CHARLES LEONARD

Zeinab Shaath tells me early in our interview: “I don’t sing anymore.” More than 50 years ago, she recorded a set of revolutionary Palestinian folk songs. Just a teenager then, and inspired by the Vietnam-era protest music of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, her plaintive song, The Urgent Call of Palestine was among the first English-language songs intended to share the stories and messages of Palestinian resistance to a global audience.

I came across this song for the first time last year on the website of the British online store, Juno Records – I was looking for relevant music to play at a Palestinian fundraising event in Johannesburg, was immediately hooked by the haunting song and ordered it. The Urgent Call of Palestine plus three other Shaath songs were reissued on a seven inch-EP (extended play) in March 2024 by the record labels Discostan and the Majazz Project. The songs were originally produced by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Beirut in 1973.

It is a Friday afternoon early in August, and Zeinab and I are connecting via Zoom. The 71-year-old granny, once we finally made contact through the helpful folks at Discostan, was not that easy to pin down for this video interview. She was, as she wrote in an email to me “a bit busy here as I am babysitting my three very young grandchildren” in Florida in the USA.

Born in 1954 in Alexandria, Egypt to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, Shaath has been living in the USA since 1976 when she moved there for her studies. After university, she became a pharmacologist, fell in love, got married and is the mother of three children and now a grandmother of five. Her husband Richard is checking that the connection is working and we are ready to talk. Introductions out of the way, a fanboy moment first as I’m proudly holding up my green-sleeved vinyl reissue of The Urgent Call of Palestine at Zeinab.

“You’ve got the record!” she shrieks with delight.

“I do indeed,” I reply with a chuffed smile.

We bond straight away over semantics.

“I still call it a record,” she says. “And people call it vinyl.”

“No, they’re wrong,” I reply firmly. “You and I are right, it’s called records.”
She chuckles and adds: “Like my grandchild who looked at it and said, ‘oh cool, what kind of a CD is that?’”

To overstate the obvious, a lot has happened since the starry-eyed 16-year-old recorded The Urgent Call of Palestine in 1973 right up to Israel’s genocide raging against the people of Gaza as we speak.

Zeinab’s family is originally from Gaza, where the Shaath family clan is really huge – “I mean, tens of thousands of people”, she tells me. She is the youngest of five children, but the only one born outside Palestine. Her father, Ali, was a respected educator. He was the principal of al-Ameiryah boys’ school in Jaffa.

“And we always lived harmoniously – according to my family – with Christians and Jews…. And among them we had many neighbours and friends. Some of them were very dear.”

When the Jewish immigration from Europe started happening during the British mandate in Palestine – at first Palestinians were welcoming of them. They thought they were coming to seek refuge, Zeinab tells me.

“And so, they opened their doors and their arms for them as they came in as a humanitarian effort. But then it starting to appear that this was a disposition and dispossession.”

There was a peaceful resistance by the Palestinians at first – repelling the paramilitary Zionist violence by the Irgun and other illegal organisations.

“And my father at that time was allowing the resistance to happen in his boys’ school.

So, he would allow them to go on protests. He would allow them to have meetings in the school, so the British didn’t like it very much.”

They started coming at Ali Shaath, threatening him with arrest if he didn’t stop the kids from participating.

In 1947, the year before the Nakba when Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs started which eventually led to the displacement of 750,000 from their homes, Ali Shaath had to take a very difficult decision. He had received an offer from Abdul Hameed Shoman, the founder of the Arab Bank, to work for him and open a bank branch in Alexandria, Egypt.

“He was being… very threatened at that time,” Zeinab tells me. “He had my two sisters and two brothers, a family of four and my mom.”

Ali Shaath said yes because he thought they would spend four, five years in Egypt and then return to Palestine once things had cooled down. “He had his mother there, his family, his sisters. I mean, he was not intending to go live in Egypt…”

And in 1948, the brutal Nakba started. “So, he was never allowed to return. And it was the heartbreak of my father till the day he died.”
Zeinab pauses.

“He died early. He died in 1967. And there was this devastating loss. And he had heart troubles. And he died in his late 50s.”

I ask her: “A broken heart, probably?”

“Yes, a broken heart. And I was 13 years old at the time.”

“Oh, that’s young to lose your dad.”

“Yes, very much so…”

Still, the Shaaths took along their Palestine home’s key to Egypt – for when they would hopefully return.

“Well, my father raised us with a lot of longing and belonging to our family,” Zeinab says. “I mean, I was born in 1954 in Alexandria. And he insisted we maintain our heritage and our longing to go back. And the key was a very important part of that.

“We all knew there was a key. We all saw the key in certain occasions. And so really, he insisted that we speak in our home with the Palestinian accent, dialect and everything.

“And outside, if you want to go speak in an Egyptian accent outside, that’s your problem. But when you’re at home, you’re going to speak with a Palestinian accent. And believe it or not, we all learned to switch from one accent to another. The moment we are in the presence of our family, we turn into a Palestinian.

“Whenever we’re outside… in school, we turn into an Egyptian. But that’s how much he put the love of Palestine in our hearts.”

Of course, the Nakba denied the Shaaths their right to return to their home.

I ask Zeinab if she ever managed to visit the family home.

“I visited [Palestine] in the 80s with my American passport and with my husband. So, I went to Gaza. That was my first trip.”

That’s where her uncles and aunts were at the time.

“We visited Gaza and had the most wonderful time there… We also went to Jaffa and tried to find our house… that was explained to me where it was. I could not find it. My brother went one time and found it. My older sister went and found it. And they found that it was turned into an alcoholic rehab facility.

“The beautiful garden was no longer there. And there was a fountain… it was no longer there. And it was all bolted up.

“It is a very heart-wrenching not only for us – I have older friends who have gone back to see their houses. And they are occupied by Israelis.

“And very few people will allow you to come in and look at it. But most of them will just lock the door and say, ‘get out’!”

When Zeinab was 16, her older sister Mysoon had brought a guitar home from varsity in the US, plus all sorts of folky protest music. It all intrigued the teenager. Mysoon had a radio show on Egyptian radio at the time: an hour in English dedicated to Palestinian issues – politics, but also culture and music.

A poet friend, Lalita Panjabi, who was the wife of the Indian ambassador in Egypt, wrote a poem titled, “The Urgent Call of Palestine”.

“So, she gave it to my sister as a gift. And, she must have read it or something, but then she brought it to me one day,” Zeinab recalls, “and said to me, ‘turn it into a song’.”

Zeinab used to “make little songs”, which she played on her guitar.

“And my sister said, ‘well, instead of doing your silly songs, I want you to compose a song – take this poem and sing it’.

“And I said, ‘yeah, sure’.

“And she goes, ‘no, I mean it’.

“And I said: OK, I’ll look at it’.”

But big sister didn’t leave it there and pushed little sister into her room and locked her in from the outside. Despite Zeinab’s protestations, Mysoon didn’t budge and asked: “Just take a look at it.”

And she did.

“I think it took me maybe an hour to come up with that tune. But I loved the words very, very much. And it was so easy to compose. And that really got me started. Because it was such a nice song.”

Zeinab ended up singing it on the radio – the listeners simply loved it.

“And it took a life of its own,” she tells me. “So, then I started thinking, as a 16-year-old, I was very frustrated because I can’t do anything for Palestine. And that just gave me the idea: there are many Arabic poets, Palestinian poets that write beautiful poetry.

“And I know that some of them are translated into English. And I thought, the Arab world knows about the Palestinian story – but people in the world outside of that don’t.

“And they’d much rather listen to a song than listen to a lecture or read a book. So maybe I can reach their heart. Maybe I can get my message across.”

Her stirring performance of “The Urgent Call of Palestine” set things in motion. It had a great impact at the time.

“It was really very powerful because I used the guitar,” Zeinab recalls. “And the guitar is not an Arabic instrument. So, it was kind of a westernised look.

“And that attracted the attention of people to listen to this young person holding the guitar, singing a song on Palestine. It attracted the young people to listen to the songs that I was making.”

Whenever there was an event at a school or university, Zeinab would be invited to come and sing. “The Urgent Call of Palestine” galvanised leading Palestinian artists, intellectuals and youth. “And then some big event happens for Palestinians, then, it’s ‘hey, let’s bring Zeinab to come and sing a few songs about that’.”

She was even on the cover of magazines singing with her guitar. Next people in other Arab countries started to hear about it: She was invited to Tunisia, Iraq and then to record her songs in Lebanon.

In 1973, Zeinab was immortalised in a short film shot by exiled Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout in the mountains of Lebanon. He was also the director of the Cultural Arts Section of the PLO. Under him, the active cultural wing was responsible for preserving Palestinian heritage, such as music, literature, poetry and film, operating from a centre in Beirut.

“He was a very good friend of my brother, Nabil, who lived in Beirut,” says Zeinab. “And we used to go there every summer. So, he said, ‘hey, when your sister comes, I want to do a film’.”

He chose “The Urgent Call of Palestine”. “We filmed for many, many hours there in the mountains.”

She also worked with Shammout to record and release an EP of the same name. It included three other songs, “Resist”, “I Am An Arab” and “Take Me Back to Palestine”, based on poems by Muin Bseiso, Mahmoud Darwish and Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati respectively.

“And I donated it fully,” Zeinab tells me. “I said, use it. Use it for fundraisers. Use it.”

The EP was designed to reach the global stage at a time when artists, writers and musicians across the Arab world created art highlighting the Palestinian struggle. Armed with a guitar and her dulcet voice, Shaath went on to perform across three continents, carrying her hopeful message to young people across the world.

This included performing at the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin in from 28 July to 5 August in 1973 – more than 750,000 people attended. Then PLO chairperson Yasser Arafat was part of the Palestinian delegation and Angela Davis was a featured speaker.

When I ask her about it, I see it’s making Zeinab smile. Did it make you feel then that a better future was possible for young people?

“Yeah, I think that when we went there and from all over the world, people came. And I sang my songs, and they were very popular… and the story of the Palestinian people was very popular in this conference. And I was very optimistic, of course, because I was young. I was 19 years old – you have this optimism that you’re going to make a difference in this world. And that the world was listening. When we walked into the big stadium, there was a standing ovation for the Palestinian delegation and the Palestinian singing. I thought, ‘oh, the world is waking up. The world knows our story. It’s going to happen. We must continue the struggle’.”

But Zeinab sighs softly.

“The Palestinian people were much better off than they have ever been since. It’s just gotten worse and worse and worse and worse.

“And now we’re fearing the worst. So, what Netanyahu is going to take over Gaza and the West Bank and have another big Nakba displacement.”

Despite being born in Egypt, Zeinab was never given citizenship. Her father managed to get Syrian passports for the family even though she never went there. In 1976, at the age of 22, Zeinab left for the US to pursue a degree in pharmacology. She continued singing in some major American cities at protests and rallies. But then life happened. She fell in love, got married in 1982 and started a family, worked fulltime as a pharmacologist, and stopped playing music. Zeinab continued volunteering for Palestinian causes though.

I ask her if there was a parallel between the anti-Vietnam war protesters and the people who came to her shows when she first arrived in the US.

“Back then, no.”

But she sees hope in pro-Palestine progressive young people today.

“I would say the movement that I see now is like the Vietnam one in America… there is this awakening of the younger generation listening to the news from social media rather than the controlled media.

“So, we hope so much that this awakening will make the difference.”

Zeinab still has family in Palestine. Her brother Nabil, a former senior Palestinian politician who is now in his 80s, lives in Ramallah with his wife and one daughter.

“I have friends and family in the West Bank. But the majority of our family was in Gaza,” she says.

And this is where the genocide gets close to home.

“Unfortunately, we lost…” – her voice breaks – “a year ago, the number was 49 who were killed. Now, I have no idea. We lost track. We lost track of them…

“They were displaced so many times back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.”

Some lived in tents. Some were taken into homes in Rafah. Some were able to leave and went to Egypt. In the very early part of the war, they were able to go… paying $5,000 per head to go to the Egyptians to cross.”

She shakes her head as if in disbelief.

“Now, later, they even couldn’t do that if they wanted to. So, the death toll of the larger Shaath family is immense…”

Zeinab pauses for several seconds.

“As a matter of fact, there are so many families that have been erased completely within this Gaza genocide, where no one is alive from that family. So, the toll is immense. The pain is immense to live on the outside and… be privileged to live like this, knowing that our people are starving in Gaza. It’s heart-wrenching.”

Zeinab looks skywards and then faces me, tears in her eyes. Her voice is barely audible.

“I can’t even tell you how much guilt I feel… Every time I drink a sip of water or sit at a table with a meal in front of me. I just – anyway, we can’t bear this.”

She pauses again and then resumes.

“What’s happening? I mean, forced starvation in this day and age, in this world, how can we – how can the world let it happen? I mean, I just can’t imagine.”

Israel is literally starving Palestinians to death, as we are speaking.

“And being complicit in the United States and for me, my tax dollars are going there. It’s a lot.”
I can see it is becoming difficult for this eloquent woman to verbalise her thoughts and feelings.

“We try – we are doing as much as we can here. Sometimes we… there are many, many organisations that have cropped up, of course, since then. And one of them is called Heal Palestine. And it was started by a very amazing individual called Steve Sosebee.”

She adds that “he was involved even before, October 7^th in 2023. But he had many organisations where he was helping building clinics and hospitals, which are mostly all destroyed and wiped out.”

Sosebee has been able to bring out a handful of children and amputees, getting them free prosthetics in the United States. But since our interview, the US has suspended medical visas for Gazans like them, as reported by Deutsche Welle’s (DW). On 17 August, the US made this announcement after the far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, claimed they were a threat to the country. The move will prevent wounded Palestinians coming to the US for treatment.

Loomer, who is close to Donald Trump, posted claims on social media that some Palestinians issued with medical-humanitarian visas to the US were “pro-HAMAS … affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and funded by Qatar”, without providing evidence. Her posts were written after Heal Palestine said it had brought 11 critically wounded Gazan children, together with their caregivers and siblings, to the US for medical treatment, DW reported. Loomer is known for spreading far-right conspiracy theories.

I ask Zeinab if she watches the news, and in the light of what she says about guilt, if she sometimes feels: “I cannot do it.”

“Yes,” she replies. “I try to watch or read things twice a day and shut it off the rest of the day because I cannot handle it.”

But Zeinab tries not to be despondent, however hard it can be.

“I try to channel my efforts in going to demonstrations and writing, joining groups and writing to our congressmen and senators and donating a lot as much as I can. So that is what I can do. So, I try to do that.”

Which leads to my next question. How would you identify yourself? Reading about your history, there’s obviously Palestinian, then there’s Egyptian, then Syrian, because that’s what your passport was. Your mom’s Lebanese and you’re living in the US. How many hyphens would there be in your identity?

“Oh, and you can add ‘a Muslim’ to this hyphen… I think that I identify myself as a Palestinian American. I had my kids and raised them here. I can’t tell you how proud I am of their attachment to the Palestinian cause. I have a grown daughter with three little kids who puts her kids on her shoulders and go to rallies. And they all chant ‘free Palestine!’ any time of day.”

They also identify as Palestinian American.

“And I say, ‘your father is an American and you were born here’ and they go, ‘no, we’re Palestinian’.”

Zeinab says she has a special love for Egypt, because she was born and raised there.

“But I didn’t really have very many rights there. I couldn’t vote there. I was always considered a foreigner. So, coming to America, I was able to get the rights that I didn’t have growing up in Egypt.” She tries to affect change as an American citizen,

“Although right now I am incredibly in fear of our new president and what he is doing to democracy in this country and turning closer and closer to authoritarianism. It’s a scary time in America, actually.”

Every first Saturday afternoon of the month I play a DJ set into the early evening at a packed little café in Brixton in Joburg. I spin whatever records I please – from jazz to reggae, hip-hop to soul and end with disco to which the diverse, lefty crowd dance like crazy.

At the end of last year, just before the knees-up section of my set, I played “The Urgent Call of Palestine” out for the first time – the normally raucous crowd went completely quiet, just listening.

Listening attentively to the compelling 52-year-old song, with prophetic lines like, “Tormented, tortured, bruised and battered/ And all her sons and daughters scattered”, describing what is still happening in Zeinab’s motherland. Israel is still trying to silence all Palestinians – now by mowing them down, over 62,000 killed over the past 23 months as I am writing this.

Also, news is just breaking of five more journalists killed in the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza – attacks on medical facilities have become normalised – by its murderous army.

I ask Zeinab how it makes her feel that the lyrics of “The Urgent Call of Palestine” are sounding as acutely relevant today as it did when it was first released in 1973.

“It really breaks my heart, actually. It breaks my heart that it is as much a needed call today as it was 50 years ago when I talked about it. It blows my mind that we’re still saying, ‘can’t you hear the urgent call of Palestine?’ “And as a matter of fact, it’s a heck of a lot more urgent now than even it was when the day that the song was made.”

How does it feel to you to listen to it today?

“I love it when I hear it sung and used by the youth, the younger generation. It really touches my heart when I hear a YouTube rendition of a 20-something singing ‘The Urgent Call of Palestine’. It just makes me feel hopeful that we’re passing the baton, that this is not going to die. This is going to only live and live until justice is done, until the Palestinian people can be free.”

Zeinab tells me how a demonstration in a Canadian underground station with thousands and thousands of people waving Palestinian flags and chanting the song’s chorus – “Can’t you hear the urgent call of Palestine?” – has gone viral.

“It just gave me chills to see it used in that fashion.”

All of this would not have been likely if it was up to the Israel Defence Force. In their 1982 invasion of Lebanon, they seized the entire archive of the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section.

This is how it was described in an In These Times article last year:

“Amid the violence and destruction … Israeli forces in Beirut occupied the research  centre of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Before demolishing the building — including multiple bombing attempts that severely damaged the building and led to its eventual closure—the Israeli forces stole boxes of precious archival materials: manuscripts, microfilms, thousands of books. Among the haul was an original black-and-white music video for ​‘The Urgent Call of Palestine’.”

The Israelis’ loot also included the master tapes of the EP of “The Urgent Call of Palestine”.

The article continues:

“When she [Zeinab] left Egypt, she brought a copy of the EP and the film — though she admits she wasn’t sure how best to preserve it, which caused some damage — while the original (its most valuable form) had been stowed in the PLO’s cultural archives in Beirut for safekeeping before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. For years, Shaath believed the original film had been burned by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in 1983, during the destruction of the PLO research centre. But, in 2017, she was contacted by Israeli researcher and curator Rona Sela, who had ​‘discovered’ the film within Israel’s military archives and had worked tirelessly to declassify it. Even Sela, however, was not granted access to the original. She had to work with a digital copy, which remained stamped with IDF insignia. Shammout and Shaath’s film is just one drop in the ocean of cultural objects that have been stashed by the IDF. Though the Palestinian cultural materials stored within the colonial archive are preserved, access to the materials is entirely controlled by the colonial power — and strategically kept out of the hands of the indigenous people to whom it rightfully belongs.”

Fortunately, the IDF plundering could not completely silence “The Urgent Call of Palestine”. An Los Angeles-based record company came to the rescue. The In These Times article again:

“An alternative means to preserve ​‘The Urgent Call of Palestine’ would arrive  in 2021, after Arshia Haq, DJ and founder of the music collective Discostan — a record label specialising in the Southwest Asia and North Africa region — saw a fellow record collector posted the iconic vinyl. Haq was immediately ​‘pulled in’ by Shaath’s voice and enlisted the help of her Discostan collaborator, Jeremy Loudenback, to scour the internet in hopes of finding Shaath to ask about reissuing the music. With Shaath on board, Haq and Loudenback joined with Mo’min Swaitat, a Palestinian artist and archivist who founded Majazz Project, a Palestinian research platform and archival record label. They used copies of the film and EP that were available in the Shaath and Shammout family archives for remastering, operating entirely outside of colonial collections.”

Zeinab tells me about how she started talking to the Discostan folks.

“I was like, OK, do you think there is a market? Is it really important?”

They convinced her.

“It took a long time to create a contract – so by the time the production of the record was done, it was in the height of Gaza’s disaster and after October 7th of 2023.

“And then all of a sudden, the song had a different meaning and a different life and a new call, the urgent call of Palestine.”

The restored EP was reissued by Discostan and the Majazz Project on 26 March 2024, with profits from the sale of the record donated to the continuing efforts of Majazz to create an archive of Palestinian music, as well as relief efforts for the Palestinian people. 

“Shaath’s place in a global history of anti-colonial protest music has until recently been overlooked,” the record companies said on Bandcamp upon release. “As the world again turns to the liberation of the Palestinian people, we invite you to listen to an far-reaching voice for the humanity of a people long oppressed, until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem again.”

Our long conversation is reaching its end because granny has grandchildren to attend to – the three young ones: a two, a four and a six-year-old. They have two older cousins of ages eight and 11. Do they know that you were a singer once, I ask Zeinab.

“I think the oldest one [of this family], the six-year-old, knows a little bit. The other older two know… and they are in awe.”

They call her Teta, which is granny in Arabic.

“‘So, Teta, you were famous. Oh, my god, I saw your video.’ So, they are starting to kind of get that. But the others know not so much. I am just grandma. I’m Teta.”

What grown-ups do you hope for them to become?

“I would love for them to be socially aware and conscious.”

When it comes to Israel, she believes it cannot sustain its warmongering.

“So, the struggle has to continue. I hope that my kids will keep the torch alive and move forward. But not only for the Palestinian rights, but the rights of everyone to be free and to be working against oppression of any kind, to any people, to any race…. So that’s what I hope the new generation would be.”

Before we say goodbye, Zeinab and I return to reissue of “The Urgent Call of Palestine” (and the other three songs), and why she doesn’t sing anymore. It’s simple. “The songs, I am glad that they are out there. That’s all I can say.”