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Palestinians Borrow Chant From Syria to Vent Rage at Their Leaders

September 10, 2012, 7:29 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Video of a West Bank protest on Monday showed Palestinians using a borrowed tune from Syria to call on their prime minister to step down.

During protests in the West Bank on Monday, Palestinians adapted a protest anthem made popular by their neighbors in Syria last year to call for their president and prime minister to step down.

The original song, “Yalla Erhal Ya Bashar,” or “Come on Bashar, Leave,” calling for the departure President Bashar al-Assad, was written last year in Syria. At a protest in the West Bank on Monday, protesters changed the words of the tune, to target President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

As Yousef Munayyer, the director of The Palestine Center in Washington, observed on Twitter, the borrowing completed a circle in a way.

Another striking image of the day's protests in Hebron was the demonstrators hurling their shoes at a large banner of the Palestinian Authority's prime minister.

Palestinain protesters hurled their shoes at an image of their prime minister on Mondya in Hebron.

As Reuters reports, the protesters were frustrated at the Palestinian Authority's management of the economy in the parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank it administers. In the evening, there were clashes between the Palestinian Authority's security forces and demonstrators in Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus.

The Israeli-American journalist Joseph Dana, who is based in Ramallah, noted that video of the security forces hurling rocks at protesters looked quite a bit like images from Egypt recorded last year.