Passport to Palestine: Transnational Solidarities via Marcel Khalife’s Music

In 2009, Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife played to a sold-out audience at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, as headliner for a glittering three-week display of Arab music and performance. The festival drew thousands, including a host of Washington’s elite. And most reviews were ecstatic, embracing Khalife for his skill on the traditional oud, his children’s choir, and his virtuoso compositions. The festival organizers declared that their goal for the series was to help Americans understand Arabs “not just as political beings, but as human beings.” This form of apolitical politics was common to mainstream multiculturalism, but it was an odd culmination for the 59-year old Khalife, who had spent much of his career as a radical voice for Palestinian freedom.

This paper will explore the first decades of Khalife’s career (from the mid-1970s to 1990), examining both how he expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle in his work and how his music became a political resource for Arabs in the Middle East and the diaspora. Khalife came to fame during the Lebanese civil war, as he was discovering the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. In the 1970s and 1980s, Darwish was already the national poet of Palestine, and Khalife began setting his work to music, deliberately highlighting a Palestinian poet as the voice of Arab liberation.

I will examine the reports of Khalife’s US concerts in the 1980s and early 1990s, often held in high schools or local community halls, and explore how Arab American and other political activists came to embrace him as a catalyst for pro-Palestinian activism in the US. The paper will explore both what made such a moment possible at the very end of the Cold War -- and what happened at century’s end to render Khalife a far less potent political voice.