The peace partners from the Palestinian Authority have announced that they have had enough of the Jews misappropriating Palestinian culture and folklore and claiming it as their own. In order to set the record straight, the Palestinian Authority has decided to clear the air and stage the true musical play about the roots of Palestinian culture that was later distorted into Fiddler on the Roof, reclaiming what the Jewish colonialists have attempted to steal from the Palestinians. American chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine will be holding amateur presentations of the play and the New York Metropolitan Opera announced plans to stage it after the play about Klinghoffer completes its run.
This new project is to show the real theatrical work that was later misappropriated by the Jews and misrepresented as based upon the writings of Shalom Aleichem. Palestinian President Abu Mazen has greeted the new production with a call to restore the play to its original pristine Palestinian form, before it underwent Zionist distortion.
The new play is called “Oudist on the Roof.” It shows the traditional Palestinian Oud player in various scenes breaking out in spontaneous song and music to accompany the singers and actors.
The central figure in the play is Itboch, the humble village milkman. He lives in a traditional Palestinian village before the Zionist colonialists conducted their ethnic cleansing of Arabs. Itboch lives with his wife Jihada and their various unmarried daughters.
In the first song of the play, Itboch comes out on stage and sings the new words to the Fiddler song “Tradition.” They go like this: “Explosion, explosion, explosion”:
Who, day and night, must scramble for a living,
Feed a wife and children, and pay the bills?
And who has the right, as master of the house,
To have the final word at home?
The Baba, the Baba! Explosion.
The Baba, the Baba! Explosion.
Itboch adorably likes to toss out citations from the Holy Books that do not actually appear there, to make himself appear to be learned. After introducing other members of the Palestinian village, he breaks into song:
“If I were a Shaheed, ya-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba die-dle-deidle, diedle diedle dum, all day long I’d detonate for fun, if I were a Shaheed guy.”
Much of the plot concerns Itboch’s efforts to marry off his daughters. One of them refuses to marry an old man that her father has picked out for her because he is demanding no bride-price, so Itboch murders the girl in an honor killing.
Itboch sings the song “To Life” from Fiddler with a few editing changes to make it appropriate for a Palestinian musical. The new words go like this:
To death! To death! Biladi!
Biladi, Biladi, to death!
If you’ve been lucky, then Monday was No worse than Sunday was,
Drink Biladi, to death.
To death, Biladi!
Biladi, Biladi, to death!
One day it’s baklava cake,
Next day a stomach ache,
Drink Biladi, to death!
Another of Itboch’s daughters decides to marry a communist. But Itboch makes his peace with the idea since the local Palestinian Communist Party told him that the communists are really pro-Islam and not anti-religion. Another daughter is to marry a nerdy guy who wheels out his new acquisition on a sewing machine table into the village square. The “new arrival” is an al-Qassam rocket fastened to the top of the sewing machine.
At the end of the show, the Zionists enter the village dressed as Cossacks and order the poor Palestinian villagers to pick up and move out, to Jericho and Gaza. The United Nations UNESCO has announced it is awarding the production a special subsidy. Tel Aviv University will be the first institution in Israel to stage it.
