‘Leve Palestina’: The 1970s song that became an antiwar anthem in Sweden

George Totari’s famous song was one of the first to bring Palestinian resistance music to the West. Now it is undergoing a major revival.

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: