Dance and music are potent forms of cultural defiance in Palestine

This article Dance and music are potent forms of cultural defiance in Palestine was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As Palestinians face unprecedented settler attacks, home demolitions and sweeping crackdowns on community organizing this year, the space for traditional political and cultural expression grows ever more narrow and dangerous. Protests are restricted and punished, civil groups are monitored and even community gatherings risk being labeled a security threat. Palestinian cultural expression is viewed as inherently “political” and requires Israeli military approval for public performance.

Yet on a delegation to Palestine in October, I witnessed how in this tightening landscape, cultural institutions persist in teaching Palestinian arts and history to the next generation. Music, dance, storytelling and theater become ways of holding onto dignity when nearly everything is under assault. 

The Ghirass Cultural Center in Bethlehem and the Douban Professional Dance Group in East Jerusalem nurture young artists whose very practice asserts a story no occupation can fully silence.

Alongside educational programs ranging from drawing to aikido, parkour to chess, the Ghirass Cultural Center offers a Palestinian folklore program and a music education program that helps young people develop their talents and stay rooted in their Palestinian heritage.

In conjunction with Musicians Without Borders, the music program teaches children oud, qanun, violin, percussion and singing twice a week. When I visited the center in October, 50 children played several songs of cultural significance for us, including one of their own compositions.

One song paid tribute to Palestinian women and the traditional embroidered dress they wear, called a thob — tunics embroidered with varying colors and patterns representing a person’s social status and village, where every stitch is a symbol of village history and identity. The children sang Lebanese and Iraqi folk love songs, and their performance concluded with a moving rendition of “Salam li Ghaza,” or “Peace for Gaza,” a poignant appeal for peace and a testament to the resilience of the people in Gaza.

As the applause faded, the atmosphere shifted, and a space opened for the journalists and students to speak directly with one another. The very first question cut straight through the room: “What do you think about what’s happening in Gaza?”

I looked around at faces as young as four, most no older than teenagers, and felt the weight of a question no child should ever have to ask. Other questions followed — about censorship, protests in the United States and global complicity. They also spoke of how difficult their lives are, living under military occupation, surrounded by Israeli checkpoints. Later, one of the journalists asked in return what the children wanted us to tell people back home about Palestine.

One child said, “You have to tell the world that we live in an open air prison. We are not allowed to move freely. There are barriers around us. There are raids that keep happening all the time. We cannot travel abroad.” Another said that they had never seen the sea, despite the Mediterranean being only an hour away without checkpoints. 

Music here becomes a form of resistance that both preserves culture and creates space for joy and creativity in the face of restriction. When children learn and perform these traditional and protest songs, they’re not just practicing scales; they’re keeping a living heritage alive. “When we play the music, it’s not like any music,” one girl said. “It’s music for our whole culture and it tells a story. Our story. We are doing something for our land. This is for Palestine, so it’s not just any song.” A boy chimed in, “I also like to play music because the songs rest the soul. It’s peaceful and it really just takes our minds away from it, what stuff happens in Gaza.”

At the Douban Professional Dance group in East Jerusalem, the studio blends modern dance with traditional Palestinian folk dance, called dabke. The school has approximately 170 students on-site and engages close to 1,400 through dance classes and programs at local schools and clubs in the city.

When Hanna Tams founded Douban in 2012, he was no stranger to the power of dance as it relates to trauma. The kids he worked with as a dance and movement educator at al-Saraya Center for Community Services in Al-Sa’diyya — one of the toughest neighborhoods of Old Jerusalem — frequently encountered violence and police brutality.

Tams described using dance education as a tool for emotional support and community building. In his view, the political constraints, intimidation, and emotional and physical abuse make it hard for young Palestinians to feel confident in their bodies. “I taught dabke and creative movement to children and teenagers from the Old City — many of whom faced difficult social or personal circumstances. The work was not only about dance technique; it was mentorship, a safe space, a way for kids to build confidence, discipline and self-expression. Through storytelling, rhythm, and folklore, I helped them connect to a cultural identity that could anchor them in a challenging environment.”

Like Ghirass, Douban avoids outdoor performances that would require Israeli permits, which “we would never receive and we are not interested in applying for,” Tams said. “Yet even in private indoor theatres, we are never fully protected; there is always the risk of sudden cancellation or forced evacuation if the military arrives.” 

During our visit, 14 dancers on the team performed a series of high-energy routines that functioned as both entertainment and a compelling retelling of Palestinian history. The choreography echoed scenes of daily village life, agricultural traditions and political resistance.

Tams concluded the performance by sharing a brief history of dabke based on research from his master’s thesis in John Moore Liverpool University in the U.K. Dabke is not simply a dance. The art form began as a communal ritual with villagers stomping the earth to pack mud into the roofs of their homes. The entire community joined, linking arms and pounding the ground in unison until the roof was strong enough to withstand winter rain. Appropriately, dabke literally means “to stamp the ground.”
Over generations, what began as an act of labor transformed into a way to celebrate weddings, births and harvest festivals. Every village developed a flavor of the steps, like dialects of the same language. 

Tams describes the dialects from a historic perspective. In 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement carved the region into separate zones: Syria and Lebanon under French control, Palestine under the British Mandate and Jordan as a separate entity. The agreement effectively fragmented and isolated the area. “So, this region was starting to have its own folklore and develop it slowly according to the life that they were living in this period of time,” Tams explained.

After Israel seized much of the land allotted to Palestine and destroyed or appropriated Palestinian culture, dabke shifted once again. In what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, in 1948, an estimated 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes amid widespread massacres and the destruction of at least 500 villages to make way for what is now Israel. Then, in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel seized the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, West Bank and East Jerusalem, a turning point that reshaped daily life and cultural identity for Palestinians.

The destruction was accompanied by cultural erasure. When Palestinian homes were taken, the new Israeli families kept what remained — photos, clothing, embroidered dresses, personal belongings. What was once intimate evidence of Palestinian life was claimed, appropriated, displayed and recast as Israeli heritage. According to Tams, thobs — the traditional Palestinian women’s tunics — were taken from families in 1948 and now sit behind glass in Israeli museums, rebranded as artifacts of “Israeli culture.” 

As Palestinians were displaced from their villages, dabke became a way of dancing the memory of the land back into existence. The dance of building homes became the dance of remembering homes.

The mentality Tams describes traces back to the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. “For people, it’s tradition. Tradition can be folklore, but folklore can be tradition,” Tams explained. “Folklore is something that we inherit and we can touch and we need to protect. This kind of mentality really developed since 1967, because whatever we have was stolen from us — from the land to our food, our customs and buildings.”

Under occupation, dabke can be viewed as evolving into a sort of cultural defiance. It is performed in refugee camps and at demonstrations. Israeli authorities have shut down dabke performances for being “political.” The dance echoes movements of agricultural history, the tight-knit circle steps of village celebrations, and modern references to stone throwing as resistance, similar to how Brazilian capoeira seamlessly blends dance movement with martial arts.

The teachings of Palestinian culture, identity and history are woven into the movements and attire. Dressed in black pants and T-shirts adorned with panels of front-facing tatreez, symbolic embroidered motifs, the dancers combined a contemporary aesthetic with centuries-old embroidery traditions.

Tams said that there’s real risk involved in outright teaching Palestinian history. “At the moment in East Jerusalem, we are not allowed to speak any more about our history or bring the word ‘Palestine’ inside schools,” he said, “because we will be interrogated and go to prison.” Tams hopes to slowly bring these teachings into his classes so that the youth can stay connected to their history, while their parents might be more focused on surviving.

“This is also why teaching history through dance becomes so essential,” Tams added. Students are able to learn about the collective memory embedded in dabke, without explicitly framing it as a history lesson that could trigger repression. “We talk about the unspoken history that lives inside the body — the stories carried in the spine, the feet, the breath. Through dance, these memories stay rooted and alive, expressing truths that words sometimes cannot hold or safely convey.”

Under military occupation, erasure doesn’t always look like demolitions, bulldozers and armed bombardments. Sometimes it’s mountains of paperwork, dual legal systems and incessant inconveniences. Books and children’s education materials are routinely held or delayed at borders. Cultural centers in the occupied West Bank must apply for permits to travel, perform or even gather — and they can be denied without cause. Instruments can be confiscated at checkpoints. Cultural events can be shut down if deemed a “threat to public order.”

In this climate of repression, arts programs are acts of nonviolent resistance. One teaches children to sing the history of their land; the other teaches them to stomp it back into memory. Both knowingly take on the risk of giving their communities a space to express themselves, explore art and hold onto what is relentlessly censored or erased.

“I always believed in movement more than words because it’s the only way I know to represent myself and my emotions,” Tams said. “This belief is why I opened Douban and chose to study Palestinian history through the lens of movement. The body and movement never lie; they reveal everything hidden beneath the surface. I dance to tell unspoken stories, emotions, thoughts and passions. I dance to free my soul and rise above reality, expressing my identity through my movement.”

This article Dance and music are potent forms of cultural defiance in Palestine was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/01/dance-music-cultural-defiance-palestine/