Khadra Abu Sariya’s voice trembles and her eyes well up as she recalls a song etched into memory by pain. In a modest home in Jenin’s Zahra neighborhood, where she’s taken refuge from recent Israeli escalations, the 87-year-old softly hums a lullaby her mother once whispered to her — the night their village, Zir’in, fell during the 1948 Nakba which marked the mass displacement of Palestinians that accompanied the creation of Israel.
“Our house had a high roof… oh God, may we see it again,” Abu Sariya murmurs. The tune — part lullaby, part lament — slips through her whisper, fragile in its delivery and faded by the decades. Abu Sariya was ten years old when Israeli militias approached Ziir’in. News of ethnic cleansing and massacres, like the one in Deir Yassin where over 350 were killed, had already spread to her village, so they, like thousands of others, fled in fear with little more than the clothes on their backs. The journey, to what would later become Jenin refugee camp, and her home for the following decades, was not a lengthy one, but became permanently etched into her memory – along with the songs that her family and friends sang during the displacement.
“I remember grown men crying, and my mother’s trembling hands as she packed our bread,” Abu Sariya says, her voice distant, her fingertips gently tracing the embroidery of her thobe — a design unique to Zir’in. “But most of all, I remember the songs. That’s how the women coped. They didn’t say goodbye with words — they sang.” She pauses, then recalls one of her mother’s parting verses: “Oh graceful one, climbing the ladder, may God keep you safe from the eyes of the people. Oh, you who walk the road to the homeland, be safe. Be safe, and may peace be upon our land.”
For 77 years, Palestinian folk music has carried the memory of the Nakba from one generation to the next, preserving it with a vividness no textbook could match. These songs—mostly improvised, then repeated over the years and rooted in oral tradition—have become a people’s archive in exile, woven from grief, hope, and defiance. They document what official records often overlook: the sound of keys turning in doors never reopened, of wheat fields overtaken by wild grass, of lives uprooted and replanted in refugee camps.
