Parody of Palestinian anthem an internet hit

Omar Karmi, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: October 22. 2009 12:03AM UAE / October 21. 2009 8:03PM GMT

RAMALLAH // With more than 100,000 hits on YouTube and featured in an Al Jazeera discussion programme, a mock version of the first Palestinian national anthem has stirred controversy among Palestinians and caused fierce debates on online social networking sites.

The mock anthem – based on the original, Mowtani (My Homeland), with words by Ibrahim Touqan, a Palestinian poet, which was used unofficially as the national anthem until Yasser Arafat, the former Palestinian leader, commissioned a new one in the 1990s – is scathing about Palestinian leaders and the Palestinian situation in general.

Rather than the paean to Palestine’s “glory and beauty” that the original was, the new version instead lambasts its “tyrants and oppressors”, who no longer seek freedom from occupation but rather “want to live in slavery”. Palestinians, meanwhile, are “servile and muzzled, poisoned by your leaders”. The new version is called Kana Mowtani, or It Was My Homeland.

The mock version was first posted online on September 13, and has to date received more than 50,000 hits. A later version, this one with the lyrics streaming over Palestinian leaders from Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader, president of the Palestinian Authority and head of Fatah, and Salam Fayyad, the PA prime minister, to Khalid Mishaal, the Hamas leader, and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, was posted on October 1 and has to date been watched more than 72,000 times.

Much thought has clearly gone into both the production and the new lyrics. The singing is as good, if not better than the original, while the words, which still borrow from Touqan’s original, mesh seamlessly.

No one has to date sourced the new version, but there seems little doubt that some investment went into it.

“It’s a very professionally made, satirical comment on what’s going on today in the Palestinian arena,” said Salim Tamari, a cultural commentator and editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly journal. While “jaded”, he said, it “reflects the public mood”.

That mood was last gauged last week when an opinion poll found that with Mr Abbas’s popularity plummeting after the Goldstone report debacle, Mr Haniyeh with 14-per-cent support among Palestinians still held a two percentage advantage over Mr Abbas. In fact, if given the choice, more Palestinians, but still only just under 17 per cent, would vote for Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader who is serving consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison.

With unity negotiations faltering and continued division among Palestinians even as an end to the Israeli occupation is nowhere in sight, it is not surprising that Palestinians should show such little faith in their current leaders. But the song still caused angry reactions. When it was broadcast during a live debate between Osama Hamdan of Hamas and Nasser al Qidwa of Fatah on an Al Jazeera programme, it caused the latter to angrily break off to remark that he had heard “the worst degree of degradation” in Palestinian society.

Hani Kashou, a music studio producer in Ramallah, agreed, if for different reasons.

“I was upset. I think the ones who made this song are as guilty of what they are singing about as the ones they are singing about. They talk about how our leaders are taking advantage of the occupation, but they are doing the same with this song.”

Mr Kashou said the song also presented a very poor image of Palestinians to outsiders. He accepted that the sentiment accurately summed up what people were thinking, but questioned what the benefit of the song was.

“The real anthem has been on YouTube for years. The new one has been on for a month and more people have watched that one. Every day on Facebook I see two or three people posting it. It’s spreading very fast and the message is that Palestinians are making songs against themselves. If that is the case, how can we expect help from others?”

Mr Tamari said the song has hit a nerve because it used the national anthem to make its point.

“People were doing these kinds of things during Arafat’s days. But because it is using the national anthem and people think of the national anthem as somehow sacred, it’s a little like making fun of religion and people get upset. People need a sense of humour.”

That sense of humour is hard to find amid the frustrations Palestinians are feeling, frustration that the song gives voice to, said Safwat Kahlout, a Gaza-based journalist.

“The Palestinian cause has reached its lowest point ever,” said Kahlout. “Rather than talk about Palestine, the factions have themselves become Palestine.”

The song’s online popularity, Kahlout said, is due to the fact that it expresses what people now “have in their hearts”.

okarmi@thenational.ae