I have been collecting Palestinian political jokes and other Palestinian folk narratives since early 1988, shortly after the beginning of the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli Occupation, known as the Intifada.

I am still doing that today, and I have become addicted to the habit of collecting political narratives, to the point of feeling completely lost unless I find out what jokes, legends, and rumours are circulating around among Palestinians.

I have collected over 1,500 jokes and humerous legends. Most of these I have collected as a participant observer in the natural settings in which people use them to comment on the political situation in the country and the world at large. Political jokes are a way of communicating and exchanging views about a political problem among a people or in a community with a sense of identity and solidarity.

From my two and a half decades of observation, I have concluded that when a political problem becomes urgent and strongly felt, telling jokes about it becomes almost compulsive. People become willing to go to great lengths and to take serious risks in order to exchange jokes concerning the problem. The reason, I believe, is that communicating about a problem through jokes is a way of coping with the problem, which, in turn, rewards the participants by bringing them some relief. Telling jokes in order to cope is not usually a community’s first choice, but instead is resorted to when people feel powerless and cannot find a practical solution to a problem.

Through joking, members of a community can feel as if they are doing something about a common problem in a number of ways:

•   They present themselves with some wishful solutions to the problem.
•   They propose possible solutions to the problem.
•   They criticise the leadership in charge for not solving the problem and put social pressure on them to act.
•   They make their viewpoint and their attitudes known.
•   They direct their hostility toward, and vent their feelings about, those they consider responsible for the problem.
•   By sharing and exchanging jokes, laughter, emotions, and hostilities they strengthen their sense of solidarity and group identification.

Jokes do not come individually, rather they come in cycles, which sweep into a community like a big school of fish or flight of birds. Each joke cycle usually revolves around an issue or a problem. Within each cycle there may be several sub-cycles, each centring around an individual who is considered of special significance in relation to the main issue or problem.

Studying a body of data requires identifying the unit of analysis of that data, then identifying the different dimensions of that unit, and then comparing and contrasting the units along these dimensions. When the unit of analysis is the individual joke, then the relevant dimensions for discussion can be things like the joke’s motive, message, technique, or nature. Other dimensions incude the conditions necessary for the joke’s appreciation, enjoyment, understanding, or creation.

But when the unit of analysis is the whole joke cycle rather than the individual joke, then it is the dimensions of the cycle that are under consideration, and these are quite different from the dimensions of the individual joke.

Some of the relevant dimensions of any joke cycle include the following:

•   The social, psychological, economic, and political conditions under which the cycle emerges.
•   The main event to which the cycle is reacting.
•   The main problem around which the cycle revolves, and with which it is trying to cope.
•   The individuals who are main players in the central problem, and around whom the sub-cycles revolve.
•   The two parties involved in the contest or struggle portrayed in the jokes of the cycle. In other words, the borders between “us” and “them.”
•   Who wins and who loses the contest, or who the “bad guy” and who the “good guy” is.
•   What forms winning and losing take.
•   The morale of the community.
•   The duration of the cycle.
•   What causes the cycle to fade out or to end.
•   Where most of the jokes of the cycle originated or were borrowed from.

Looking at the over 1,500 political jokes I have collected over the past 25 years, it becomes apparent that Palestinian humour has gone through many different cycles since the beginning of the First Intifada, each with several sub-cycles.

In this article, I will address the first two cycles only, the First Intifada and the Gulf War. The over 200 jokes I have from the First Intifada were collected during the years ‘88, ‘89, and ‘90. The cycle ended shortly before the beginning of the Gulf War in early 1991. The jokes from this cycle generally portray a struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and deal with things like demonstrations, rock throwing, arrests, detentions, strikes, curfews, flag-raising, and “masked” mulathem Palestinian youth. Palestinians are represented in these narratives by nameless young teenagers, often masked with the keffiyeh. The Israelis are represented by soldiers and border police.

The morale of the Palestinians at this stage was very high. This is shown in the jokes in several ways:

•   The Palestinians are completely unified, as demonstrated by the lack of jokes involving struggle among different Palestinian political groups.
•   The heavily armed Israeli soldier is confronted and defeated by a Palestinian child or an unarmed middle-aged woman. The defeat is often bodily or physical but occasionally moral.
•   Unity is reflected in the jokes by the cooperation among Palestinians and the unconditional support given by the community to the stone throwing kids.

An example is the following joke:

A group of soldiers stopped a shab (youth) in the marketplace and were about to take him away. A woman who was shopping in the vicinity saw what was happening. Immediately, she threw herself at the soldiers and started shouting and screaming, telling the soldiers to let her son go because he had not done anything, but was simply walking with her while shopping. She kept pulling and tugging at the boy until she got him loose. As she walked away with him hand in hand, one of the passers-by heard the woman ask the boy, “Which family are you from, dear?”

The Palestinian child facing the Israeli soldier was, sometimes, no more than few hours old:

A woman was going home after having given birth at the hospital. There was a curfew, and she wanted to get home. A doctor who had a permit [to drive during the curfew] took her with him. On the way home, a group of soldiers met them and stopped them. They asked the doctor, “Where are you going?”

The doctor said, “A woman has given birth and is going home.”
The officer turned to the woman and asked her, “What did you give birth to?”
“A boy,” she replied.
He said, “Oh, a boy! Where are his hands? Let me see them.”
She asked “What for?”
He replied, “I want to find out if he is carrying any stones.”

Actually the Palestinian child was willing to stand up to the Israeli soldiers even before being born:

One time when the town [Gaza] was under curfew, a pregnant woman started to have labour pains. The soldiers took her to a military hospital to give birth there. It turned out that she was pregnant with twin boys. The head of one of the babies came out. He looked around and saw all these [Israeli] military uniforms and then turned back to his brother and shouted, “Ahmed! Ahmed! We are surrounded! Get some rocks!

According to the jokes, Palestinians during the Intifada were not only self-confident but became outright cocky. They started to feel superior to other Arab peoples and made fun of them for not having the courage to stand up to the Israelis, as is the case in the following narrative:

Two women, a Palestinian and Egyptian, were in the maternity ward of a hospital. The Palestinian woman was shouting and screaming while the Egyptian woman stayed very calm. Then, the doctor came and said to the Palestinian woman, “What is all this screaming about? Here is another woman, right next to you, and she is in the same situation but is not screaming!”

The Palestinian woman replied, “Well, giving birth to a mulathem is not as easy as giving birth to a belly dancer.”

The Intifada joke cycle ended shortly after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in August 1990, when the attention of most Palestinians turned from their own struggle against Israeli Occupation to the conflict in the Gulf.

The Gulf War cycle or wave of jokes includes close to 100 jokes I collected during the period between September 8, 1990 and May 1, 1991. These narratives generally commented on the conflict between the two parties to the Gulf crisis, namely Iraq on one side and the United States and its allies on the other. Iraq was often represented in this body of narratives by Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi soldier, or a Scud Missile. The allies were represented by an American Soldier, a Patriot anti-missile missile, an Israeli leader or soldier, or a head of an Arab state allied with or supporting the United States, especially the leaders of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Syria.

There is no doubt where Palestinian sympathy lay. All the jokes in the collection were directed against one side of the conflict: the allies. None of these jokes manifested any aggression, hostility, or ridicule toward Iraq or any of the countries sympathetic to the Iraqi cause, such as Jordan, Yemen, or Sudan. If we were to judge by quantity of jokes, then Israel received the greatest amount of hostility, followed by the US, and then Saudi Arabia. This gives the impression that Palestinians supported Iraq not because they loved Iraq, but more because they hated Iraq’s enemies.

There were also qualitative differences. When it came to Arab countries, such as Syria or Egypt, we find Palestinian hostility was directed toward leaders alone, rather than the people or the nation. Palestinians must have assumed that the people in these countries stood with Iraq. In the case of Israel and the US, the aggression was directed toward the country as a whole: the land, people, and government alike. Here is a joke directed against the three Arab leaders, Mubarek of Egypt, Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and Hafez Assad of Syria. The humour in the joke relies on the Middle Eastern understanding of the foot as the lowest and meanest part of the body, and that any association with the foot or with footwear is insulting and degrading. In this joke the association is established between the meaning of the leader’s name in Arabic and some characteristic of footwear:

Saddam was sitting down with his legs crossed. Tareq Aziz [his advisor] noticed that Saddam had new shoes on. So he said, “Mubarak (congratulations)! What kind of leather are they made of?”
Saddam replied, “They are made of Fahd (panther) skin.”
So Tareq Aziz said, “These are good shoes. Hafez on them (take good care of them).”

When it comes to the US, on the other hand, President George H.W. Bush was ridiculed, as in this narrative:

One time Bush got a nice piece of material. He wanted to have it made into a suit. So he travelled the whole world, but wherever he went he was told that the material was too small for a suit. Finally, somebody told him that there were some good tailors in Iraq who may be able to do the job. So he went.

In Iraq they told him that the material would be enough for a suit, an extra pair of pants, and he would have some left over. He was surprised to hear that and said, “How come everyone else says it is not even enough for a suit, and you say it can be made into all this?”

The Iraqi said, “The whole world must think you are something big, but we see you this big (making a sign with the thumb and the index finger).”

However, we find that the Palestinians were not satisfied with laying the blame on the American leadership alone. They also criticised the quality of the American individual by portraying the American soldier as pampered and soft:

The American soldiers, shortly after arriving in Saudi Arabia, sent President Bush an urgent telegram requesting that he should build a chocolate factory capable of producing bars that would not melt in the heat of the Gulf countries.

Among the Arabs only the Saudis were criticised and ridiculed as a people:
A Saudi officer asked one of his soldiers, “What would you do if you were to run out of ammunition on the battlefield?”

The soldier replied, “I would keep on shooting so the enemy won’t notice that I have run out of ammunition.”

Finally there was definite change in the mood of Palestinian humour over the duration of the crisis, but Palestinian support for Iraq never wavered. Even after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, Palestinian jokes were short, lighthearted, and merry. One of the first Gulf crisis jokes portrays the relationship between Saddam and Kuwait as a romantic one. To understand this joke, the reader needs to know that the Arabic word dham, which means annexed, can also mean “embraced” or “hugged,” and that the name “Kuwait” sounds feminine to the Arabic ear:

Why did Saddam’s wife ask for a divorce?
Because Saddam “dham” Kuwait.
Another joke suggests that the Palestinians felt the ruling Kuwaiti family, in the midst of their misfortune, deserved ridicule rather than sympathy:

A short time after Saddam had occupied Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber, Al Sabbah’s daughter, who had not heard of the invasion at the time, called home from somewhere in Europe. As soon as she heard someone on the other end she cheerfully said, “Daddy Jaber?”

And the voice replied, “No, this is Uncle Saddam!”

The following three jokes reflect the Palestinians’ wish to have what happened to Kuwait happen also to Qatar, Dhubai, and Bahrain:

Shortly after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, Saddam’s little daughter had a birthday. Saddam asked her, “What would you like me to get you for your birthday?”

She replied, “Get me Qatar.”

Shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they asked Saddam, “How many children do you have?”

He answered, “Qusai, Udai, and now my wife has cravings for Dhubai.”

Someone asked Saddam how many hours it took him to occupy Kuwait. He answered, “Four hours.”

“And how many hours would you need to take Saudi Arabia?”
“Eight hours.”

“And Bahrain?”

“That, we can take by fax.”

Later on, when the Palestinians realised that the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait was not going to pass uncontested by the West and that the United States, in its threats of war, was not bluffing, anticipation of war started to dominate the atmosphere, and Palestinians began to wonder whether Iraq could withstand such a formidable enemy. They tried to convince themselves that, in the end, Iraq would come out the winner. This phase lasted roughly from the beginning of November 1990 until the end of January 1991, two weeks after the actual beginning of the war.

Like whistling in the dark, jokes circulating among Palestinians during this period reflected the people’s apprehensions and their eagerness to grasp at anything that gave them hope. In the jokes, for example, they tried hard to convince themselves that Iraq’s enemies were truly scared of Iraq and with good reason. Thus, the Emir of Bahrain is too scared to admit who he is, even over the phone:

One time, shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Emir of Bahrain called up Saddam Hussein and said, “Listen here, Saddam, you better get out of Kuwait right away and without any conditions or else!”

And Saddam answered, “Excuse me sir, but may I know who is calling, please?”

The Emir of Bahrain replied, “This is the Emir of Qatar.” And he immediately hung up.

And the Israelis, according to Palestinian humour, were so scared that they started to spread Palestinian headscarves on the roofs of their homes to divert Iraqi missiles away from them. Even President Bush was scared stiff of Saddam:

One time Bush went to the barber for a hair cut. His hair was so smooth, the barber had a hard time cutting it. He thought for a moment then suddenly shouted, “Saddam!” Bush’s hair stood on end and the barber was able to get the job done.

Actually the whole world was scared of Saddam to the point that doctors started to prescribe Saddam’s name to cure children from drooling:

One time this person took his son to the doctor because his son used to drool a lot. The doctor checked the child and wrote out a prescription. When they got home, the father opened the prescription and all he found written on it was “Saddam, Saddam.” The father became very angry and went back to the doctor, saying, “What is this? Are you taking my son’s illness as a joke?” And the doctor replied, “Well, Saddam gave the whole world a dry mouth [from fear], couldn’t he do the same for your little son?”

Toward the end of the war, when it became completely evident that Iraq was not only losing the war but would also be completely humiliated and destroyed, Palestinian frustration and indignation reached its climax and the jokes lost almost all distinction between their latent and manifest content and included direct, undisguised violations of religious, sexual, and moral values.

Most of these jokes were directed against Israel:

They say that Nahman Shai [the Israeli military spokesperson during the war] got freaked out because of all the Iraqi rockets and kept mumbling to himself, “Abbas, Hussein, Abbas, Hussein…” Finally, he went to a doctor, and the doctor gave him a Patriot suppository.

Another joke responded to the often-made Israeli claim that Patriot missiles did not miss the Scud but hit it from the back and thus did not explode its war head:

Once a Patriot was launched to stop a Hussein rocket, and the Hussein told him, “Kiss my...”

Many jokes indicated how bitter the Palestinians were against the Muslim world for deserting Iraq at its time of dire need:

Why are the Allies going to win the war against Iraq?

God loves Christians and Jews much more than Muslims, because when Christians and Jews pray, the turn their faces to God, while Muslims, when they pray, they turn their butts to Him.

Shortly after the end of the Gulf War, the United States started talking about the possibility of peace talks between Israel and the Arabs and a new wave of “Peace Process” jokes started.

Dr, Sharif Kanaana is an anthropologist, folklorist, researcher, author, and educator of international renown. He has published some 20 books and dozens of scholarly essays, as well as presenting at conferences around the world on research issues relating to Palestinian society, heritage, and recent history.

See PDF www.thisweekinpalestine.com/i179/pdfs/article/palestinian_political_humour.pdf