging discursive battles aimed at legitimizing their rule, from France’s “mission civilisatrice” and Britain’s “White man’s burden” to the US’ “rules-based international order.”
Those discourses have often been animated by racist tropes that depicted non-White populations as incapable of ruling over themselves and untethered to the land targeted for conquest. Proponents of Zionism have likewise deployed anti-Arab racist tropes to try to legitimize the Zionist conquest of land inhabited overwhelmingly by Palestinian Arabs. Following the 1948 Nakba, they mobilized these racist tropes to deny Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland.
Palestinians have long waged a discursive battle against this “Nakba denialism.” Even after the Israeli state destroyed Palestinian villages and replaced their names with Hebrew ones, second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees continue to refer to them by their Arabic names. And they continue to insist upon return.
Today, with some Jewish extremists seeking to destroy the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with a Jewish temple, many Muslims see protecting the Aqsa Mosque as part of this anti-colonial struggle. In “Rajieen,” Libyan singer Fuad Gritli insists, “Al-Aqsa is ours / Even if my enemy erases its name.” Egyptian Trap artist Marwan Moussa vows, “I’m returning again to my land / Al-Aqsa is where I will hold my next prayer.” At a time when Muslims and Christians are frequently barred from accessing their holy sites in Jerusalem and subjected to attacks by Israeli police and Jewish settlers, the “return” here is also a promise of religious emancipation.
Yet “Rajieen” knows that the present moment is about much more than a contested holy site, important though it may be. In the last minute of the track, we see images of the massive, worldwide protests that have been held over the last two months, include that of young American Jews who took over New York’s Grand Central Station on 28 October, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. As we watch images of these protests flashing across the screen, we hear the refrain, “If I lose my voice, your voices won’t leave,” repeated eight times. It’s a trust that one group of youth is bestowing upon another.
Ultimately, the artists of “Rajieen” insist on returning the Palestine cause to its pan-Arab, anticolonial roots. At the end of the song, as the camera pans across the twenty-five young artists, a phrase appears: “We do not just stand in solidarity with the cause; we are its custodians.” It is a generational call, as young people around the world – and in the US – mobilize in the streets and battle censorship online to champion the Palestinian cause.
If this is truly the anthem of this generation, then despite the war’s horrifying, gut-wrenching toll on Palestinians lives, their liberation and return may indeed be closer than ever before.
Maha Nassar is an associate professor of modern Middle Eastern history in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (2017).
In the Moment 