Gothenburg, Sweden – George Totari’s understated apartment is full of noise and life even in his retirement, as he sits surrounded by his daughter and grandchildren. Soft grey walls typical of a Swedish apartment bear no hallmarks of a home belonging to an internationally acclaimed musician, however.
With his long, greying hair, wide-rimmed spectacles and fiery eyes, the Swedish-Palestinian Christian, born in 1946 in Nazareth, remembers his hometown being transformed by illegal Israeli settlements and checkpoints when he was a child.
By the 1960s, Nazareth had become a hotbed of Palestinian activists amid a swelling number of internally displaced people. And its vibrant interfaith community of Palestinian Christians and Muslims, together with their political zeal, were the inspiration for a powerful protest song by Totari, first released in Northern Europe in the late 1970s and revived, decades later, by the latest global movement against the ongoing war on Gaza.
Leve Palestina, Totari’s 1979 song about Palestine, has gained new life since Israel’s brutal war on Gaza began on October 7 last year and has left more than 39,000 Palestinians dead – with many thousands more lost under the rubble and presumed dead – and nearly 90,000 wounded.
On a grey, late October rainy day in Stockholm, protesters against the war gathered in the Swedish capital chanting the lyrics to Totari’s song from the 1970s, calling for an end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza:
“Leve palestina och krossa sionismen. Leve leve leve Palestina… [Long live Palestine and crush Zionism. Long live, long live Palestine…]”
A video of the protest, clipped together with the song, Leve Palestina, itself and uploaded on TikTok, immediately went viral and reached more than five million views since October. The comments section overflowed with supporters hailing from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey expressing their newfound fondness for Sweden’s Palestinian song.
Since then, Leve Palestina has become the go-to resistance anthem on the streets in Sweden and social media videos.
In April, pro-Palestine activists on the Stockholm Metro in Sweden sang Leve Palestina. In a video of that protest, the camera moves across multiple carriages full of keffiyeh-wearing Swedes, cementing Totari’s song as an anthem for Palestinian resistance around the world.
Telling the world
It all started in 1972, with the emergence of a counterculture band called Kofia which consisted of five mainstay artists – Totari, Palestinian percussionist Michel Kreitem whose family fled Jerusalem in 1948, and the Swedish trio of Carina Olsson, singer, Bengt Carlsson who played the flute and Mats Ludalv who played the guitar, mandolin and oud.
An ever-changing group of Palestinian drummers and choir joined them, spearheaded by Olsson, who joined the band after jumping on stage during a performance, and Totari, the band’s songwriter, vocalist and also an oud player.
The band’s name refers to the similar-sounding keffiyeh, a scarf commonly worn in Palestine and known for its woven patterns and its symbolism of resistance.
Kofia played music at demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War and South African apartheid during the 1970s. At that time, Gothenburg, traditionally a working-class city, was central for activists supporting international solidarity movements that included demonstrations against South African apartheid and the Vietnam War.
The band was particularly popular within the left-leaning, alternative music crowd that vigorously lived and breathed socialism and anti-imperialism in 1970s Sweden. But it was abroad where Kofia’s concerts attracted the most attention.
A year after the overthrow of the Shah, in February 1980, Totari had scripted a song dedicated to the struggles of Iran. Grateful for the support and backing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Iranian revolutionaries wanted a Palestinian music group to perform in Tehran. And so, Kofia, along with a Stockholm-based Chilean group singing against imperialism, performed in a makeshift outdoor concert lit using car headlamps.
“Their sound was unique, combining Arabic folk traditions with Scandinavian acoustica,” says Louis Brehony, a scholar on Palestinian musicians in exile and director of a short documentary on Kofia.
He adds that Kofia sent an “uncompromising message and musical vibrancy”, fusing revolutionary music with tours of Iran and East Germany in an era of change.
Totari himself had left Nazareth in 1967 in his early 20s, fleeing Israel’s Six-Day War which resulted in the seizure and occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip (which had previously been under the control of Egypt).
In Sweden, he found a world that seemed entirely ignorant of the plight of the Palestinians.
“When I came in 1967, people knew nothing about Palestine. They said it was a desert and that there were no Palestinians,” Totari recalls with exasperation. That was the impetus for him to launch himself on a mission to educate the locals, through music, that Palestinians “existed”. All four albums released by Kofia over a decade were sung and produced in the Swedish language.
Kofia is recognised as the first band to sing about Palestine in the Swedish language, breaking tradition with what previously had been an Arabic-speaking world of music and art solely talking to, and for, Palestinians and and those in the wider Arab region.
The 1979 release of Leve Palestina, known as Demonstrationssangen (or “demonstration song” in Swedish) and Kofia’s final song on their second album titled Earth of My Homeland, caused controversy – not just in Sweden, which at the time supported Israel’s growing presence in the Middle East. Some Arabs “didn’t accept me singing in Swedish” either, says Totari.
But 45 years later, Leve Palestina has not only survived its early critics but has found a new significance.
“In an age when most pop music is homogenous and almost apolitical, Leve Palestina is a source of inspiration,” says Jan Lindstrom, a PhD student at Lund University, one of Europe’s oldest universities. Like many students, he took part in a pro-Palestinian encampment at the Swedish university before police forcibly removed students in May.
“We’d sing the song in our tents, sitting still and at protests. Chanting in your own language adds a powerful dimension that has unified many Swedes,” says Lindström.
A month after the closure of the encampment in June, Lund University students take to the streets for a demonstration. On a typically cool, sunny Nordic summer’s day, solidarity banners and keffiyeh are everywhere. Leve Palestina rises along with the slow, steady march.
“Even the non-Swedes understand that this is a song made in Europe, about global injustice,” adds Lindstrom.
To be sure, accusations of anti-Semitism from Swedish authorities have emerged in recent years, including in November 2019, when a political youth group aligned with the Swedish Social Democratic Party sang Leve Palestina during a May Day march in Malmo.
This time around, Maria Stenergard, Sweden’s minister for migration, posted on X a clip of a protest last November in the southern city of Kristianstad, accusing the group of anti-Semitism. Sweden’s then-Prime Minister Stefan Lofven also told parliament that the song was an “unacceptable expression” of opposition to the Israeli state. It is an accusation that baffles Totari.
”Leve Palestina och krossa sionismen. Och vi har kastat stenar på soldater och poliser, och vi har skjutit raketer mot våra fiender”
Ja mina vänner, vi har mycket ilska, oförsonlighet och hat på våra torg. Kom i samspråk med propalestinier på Stora torg i Kristianstad för en… pic.twitter.com/SsaHxkPuRV
— Sofia Nerbrand 🦋 🇺🇦 🇸🇪 (@sofius) November 14, 2023
“I can’t be anti-Semitic… because it is against me,” Totari says, pointing out that Arabs are, themselves, a Semitic people. “And I can’t be against Muslims or Christians, both in my family, because that would mean being against my own being.”
A connection to the land
Back in the 1970s, a circle of progressive Swedes vocally supported Kofia. Many Jewish people were also core supporters of the group.
More than five decades on from fighting those first fires of injustice, Totari’s eyes brighten, as he describes the power of music as a form of resistance.
Leve Palestina’s repetitive lyrics and melody mimic the beat of an easy-going chant sung at a lively demonstration.
“It is a song that is to be sung in demonstrations, one person chanting after another,” Totari says. “I used that way in the songs, along with the idea of proving we [Palestinians] exist.”
As well as fusing the beat of demonstrations, Kofia’s repetitive melodies are based on the “maqam traditions of turathi – heritage – of Palestinian singing”, writes Brehony, the author, in a foreword for a film released in 2022 showcasing Kofia’s impact on protest music in Europe.
“Boasting a revolving door of choir members, Kofia turned the singing of political slogans into an art form,” he says.
Leve Palestina’s melodic chants stick in the memory. But it is lyrics dedicated to the land that hold deeper meaning. As one part of the song goes:
“And we have cultivated the earth
And we have harvested the wheat
We have picked the lemons
And pressed the olives
And the whole world knows our soil.”
Totari says this refers to the agrarian life of many Palestinians. “We are peasants. The soil is our life. It is our oxygen,” he explains.
“Some people ask ‘what do you mean with the song?’ Every person has to understand by himself what it means for him. The song isn’t just what I think it means. It means what every person feels. They’ll add to the lyrics with their own interpretation. For some people it is love, for others it is a struggle,” he says.
For Totari, it is about community. Born into a Christian family, he grew up in Palestine living side by side with Muslims and Jewish people. He discovered the same cohesion when he arrived in Sweden. “My people, no distinction,” he says, remembering the kindness that many Swedes showed him 50 years ago.
He now sees hope in the swell of protests on streets around the world in support of Palestine, and the shifting positions across Europe.
Ireland recognised Palestine as a state, alongside Spain and Norway in May. The three European nations are now pushing for other countries to acknowledge pre-1967 borders and say this recognition is the only way to ensure peace.
Sweden has recognised Palestinian statehood since 2014 and has hosted a Palestinian embassy in Stockholm since 2015. However, Sweden’s current right-wing government has staunchly backed Israel.
‘As long as there is hate, there is no hope’
Totari is hopeful, but not complacent. Over the decades, he says, he has seen many protest movements come and go. He fears the momentum and energy from the current global protests will start to wane.
“Spontaneous acts don’t last for long,” he warns, asking protesters to channel “the energy from the streets” into the pursuit of rebuilding Palestinian institutions across civic society, government and the arts. Only that, he says, can sustain the renewal of Palestinian life.
Totari, who has written hundreds of songs which remain unpublished, says he longs for creative institutions that cocoon and encourage musical resistance. He also longs for a day when all hate disappears from the earth.
“As long as there is hate there is no hope. We have to fight hate,” Totari says. “That’s our biggest problem; not the atom bomb. Hate is the biggest enemy.”
“Maybe after I die, today’s youngsters can look at what I did and take it on. You become more famous when you die, after all!”
For now, Totari shrinks from the limelight.
“I feel small when my songs become popular. I’m unable to sing if I feel that I am famous,” he says from his Gothenburg home.
Totari’s inbox is full of messages from young people across the globe, “finding a home” in a band formed long before the internet and social media.
“The songs are created to unite anyone and everyone who wants to fight for their freedom,” he muses. “It seems to me Leve Palestina is for all oppressed people; they don’t have to be Muslim or Palestinian. It is for all people in the world. And that makes me very happy.”
