Zeinab Shaath

Zeinab Shaath (; born 1954) is a Palestinian-Egyptian singer-songwriter. She is known for the song "The Urgent Call of Palestine", released in 1972.

Early life Zeinab Shaath was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1954 to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. Her parents had moved to Egypt in 1947 after her father accepted a job as an educator. The following year, the State of Israel was established, marking the start of the Nakba, rendering her family unable to return home. Shaath inherited a sense of Palestinian identity from her family, who spoke Palestinian Arabic at home and were active in the refugee community in Egypt. Shaath and her family lacked Egyptian citizenship and were considered stateless, although they later received Syrian passports after her father filed a request to the government. Shaath was interested in music from a young age, first learning the piano, and was later introduced to the guitar by her older sister Mysoon, who also shared with her a number of records from the United States. She then became influenced by American folk songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. After being invited to perform at a Palestinian festival in Lebanon in 1972, she met Ismail Shammout, painter and Director of the Cultural Arts section of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Shammout then directed a short film, sometimes described as the first Palestinian music video, of Shaath performing "The Urgent Call of Palestine" in the mountains of Lebanon. She also worked with Shammout to record and release an EP of the same name, which also included the songs "Resist", "I Am An Arab" and "Take Me Back to Palestine", based on poems by Muin Bseiso, Mahmoud Darwish, and Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati respectively. The EP and film were released in 1972 and 1973 respectively.

Re-emergence In September 1982, the entire archive of the PLO's Cultural Arts Section was seized by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the invasion of Lebanon, which included the master tapes of the EP and the film. In 2021, Arshia Haq, founder of the record label Discostan, discovered The Urgent Call of Palestine EP and contacted Shaath, before starting work to restore the recording with Mo'min Swaitat, founder of the Majazz Project, a Palestinian musical archive. Without the master tapes, the restoration was based entirely on personal copies of the release.