Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production 9780367563172, 9781003097310

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Note on Transliterations
Map of Israel-Palestine
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Everyday Practice and Performance of Nation-Making and Resistance in Palestine: Al-Kamandjâti Music Conservatory
2 Coexistence, Multiculturalism and Pluralistic Citizenship in Israel: The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC)
3 Music and the Politics of Spatiality and Temporality in Palestine: Checkpoints, Occupation Bureaucracy, Subjectivity
4 On Music, Politics and Social Justice: Israel’s J14 Social Protest Movement and its Imaginings of “home”
5 Strangers in their Homeland: On the Lives and Musics of Palestinian Citizens of Israel
Epilogue
References
Index

Citation preview

Music in Conflict

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the conflict, borders and boundaries are material and social manifestations of the ways in which the production of knowledge is conditioned by political and structural violence. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape artistic production in this context are informed by profound imbalances of power and contingent exposure to violence. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities. The ethnography is based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and the West Bank in 2011–2012 and other excursions since then. Author has “followed the conflict” by “following the music,” from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes and even a checkpoint. In all the different contexts presented, the monograph is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize both spatial and social boundaries in a situation of conflict. Nili Belkind is an ethnomusicologist specializing in Caribbean and Middle Eastern musics. The writing of Music in Conflict was supported by consecutive postdoctoral fellowships.

SOAS Studies in Music Series Editors: Rachel Harris, SOAS, University of London, UK Rowan Pease, SOAS, University of London, UK Board Members: Angela Impey (SOAS, University of London) Noriko Manabe (Temple University) Suzel Reily (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) Martin Stokes (Kings College London) Richard Widdess (SOAS, University of London) SOAS Studies in Music is today one of the world’s leading series in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Our core mission is to produce high-quality, ethnographically rich studies of music-making in the world’s diverse musical cultures. We publish monographs and edited volumes that explore musical repertories and performance practice, critical issues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, historical and analytical approaches to music across the globe. We recognize the value of applied, interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and our authors draw on current approaches in musicology and anthropology, psychology, media and gender studies. We welcome monographs that investigate global contemporary, classical and popular musics, the effects of digital mediation and transnational flows. Presence Through Sound Music and Place in East Asia Keith Howard and Catherine Ingram Musicians in Crisis Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry Ioannis Tsioulakis Becoming an Irish Traditional Musician Learning and Embodying Musical Culture Jessica Cawley Music in Conflict Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production Nili Belkind

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ music/series/SOASMS

Music in Conflict Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production

Nili Belkind

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Nili Belkind The right of Nili Belkind to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-56317-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09731-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra The audio and video examples can be accessed via the online Routledge Music Research Portal: www.routledgemusicresearch.co.uk. Please enter the activation word RRMusic and your email address when prompted. You will immediately be sent an automated email containing an access token and instructions, which will allow you to log in to the site.

Contents

List of illustrations Note on transliterations Map of Israel-Palestine Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1

2

vii ix xi xiii xv 1

The everyday practice and performance of nationmaking and resistance in Palestine: Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory

42

Coexistence, multiculturalism and pluralistic citizenship in Israel: the Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC)

82

3

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine: checkpoints, occupation bureaucracy, subjectivity 124

4

On music, politics and social justice: Israel’s J14 social protest movement and its imaginings of “home”

157

Strangers in their homeland: on the lives and musics of Palestinian citizens of Israel

197

5

Epilogue References Index

241 247 269

Illustrations

* Unless specified otherwise, all photographs are by the author 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2

Poster of Ramzi Aburedwan as an eight-year old and as an adult violist. Photograph courtesy of Al-Kamandjâti Ramzi and the Ramallah Orchestra in rehearsal The Voices of Peace choir performing at the diplomat’s reception The Shirana choir at Abu El-‘Abed’s restaurant Poster depicting the distance to Palestine’s non-existent International airport Social protest iconographies of ‘home’ Banner at the Jaffa tent city: “the Tel Aviv municipality is destroying Jaffa!” System Ali at the Jaffa tent city Amal Murkus at the Zababdeh Culture and Arts Festival Jowan Safadi and FishSamak at Beit Aneesah, Ramallah. Photograph courtesy of Fares S. Mansour

49 59 96 114 124 160 168 173 212 225

Note on transliterations

Transliterations of Arabic words generally follow the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies system, but are modified to Palestinian dialect and colloquial speak. Such modifications include variations that differ from one geographical location to another and from one performance context to another, and hence, the same word may be differently transliterated in other sources. Transliteration of Hebrew words mostly follows the Library of Congress’ Hebraica Cataloging guide to Romanization, excepting commonplace terms that consistently appear differently in academic literature and public spheres (e.g. Eretz-Israel rather than Erets-Israel). Names of people adhere to the Romanized spelling chosen by their owners, as are names of groups (System Ali) and organizations (Merchavim). Names of places (e.g., Haifa), publications (Haaretz; Al-Ittihad) or terms that have a commonplace, accepted Romanized spelling (hanukkah; Hamas; Mizrahim) retain this form as well. Transliterated Hebrew and Arabic System Ali song texts (Chapter 4) are provided on eResources accompanying the book.

Map of Israel-Palestine

Lebanon

Acre Haifa

Kufr Yassif Nazareth

Taybe Tel Aviv - Jaffa

Lydd Ramla

Jenin Tulkarem Nablus West Bank Ramallah

Jerusalem Bethlehem Hebron

Gaza

Be'er Sheva

Sinai - Egypt

Syria

Jordan

Preface

People who have been engaged with Palestine-Israel over the years are likely to be familiar with the image that forms the backdrop to the cover of this book: a vintage poster featuring a hand-painted photograph of Jerusalem centered on Dome of the Rock (al-Ḥaram al-sharīf/ Temple Mount), framed by a tree, the caption Visit Palestine embossed underneath. While the image’s iconicity is instantly recognized, its convoluted history, along with the diverse and evolving applications and cultural meanings the image has lent itself to, is perhaps less known. The poster was created in 1936 by Franz Krausz, a Jewish immigrant from Austria who, together with his wife, fled Germany a couple of years earlier, before the Holocaust. It was commissioned by the Zionist-oriented Tourist Development Association of Palestine, whose goal was to encourage Jewish travel and immigration to the country then under the British Mandate. The poster re-emerged into public view in 1995, when David Tartakover, a Jewish-Israeli graphic artist, reprinted it with Krausz’ permission, in a gesture that celebrated the optimism of the 1990s peace process and its prospects for reconciliation between Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. This optimistic, reconciliatory mood was short lived, soon to be replaced by numerous cycles of violence, Israel’s harsh repression of Palestinian dissent and entrenchment of the Occupation and settlements. Yet by the time the peace process had derailed, the poster had already been embraced by Palestinians as one that broadcasts Palestinian identity and indigenous right to Palestine, appearing in numerous locations in the Occupied Territories and disseminated by Palestine solidarity activists abroad (Davis and Walsh 2015). In 2011, during my time in the field, the image served as backdrop to the Al-Kamandjâti conservatory’s 2011 Music Days Festival Program. For Palestinians who are aware of the poster’s origins, appropriating the image may be an ironic move that snubs at the Israeli government’s politics of erasure (Davis and Walsh 2015), or one that recasts Jerusalem as a Palestinian domain for Palestinians now living on the other side of the separation wall and barred from the city. The poster has, since the 1990s, also been recycled by both Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis as a referential icon to be

xiv Preface re-canvassed and re-tooled for numerous politicized messages. Many visual artists have toyed with the image, creating “remixes” for a myriad of statements and commentaries. For example, one version of the poster features the separation wall with Jerusalem hidden behind it, making the wall the most prominent feature of the holy city. Another replaces the serene, Orientalized landscape with an image of a bomb explosion, the “Visit Palestine” caption substituted by “Visit Gaza.” Others have opted for broadcasting post-national imaginaries, with captions such as “Visit OneState” or “Visit Nomansland.” The convoluted history of the poster and the ways it has been appropriated and recreated over the years speak to the important role of cultural products in meaning-making for communities and individuals, the complex processes of remembrance and forgetting involved in the making of identities across time and perennial violence, and the narrative and emotive power of a visual image. This history also speaks to the inextricability of Jewish and Palestinian lives within a landscape the poster depicts as empty of human life and presence. In 1936 this emptiness may have suited the “land without a people to a people without a land” trope within the Zionist imagination, or it might simply have projected the Oriental allure the Tourist Development Association of Palestine wished to portray to travelers. Yet perhaps it is this very emptiness that also invites different agents to pour their own meanings, experiences and visions unto the landscape, a process of place-making constructed by numerous emplacements, displacements, ongoing violence and hopes for a better future. In filling up the stillness of the frozen image with sound, music and human agency, the music makers featured in this book are all reshaping this landscape into the place and habitat they wish it to become. The Visit Palestine poster was recreated with permission granted by Michael Krausz and Nurit Krausz. Cover design: Fares S. Mansour Musicians’ images on cover: Amal Murkus; photograph by Tal Adler. Jowan Safadi; photograph by Yaacov Saban. Members of System Ali; photographs by Fares S. Mansour. Members of the Palestine Youth Orchestra (PYO); photographs by Fares S. Mansour.

Acknowledgements

It is my great pleasure to thank all who have facilitated my research, taken part in it or otherwise helped me in the long process of research and writing of this book. First and foremost are the many institutions and people in Palestine-Israel to whom I am indebted for opening so many doors and sharing so much time, knowledge and local perspectives with me. I view this book as the product of their endeavors and stories as much as it is mine. For various reasons, some of the people in this list will be mentioned by their first name only. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Ramzi Aburedwan for welcoming me at Al-Kamandjâti conservatory in Palestine, the amazing staff that worked at Al-Kamandjâti’s Ramallah branch during my fieldwork, the music teachers who hosted me so often in their homes and some of the international musicians who come to Palestine to work with AlKamandjâti on a seasonal basis. A big thank you goes to Al-Kamandjâti’s administrative staff members Celine, Eyad, Khalil and Lina; the teachers Maddalena, Jason, Julia, Dimitri, Nick and David; intern Elena Sordini; Oday, who kept me up with his singing until 3 AM the first time I stayed overnight in Ramallah; Peter Sulski, the Baroque Music Festival director; Javier Caballero, a returning musician whose friendship extends past our shared time in Palestine; and the Ramallah branch students, some who appear in these pages under pseudonyms. I also thank Marco, one of the teachers at the Barenboim-Said Foundation, and Nabeel Abboud-Ashkar, director of the Foundation’s projects in Palestine-Israel, for hosting me at home or at the Foundation’s apartment in Ramallah. A huge thank you, too big to truly express, goes to Michele Cantoni, who was at the time of this research the Edward Said’s National Conservatory of Music’s (ESNCM’s) academic director. I thank Michele for making his home my home in Bethlehem, and for all the work, companionship, friendship, introductions and hours spent in front of our respective computers at the kitchen table, or talking about life and politics at Casa Nova and elsewhere. I am grateful to Adaya Barkay, who has since passed away, for introducing us. I am also grateful for the time, the knowledge, shared experiences and friendships of Tim Pottier, Ramadan and Fares Mansour. I thank Fares specifically for the beautiful photographs and cover design he contributed

xvi Acknowledgements to this book. A collective thank you is owed to many individuals among the ESNCM’s staff and students, too numerous to mention here by name, who welcomed me to their rehearsals, concerts and social life. In Israel, I am indebted to several institutions for opening their doors to me: the Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra (AJYO), the Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC) and the Jerusalem Intercultural Center (JICC). At the AJYO, I thank Dr. Meir Weisel, Avital Rappaport, Dr. Taiseer Elias and the orchestra’s players for sharing their musical and social processes. I will never be able to reciprocate the Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center for the different ways I have been welcomed with such open embrace. I am most grateful to Hadas Kaplan, the center’s deputy director and creative spirit; Idan Toledano, the music director; Mika Danny, director of the Shirana Choir; the members of the Voices of Peace Choir and the amazing women of the Shirana Choir. A special thank you goes to Badria and Aliyah of the Shirana Choir for their friendship and willingness to discuss sensitive topics. Many of these people are no longer with the AJCC, but they continue to work towards ideals of shared life and social justice through music. I thank Hanan Ohana of the Jerusalem Intercultural Center for integrating me into the JICC’s Speaking Arts conference from its initial planning stages to its execution process. Outside of these institutions, there are numerous individuals who have been instrumental in providing me with some of the richest fieldwork experiences one could wish for. I am most especially grateful for the artists who welcomed me into their worlds, lives and homes. An enormous thank you goes to Amal Murkus, Jowan Safadi and the members of System Ali, all of who appear in this work. I am also thankful for the time, knowledge, friendships and camaraderie of Neta Weiner, Yair Dalal, Sana‘ Moussa, Ami Yares and Sameer Makhoul. I thank Sameer for delving with me into the music of Sabah Fakhri, and Wisam Gibran, Emad Dalal, Abed Hathout and Elias Wakileh for their time and perspectives. Other members of the cultural community—producers, curators, educators, critics, DJs, etc.—have also been instrumental in this study, and oftentimes, have also provided anchors of solidarity and support. Ayala Badmor-Yaron of the Karev educational project tagged me to numerous Arabic music concerts in kindergartens and schools all over the Galilee and the Golan Heights as well as the Nahariya hospital children’s ward. Ayala has since passed away, but her friendship and generosity will always be remembered. Yona and Sarit Bargur from the Palestinian-Israeli Bereaved Families Forum introduced me to Ayala and also invited me to many of the Forum’s initiatives. Eli Grunfeld, founder of the Culture of Peace Festival and the Oud Festival, made many shows available for documentation and spent hours discussing the Israeli cultural terrain with me. Noam BenZeev provided journalistic coverage of music in Palestine and demonstrated his commitment to humanistic values in times of need. Ethnomusicologist and radio executive Moshe Morad opened doors, provided links and

Acknowledgements  xvii spent hours talking about music and politics with me. Watan Alqasim from Lamsa Media shared his work and views on regional cultural politics. Effie Benaya, director of the Jerusalem Oud Festival, discussed the history of the festival with me. Ofer Amsalem, director of the Andalusian Mediterranean Orchestra, recounted the orchestra’s history and invited me to its performances. Ami Yares introduced me to the Heartbeat project. Barbara Ann Schmutzler shared her experiences at the Barenboim-Said Foundation with me and introduced me to other interlocutors. Benjamin Greenberg discussed his teaching experiences in Palestine with me. Ehud Krinis, Erella Dunn and Ruti Katz introduced me to the Villages Group projects and to the Salem music school, which they helped found. During my fieldwork I met a group of scholars, all associated with different institutions and working on different aspects of expressive culture in Palestine-Israel. Dr. Abigail Wood of Haifa University initiated our first gathering and paved the path for an amazingly gratifying informal workshop and social network that we dubbed “the underground research group.” I thank Abigail, Nadeem Karkabi and Johannes Becker for hours spent around food, talk, music and shared interests, and for our collaborative work. I also thank Nadeem for his help with transliterations of System Ali lyrics and for partnering up with me to produce the Rough Guide to Palestine music compilation on the World Music Network label, released in 2014. The compilation was our small tribute to diverse and burgeoning contemporary Palestinian musical scenes and to some of the artists who have shared their worlds with us. There are other people who were not directly involved in musical life during my time in the field, but whose friendship and support was invaluable. Kriszta Bakos’ hospitality in Ramallah and enduring friendship provided an important anchor. Bilal and Iman Abu-Khalaf provided an important respite station in Jerusalem. Bashir and Jeannette Akkawi and Monther and Inas El-Botma “adopted” me not just as a friend, but as a family member. My aunt Miri Idelstein hosted me in Jerusalem whenever I needed to stay overnight. Dr. Haim Ben-Shahar provided me access to the libraries of the Tel-Aviv University. I also thank my friends and family members who helped furnish and accessorize my temporary home base in Jaffa, too numerous to list here by name. Back in New York, I thank Zhafer Taweel for his assistance with Arab-English translations of System Ali’s summer 2011 performance at the Jaffa tent city. This work would not have been possible without the financial support that was extended to me. Preliminary fieldwork in 2010 was enabled by Columbia University’s GSAS and Middle East Studies summer research travel funds. My fieldwork in 2011–2012 was supported by grants from the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) and Columbia’s GSAS. Special thanks go to Penny Mitchell and Hadeel Qazzaz from PARC for their personal engagement with the challenges of my fieldwork. The 2012–2013 dissertation write-up year was financed by a Whiting Foundation grant.

xviii Acknowledgements The process of revising and adapting the dissertation to a book was enabled by my postdoctoral fellowships with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A big thank you goes to the IPRH staff and most especially Director Antoinette Burton and Deputy Director Nancy Castro. Final edits on the book took place as I started my fellowship at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace. I am indebted to all these organizations for the material support I have received and for their recognition of the importance of the cultural terrain that this project navigates. I am most grateful for the years of support and encouragement I have received from a community of mentors and peers along the way, starting with Atesh Sonneborn, who has been my friend and unofficial mentor for many years. At Columbia University I thank Ana María Ochoa, Aaron Fox, Ellen Gray and my advisor Chris Washburne. A special thank you is owed to Chris for being there in every possible way. Heartfelt thanks are also due to scholars outside my department or university whose work has inspired me and who have mentored me in different ways, including Edwin Seroussi and Rashid Khalidi. I also thank Antoinette Burton and Michael Silvers for reading drafts of my book; Ted Swedenburg for the recommendations; and David McDonald, whose feedback on my dissertation supported this project’s development and who has also provided moral and intellectual affirmations of its value. Finally, I thank Daphne Carr for her input and Janet Christensen for helping me be more concise. My most profound thank you goes to my family, who provided a backbone of support throughout my fieldwork experiences in Palestine-Israel, and whose ongoing embrace is a primary reason for my return after so many years. This work is dedicated first and foremost to my parents Ilana and Naaman Belkind, who have instilled in me the freedom to be who I am, no matter what. It is also dedicated to my brothers Ori and Shai and my cousins Michali Alroy and Hanan Abu-Nassar, whose love sustained me during my time in the field and remains part of the energy that always keeps me going.

Introduction

“I believe in a three-state solution: ‘Judea’ for the Jews, ‘Palestine’ for the Palestinians, and the rest of the country for all those who just want to live together.” This sentiment was expressed by Ben, a (Jewish) Israeli-American bass player and member of the Legacy Band, an R&B/hip hop ensemble shipped to the Middle East by the US State Department on a goodwill tour. The Legacy Band had just performed for an audience that included a small crowd of shy but appreciative Palestinian youth, and a sprinkling of representatives of East-Jerusalem’s American Consulate, in the auditorium of East-Jerusalem’s Notre Dame Church (December 4, 2011). Among the four members of the band, three of whom were African-American, Ben was the only one with native ties to the region. Ben was speaking with a Palestinian television crew that had come to cover the show. Ben’s statement greatly amused the TV crew, the American Consulate representatives, Legacy’s Palestinian driver, Ben’s Israeli family and all others present. By deterritorializing geographic boundaries and conceptions of sovereignty in favor of a “third state” for those who “want to live together,” it parodied contemporary debates that ubiquitously focus on the values of the one (bi-national) state or two-state “solutions” to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Both approaches place demographic ethnonational considerations and attendant geographic boundaries in high currency. The one-state solution is espoused by some left-leaning Jews as well as some Palestinians as a means of dissolving present Jewish hegemony in both State and Occupied Territories and providing civil liberties for all. Yet, the nature and ethnonational character (Israel or Palestine?) of this arrangement remains the ambiguous elephant in the room. The one-state solution is also visualized by die-hard expansionist Zionists as a means of maintaining territorial continuity and Jewish hegemony across Israel and the Occupied Territories, with total disregard for the inescapable eventuality of integration with a Palestinian population soon to become the majority in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The two-state solution is viewed as a means of realizing the separate national aspirations of both peoples. It holds currency among both Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis, and since the 1990s peace process, is internationally accepted as the most viable solution

2 Introduction for ending the conflict. In contrast, Ben’s statement projected a post-national identity that disrupted local regimes of knowledge, unbeholden to ethnonational categories, the materiality of maps, geographical borders, social boundaries, power imbalances and the geography of violence that characterize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ben’s statement also provided a humorous intervention in the weighty subject matter at the heart of this ethnography: the contemporary relationship between musical production and political life in the context of the protracted, violent conflict, which for over a century has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews1 in Palestine-Israel. Throughout the conflict’s history, music has served to mediate the construction of competing social imaginaries in this contested land. Both peoples have generated large music repertoires that reflected or symbolized the “nation,” invented “authenticized” pasts, fetishized the land, mobilized struggles, celebrated victories or lamented losses, in which the Other was often absented from the landscape or cast as enemy. Israel’s most emblematic national signifier is Songs of the Land of Israel (SLI), a canonic repertoire of songs in modern Hebrew but rooted in Eastern European modalities, that project the aesthetic sensibilities of Zionism’s founding fathers and are laced with tropes of native collectivity. SLI was promoted as official state-supported culture in the first decades following the country’s establishment (Regev and Seroussi 2004, Chapters 3–6). The repertoire most closely associated with the Palestinian national movement is the folk revival that accompanied the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s which, along with the image of the Palestinian peasant and idealization of the land, emerged as the national signifier of collectivity and resistance most prominently in the aftermath of the 1967 war (McDonald 2013b, Chapters 3 and 4). During the 1990s peace talks, with hope on the horizon, new imaginaries of regional integration and possibilities for a better future were also mediated through musical production, exemplified by several distinct yet overlapping trends. Palestinian musical production of this period reflected stylistic diversification that privileged “art” and individualized expressive forms over revolutionary commitment to the national cause and its associated collectivist musical representations. Both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis developed hybrid, experimental styles that sonically fused Western and Oriental musical idioms. Such experimentations also generated an unprecedented yield of musical collaborations between both peoples, which came to symbolize the blurring of sociopolitical boundaries and sites for fostering coexistence, via both their aesthetic and social resonances. In Israel, a growing interest in Arab culture was evidenced by the proliferation of classical Arabic music concerts featured in prominent venues and festivals. While the 1990s cultural renaissance reflected the optimism accompanying the peace process, the entry of the new millennium only brought further cycles of violence. In the years following the 1993 Accords the peace

Introduction  3 process stalled. The second intifada erupted in 2000, shortly after the failed US-brokered Camp David summit. Israel’s response was unprecedented in its heavy-handedness. The IDF invaded Palestinian urban centers in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), construction of the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank began, and draconian measures now curtailed Palestinian mobility. In 2007 fissures within the Palestinian leadership led to Hamas taking control of the Gaza Strip, to which Israel responded with a blockade on the territory. Altercations between Hamas and Israel led to a succession of Israeli military operations in Gaza (in 2008/2009, 2012, and 2014) with devastating outcomes for Gaza’s population. In the shadow of the ongoing violence, hopes for an imminent political resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have dimmed. This is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complicated cultural politics of music-making in Palestine-Israel in the post-Oslo era, a time of highly polarized sentiments and retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process. The book analyzes the politics of sound and the ways by which music-making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, affect public spheres and contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic perspectives that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by the profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel) and the stateless (Palestinians of the oPt), the complex positioning of Israel’s Palestinian minority and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence. With the conceptual life and currency “Palestine” has gained around the world as an entity deserving of statehood since Oslo, such perspectives are also informed by strategic shifts in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is increasingly taking place on the world stage through diplomacy and cultural work. Finally, despite the polarized atmosphere and its effects on cultural production, music-making continues to provide sites in which ethnonational divisions are transgressed. All these trends are reflected and constituted in cultural production in myriad ways. The ethnography maps out how, in the post-Oslo period, music is used as an agent of both boundary markings and boundary crossings, a continuously evolving process that injects new meanings into epistemologies of “nation,” “home,” “citizenship” or “ethnicity” for groups and individuals. Mapping out diverse musico-aesthetic terrains in this context is a means of foregrounding the situational, context-specific, contingent and shifting nature of meaning-making in a region often perceived through a prism of hardened, ontological ethnonational binaries. Further scrutiny of the Legacy Band concert and related events contextualizes their performance within the conflict, and also weaves together several threads that anchor my approach to interrogating the dynamics of music in conflict. The Palestinian television crew covering the show interviewed Ben because they were especially interested in hearing about his experience as a Jewish-Israeli in the oPt, where the Legacy Band had been touring for the previous several days. Ben spoke of his encounters in Hebron, where the

4 Introduction band had conducted a workshop followed by a concert. Among Palestinian urban centers, Hebron is an especially charged place. Local Palestinians face constant attacks on their bodies and properties along with other forms of harassment from the few hundred settlers who live within Hebron’s Old City, and from the military, which is heavily present to “keep the peace” by protecting the settlers. Palestinians are also barred from certain public spaces, including a main commercial thoroughfare, in order to support this arrangement. Apparently, the Hebron youth attending the workshop had picked up quickly that Ben was Israeli, as he spoke Hebrew with the band’s driver, a Palestinian Jerusalemite. Ben sensed that his identity turned the Hebron youth off. The youths’ attitude completely changed however, when Ben told them about himself, most specifically when he recounted that he had never performed his required military service.2 For Palestinians of the oPt, soldiers are the enforcing agents of a brutal occupation, and Ben’s refusal to join the military opened up a space for the Hebron crowd to warm up to him. Ben also told them that his grandfather was the Iraqi immigrant and communist activist Moussa Khoury. Known for his weekly satirical column in Israel’s Communist Party’s Arabic newspaper Al-Ittihad—whose prominent writers became known in the region well past Israel’s borders—Khoury retained Arabic as his language of literary identity throughout his life in Israel. Ben closed this introduction to the Hebron youth with his three-state solution plan, which won them over. The concert that followed was so well attended that many had to watch the performance on video screens constructed outside the venue. In the following pages I unravel the different threads packed in this little vignette that provide some of the impetus for the lines of inquiry, the ethnographic gaze and the themes underlined in this work, as a brief exposé for the content that follows. The first thread probes the relationship between borders, social boundaries and musico-aesthetic production in Israel-Palestine, which Ben’s statement had (so absurdly) deconstructed. Borders, boundaries, music As numerous scholars (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Morehouse 2004; Newman 2006; Rumford 2006; Salter 2006; van Houtum 2010) have pointed out, borders are material technologies and manifestations of spatial regimes of power. As such, borders implement a politics of exclusion and inclusion, constitute identities and construct social barriers. In the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, borders are both the product and mainstay of a history of violent encounters, in which Israel has consistently gained the upper hand, and Palestinians have been subject to numerous cycles of spatial fragmentation. Today the separation wall, the blockade on Gaza, and the associated regimes of control and surveillance Israel uses to govern Palestinian mobility profoundly represent, materially and affectively, the

Introduction  5 malignant effect of imposed borders. The Hebron youth who attended the Legacy Band’s performance could not follow the band to East Jerusalem, a short driving distance from their home, without receiving a rare special entry permit and entering Jerusalem through checkpoints staffed by armed soldiers. The construction of borders ripples, in different ways and manifestations, through institutions, social relations and cultural production. While much of the literature about borders focuses on the architecture and infrastructures of power, domination and violence enforced by nation states, my objective is to explore how sound and expressive culture intersect with their physical and social effects. Borders permeate this ethnography, functioning as material reality, as metaphor, as social practice, as structures of feeling and as embodied experience. In taking this approach I follow Josh Kun’s (2001) call to theorize the “aural border,” one narrated through sound, music and noise. Characterized by sonic juxtapositions, collusions and interpenetrations, the “aural border” not only reflects the material border’s violent impositions but also enables the mapping of cartographies of possibility unavailable in the real time of political realities. While Kun speaks of a geopolitically accepted national border (US-Mexico), I extend the “aural border” lens to a place and region in which national borders are most contested. This study questions and narrates different ways by which borders and social boundaries are locally conceived, reified, practiced, subverted, resisted, transformed or transcended, through musical practice. The social construction of borders and boundaries points to the importance of understanding the relationship between performance and space. Ben’s discursive performance of relationality was recycled from an unmediated site in Hebron to Palestinian TV in East Jerusalem, gaining new audience and meanings through its re-signification. If, as Judith Butler (1993) argues, the performative act and its reiterations are a site for identity formation, in the context of Israel-Palestine, performance also acts as a catalyst for asserting, contesting and reconfiguring borders and social boundaries across different physical and social spaces. Musical and discursive performances, among other aesthetic and ideational cultural signifiers, interface with the performative aspects of material objects and spaces. Such aspects include the power imbued in representational maps, in the concrete 12-foot slabs of the separation wall and in the watchtowers, loudspeakers and barred passages that characterize permanent checkpoints. This interface is analyzed in a few case studies highlighted in this book, among them the story of a Palestinian youth orchestra’s performance at a checkpoint, which, for the duration of the concert, remade the checkpoint into a Palestinian public space. The important intersection between performance and space also pertains to the Legacy Band’s concert, as the Notre Dame Church is located just outside the ancient walls of the sign-loaded space of Jerusalem’s Old City. If borders are intimately interwoven with spatial regimes of power, so is the very location and geography of the event that brought the Legacy Band

6 Introduction to this location in East Jerusalem. This geography weaves together larger, concentric circles of global and local intersections of power, hegemony and cultural production, echoing the long history of foreign interventions in the Holy Land. The Church, a seemingly bizarre choice of venue for a hip hop show, was established by French Assumptionists in 1885 to provide hospitality to pilgrims, with the added contemporary “mission” of “fostering peace and unity among cultures, religions, and peoples.”3 Representatives of the American Consulate in East Jerusalem were at the concert because they were responsible for representing the United States to Palestinians of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In parallel to the American Embassy, which interfaces with Israel, they are the conduit for American interventions in the region. Such interventions manifest locally in articulation with political, economic and cultural spheres. The East Jerusalem Consulate’s activities were geared to prop and support the governance of the Palestinian Authority (PA)4 —the creation of which was the outcome of the American-brokered peace initiatives that led to the Oslo Accords in 1993—as the sole legitimate representation of the Palestinian people. US interventions in support of Palestinian state-building at this time included development projects in the West Bank and sponsorship of cultural projects. However, given the suspension of the “peace process”, such projects were often inconsistent with the United States’ support for Israel, which was channeled through the American Embassy then in Tel Aviv.5 Culture plays an important role in this venture of “peacemaking” and “state building.” The Legacy Band was participating in the US State Department’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs’ “The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad” program, whose mission was to “encourage mutual respect and understanding,” in countries including “Algeria, Tunisia, Israel/ Jerusalem, Egypt, South Sudan and Kenya” (Misani 2011).6 Each of these sites was undergoing political instability associated with the tumultuous events of the Arab Spring or varieties of ethnic, national and/or religious strife. Cultural production is hence intimately connected to the intersection of foreign diplomacy and projected interests, evangelical and/or political, with local moves and desires. Several case studies discussed in this work unpack the cultural politics and power plays involved in such intersections. Cultural policy This brings us to the link between governmentality and cultural policy, which forms the very basis for the Legacy Band’s tour in Palestine-Israel. Cultural policy is a set of values, principles and goals that guide the state, local governments or NGOs in cultural interventions. Its implementation is intended to promote productive forms of cultural citizenship, ameliorate social dysfunctions and stake political claims. There are numerous NGOs active in the region promoting music education with the added aim of achieving

Introduction  7 sociopolitical goals. In Israel, a number of public organizations and NGOs are dedicated to promoting coexistence and pluralism between Israel’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority through music-making, via multicultural collaborative representations. Such projects are in part the outcome of the 1990s peace process, which established an ideology of aesthetics as a site of conflict negotiation and transcendence. Today they also represent the shrinking potential and residue of this ideology. The multiculturalist approach to coexistence underscores the limitations of this ethos to affect the public sphere at a time characterized by a turning away from relationality and a growing legislative and discursive drive to “Judaize” the country. In addition, such projects can no longer extend to the oPt as they did during the 1990s peace process, for both logistical and ideological reasons. In the oPt, institutionalized music education is often bound with nationmaking and resistance to the Israeli Occupation, and hence, to the very assertion of difference. Perceptually linked to the process of building cultural infrastructure that befits a modern state, and a means of consolidating and representing a defiant Palestinian collectivity, classical Western and Arabic musics and ensemble work are cornerstones of music education in Palestinian conservatories. Among these conservatories the prevailing view is that collaborative work only functions to support Israel’s pluralistic image around the world, masking the violence and repression perpetrated by the Jewish State; hence, the majority of Palestinian cultural organizations boycott such collaborations. This work features organizations based on both sides of the border that adhere either to the politics of coexistence or to the politics of nation-building and resistance, to interrogate how music-making is mobilized in the construction of subjectivities in the postOslo era. Relationality The final thread relevant to this project and highlighted by the vignette are the dissonances that arise when personal geographies do not align with the imposed borders and social boundaries perpetuated by the conflict, and the musico-political implications of such dissonances. Ben’s statement projected a universal, cosmopolitan approach to human experience that refuses to be subject to local projections of Othering formed through the lens of the conflict. By recalling his grandfather, Ben was pointing to the ways in which local regimes of knowledge, based on ethnonational affiliations and experienced through local power hierarchies, marginalize the multiplex aspects that form individual subjectivities in the region. In speaking of local regimes of knowledge, I am highlighting the ways in which borders and social boundaries have been naturalized into conceptions of Self and Other. The story of the conflict is commonly narrated as occurring between discrete, self-contained and uniform national entities that have developed separately, which historian Zachary Lockman (1996) describes as

8 Introduction a model of “dual societies.” This model occludes points of contact and interdependencies that occurred between both peoples in favor of constructing teleological narratives for both Zionism and the Palestinian national movement. It also contributes to the construction of a Palestinian/Arab-Jewish/ Israeli binary further naturalized via structural segregation, education and perpetuation of the myth that Israel represents a (modern, Judeo-Christian) Western extension in the Orientalized (premodern, Arab, Muslim) East (Anidjar 2003; Stein and Swedenburg 2005b). Instead, Lockman proposes a “relational model,” which foregrounds the interrelationships and mutual constructedness of Palestinian and Jewish narratives, histories and articulations with the region and the wider world. I shall return to this point later in this introduction. For now, I wish to point out how the relational model supports our understanding of the multiplicities involved in the construction of local subjectivities, which are overlooked or flattened out in the shadow of the conflict’s bifurcating lens. Moussa Khoury was an Iraqi Jew, communist and writer, who prioritized a cultural and linguistic regional affiliation with the Arab world, and JewishPalestinian civic partnership in Israel, over ethnonational/religious (Jewish) Israeliness. His cultural and political affiliations destabilize the epistemological binary between Arab and Jew. They also point to wider regional affiliations of Mizrahim, which were repressed by Zionist narratives and Israeli institutions that viewed their culture as inferior (Shohat 1999). The inherent dissonances between the complex personal geographies of local subjectivities, and the essentialist grid of ethnicity, nationality and forms of belonging generated by the conflict and its related epistemologies, form yet another locus of musical inquiry in this project. A focus on the lives and musics of Palestinian citizens (Chapter 5), who experience these dissonances most profoundly, highlights the multiplicities and intersectionalities involved, as well as the role of individual agency in developing public spheres that map onto the politics of musical production. My approach to the issues I touched on in this exposé will be further developed below. Beforehand, a short explanation of how terminology is used in this work is called for. The complex, semantically loaded designations of subject positions generated in articulation with the conflict are influenced by historical developments and by profound power imbalances between the two peoples. Multiple designations reflect different ways in which geographical areas, nationalities and ethnicities are constructed and labeled in both colloquial and official parlance. These designations affect public policies, local epistemologies and individual identities alike. They are also oftentimes fluid, changing over time or according to different facets of the hyphenated identities that inhabit the region, aspects of which may be differentially foregrounded in a given moment, or for a specific audience. Regardless of the fluidities involved, these designations are implicated in the ideological bent and relative position of their utterer—including that of this writer. Mapping out this terminology both clarifies the semantic lineage of such labels and renders my usage of them transparent.

Introduction  9

Terminology and its politics When speaking of Israel-Palestine, I am speaking of the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, while considering divergent territorial and statist categories and the meanings assigned to different representations of this area. International designations, solidified following the Oslo Accords (and naturalized by discourses of the UN, the European Union, UNESCO, etc.), distinguish between Israel and the oPt. The oPt is geographically demarcated from Israel by the Green Line—the 1949 armistice line that separated Israel from its Arab neighbors. The term “oPt” appears in this work specifically in relation to territories conquered by Israel in 1967, which are internationally recognized as the basis for the future Palestinian State. These territories include the West Bank and East Jerusalem (part of the West Bank which Israel has annexed, an act unrecognized by the international community) conquered from Jordan, and the Gaza strip, previously controlled by Egypt. Right-wing Israeli ideologists refer to the entire territory “between the River and the Sea” as “Greater Israel” (eretz-Israel ha-shlema, literally “the whole/complete Land of Israel”). These ideologists have labeled the West Bank “Judea and Samaria,” a biblical designation that projects rights of Jewish ownership highly promoted and, along with the sense of ownership, naturalized into the public sphere by successive Israeli governments, since the expansionist Likud party took power in 1977. The term “Occupied Territories,” or simply “The Territories” (ha-shtaḥim), is sometimes also used in Israeli discourses, absenting “Palestine” from the designation. Palestinians often refer to the whole territory as historic Palestine, or simply Palestine, when speaking of cultural and territorial lineages. They demarcate geographical divisions between State and Occupied Territory by speaking of ’48 territories (now Israel) and ’67 territories (oPt). These designations profoundly reflect the cycles of trauma and displacement Palestinians have suffered. The Nakba (catastrophe) references the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that led to Israel’s independence and to the dispersal of the majority of the Palestinian population (approximately 750,000); ’48 territories are those Israel established itself on following the war. The Nakba was followed by the Naksa (setback), the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in which (among other territories) Israel took control of the Palestinian-populated West Bank and Gaza, precipitating further cycles of displacement and fragmentation for Palestinians.7 Internal fissures brought further fracturing to Palestinian society. While Fatah, the dominant party within the PLO, assumed power in the PA following the 1993 Accords, in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections the Islamist Hamas organization emerged as the leading party. Conflict between the two parties led to Hamas taking control of PA institutions in the Gaza Strip. Israel responded with a complete blockade on Gaza. This situation imposed further fragmentation on Palestinian lives and tremendous hardships on Gaza’s population, which is constantly described by relief agencies as living on the brink of a full-fledged humanitarian disaster. In this book

10 Introduction I speak of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip when referencing specific geographical territory. I use the term “oPt” when speaking of both or when highlighting Israeli governmentality therein, in order to clarify that I am specifying parts of Palestine-Israel that are under military occupation or siege. However, I speak of “Palestine” when foregrounding emic categories of the oPt’s Palestinian residents of the place in which they live and the contexts in which I worked. My research in the oPt centers on the West Bank as the blockade on Gaza rendered it inaccessible to this research.8 These geographic distinctions articulate with the ways in which nationality, ethnicity and social location are conceived of and used in official discourses and everyday speech. In Palestinian colloquial speech, Palestinian citizens of Israel are commonly referred to as ’48s, or “inside Palestinians,” referring to their geographical location inside historic Palestine. ’48s are descendants of the approximately 150,000 Palestinians who remained within Israel’s borders following the Nakba, and today they make up approximately 20 percent of the country’s citizens (about 9 million). The ’48 distinction hence also articulates differences in civic status between Palestinian citizens and non-citizens of the oPt. Israel has never acknowledged its Palestinian citizens as a national minority; they are labeled “Arabs” (as opposed to “Jewish”) in official documents under a category of “nationality,” a designation that in effect conflates ethnicity with nationality as a category subordinate to Israeli citizenship. This is partially due to historical developments. The formation of a modern Palestinian national consciousness occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century, most prominently in the aftermath of WWI and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Khalidi 1997). However, with the rise of the PLO in the 1960s, and most especially in the aftermath of the 1967 war, it became decoupled from its pan-Arab registers, surging as a profoundly distinct Palestinian political entity. Israel did not accept the existence of a Palestinian people for decades (nor did the PLO accept a Jewish “nationality”), and demands from the increasingly politicized Palestinian community in Israel to be recognized as an indigenous national minority are a recent, post-Oslo trend. The de-nationalized ethnic register of the “Arab” label, however, has also been instrumental in furthering the State’s goals of separating Palestinian citizens from their oPt and diaspora brethren, and denying them status as either individuals with full civic rights or a collective national minority within the Jewish State. The fraught identity politics involved in various labels of regional identity are well exemplified by Israel’s 2013 Supreme Court rejection of an appeal by a group of Israeli citizens (mostly Jews) who wanted the official designation of their nationality changed in the population registry from “Jewish” or “Arab” to “Israeli.” In their ruling, the judges explained that changing the nationality designation in the registry cannot be based on the subjective feelings and viewpoints of the person asking for the

Introduction  11 change, but on the law and the common definitions of nationality… in the future changes in the law may need to be made, among which the recognition of some “local” nationality that may be created over the years, will be made possible. (Hovel 2013) This seemingly bizarre negation of the Israeli nation, and the myriad large bodies of locally produced cultural repertoires, genres, symbols and expressions it has developed as a nation, points to the fraught and complex bundle of categories involved in defining nation, ethnicity and religious affiliations in Israel. The appealers wanted a country based solely on a civic contract between citizens and the government. This negated the basis on which Israel was established as a place that “belongs” to all Jews, conflating religion, ethnicity and nationality into a primordial entitlement to territory, and excluding those who are not Jewish from full membership in the body politic. The Supreme Court would not challenge the logic on which the State was founded, but to support this decision, had effectively negated the very nation that brought the court itself into existence. Labels used in everyday talk in Israel are just as complex as their legal and civic status manifestations. Palestinian citizens may refer to themselves as Palestinians, as Arabs and as ‘48s (a designation most Jewish-Israelis are not familiar with), or as some variation of hyphenated identity (e.g., ArabIsraeli), depending on context and degree of politicization. Jewish-Israelis may refer to themselves as (unhyphenated) Israelis, or as Mizrahi (Oriental) or Ashkenazi (Occidental). These categories differentiate between Jews originating in (largely) Muslim-majority countries in Asia and North Africa from those originating in Europe, providing ethnic classifications (and social divisions) sublimated under Jewish ethnicity/nationality. Jewish Israelis might also refer to themselves by their hereditary country of origin (Moroccan, Russian, etc.). Such labels are sometimes manipulated in moves that present an identity politics contradictory to hegemonic definitions, as when a musician of Iraqi origins (Yair Dalal) presents himself as an Arab-Jew. In doing so, he is foregrounding a history of Arab-Jewish relationality and critiquing Israel’s marginalization of Mizrahi culture, as well as its proclivity to distinguish itself as superior to, and separate from, the region in which it is embedded. Likewise, when Israel-based Palestinian artists (Jowan Safadi; Akram Abdulfattah) publish their place of residence on their websites or Facebook pages as located in (occupied) Palestine, they are displacing hegemonic definitions of State, territory and nation. I privilege the term “Palestinian” over “Arab” when speaking of Palestinian citizens of Israel, because the artists prominently featured in this work would prefer this designation, and also, as a means of speaking to official Israeli denial of this aspect of their identity. However, I attend to the fluidities of multiple designations, using the term “Arab” in situations in which this designation is naturalized within the contexts of cultural production, as, for example, in the multicultural musical projects of the Jaffa Arab-Jewish

12 Introduction Community Center. When speaking of Israeli Jews, I note this as a hyphenated category, both for the sake of clarity and in order to counter the normalized assumption of privilege that as a stand-alone category, Israeli = Jewish.

Performing resistance, performing coexistence and the spaces in between I now return to the primary focus of this ethnography. The basic supposition that underlines this project’s undertaking is that cultural and political domains are not only mutually constitutive (Stokes 1994) but also extensions of each other. In the context of a violent conflict, this concurrence becomes a hyper-reality that shapes both cultural production and its presence in the public sphere most intensively. Music is an especially rich site for tracking the mutually constitutive aspects of culture and politics because of its performative and participatory nature, its publicness, its circulatory unboundedness, and the ways in which its modes of signification and reception combine analytic and affective realms of perception. Music can be read as a social text, perceived as an embodied, sensory experience, and felt as projection of the Self. In short, music combines different ways of knowing. It is hence a potent instrument of governmentality as well as a powerful medium for projecting and mobilizing oppositional individual and/or collective agency. John Street argues for the inherent power of knowledge transmitted through music audition, stating that “music does not just provide a vehicle of political expression, it is that expression” (2012, 1). Given a situation of political conflict, the question that follows is what, in this particular context, does music do? Or, as Stuart Hall asks, “What does it mean to take seriously… the thought that cultural politics and questions of culture, of discourse, of metaphor, as absolutely deadly political questions?” (1997, 289–290). Here I would like to recall the discourses promoted by the music organizations located on different sides of the Green Line mentioned above, in which two tropes are profoundly implicated: “music as coexistence” and “music as resistance.” It is important to understand these tropes both within their local context and history, and within broader debates on the role of music in conflict situations. Both tropes are manifestations of contingent and evolving narratives in the current historical moment that are deeply positioned in the power relations constructed by the conflict. Understanding these tropes means understanding the places and positionalities from which they have developed. Music as coexistence One of the premises on which many musical interventions in political conflicts are based is that the performing arts provide a locus for recognizing and legitimizing intragroup identities while encouraging intergroup cooperation.

Introduction  13 This understanding is interlinked with a more ephemeral and widespread belief that music is a universal language, transcending all boundaries. The popular belief in the redemptive power of music provides the i mpetus for a multitude of concerts and festivals around the world organized around themes such as “music for peace,” “music for harmony” or the “culture of peace.” Various scholars (Higgins 2014; Letts 1997; Shehan Campbell 1997) have debated and deconstructed this idea. What is pertinent to this study however, is how this conceptualization becomes a productive frame for the construction of sociocultural spheres and affective affiliations in particular contexts. Numerous musical interventions in Israel-Palestine, from the prominent West-Eastern Divan Orchestra founded by the Jewish-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, to various community projects taking place in Israel today, are anchored in this premise. One of the most publicized musical interventions into Palestinian-Israeli politics of coexistence took place during the 1994 signing of the Norwegianmoderated Oslo agreement concluding the Gaza-Jericho Accord, between Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and PLO leader Yassir Arafat. The signing occurred during the intermission of a Peace Concert in which a choir of Norwegian, Jewish-Israeli and oPt-based Palestinian children sang Zamān al-Salām (Time for Peace) in Arabic, Hebrew and English. Musically, the song featured Yair Dalal playing oud and oriental violin to the accompaniment of the Norwegian Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta. This provided a textual and aesthetic symbolic frame for feeling and imagining the supposed dawn of a new era. In this context, music was not only accorded an important place in the “peace process,” but constituted its projected ethical and aesthetic ideals. It also signified a new cultural politics of integration and relationality that characterized numerous hybrid experimentations throughout the 1990s (Brinner 2009). The musical coexistence projects taking place in Israel today tend to follow this aesthetic framing via multicultural representations that combine (local associations of) “East” and “West,” musically and linguistically, as a means of projecting pluralism and equal authorship of modes of expression. The popular belief in the redemptive power of music in conflict situations (and the extensive public funding poured into the actualization of this belief) is echoed in interdisciplinary academic debates on the potential role of expressive culture in general, with some focus on music in particular, as a mediating agent in the resolution of conflict. This idea has generated attention from anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, peace and conflict studies scholars (Avruch 1998; Bergh 2010; Gottesman 2017; Lederach 1995; Lumsden 2000; Ramsbotham et al. 2011; Urbain 2008a, 2008b; Zelizer and Rubinstein 2009), and more recently, ethnomusicologists (O’Connell 2011; O’Connell and Castelo-Branco 2010). In general, ethnomusicologists have regarded the “music as coexistence” trope with much more suspicion than have other disciplines. This is due to

14 Introduction disciplinary hyper-awareness of the inherent ambiguity in meaning-making generated by music-making, and the very plasticity that renders music as much an instrument of war, domination and subjugation, as a powerful mediator of redemptive or transcendent potential (Araújo 2006; Cusick 2008; Johnson and Cloonan 2008; Pieslak, 2009; Ritter and Daughtry 2007). As Samuel Araújo explains, this awareness involves “taking both conflict and, to a certain extent, violence as central conditions of knowledge production, which includes the production of musical knowledge and cultural analyses of music and music-making” (2006, 289). The understanding that peace and war are a continuum wrapped up in power relations, and that music serves different functions along this continuum, can get overlooked, or reductively approached, in the enthusiastic turn to culture, and especially music, as a potent resource in conflict mediation. As John Morgan O’Connell puts it, “a peaceful song for one person could be a warlike song for another” (2011, 117). This observation is especially salient when regarding the ways in which the coexistence politics of collaborative musical projects in Israel today are experienced and viewed by different constituencies. Such projects are marginalized by mainstream sociopolitical viewpoints in Israel, which, since the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the aftermath of Oslo, have veered sharply to the right. This trend has been accompanied by increasing xenophobia, legalization of Jewish hegemony and entrenchment of the settlement movement and the Occupation. In the face of this trend, coexistence projects seek to advance a universalist assumption that art represents and constitutes the common humanity of all, and hence can facilitate a more egalitarian and productive Arab-Jewish civic partnership in Israel. Certainly, many participants in these projects and their audiences, Jews and Palestinians, value this ethos. Yet, these projects also advance a particular understanding and meaning of what such partnerships entail that does not, or cannot, truly challenge the structural discrimination of Palestinians citizens of Israel, the total lack of civic rights in the oPt, and the overriding hegemonic presumption of Israel as a Jewish State, which are unacceptable premises for many Palestinians. This tension is well exemplified by the following anecdote, recounted by the director of the Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra (AJYO), Dr. Meir Weisel. Wanting to revive musical partnerships across the Green Line that had begun taking place during Oslo but soon halted, he asked Suhail Khoury, the director of the Palestinian Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM), to partner in a joint concert. Khoury’s answer was that he would be willing to partner up if the concert were tagged as a joint project against the Occupation. Dr. Weisel declined: in this situation, universalist values were delimited by hegemonic pressures set on Israeli-initiated coexistence projects and the so-called apolitical boundaries to which they are confined. Because of the hegemonic frames that Israeli musical coexistence projects are restricted to today (and many would say were just as restricted during the Oslo process, as Palestinians had little leverage to advance their claims),

Introduction  15 many Palestinians, overwhelmingly in the oPt but also in Israel, regard such collaborative work as a means of whitewashing violent political realities. From this point of view, such collaborations amount to what is termed “normalization” (taṭbīʽ): the naturalization of unequal relations that serves those in power, and that both obscures and supports the oppressive occupation regime and the ethnonational hierarchy within Israel. This critique of Palestinian/Jewish-Israeli collaborative work has been propagated most prominently by the growing grassroots BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement and its cultural arm PACBI (Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). The movement was founded in 2005 and signed on by numerous civil society organizations, trade unions and academics in Palestine, yet right from the beginning BDS/PACBI focused its attention on global stages.9 Most Palestinian cultural organizations in the West Bank are members of the BDS movement, viewing the campaign to boycott Israel as an ethical stance against Occupation and subjugation, a nonviolent resistance strategy, and a means for generating support for the Palestinian cause around the world. Both approaches, coexistence and boycott, equate the production of culture with what it means, or what it should mean, to be human. But what being human stands for takes divergent interpretations in the context of the conflict. Israeli coexistence projects advance an imaginary in which diversity is a showcase for a universalized humanity based on difference yet fundamental sameness. Due to “the situation,” however, sameness remains an “if only” proposition. In Palestine, musical production is intimately linked with a politics of nation-building and resistance in which the notion of a universalized humanity is yoked to the assertion of difference. Music as resistance If politics are essentially a cultural discourse involving a shared set of symbols and meanings, then resistance is an act of rewriting that discourse (Duncombe 2002). In the context of the Palestinian experience of dispossession and nation-making, music-as-resistance is understood as part and parcel of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The musical repertoire most prominently indexed with Palestinian liberation politics is associated with the rise of the PLO in the 1960s, especially following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Arab defeat led to disassociation from the pan-Arab nationalist rhetoric, espoused most prominently by Egyptian President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, who incorporated Palestinian return (al-‘Awda) to historic Palestine into his pan-Arab design. Among Palestinians, who in the aftermath of the 1967 war were left feeling used by all parties involved, this process was paired with the rise of an independently led Palestinian guerilla movement (the fidā’iyyīn) and a cultural recycling of folk repertoires (dialect, dress codes, foods, musics, etc.), now drafted to the aims of national liberation. In the years of the fidā’iyyīn martial hymns were mixed with indigenous (sha‘bi) genres and the

16 Introduction peasant kūfiyya (headscarf) was paired with fatigues. Yet the folklore revival remained a prominent practice symbolic of national sentiments, well after the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon (1982) and the decline of the armed struggle (McDonald 2013b, 78–115). This was a performative space in which sound was perceived as the very assertion of that which has been violently silenced: the narrative, the history and the very existence of the Palestinian people. However, it was a reclamation of agency that in the West, as Edward Said pointed out in his article “Permission to Narrate” (1984), remained absented from both political accounts that are hostile to Palestinian claims and experiences and those that are sympathetic. In contemporary Western accounts and interpretations of Palestinian music however, “resistance” looms large. This is evident in music compilation albums distributed in the West themed around the Palestinian struggle for liberation,10 media fascination with Palestinian hip hop as a signifier of resistance (Swedenburg 2013) and academic scholarship (Kanaaneh et  al. 2013; McDonald 2013b). The prominent musical activity that fueled and narrated the mass mobilizations of the Arab Spring, which generated much attention from both media and academic scholarship (El Hamamsy and Soliman 2013; LeVine 2012; Swedenburg 2012), has also contributed to the projection of popular cultural forms in the Middle East as something to be viewed predominantly through the lens of resistance politics. But what resistance means in the particular Palestinian context needs further unpacking. What is “music-as-resistance”? And how does it articulate, ethically and aesthetically, with the politics of resistance? A common answer one hears in Palestine today is that the very act of making music, of trying to live a quasi-normal life under the Occupation and against all odds, is in itself an act of resistance, regardless of the type and content of the music performed. This understanding resonates in academic writing as well.11 In my view, the very presumption that all Palestinian music is about resistance is one that is made salient most especially when viewed through the lens of a historical moment in which—at least in the West Bank—diplomacy, an emphasis on human rights discourses and prolific cultural production rather than armed struggle are the mainstay of Palestinian resistance strategies and struggles for legitimization. This contemporary understanding of the role of music in the conflict does not necessarily reflect the different ways in which Palestinian resistance was locally conceived and practiced during specific historical episodes. In Palestine, music’s place and historical role in the sounding of resistance was at times also punctuated by a liberation politics in which an ideology of silence, most especially during the difficult periods of the intifadas when exposure to violence, and resistance through violence, overwhelmed the production of knowledge. Iris Jean Klein (2001) speaks of the process of Palestinian selfnationalization during the first intifada (1987–1993) as one of “suspension of everyday life.” This meant a suspension of rituals, life-cycle events, parties, entertainment, weddings and celebrations. The ethos was one of ascetic

Introduction  17 self-restraint and abstention, which resonates with the concept of ṣumūd (steadfastness or persistence), a collective production of stoic adaptation to the abnormality of everyday life (Allen 2008). In the absence of everyday social spaces in which music is heard, the only role that music can have is in collectivized revolution (thawra) and nation-making. This leaves little room for any but fixed formulas of signification. It also provides for a hegemonic frame of social propriety that suppresses a whole range of subjective experiences and individualized expression. The denial of and abstention from the everyday “normal” equates the de-normalization imposed by the Occupation with the de-normalization of a life sans culture. During the second intifada, Ramzi Aburedwan, founder of the AlKamandjâti conservatory in Palestine, encountered criticism when he started teaching music to the children at the refugee camp he grew up in. Ramzi wanted to transform the experience of the long periods of enforced curfew and indoor confinement to an enjoyable and productive use of the children’s time. For Ramzi’s critics, however, music education was a frilly endeavor inappropriate to the extreme hardships and overwhelming losses experienced by all, and to the revolutionary focus of the intifada. But Ramzi’s vision and goals were a preview to a new, upcoming era that had started in the 1990s following Oslo, but became most conspicuous in the aftermath of the second intifada (2000–2005). In this post-intifada era, the proliferation of cultural institutions, festivals and events that highlight “Palestine” or “national” (waṭanī) in their title is the hallmark of a politics of nation-building and resistance in which “normalizing” life against all odds is a prominent paradigm. The politics of sound have an important role here, as the performative celebration of Palestinianness in public spaces, so restricted by the separation wall, the checkpoints, military presence, the occupation bureaucracy and the encroaching settlements, is a means of re-inscribing spaces of confinement into spaces of Palestinian agency and resistance. The ways in which this interface with power and violence is ethically lived and aesthetically reconfigured is the subject of Chapter 3 in this book. What we have here then are two different forms of resistance and cultural expression, each suited to different political and historical contexts and the subjectivities they produce. One emphasizes armed struggle and civic support for it through the negation of cultural production in everyday life, which, at its bleakest moments, was also paired with intensive cultural production centered on shahīd iconographies and commemorations (Allen 2008). The other emphasizes diverse forms of cultural production as the voice, content and signification of a spirited humanity that resists the violence of a de-humanizing repressive regime of Occupation. “Music as resistance” then can be the insistence on sounding, experiencing and celebrating life against all odds, and it can also become the silence emblematic of life abnormal, or life de-humanized. Both approaches project Palestinian agency and resistance, but depending on the context, “resistance” itself takes on highly different meanings. While musical production in the West

18 Introduction Bank today is flourishing more than ever, some tension remains among cultural producers regarding whether the primary purpose of music is to form an emblem of collective representation, or to portray diversely stylized artistic expressions of individual experiences through and as “art.” David McDonald (2013b) provides further nuance to the reading of the dynamics of Palestinian resistance by proposing two registers within which “music as resistance” should be further interrogated. The first highlights local frames of power struggles, not only vis-à-vis the occupier but also vis-à-vis competing intra-Palestinian discourses. This is well exemplified by local critiques of the PA’s diplomatic moves and negotiations. On the eve of Palestine’s appeal to the UN to be counted as a full member State (September 23, 2011), I attended an evening at the Lāji’ (refugee) Community Center in the al-Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, an event that discursively centered on how this move could affect the lives of Palestinian refugees. For, if Palestine were to be accepted at the UN as a full member state, it would be based on territorial sovereignty within the oPt, and hence, potentially bypass or cast aside the right of return (also upheld by UN resolution 194) for refugees originating in 1948 territories now part of Israel. As we walked into the community center, armed Palestinian security forces were patrolling the refugee camp. They were here to “keep the peace,” to discourage opposition to the PA’s international diplomatic moves and to prevent local dissent from angrily spilling over towards the checkpoint and Israeli settlements further down the main artery leading out of Bethlehem. The speeches made at the community center focused on the inalienable rights of the refugees to their ancestral homes. Speeches were back-dropped by a banner on which an eye enclosed the Palestinian flag and the inscription rājiʽīn (we will return), and sided by the separation wall that borders on the community center, visually packed with graffitied images of soldier violence, local resistance and exilic displacement. A stylized dabke performance by the al-‘Awda (The Return) dance troupe followed the speeches. Popularized as a revolutionary art form during the PLO’s ascent, dabke is part of the folklore revival, signifying Palestinian authenticity, nationalism and resistance.12 However, here the performance’s targeted Other was not only the colonizer but also the PA, which is internationally positioned to represent all Palestinians. For many of the Aida refugee camp inhabitants this move for international legitimization amounted to throwing out the baby along with the bathwater: their fundamental rights to their homes in historic Palestine. The speaker who introduced the dance troupe made a point of highlighting that dabke was a tradition the refugees had preserved since the Nakba. And al-‘Awda’s presentation was a performative reminder to the PA’s security forces that the residents of the refugee camps are the “authentic” core of Palestinian resistance (maqāwma) and of what it means to be Palestinian, in a historic moment in which the struggle for liberation is increasingly encased in international diplomacy and new symbols of Palestinian modernity.

Introduction  19 Modernity brings me to the second register by which McDonald problematizes “music as resistance:” the reductive tendency of academic readings anchored in postcolonial studies to view cultural production largely through the binary lens of domination and resistive empowerment and to romanticize “resistance” rather than interrogate its framing. Such readings often collapse distinctions between different forms of resistance, are inattentive to the always shifting dynamics of context and power, and elide other possible meanings of cultural production. Academic fetishization of “music as resistance” has generated much interest in Palestinian hip hop, due to the genre’s association with oppressed groups in general and Palestinian youth culture’s transnationalized, modern expressions of resistance in particular. This focus leads to a “regime of representation” (Nooshin 2017) that essentializes Palestinian identity by marginalizing rap artists’ engagement with issues and aesthetic realms that do not project “the nation” and its struggles, and by treating artists as representations of a collectivity rather than as complex individuals with diverse positions and artistic interests (Swedenburg 2013). The focus on hip hop’s resistive empowerment also leaves the “political” in other genres and representations undertheorized. **** If “music as coexistence” and “music as resistance” are important sites of power struggles taking place both within and between different arenas of the conflict, then cultural policy is an important stakeholder in shaping these dynamics. For, as Tony Bennett (1992) suggests, culture is both an “object” and “instrument” of governmentality. The diverse institutions working to promote coexistence through expressive culture in Israel, or those in the oPt working to assert Palestinian independence and resistance to subjugation, are a testament to Miller and Yúdice’s (2002) analysis of cultural policy as a conflation of aesthetic (musical content) and anthropological (the training of citizens or subjects to common values) registers. While Israeli coexistence projects feature “East-West” hybrids to project the ideals of common cultural citizenship, music conservatories in the West Bank focus on classical repertoires of Western and Arabic musics and on developing cultural and educational institutions understood as indispensable for citizens of a modern state. This combination produces its own articulations with “East” and “West” embedded in the project of nation-making. Yúdice’s (2003) observation that culture today is increasingly called on to solve problems previously perceived as the domain of economics and politics is also pertinent to the cultural interventions, and associated funding allocations, that take place within the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In general, Israeli coexistence projects have been experiencing shrinkage in public funding, along with shrinkage of state support for Palestinian citizens’ venues of cultural production. This is due to the swing to right wing politics within Israel and international exasperation with the cultural “peace industry” that has not brought peace. By contrast, the

20 Introduction growing NGO-ization of the West Bank economy has enabled an unparalleled growth in cultural industries, mostly funded by foreign donors to support state-building and a robust civil society, yet there is apprehension about whose interests this economy truly supports. Both trends point to shifting local and global interests and interventions. Music organizations from both sides of the Green Line are featured in this work as a means of mapping out how ethical positions regarding the conflict and sociopolitical goals are aesthetically framed and discursively naturalized through institutional frameworks; how daily performative musical and social practices are lived, breathed and sounded within these institutions; how they integrate themselves among the communities in which they operate, and how they position themselves vis-à-vis their publics and their sources of sponsorship. To summarize, both the politics of coexistence and the politics of resistance are a complex matter embedded in power relations, social constructions and lived experiences, at specific historical junctures. Attending to both tropes brings into high relief the multiplex ways in which musical culture is a sphere in which power and hegemony are asserted, negotiated and resisted through shifting relations between and within different groups. Both positions challenge the hierarchies of moral and political orders associated with place, citizenship, ethnicity and nation inscribed by dominant ideologies and political realities (Stokes 1994). But what is meant as a challenge to the hegemonic order acquires highly divergent meanings within different arenas of the conflict and among different subjectivities within these arenas, perspectives that change and evolve in articulation with the political situation. Yet, the two approaches to cultural interventions in the conflict delineated above—one that views music as a force of reconciliation, the other, as a site for constructing difference, bolstering nationhood and performing resistance—are only partial frames for understanding processes of cultural territorializations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) within the conflict. “Music as coexistence” and “music as resistance” are conceived and projected by music organizations on both sides of the Green Line as mutually exclusive tropes anchored in different conceptualizations of a universalized humanity. This bifurcation is enhanced by discourses promoted by the BDS movement for whom cultural boycott of Israel is an important strategy; by international interventions in the conflict that reductively equate “culture” with “peace,” thus banalizing both; and by the Israeli government, which promotes performances of “coexistence” abroad in order to project a democratic, pluralistic image whilst working to solidify Jewish ethnonational hegemony within the country. In other words, both “music as coexistence” and “music as resistance” are instrumentalized to political ends through the rhetorical authentication of their contrastive trajectories. On the ground, however, there are numerous performative instances in which these two constructs blur into each other or change their associated meanings. For example, when the JewishPalestinian hip hop collective System Ali performed at a demonstration

Introduction  21 against the demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, what was initially perceived by some local Palestinians as a performance of “coexistence” under unequal terms became an act of co-resistance. Further grappling with “music in conflict” then means understanding diverse communal contexts where music-making resonates with a multitude of distinctive social positions, both within and outside of institutionalized frameworks. While hegemonic narratives in/on Palestine-Israel that permeate the public sphere tend to theorize constructs such as nationality, ethnicity and citizenship as bounded, inflexible categories, it is within the ever-fluid multiplicities of lived realities that meaning emerges. Here the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies provides a useful framework for analysis. Stuart Hall (1986, 1996) approaches expressive culture as a constructive process marked by shifts and internal contradictions articulated through a myriad of modalities of difference, rather than through binaries of hegemony and resistance. In this model identity is always emergent and constantly negotiated by multiple actors. In the process, “primordial” entitlements anchored in national formations and fixed forms of belonging may be politically and culturally challenged, re-imagined and re-fashioned. This processual conceptualization of the cultural construction of place and nation is especially relevant to Israel-Palestine. Here ethnic, national and civic identities articulated through music are often hyphenated, the local includes a plethora of diasporic and exilic experiences, and identity construction is always implicated in a highly volatile and rapidly changing political landscape. Internal heterogeneities that characterize Palestinian and Jewish communities and the ways in which these have been historically inflected in access to music education, values about music-making and the saliency of distinct cultural repertoires amongst different populations, also intersect with cultural production and nation-making. Such heterogeneities include sectarian (Muslim and Christian) distinctions within Palestinian communities and all shades of secular or religious dispositions in between, as well as Orthodox-to-secular and Mizrahi-Ashkenazi inflections amongst Jewish-Israeli populations. They also include spatial distributions that add a lot of grain to the most palpable division between State and Occupied Territory, including urban, rural and refugee populations in Palestinian society and “center” vs. “periphery” amongst both Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis. All these heterogeneities, among other inflections of subjectivity, intersect with class, gender, social location, and place-making. In all these contexts, however, music mediates the production of social imaginaries through aesthetic rendering, and this is a matter of both being and becoming, a process occurring both in place and through space. Mapping out musico-aesthetic terrains in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a means of contextualizing a dramatic struggle over modes of signification that embody diverse and evolving, as well as competing and overlapping, values, identities, aspirations and goals. The “borders” metaphor highlighted above comes in handy here, for the production of social

22 Introduction imaginaries joins the political, the collective and the personal in processes in which borders and social boundaries are constructed, reified, and also, re-imagined and transgressed. Borders function as a social process shifting across time, place and metaphor; where one is eliminated, another is constructed somewhere else. Attending to multiple and shifting sites of cultural production, narratives and life experiences complicates the construction of contested spaces and identities produced through a lens of binary oppositions: “political” vs. “cultural,” structural vs. relational, predetermined vs. emergent, indigenous vs. colonizer (Beuchler 1995; Monterescu and Rabinowitz 2007; Swedenburg 2012) and also, coexistence vs. resistance. In between coexistence and resistance What lives in between the coexistence/resistance binary then are diverse geographies of identities (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996), a term that is especially useful here as it signifies not only the multiplicity of subjectivity(ies) Stuart Hall foregrounds but also the multiplicity of space(s). Using another twist on the border metaphor, Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg identify this zone as a third time-space, a “terrain that calls for, yet paradoxically refuses, boundaries, a borderzone between identity-as-essence and identityas-conjuncture…” (1996, 13). In Palestine-Israel, a place where violence, domination and exclusion are normative frames for knowledge production and spaces of belonging, yet one where Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian lives are also inextricably intertwined, this “zone” is especially conspicuous where physical spaces and fixed ethnonational identities cannot align. This friction generates alternative modes of relationality as well as alternative modes of resistance undetermined by overriding hegemonic frames of belonging. Such emergent imaginaries are always subject to shifting processes of construction and deconstruction in articulation with the political trends that shape the historical moment. These processes are developed in this work primarily through two subjects of ethnographic engagement, both of which highlight the multiple and the changing in the fluid conjunctures of lived realities and in relation to political life: the social protest that overtook Israel in the summer of 2011 and biographical and artistic trajectories of artists who are Palestinian citizens of Israel. The social protest was a highly charged, if short-lived, historical moment that engaged Israeli citizens from all walks of life and took place (or took over) a multitude of public spaces across the country. It initially began in protest to the high cost of living in Israel. However, it soon became the site of a debate in which Jews and Palestinians, middle class and working class, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, “center” and “periphery,” negotiated the parameters of nation, citizenship and territorial forms of belonging through different conceptualizations of “home.” The flood of musical production, poetry and visuals associated with the protest became a site of emergent narratives and identities in which Jaffa, a mixed Palestinian-Jewish “borderzone” city, created new imaginaries for “home” epistemologies.

Introduction  23 Palestinian citizens of Israel bear the highest burden of the conflicted multiples that are part and parcel of the geographies of identity generated by the conflict and by the varieties of diasporic or hyphenated identities in the region. Artists who are Palestinian citizens are important cultural agents traversing spatial and ideological geographies of separation: State from Occupied Territory, Palestinian citizens from their collective memories and narratives and Palestinians from Jews in Israel. They also complicate hegemonic representational frames of aesthetic and ethical Palestinian “authenticity.” A spotlight on the biographies, musical output and audiences of specific artists, foregrounds individual agency, personal negotiations of the “multiples” and the production of alternative communal imaginations, in tandem with the political tensions that dominate the public sphere. To summarize, in all the diverse musical scenes and ventures mentioned above, music is used as a resource for constructing and negotiating cultural, ethnic, national and transnational identities (Bohlman 2004; Schulze et al. 1996). Attending to different spaces and multiple identities within the conflict means attending to different aesthetic renderings that produce meaning in specific social contexts. This involves engaging with a host of musical genres and the ways in which they are implicated in discourses of emplacement and displacement, hegemony and resistance, the personal and the collective.

On the politics of genre Genres in and of themselves can be read as social texts. In this work, however, I focus more prominently on performance contexts as sites of meaning-making. This move may seem counterintuitive: as a discipline, ethnomusicology has produced (and still does) a plethora of ethnographies centered on specific musical genres as a means of interrogating different life worlds, and understanding the ways in which those have been constructed through various forms of musical signification. Genres arrange people and music within systems of symbolic classification. They organize the production and consumption of cultural material (Negus 1999; Taylor 1997). They influence and naturalize tastes as well as the hierarchical social structures in which they are embedded (Bourdieu and Johnson 1993). Different groups use genres to construct and express social identity, thus combining aesthetics with ideologies, ways of hearing and experiencing with ways of knowing. As Simon Frith (1996b, 89) puts it, “people… live in genres.” Genres have then provided an anchor for mapping and for understanding underlying structures of social interactions, power dynamics, processes of inclusion and exclusion and the matrix in which nation, race, class, ethnicity, gender, diaspora, various formations of alterity and so on are constructed and stylized. In moving away from a genre(s) focused study to one focused on performative contexts, I am adding to scholarship that has begun to question the presumed ontological meaning and fixed notions of musical genres. This viewpoint highlights hybridity and blurred boundaries as fundamental

24 Introduction aspects of musical life, and, along with individual, local and particularistic relationships with and to genres, important to understanding the totality of social space (Holt 2007). Importantly, choosing performative contexts over genre in Israel and Palestine is also a means of diffusing the ontological power of “the nation.” Both Israeli and Palestinian national identities are relatively recent, competing and contested formations. Understandably, much research has been devoted to the ways in which popular genres symbolize and signify representations of national collectivities in repertoires prominently etched in the two peoples’ collective memories, or embedded in collective formations of contemporary modernities. There are a number of studies that provide highly informative and nuanced readings into the musical projections of Israeliness or Palestinianness represented by and constructed through prominent popular music genres, along with the ways in which different genres have served to complicate, expand, appropriate or subvert the “nation” through sonic signification (see for example McDonald 2013b; Regev and Seroussi 2004). Yet, by generally focusing on how musical genres are implicated in either collective Palestinian perspectives or (Jewish)-Israeli ones, they often reify “the nation.” I build on these works in my own study, but I also seek to expand and complicate them by moving away from methodological nationalism (Amelina et al. 2012) to a vantage point situated at the “aural border(s).” I attend to this by addressing some of the complex cultural and political terrains intersecting in Palestine-Israel, where the “nation” (within itself and against its Others) is musically constructed through a variety of musical activities and genres that do not bear the stamp of quintessential representations of the nation—for example, performances of classical Arabic or Western musics in Palestine—and have therefore received less scholarly attention. I also highlight how genres indexed with national formations, including Palestinian sha‘bi and SLI, are performatively deconstructed to create alternatives of possibility, borderline hybridity and post-national imaginaries. This move enables the reading of the multiplicity of meanings genres incur in divergent social and geographical spaces, temporalities and changing sociopolitical realities. It also brings attention to how genres are re-signified in subversion of representations they are iconically associated with. My approach was solidified in a preliminary research visit to IsraelPalestine (Summer 2010). I visited a multi-branch music conservatory in Palestine in which classical Western music and classical Arabic music played important roles in the projection of nationhood. Here these repertoires acquired collective meaning no less than the ubiquitous folklore-based genres conceived as the soundtrack and mobilizer for the Palestinian struggle for liberation, or Palestinian hip hop, which has generated much attention for its role in negotiating Palestinian modernity and modes of resistance. I watched a mediated concert in which the famous conductor Zubin Mehta led the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, transported to the Gaza border, in a classical Western music performance intended to create world awareness

Introduction  25 for the plight of Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier abducted by Hamas four years prior and since kept in isolation. I attended a Tel Aviv performance of the Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra (AJYO) in which Taiseer Elias, the Orchestra’s musical director and an Arab-Israeli, performed a brilliant oud solo on the song “Shibolet ba-śade” (Wheat Stalk in the Field)—an emblematic representation of the Zionist SLI repertoire—backed by an orchestra that combined Western and Eastern instruments. This left me wondering whether he was projecting the Orchestra’s ethos of coexistence, subversively re-signifying national cultural codes and legacies, or simply enjoying the musical moment. During this visit, the importance of privileging performance context over genre in my project became profoundly palpable at a demonstration and concert that was organized in protest of government-ordered demolitions of homes in a Palestinian village in Israel. Dahamesh is one of over 100 “unrecognized villages” populated by Palestinian or Bedouin citizens. The land occupied by Dahamesh residents for decades had been classified as non-residential state land. Construction on it was illegal, leaving no legal framework to accommodate the housing needs of an expanding population. And, like the other “unrecognized villages,” it was not connected to national utility and infrastructure services. The demonstration started with a procession from the nearby town of Ramlah, led by children from the village. The children had formed into a samba rhythm section complete with surdos, tambourines, cuicas and whistles, and some of them carried carnival puppets. As we walked towards the village, the demonstrators, Jewish and Palestinian citizens, chanted over the percussion ensemble in Hebrew and Arabic: “Arabs and Jews don’t want to be enemies.” The procession paused at the entrance to the village, where the paved road turned to dirt and a number of dignitaries gave speeches. This was followed by the carnival procession leading us to the center of the village for the concert. Billed as the “Bulldozer Night,” the generator-powered concert featured a variety of performances that included a classical Arab music orchestra from Nazareth, Toot Ard, a Druze Arabic reggae band from the Golan Heights, and System Ali, the Palestinian-Jewish hip hop collective from Jaffa, rapped in Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. DAM, the highly profiled Palestinian hip hop, band from the nearby town of Lydd, closed the show. In this context, samba, classical Arabic music, reggae and hip hop had all come to signify resistance and solidarity with the struggle of Palestinian citizens against the Jewish State. When we left the site, the bulldozers were hovering on the outskirts of the village. On the following day, demolitions were postponed pending further court deliberations. All these examples, and the generic heterogeneity they exemplify, point to the ways in which in Israel and Palestine today struggles over meaning and territory, the nation and its “others” are not necessarily signified through specific musical genres, styles and performance practices (although key popular genres associated with national formations clearly remain important in this mix), but rather through the contexts in which they are deployed

26 Introduction to collective ends. This understanding forms the basis for the diverse genres featured in my work, along with my personal proclivity to contribute to the project of de-essentializing discourses on collective identities in the region. The book highlights instances in which Palestinians of the oPt joined in an act of resistance to the Occupation by playing Mozart, rather than folklore-based songs of resistance. Jewish and Palestinian women from Jaffa sang Palestinian folk repertoire as a means of promoting coexistence, rather than demonstrating Palestinian national sentiments. And System Ali interpreted a well-known number from the SLI repertoire, and in the process, both deconstructed the genre and re-signified its associated meanings. In all these diverse scenes genres are both archetypal representations and tools of re-signification, taken out of their original context and meaning and embedded in diverse ethical and aesthetic sites of identity construction that characterize the post-Oslo globalized world(s) of cultural production in Palestine-Israel. In short, by moving away from genre-based analysis to one anchored in performance contexts, I am also moving away from self-contained Palestinian and Israeli teleological narratives and reflexive constructions of nationhood, which permeate musical inquiries into expressive culture in Palestine-Israel as much they do the historiography of both peoples. Instead, I seek to develop a contrapuntal reading of Israel and Palestine that complicates their ontological boundaries.

Reading (or listening to) Palestine-Israel in counterpoint The commonplace disciplinary split between “Israel Studies” (often part of Jewish Studies) and “Palestine Studies” (situated in Middle East and North African Studies) on campuses across the United States is borne of divergent philosophical, historical and cultural questions enfolded within queries that lead scholars to specialize in “Israel” or “Palestine.” Such choices reflect moral, ideological, emotional and intellectual alignments that are both the outcome of, and the engines for, distinct regimes of knowledge production and the lexicons that support them. Moreover, the development of these “nationalized” fields of study has been supported by external funding often implicated in implicit or explicit advocacy in support of either Israel or the Palestinian cause (with power differentials seemingly replicating those in the world outside academia). “Palestine” and “Israel” hence tend to be compartmentalized as self-contained categories for analysis or at times incorporated into scholarly analysis primarily in relation to the Other’s displacement (past, present or in potential). Yet both labels represent the same geographical territory where—both because of, and in spite of, the ongoing violence and overwhelming disparities—Palestinians and Jews have been “forced to share an inextricably linked life” (Hochberg 2007, 5) for over a century. This is especially notable when considering the politics of cultural production and most especially of music, as some repertoires are enjoyed

Introduction  27 among groups and individuals across the ethnonational divide, and as no wall, checkpoint or bypass road can divert the travel of mediated sound (although it can change its meanings). In writing against the grain of disciplinary and epistemological boundaries I am indebted to a lineage of scholars who have broken the mold before me. In 2005, a collection of articles was published as a single volume titled Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Ted Swedenburg and Rebecca Stein. The monograph challenged disciplinary conventions in two prominent ways. First, it was the first English book publication to focus on popular culture in the context of the conflict. In the introduction, the editors discuss the historical marginalization of cultural studies within scholarship in Middle East Studies. They peg this oversight on the historically widespread approach to popular culture within the field, which treated popular culture as epiphenomenal to pressing and volatile questions of politics, power and conflict in the Middle East, rather than as a constitutive force that powers them. The editors argue for a view of expressive culture that is integral to the matrix of power and violence that has shaped the lives of Middle Eastern subjectivities, and more specifically, the lives of Palestinians and Jews in Israel, Palestine and beyond. My focus on music and conflict resonates with this view. Stein and Swedenburg’s edited volume was also a landmark for its inclusion of both “Palestine” and “Israel” in its title and contents, highlighting the interrelationships and mutual constructedness of Jewish and Palestinian narratives, histories, articulations with the region and cultural production. This move contributed to the destabilization of analytic paradigms that have long dominated scholarship on Palestine and Israel in the US academy, as well as Palestinian and (Jewish-) Israeli historiographies and cultural narratives. In these narratives “the nation” (Palestinian or Israeli) reigns supreme as a discrete entity and unit of critical analysis. This frame downplays transnational and diasporic dimensions that serve to deterritorialize the nation, alongside histories of contact, influence and interdependence (Klein 2014; Lockman 1993, 1996; Shamir 2000). It also obscures shared cultural lineages or intersections and the importance of political, ethnonational, class-based, gendered and generational heterogeneities that fragmentize or complicate “the nation” from within. As Stein and Swedenburg point out, flattening out these dimensions leads to a conceptualization of power that presumes a domination-resistance binary. “Culture” is then accorded relevance based on its instrumental use in the service of hegemony or oppositional resistance, rather than as a player negotiating complex, unstable and shifting relations between dominant and subaltern over a wide array of fronts, contingencies and modalities of difference. By focusing on diverse sites of personal and spatial geographies in Palestine-Israel, this work seeks to contribute to the project of deterritorializing the fixity of binary constructs, instead highlighting the changing and shifting nature of boundary drawings and boundary crossings, across and

28 Introduction within different sites of cultural production. The “relational model” that has been developed by the historians cited above, which emphasizes how both nations have “made each other” and how histories of interaction and interdependencies between the two have been muted in favor of advancing national narratives, is yet to be fully developed both in the historiographies of both nations and in cultural studies of contemporary Palestine-Israel. This work attempts to bolster steps taken in this direction (see for example Hochberg 2007; McDonald 2013a; Monterescu 2015; Sa’ar 2006). It must be noted here that due to the power imbalances between JewishIsraelis and Palestinians, and contingent exposure to violence, working against the grain of exclusivist ideologies of “the nation” is a complex process that is implicated in power structures in and of itself. The words of Michele Cantoni (2011), the ESNCM’s academic director at the time, illustrate this point: The perception of Palestine around the world… is that Palestine exists exclusively in relation to Israel. Consequently, the Palestinian people, their society and their culture are deprived of being viewed as such—a People, a Society and a Culture of their own. The sense that Palestinians have yet to be recognized and legitimated for who they are is obviously entwined with the disempowering experience of dispersion, statelessness and Occupation, but also, with a long history of Western identification with the Zionist narrative. As Edward Said (1979 and 1984) has pointed out, this orientation has muted Palestinian perspectives, and also, their very existence.13 All this has also affected trajectories of academic scholarship.14 Khaled Furani and Dan Rabinowitz (2011) cite the 1980s as the decade that marked the “ethnographic arrival of Palestine” as an admissible subject of study after decades of absence. They explain this arrival as contingent on postcolonial discourses and the “crisis of representation” in the social sciences and the humanities, along with the epistemic rupture of Israel’s sanctity in the eyes of the West. If the 1980s marked the ethnographic arrival of Palestine, 2013 marked the arrival of musical Palestine, with four English book publications (Beckles Willson 2013; Kanaaneh et al. 2013; Maira 2013; McDonald 2013b) centered on the role of music in Palestinian life. Prior to this, a lot of literature on music-making was inspired by cultural production accompanying the Oslo process, and engaged primarily with the cultural politics of reconciliation or Israel’s relationship with its Arab minorities and the region (AlTaee 2002; Beckles Willson 2009a, 2009b; Belkind 2010; Brinner 2003, 2009; Dardashti 2009; Perelson 1998; Regev 1995). All these by default placed Israel prominently in one’s frame of reference. The four new books have greatly bolstered a hitherto relatively sparse literature that included an assortment of articles and one dissertation distinctly focused on music in Palestine or Palestinian narratives and perspectives (Beckles Willson 2011;  Massad

Introduction  29 2003; McDonald 2006a, 2006b, 2010a, 2010b; Morgan and Kidel 1994; Morgan et al. 2006; Oliver and Steinberg 2002). The four publications on Palestinian music are an answer to Stein and Swedenburg’s call for expressive culture to be taken as a serious subject of study in the Middle East rather than as backdrop to questions of power and politics. They also testify to the contemporary epistemic shift in postcolonial studies and the growing presence of Palestine and Palestinian culture in the West. By focusing on Palestinian culture per se, much of the contemporary literature on Palestinian music seeks to correct the historical lacuna in academic literature, as well as to project hitherto silenced Palestinian narrative(s) unto the public sphere. At times, however, the result is that Palestinian culture is apprehended as self-contained, or alternatively, in dual frames that project culture as either the (unfortunate) product of the colonial encounter or resistance to it. In re-inserting the relational approach to cultural production in PalestineIsrael, I strive to account for the muscled absenting of Palestine from decades of academic scholarship. At the same time, I also seek to problematize essentialized discourses rooted in primordial conceptualizations of “the nation” that serve to uphold the myth of the Arab/Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli binary—a view that is often bolstered by the reflexive bent of Palestinian scholars and Western scholarship sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. This means straddling a fine line in which questions of power do not obfuscate questions of agency; in which hegemony is apprehended in the discourses of both dominant and subaltern; in which the rhetorical power of what is absented from national narratives is rendered as visible as that which is present, and in which the politics of culture are understood as a highly dynamic process, rather than as essence. My hope is that by presenting multiple contexts, field sites, issues and ideologies pertaining to music in conflict, the stories and accounts presented in this book do so successfully.

Methodology, ethnographic positioning and their twists and turns From January 2011 to September 2012 I “followed the conflict” by “following the music” on both side of the Green Line. I worked as a volunteer in Israeli institutions that promote Arab-Jewish coexistence projects and in Palestinian conservatories in the West Bank. I interviewed numerous artists, producers, music educators and actors from different scenes who graciously brought me into their fold. And I filmed performances in venues ranging from concert halls to demonstrations, community centers to checkpoints, restaurants and nightclubs to refugee camp children’s clubs and home rooftops. My fieldwork overlapped temporally with significant local and geopolitical trends and events: the Arab Spring, the largest social protest movement in Israel’s history, and Palestine’s growing presence on the world stage,

30 Introduction punctuated by the Palestinian UN bid for recognition as an independent state and Palestine’s acceptance to UNESCO. These events became part of the compass for the particular geography of an “ethnography-in-motion” that I was conducting. The first concert event I attended, days after arrival, was a Tel Aviv-based production in support of the Tahrir Square revolution that featured Jewish and Palestinian citizens. It was the brainchild of a producer who was irked by the Israeli media’s sole concern that the Arab revolutions would create regional instability and jeopardize Israeli security and peace agreements afforded by the dictatorial regimes of Israel’s neighbors, rather than concern for the masses seeking democracy and social justice. While this was the only event I attended that was a direct response to the Arab Spring, the revolutionary spirit that undertook the region remained in the air throughout my time in the field. It echoed in Palestinian identification with the revolution, yet frustration with the fact that once again, it seemed to bypass them, and it also echoed in Israel’s summer 2011 social protest movement. And, Palestine’s international moves and growing presence on the world stage provided a shifting background-foreground dynamic to various case studies featured in this monograph, as such trends and events intersected directly with local sites of ongoing cultural production. My “geographical compass” in the field and my methodology were also conditioned to some extent by my own personal geography and ethnographic positioning, first as a bi-national Jewish-Israeli/American scholar from Columbia University, and later, by developments that occurred during my fieldwork. Ethnographic positioning and methodology are often intertwined; for me, they habituated how I lived, experienced and navigated a highly volatile and complex field, logistically, legally, affectively, culturally and ideologically. It is this complexity, and the open ended, improvisatory adaptations that such fieldwork requires, that renders methodology both integral to the research’s vision and design, and the outcome of rapidly changing situations and instinctual, spur-of-the-moment reflexes. My background provided a solid point of entry to the field, and also, a number of barriers to work through and around. I therefore begin with how it all started for me. Origins and departure I was born in Israel to a Zionist family whose heritage is considered an important part of the legacy of the national Jewish revival in Palestine (now Israel). Today names of family members who have long passed away grace street signs, museum walls and history books, along with names of towns and villages whose founding they were directly involved with. They are considered prominent members and leaders of the “first pioneers” (‘aliyah rishonah, 1882). My grandfather named me Nili after a spy ring that was active during WWI, in which the family played an important role. The ring sought to expedite the end of Ottoman rule in Palestine by providing classified information to the British, in hopes of ending the increasingly corrupt and

Introduction  31 oppressive Ottoman rule of the wartime years, and to position the Jewish community in better standing with the British, who they believed would inherit Ottoman power. Among other members in the ring, this activity claimed the lives of my grandfather’s cousin and his brother, a fate from which my grandfather narrowly escaped. Family history has since become the stuff of legends, providing raw material for projections and interpretations of historians, novelists and politicians alike. For me, this material was alive in the stories, portraits, photographs and clannish embrace I grew up on, whose center was the home of my grandparents, my great uncle and my two great aunts. In this home my great uncle’s beehive, a garden full of fruit trees, herbs and flowers, and a huge jasmine-covered porch provided a playground and a backdrop to the old folks’ inexhaustible hospitality. Being named Nili Belkind was like wearing one’s identity of clan and kin affiliations—and assumed political or ideological bent—on one’s sleeve. This often clashed with my humanist sensibilities (which along with the loaded history, I also credit my family for). I left Israel in November 1983, days after completing my required military service. My service coincided with the first Lebanon war (1982/1983). Besides my aversion to the structurally inherent abuses of power I witnessed in the military, my core beliefs had been shaken. I had grown up on the naturalized assumption that Israel’s wars had all been wars of survival, “no choice wars” in local (Jewish-Israeli) parlance. The Lebanon war was a whole other matter, in which Lebanese, Palestinian and Israeli lives were sacrificed to further Israel’s political goals, not to ensure Jewish survival. Images of the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which happened under the watch—or averted gaze—of the then Minster of Defense Ariel Sharon, were the visual accompaniments to the straw that broke the camel’s back in my orientation. When I joined the 400,000 strong Peace Now demonstration in Tel Aviv that protested the carnage, it was in contravention of IDF regulations of sanctioned political activity for soldiers in service. By the time I left the country, I knew I wanted no part in the pre-given binary choice between predatism and victimhood, and the violent processes of Othering, that regional politics inflicted on one’s personhood. This is the background, and point of departure, from which I carved my own path. I spent the next couple of decades building my life in the United States, but retained a strong attachment to the “home” I visited as frequently as possible. My musical career led me to becoming highly involved in Latin music and Caribbean genres. In the late 1990s, while running a Latin music label, I spent so much time shuttling between New York and Puerto Rico that the island became a kind of third “home.” When I decided to return to school for a doctoral degree, the Caribbean seemed the most obvious choice of geographic focus. My MA thesis was about Haitian artists living in diaspora. Yet, something amorphous in the back of my mind kept nagging. Throughout the years I kept strong musical and personal ties to the Middle

32 Introduction East. I had worked as a Middle East music imports consultant, produced numerous Middle East centered compilations for a world music label and co-produced an album that brought together several diasporic New Yorkbased talents from the Middle East. Through my work and frequent visits to Israel, I had also established professional and personal relationships with music industry professionals, promoters and musicians (Jews and Palestinians) based there. I was fascinated with the musical trends of the 1990s, the new genres that had sprouted in tandem with the Oslo process, the unprecedented presence of classical Arabic music on Israeli stages and the ways in which music mediated the conflict, as well as hopes for its transcendence. On December 26, 2008, I flew to Israel, with the intent of turning the inter-semester winter break into a family visit combined with time for final edits on my MA thesis. Israel’s war on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) began on the day of my arrival. I spent this time trying to work on the thesis, in between watching the horrors taking place in Gaza on television and taking in the hyper-nationalistic vibes emanating from the Israeli streets and the media. And one day, as I walked with my mother past the mosque on Jaffa’s Jerusalem Boulevard, the city’s main thoroughfare, a young Palestinian man who had just left the Friday service at the mosque sliced his way between us hissing: “idhbaḥ al-yahūd” (slaughter the Jews). Trying to focus on the lifeworlds of diasporic Haitians in the midst of this became a surreal experience, something that belonged to another world and another temporal existence, yet one in which discourses of displacement and emplacement, along with histories of colonialism and violence, potently inform personal and collective narratives of belonging and estrangement. By the time I returned to New York I knew that I was ready to come back to Palestine-Israel for the next chapter of my academic and personal life. Return and methodology I returned (home) to the field 27 years after leaving. I chose Jaffa as my base, both because it is a mixed Palestinian-Jewish city and because of its central geographic location, facilitating access to the Northern city of Haifa and the Galilee region, as well as to Jerusalem and West Bank sites important to my research. While my reasons for choosing Jaffa were strategic, and I spent as much or more time away as I did in it, the longer I lived there, the more Jaffa and its people became my habitat. The communal access that characterizes Jaffa, despite its profound social malaises, is one of the reasons that this city, relative to other sites, is extensively featured in this work. Elsewhere, my background, bi-nationality (Israeli-American) and research focus were both potent facilitators and setbacks in my fieldwork, culturally, ideologically and logistically. As a Jewish-Israeli, I was fluent in Hebrew and just as importantly, also fluent in codes of cultural intimacy, iconic musical repertoires and the Israeli musico-cultural terrain. While I was well versed in various Middle Eastern music genres, I did not have the

Introduction  33 extensive contact base and personal acquaintance with the cultural terrain in the oPt that I had in Israel. Also, I had only begun studying Arabic in the year prior to my entry into the field. At Columbia University as elsewhere, the focus is on Modern Standard Arabic rather than on the Palestinian dialect. This presented a minor problem: Palestinian citizens are fluent in Hebrew, and the lingua franca of music conservatories in Palestine, my first point of entry into research in the West Bank, is English, due to the high proportion of foreign personnel in these institutions. English is also ubiquitous in the urban centers in which I mostly worked. I remain very grateful to my interlocutors for their willingness to translate linguistic idioms and cue me in where my cultural competency lagged. Logistics, the basics of getting around, posed a much bigger problem. In the first six months of my research I volunteered at the Tel Aviv-Jaffa office of the Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra (AJYO) and at the Al-Kamandjâti conservatory branch in Ramallah, which meant that I was constantly shuttling between the two locations (as well as other parts of the country on shorter excursions). While the geographical distance between Jaffa and Ramallah is under 50 kilometers, they are in fact both hours and worlds apart, even for those who are legally permitted to travel between State and Occupied Territory. Since the Oslo accords (1993) and the founding of the PA, the West Bank has been divided into different jurisdictions that include Areas A, B and C, within which the PA and the Israeli authorities have different levels of control. Areas A (which are discontinuous) are concentrated Palestinian urban centers, where the PA has both civil and security control. Area B, containing the majority of the Palestinian rural population, is under Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control. Area C (60 percent of the West Bank) is under full Israeli control and is also where the Israeli settlement project has expanded the most since Oslo. The separation wall and checkpoints that separate Israel from the oPt and different areas within the oPt are bolstered by a host of surveillance mechanisms, including color coded license plates (yellow in Israel, Green in the oPt), and the West bank is dissected by the settlements, checkpoints, systems of segregated “bypass” roads and the bureaucracy of the occupation’s civil administration. These systems impose tremendous hardships, fragmentation and isolation on Palestinian life in Occupied Territory. They also impose limits on Jewish-Israelis: Areas A are legally off limits to Jewish-Israeli citizens. Big red signs at checkpoints leading into an Area A state the following: This road leads to Area A which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Entry of Israelis to Area A is forbidden, endangers your life, and constitutes a criminal offense.15 Being an Israeli citizen conducting research in the oPt meant that I had to find ways to circumvent travel restrictions imposed on Jewish-Israelis.

34 Introduction Americans are not subject to these restrictions, so I travelled with my American passport. However, any soldier or security personnel savvy enough about the regulations could figure out that I am also Israeli, as my passport indicated I was born in Israel and did not bear an entry visa stamp. In order to avoid such encounters, I took longer routes, bypassing checkpoints leading directly from Areas A into Israel and taking roundabout ways to come out of Areas C, where checkpoints accommodate the needs of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Palestinian public transportation on these roundabout routes cannot cross the checkpoints. About nine months into my research I acquired a car with both Israel and West Bank insurance and could drive myself around. Until then, I travelled by a taxi driven by Palestinian citizens or East Jerusalem residents, who are permitted to drive in both areas with Israeli (yellow) license plates and who would take me in and out on the Ramallah-Jerusalem axis, from where I would make my way back to Jaffa on my own. I relied primarily on the services of two taxi drivers from East Jerusalem. One of them took special care in watching out for my safety. Getting around was not just a learning curve or skill to master, but also how the violence of imposed borders became inscribed in my own body and psyche, through a myriad of instances and images etched in my memory. Numerous examples come instantly to mind. Six soldiers stopping the Palestinian service taxi ahead of the car I am in on an artery leading out of Ramallah and taking one of its passengers past a mound behind which they all disappear, a sense of trepidation and helplessness engulfing me. Two border policemen, hands on their firearms, pouncing on the hood of my car at Qalandiya checkpoint, in search of Jewish lefties trying to enter Area A or to monitor the checkpoint abuses, to which I instinctively respond by waving my American passport and saying good morning in American-accented English. Burnt tires and garbage that litter the main thoroughfare at Aram village, where a kūfiyya-hooded young guy, still adrenalized by the bloody confrontations that took place between Palestinians and the IDF throughout the preceding Nakba commemoration weekend, hurls a few stones at the (yellow plate) taxi taking me from Ramallah to Jerusalem. Other occasions. The more I traveled this geography, the more methodology, ethnographic focus and questions of violence and performance, of space-making and musicking, became inseparable from my own life. Working at Al-Kamandjâti provided another set of positional and ethical complexities. In communities subjected to violence and conflict, as anthropologist Jeffery A. Sluka (1995, 287) points out, the prevailing ethic is that “no neutrals are allowed.” Here both my research focus and my background were a source of perplexing ambiguity that I inserted into my field site. When I approached Al-Kamandjâti I was quite transparent and upfront about the fact that I was also studying the politics of musical coexistence in Israel, yet here I was volunteering to work in an institution that was a member of BDS. In addition, as a Jewish-Israeli, I was unaffiliated with any of the Israeli organizations working in the West Bank whose politics and

Introduction  35 identifications are evident, and whose scope of activity in Palestinian Areas A is anyways negligible, such as Anarchists Against the Wall or Ta‘ayush. My American citizenship, Columbia affiliation, ethical identifications and musical experience counted in my favor, and Ramzi, Al-Kamandjâti’s founder, welcomed me. However, he and other Ramallah-based interlocutors recommended that I keep my Israeli background muted, whether for the purpose of integrating with the community and understanding local positions or for my own safety. Although I loved the community feel of Al-Kamandjâti, its personnel (both Palestinian and foreign nationals) and the students, from whom I learned so much, maintaining “the veil” was difficult, ethically, emotionally and logistically. The more I integrated into Al-Kamandjâti’s administration—writing all English communiqués, website contents and a major grant application, alongside setting up a relationship with an international music label—the greater the burden became. When in Ramallah I often stayed in the homes of Al-Kamandjâti’s foreign personnel, where due to turnover and their generous hospitality there always seemed to be a free room or bed available. However, having to mute my citizenship status, as was recommended to me, meant that I could not answer all their questions straightforwardly. I also felt I could not interview them formally without fully disclosing my background. This situation produced ethical questions and dilemmas for me, and also raised questions within the organization. After several months of my working there, incongruities rose to the surface. Rumors about my life “on the other side” started to circulate, and eventually, the complexities of managing the situation became too big an overload for Al-Kamandjâti, and perhaps, too insecure for me. I was still welcome as visitor and retained my relationship with the conservatory, but stopped working there. Fieldwork, however, leads you as much as you lead it. Around the time I stopped working at Al-Kamandjâti, I also felt like I was close to exhausting what I could learn from my work with the Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra (AJYO). The Orchestra consists of players from around the country who meet occasionally, and hence is not embedded in a community where the mundanities of everyday musical and political life can be more fully apprehended. I worked in the orchestra’s Tel Aviv administrative center, where there were few interlocutors to engage with outside the occasional rehearsal or performance and little music listened to in the office. I wanted to expand my work to an institution embedded in community. Luckily, my base of relationships had grown. I soon began volunteering with the Arab-Jewish Community Center in Jaffa (AJCC) and with the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM), which provided me with new and rich sites of engagement in both Israel and Palestine. My civic status was made known to all those with whom I was in close contact at the ESNCM, which removed the anxieties, ethical dilemmas and uneasiness I previously experienced while working in the oPt.

36 Introduction In between these commitments I engaged with artists and institutions whose work was relevant to my research. I volunteered at the Jerusalem Intercultural Center’s (JICC’s) annual Speaking Arts conference, documented events hosted by the Palestinian-Israeli Bereaved Families Forum and other organizations working on both sides of the Green Line, followed a Galilee-centered Arabic music educational project and attended rehearsals, workshops, music festivals, protest concerts, demonstrations, commemoration events and performances situated in diverse scenes. Many of these events, and the interlocutors who led me to them, have been left outside these pages. But they have all informed my readings of the complex terrain I was grappling with, and I remain grateful to all those who shared their time and knowledge with me. I now return to the ways in which my personal life affected my position as a researcher in the field. Nine months or so into my research, I acquired new family. This “acquisition” inflected in my fieldwork, and hence I am including the story here. My Palestinian family The story begins with a baby who was given up for adoption to a church-run orphanage in Haifa in 1929. His baptism papers stated that his name was Yoseph Belkünd. Yoseph was adopted by the woman who ran the orphanage school, became Yusuf Shofani and was raised as a Christian-Arab. He had been circumcised before he was given up for adoption, and much later, when the boy now called Yusuf kept inquiring about his origins, he was told by the church priest that he was of Jewish origins. Yusuf searched for his biological family all his life, but never found a connecting thread. Two years after his passing his granddaughter Hanan, who continued the search in sake of his memory, contacted my father. The connection was made through thin but solid threads: a similar family name and a picture she found on the website of the museum of Rishon le-Zion (First of Zion, a city whose founders included my family) which had published our family tree online. In it was a photograph of my great-uncle Yishay, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Yusuf. Photographs and e-mails were exchanged. When the two families met, resemblances were too powerful to resist, as was the eerie sense of familiarity. The Shofanis however, after their long search, wanted solid proof. A few days after DNA samples were taken, I heard my cell beep early in the morning. It was a message from Hanan: “Good morning cousins, the results are positive, welcome to the family reunion…” We now had new family all over the Galilee. During the rest of my time in Israel-Palestine, the two families became intertwined and the clannish habitualities, which had dissipated after my grandparents’ passing, were resurrected. We produced a large family gathering in Haifa numbering 120 people, followed by many smaller gatherings,

Introduction  37 events and holidays spent together: Sylvester in Nazareth, Passover at my parents’ home, and other occasions. On my next trip to Ramallah I found myself fantasizing about the vignette that would open a movie about the family, with a relative who runs an important forum theater there, and with whom, it turned out, I also shared a number of friends and acquaintances. And just before I left the country, we attended the wedding of Hanan’s sister, which provided one of my favorite snapshots from these family celebrations. I had never seen my parents dance before, let alone to Arabic music; here the collective joy had everyone on their feet and my parents on the dance floor. In an ironic twist on history, my father saw to it that the Shofani branch was added to the family tree on the Rishon le-Zion museum website. As time went by, I also found out that a number of my Palestinian friends and interlocutors were connected to my family in one way or another. The great aunt of a college friend had been Yusuf’s godmother. Another friend had played music with a now deceased singer from the Shofani family. Two young artists, members of ensembles whose rehearsals I attended and performances I documented, were related to Hanan’s husband. Yet another artist with whom I traveled was related to Hanan’s father by marriage. The circle kept getting larger, and all these overlaps, a cobwebbed network of identities in a twilight border zone that kept unveiling new disclosures, felt as though a kind of inner compass of the subconscious had directed my return at this point in time. The story also affected my positioning in the field and what kind of insider/ outsider I could represent. As one interlocutor in Palestine said (jokingly): “so now when the Palestinians are wrong you can be Jewish, and when the Israelis are wrong you can be Palestinian.” Another Palestinian musician I had just been introduced to, began telling me about an (Jewish-) Israeli researcher who was working in Palestine and had found out she had Palestinian family while she was working there. When I replied this story was probably about me, he was not only moved, but proceeded to tell me about the past history of Jewish presence and life in his hometown of El-Bireh. Several Jewish leftist activists I came to know through my work were jealous of my newly found “pedigree.” All this provided a bizarre backdrop to my own ethical dispositions, which had not changed in fundamental ways. However, my story now provided modes of relationality for many around me that were unhampered by the ethnonational grids of separation that characterize the post-Oslo era. Over time I also found out that while my family’s story is rather unusual, it is not unique. The more publicized our story became, the more people I met would find the need to tell me of other stories they either experienced personally or were acquainted with their protagonists: the story of a Jewish woman who followed her Palestinian lover in 1948 to a refugee camp in Nablus that became their home, remaining cut off from her Jewish family for decades; that of the Palestinian family from Bethlehem that adopted two orphaned Jewish girls, daughters of an archeologist who worked there after

38 Introduction 1967, and others. Sometimes these tales were passed on to me in confidence, their tellers wishing to avoid stirring ghosts from the past or to compromise the living. These stories, and their absence from public spheres, testify both to the inextricability of Palestinian and Jewish lives on the land inhabited by both peoples for over a century, and to the ways in which the trajectory of national narratives, spun over a history of violent encounters and Israel’s domination over Palestinian lives in both State and Occupied Territories, forcibly denies this inextricability.

Chapter outline The following chapters address themes and topics that contextualize musicmaking and political life in Palestine-Israel at a particular historical moment. Each chapter is concerned with different spatial, communal or personal geographies that form the larger puzzle of expressive culture in conflict. By changing the ethnographic camera angle from one site or context to another in each of the chapters, I hope that I am also providing a glimpse towards a larger whole: the different modalities by which music-making intersects with borders and social boundaries in the midst of a violent conflict. Two chapters are concerned with cultural policy and institutional politics of music-making: the ways in which artistic production is converted to social value within specific institutions on different sides of the Green Line. Chapter 1 focuses on Palestinian nation-making, resistance and conceptions of democracy as practiced at Al-Kamandjâti. This multi-branch conservatory, along with other cultural organizations in the West Bank, is building infrastructure for cultural life in Palestine that aims to create and consolidate continuity in Palestinian life past the barriers set by the occupation. It is also a leading institution in its efforts to reduce differential access to music, or “democratize” it, within Palestinian society. Through a number of case studies, I follow how these politico-cultural aims are explicitly and implicitly lived and practiced through musical activities, discourses, aesthetic content, local and international projects, ensemble work and performances that constitute daily life at the conservatory. Among cultural organizations in Palestine, cultural policy pertaining to nation-building and resistance is by nature implicated in the aid economy set up by Western powers following Oslo in the name of “state building” and “peace making,” which has also enabled the growth of these organizations. Cultural policy is also implicated in the increasing globalization of the conflict, cultural organizations’ alignment with BDS’ international campaigns to delegitimize Israel and the hardship of building cultural life under conditions of military occupation. The meanings musical activities take on in this context emerge within the tensions that arise between foreign interests and alignments and local ideologies and desires. Due to manuscript length constraints, this topic has been omitted from this book. However, an ethnographic focus on how these dynamics are played out at the ESNCM,

Introduction  39 published in article format, complements, completes and also complicates the chapter on Al-Kamandjâti (see Belkind 2020). Chapter 2 focuses on the dynamics of the musical politics of coexistence, as lived and practiced at the Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center’s choral projects. These projects invest and are invested in multicultural musical representations as a means of resolving tensions between Arabs and Jews in Israel, by showcasing and fostering more egalitarian models of citizenship. They occur against a backdrop of an exclusionary neo-Zionist trend that overwhelms the public sphere, as well as against Palestinian critiques of such projects. By focusing on the interplay between the ethics of ArabJewish integration and multicultural aesthetic content, I highlight both the prominent integrative value of these projects and the dissonances inherent to the focus on cultural citizenship in the midst of a bi-national conflict and unequal power relations. Chapter 3 discusses the relationship between music, time and space in Occupied Palestine. It foregrounds the role of music in the cultural remapping of the extremely confined spatial habitat of Palestinians in the West Bank, where checkpoints, closures and a colonial-styled bureaucracy create a “barrier frame” of spatial and temporal restrictions that have become deeply embedded signifiers of identity. I show how music-making intersects with cultural production of place, space and temporality, providing a means of resisting and reterritorializing spatial boundaries, changing the experience of confined temporalities for individuals and communities, advocating globally for the Palestinian cause, and transforming embodied experiences of violence into sites of creativity. Chapter 4 moves from the nationally bifurcated spatiality of the occupation to the ways that Jaffa engaged with the nationwide summer 2011 Israeli social protest movement—musically, sociopolitically and culturally. The social protest was a site of public discourse concerned with the relationship between power and one’s home, be it a physical shelter or a subject’s relationship with place, community and country. Jaffa, a mixed JewishPalestinian city, was where tensions relating to the conflict and to structural discrimination against Palestinians citizens led to a distinct vocabulary for emergent identities. While ethnonational tensions were expressed, they were also subsumed by “periphery” class-based Jewish-Palestinian alliances visà-vis the protest’s “center.” The chapter outlines the ways in which music mediated the social protest’s hegemonic narratives, but focuses most specifically on how music channeled Jaffa’s perspectives and responses to these narratives. Chapter 5 focuses on the lives and musics of two artists who are Palestinian citizens of Israel: Amal Murkus and Jowan Safadi. The chapter describes political and aesthetic modalities by which artists who are “strangers in their homeland” individually negotiate a distinct exilic experience, as well as their roles in generating audiences in specific musical scenes and public spheres. As the only actors providing live music to both Jews and

40 Introduction Palestinians on both sides of the border, artists who are Palestinian citizens bind the isolated and isolating geographies of Palestinians in Israel and in Occupied Territory, and Palestinians and Jews in Israel, in embodied fashion. From this liminal space they perform multiple roles that may challenge or affirm, but always complicate, exclusivist nationalist paradigms and their associated artistic frames. The reader may notice that the ordering of chapters shifts between Palestine and Israel, and closes with artists who personally inhabit the “border zone” of in-between. The order is designed to suggest that Palestinian and (Jewish-) Israeli nationalisms and perspectives on the conflict are always situational, shifting and yet mutually constructed, as are their musical expressions. It is also designed as a gesture that hints to the possibility that a better future for all involves the deconstruction of teleological narratives and the disassembling of the power structures that uphold them. The Hebron youths’ receptivity to Ben’s performance of identity, which opened this introduction, also gestures towards the reconciliatory and healing potential of expressive culture under such circumstances.

Notes 1 I use the term “Jews” (as opposed to Israelis or Jewish-Israelis) here in its ethnonational rather than religious register, both because Israel contains a large minority of Palestinian citizens and because the conflict predates the founding of State of Israel. 2 In Israel, 18-year-old Jewish men are drafted for a minimum of three years (with exemptions provided to ultra-Orthodox Haredim). Many serve in the oPt. 3 Legionaires of Christ 2007; see also notredamecenter.org (accessed April 12, 2013). 4 Arabic: Al-Sulṭa al-Waṭaniyya al-Filasṭīniyya, or the Palestinian National Authority. 5 Since the derailment of the peace process followed by Hamas taking over power in the Gaza Strip, the PA has been locked into a process of state-building with no foreseeable actualization of its intended outcome. The United States’ most visible economic intervention in the West Bank were the USAID built “bypass roads,” intended to connect Palestinian locations without interfering with the continuity and infrastructure of Jewish settlement in the oPt. Such policies attest to the contradictory logic of the US support for Palestinian state building and Israel’s colonization project in the very same territories. Since the election of Donald Trump to presidency, US policy has shifted once again. In 2011 the American Embassy was in Tel Aviv; Trump moved it to Jerusalem in 2018. He also withdrew much of the US support for the PA and UNRWA. 6 The omission of “Palestine” from the tour description, despite the fact that the Legacy Band performed primarily in Palestinian locales in Israel and the West Bank, is indicative of the State Department’s prominent alignment with Israel. 7 Today, there are over a million Palestinians living in Israel (estimates range from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, varying partially because in some accounts Palestinians of East Jerusalem are “counted” as part of Israel and in others as part of the oPt), over 2 or 2.5 million in the West Bank and over 1.8 million in Gaza. Another 4.5–5 million, who are descendants of the 1948 refugees, are dispersed among various countries in the Near East and elsewhere. In 2001 the United

Introduction  41

8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees estimated the number of refugees in the Near East at 3.9 million (Schultz and Hammer 2003). Many have experienced multiple displacements. The Jewish population in Israel-Palestine numbers approximately 6.5 million, with over 400,000 living in West Bank settlements. Musical life among diasporic Palestinian communities living outside of Palestine-Israel (constituting the majority of the Palestinian people) is beyond the scope of this work. PACBI’s focus on culture is modeled after the international boycott of South Africa during Apartheid, with the understanding that grassroots mobilizations boycotting international collaborations in culture and sports eventually led to more consequential means of pressure enacted by the international community against South Africa. The South African model hence provides BDS with analogies that are both ethical and strategic; PACBI’s anti-normalization campaigns aim at gaining similar narrative traction in public opinion around the world. For more on BDS/PACBI see Barghouti 2011 and 2013 and PACBI 2011b. See also https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi (accessed August 19, 2018). See for example: “Palestine Lives! Songs from the Struggle of the Palestinian People” (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1974/2006); “Palestine—Music of the Intifada” (Virgin 1989). For example, in the introduction to Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance Since 1900 Moslih Kanaaneh writes: “Although all the contributors [to this book] somewhat agree that Palestinian music is potentially music of resistance, not all of them agree that all Palestinian music is music of resistance, thus drawing a distinction between music as resistance and music as music, or between music for politics and music for enjoyment” (2013, 9). A folk dance performed throughout the Levant, dabke became associated principally with Palestinian liberation politics starting in the 1960s (Kaschl 2003). See also Beshara Doumani’s “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine” (1992) and “Palestine Versus the Palestinians?” (2007). See Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s “Anthropology’s Politics” (2016) for the continuing effects of the American alignment with Zionism and Israel on academic scholarship, and most especially, the censorship of Palestinian narratives. The sign is actually meant for Jewish Israelis, as Palestinian citizens are usually permitted entry to Areas A, another example of the slippages invoked by categories of nation and citizenship in Israel I have addressed above.

1

The everyday practice and performance of nation-making and resistance in Palestine Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory

Malik, a teenaged trombone student at Al-Kamandjâti conservatory in Ramallah, has been practicing the “Ride of the Valkyries” theme from Wagner’s opera Die Walküre all afternoon.1 After his practice session we meet in the conservatory’s courtyard. Malik recounts the story of his teacher, a foreign national who had been held up by the Israeli authorities at Tel Aviv’s international airport. This is a common occurrence: foreign nationals working with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are often treated with suspicion at crossing points. When the authorities questioned the teacher’s ability to play the trombone he was carrying, he responded by taking out his instrument and playing Wagner. Malik then says: “Someday when I can go to Jerusalem, I will stand near the al-Aqsa mosque at the Old City and I will play Wagner; I will annoy them so much. I don’t care what they might do to me.” I tell him that young IsraeliJews will most likely associate the theme with [the movie] Apocalypse Now rather than Wagner, and that the only ones who might be hurt by this are old Holocaust survivors who know the music and associate Wagner with Nazism and the concentration camps. Malik’s expression becomes confused. “It’s not them I want to hurt, it’s Israel (i.e. the authorities)… Wagner, as an antisemite, didn’t like Arabs either,” he says. The conversation soon meanders into questions about the meaning of democracy. Malik points out that Israel is considered a democracy, yet represses Palestinians, and that the United States has fought for its independence from the British, and yet is now supporting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. My response is that democracy seems to always be a work in progress; slavery was embedded in the American democracy well after independence, and women did not get to vote until the twentieth century. Malik: “so democracy is the best of the worst?”2 Malik is a Palestinian music student living under Occupation. He is deliberating, in his youthful way, the social meanings he associates with making music. First is resistance to the confinements of the Occupation, among them the lack of access to Jerusalem, from which West Bank residents are barred unless they have special permits. Second is the formation of a democratic and humanistic ethos, including equal rights and personal freedoms,

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  43 as the governing principle of national life. In doing so, Malik echoes broad discursive and ethical frames that cultural organizations in Palestine associate with aesthetic production, in which ideas about a modern Palestinian national identity are paired with “cultural resistance.” Palestinian cultural organizations are highly invested in the buildup of cultural life and infrastructure that forms a vibrant civil society and advances a contemporary, pluralistic view of national identity. Mobilizing cultural forms of resistance to the Occupation is both embedded in, and forms a prominent aspect of, the project of national emancipation (Jarrar 2005). This chapter analyzes how these joint discursive frames are lived, practiced and performed at Al-Kamandjâti. Nation-building and music education in Palestine Since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), much of the institutional cultural production in Palestine has been tailored to construct and consolidate symbols and practices of Palestinian sovereignty, a trend that was magnified in the decade that followed the second intifada (2000–2005). This is evident in the multitude of sponsored dabke dance troupes prominently displayed on important national days and events, festivals that celebrate traditional Palestinian cuisine and folk arts, architectural heritage preservation projects, numerous national music ensembles and orchestras established in the past two decades and a variety of events that celebrate Palestinianness. All these articulate with the different ways in which sovereignty is constructed, viewed, projected and sounded. The proliferation of cultural institutions and events that highlight “Palestine” or “national” (waṭanī) in their title renders the projection of Palestinian emancipation and independence seemingly inevitable. It is a kind of “anticipatory representation” (De Cesari 2012) that calls into being the new state under conditions of statelessness and in contradiction with reality on the ground. The buildup of proto-state institutions and nationalized cultural content occurs in tandem with continued erosion of personal freedoms and collective autonomy, as the Israeli Occupation deepens its grip through the permits regime, segregated roads, separation wall, control over  the planning of new construction and natural resources management. All these cultural activities in Palestine are hence also a means of re-inscribing the increasingly confining spatiality of the Occupation with Palestinian design, sound, life and agency. The growth of organizations dedicated specifically to music education in the West Bank and benefitting youth like Malik, was in great part enabled by a broader wave of foreign investment in Palestine that followed the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the PA. Foreign interventions in Palestine have been intimately tied to advancing the peace process (and since the second intifada of 2000–20005, to jumpstarting it), in anticipation of

44  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory and support for the establishment of the Palestinian polity. Many of these interventions are geared towards “development” (in preparation for statehood) and “democratization,” buzzwords that are attached to a framework in which Culture has been awarded a vital place. All this has contributed to an astounding expansion of cultural institutions and arts activities in Palestine, and in urban centers such as Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, to the development of a cosmopolitanized ethos and aesthetic practices that inform cultural production and consumption. Today, there are three prominent multi-branch music schools in the West Bank, all of which have been established since Oslo. Founded in 1993, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM) was the first to open its doors. The Barenboim-Said Foundation was established in 2004 and Al-Kamandjâti (“the Violinist”) was founded in France in 2002, but opened its first Palestine center in Ramallah in 2004. All three institutions are filling a void in Palestine. Until these conservatories began their work, no institutions providing formal music education had been in existence since 1948. Beyond music education, these institutions are performing a crucial role in building infrastructure for musical life in Palestine through public performances, festivals and outreach programs. Uneasy relationships that are both collaborative and competitive exist among these establishments, with differences among them reflected in both their cultural policies and artistic emphases. Tensions among these institutions are underscored in part by different ideologies attached to perceptions of the sociopolitical role of music education in occupied Palestine. The ESNCM and Al-Kamandjâti are local Palestinian initiatives. They position their musical projects and discourses prominently within the discursive frames of Palestinian nationalism and culture-as-resistance, and both organizations are members of BDS. The Barenboim-Said Foundation is the brainchild of the Israeli-Argentinean pianist-conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. It came into being with the idea that music can serve as the basis for “intercultural conciliation” between Jews and Palestinians, with the famous Jewish-Arab East-Western Divan Orchestra becoming the foundation’s flagship model.3 The two founders envisioned the orchestra as a utopian space for a shared, collaborative existence, where the common goal of music making would also support the creation of imaginaries and possibilities that resonate in larger sociopolitical realms. With the deepening of the Occupation and polarized atmosphere following the second intifada, the organization and Barenboim have come under criticism in Palestine for the institution’s discourse of coexistence, viewed as supporting “normalization” (Hass 2009). Ideological differences between the Barenboim-Said Foundation and the locally initiated conservatories are paralleled by their approaches to aesthetic production. This is most evident in their curricula. The Barenboim-­ Said Foundation concentrates solely on Western music education. The ESNCM and Al-Kamandjâti provide both Western classical music and

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  45 Arabic music education, as both are considered important for building musical infrastructure in contemporary Palestine. This focus is a new turn for musical production. Until the 1990s, the social functions of Palestinian music most associated with nation-making were centered on life cycle events and folklore-derived genres, retooled for the aims of resistance and revolution (McDonald 2013b; Morgan et al. 2006). The new focus on Western and Arabic classical music traditions is a departure from the ethical (ṣumūd, or steadfastness) and aesthetic (folklorized) frames associated with Palestinian nation-making and resistance in the 1970s and 1980s (which also remain important today) (Taraki 2008). This focus on the great traditions is a means of creating new functions in Palestinian cultural life: high culture as important to Palestinian modernity and enjoyment of music (and other arts)—rather than honoring the ascetic ṣumūd ethos—as both aesthetic practices and fundamental aspects of the national project. The two music genres that form the basis for music education are important in this mix. The formal study of, and professionalization in, classical Arabic music (or ṭarab music) is a means of re-contextualizing and re-embedding Palestine within the great Arab traditions of the region. More generally, it projects a geopolitical identification that harkens back to a time when Middle Eastern borders were open, and culture, as well as people, circulated freely. This process was disrupted in 1948 when a prominent cadre of local professional musicians went into exile, and institutions of music production such as the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS, established 1936) were decimated. In tandem, the institutionalization of Western classical music in Palestine is a claim for membership among modern nation states. In focusing on both traditions, Al-Kamandjâti and the ESNCM are replicating conservatory models that have appeared in urban centers around the Arab world over the course of the twentieth century (Racy 2003). Moreover, both conservatories have established “anticipatory” representative national ensembles that cover these genres. The ESNCM has been developing two national orchestras focused on classical Western music: the Palestine Youth Orchestra (PYO), which was formed to create “a quality national youth orchestra on par with similar groups worldwide,” and the Palestine National Orchestra (PNO), which consists of professional musicians of Palestinian origin from the entire diaspora (ESNCM 2011a, 2011b). Al-Kamandjâti has been weaving ṭarab into institutionalized national representations: since 2010 the conservatory is home to The Palestine National Ensemble of Arabic Music (PNEAM). The professionalization and nationalization of music associated with high culture is a process that has accompanied various nations in periods leading to independence and in early years of state formation (Bakhle 2005; Stokes 1994), but the ways in which such projects are localized are unique to each. In Palestine, the dual focus on Western and Arabic classical repertoires combines projections of past and future, as well as regional and international, that provide the template for performing and imagining the sound

46  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory and texture of future Palestinian sovereignty. My focus on Al-Kamandjâti in this chapter foregrounds the relationship between ethics and aesthetics that are intertwined in cultural production, highlighting the ways in which Orient and Occident are discursively positioned, played and listened to at a music institution invested in nation-making and cultural resistance. Performing the nation In 2011, during my time in the field, the Palestinian Authority decided to seek alternative paths to the stalled “peace process” by bypassing Israeli entrenchment, internationalizing the conflict arena and negotiating Palestinian independence at the United Nations (UN). This marked a radical shift in the PA’s approach to the conflict; rather than seeking to revive the peace process, it sought to bypass it entirely. In Palestine this move was accompanied by an accelerated buildup of Palestinian civic infrastructure and performative displays of national symbolism. The process was most visible in Ramallah, where in preparation for the UN vote (September 23, 2011), the city buzzed with public works projects. Downtown streets were excavated and newly resurfaced, and frantic construction proceeded at the Muqāṭaʽa, the PA’s compound. Nearing the UN presentation deadline, a giant blue chair with the inscription “Palestine’s Right” was installed at al-Manara, the city center. By the time of the September vote, huge banners displaying the Palestinian flag inscribed with “UN—State of Palestine 194” decorated numerous buildings in different urban centers in Palestine. On September 23, thousands rallied in public squares to watch President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech at the UN, which was broadcast live on giant video screens constructed for this purpose. In Bethlehem, where I spent the night, the speech was followed by people driving their cars in circles around Manger Square, waving Palestinian flags and tooting their horns. Spontaneous dabke dance performances erupted in public spaces, most especially by the Aida refugee camp. People were celebrating the international enactment of the nation as an “imagined sovereign community,” despite the fact that all participants knew that on the ground, whatever international recognition this move might bring, the Occupation was not about to be dismantled. The daily work of Al-Kamandjâti (and other cultural organizations) parallels the PA’s efforts to build up the institutions, infrastructure and symbolic content of the anticipated state, and like the PA’s moves described above, the power of their work lies in its performative agency. However, as independent NGOs, cultural organizations are free to project their own imaginaries of “Palestine,” and their dramas unfold in much smaller, incremental processes than the public national display described above. At Al-Kamandjâti, the process of institutionalizing Palestinian cultural life occurs through professional music education; creation of numerous and permanent local, regional and national music ensembles; seasonal music camps, and basic music education outreach programs. It also occurs through the production of concerts, festivals and tours intended to develop audiences

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  47 and a receptive public in Palestine and international audiences abroad. In all these activities, musical performances are sites in which nation-making and cultural resistance are enacted and constituted. In musical events the overlay of performance practice, discourse, embodied representation, social context and physical location combine to enhance social interaction and participation in a collective consciousness. Musical performances are performative actions that are contextually and temporally framed, displayed or highlighted in both daily life and theatrical spaces, ultimately constructing and producing social realities. My primary focus in this chapter is on staged musical events that constitute rich sites of performance, and the activities and discourses that surround them. I spotlight two of Al-Kamandjâti’s prominent cultural initiatives: The annual Music Days Festival and Al-Kamandjâti’s flagship orchestral project, The PNEAM. Concerts that took place during the Music Days Festival combined a politics and poetics of resistance to the Israeli Occupation along with efforts to instill Al-Kamandjâti’s ethical and aesthetic values, and models of cultural citizenship, amongst diverse groups in Palestinian society. They also created spaces for advocating globally for the Palestinian cause. The PNEAM’s concert I feature, along with the choice of repertoire and discursive frames that accompanied it, demonstrates how the Orchestra advances Palestinian nation-formation within dual frames of pan-Arabism and the construction of distinct Palestinian national legacies. In all these performances, the interplay of resistance politics and nation-­ building was cast through aesthetic production that produced not only an ephemeral “collective consciousness” but also the very nature and principles on which this collectivity is based. Malik’s deliberations on the meanings of democracy are pertinent here, as the performances featured in this chapter are all sites in which different ideas associated with the making of modern Palestine were performed, projected and enacted, in a process interlinked with conceptions of democratic ideals of humanism, equality, pluralism and participatory access. The performances became productive spaces in which tensions between different cultural meanings attached to the nation-­building project were worked out: the place of personal freedoms versus collective ones, local identity versus cosmopolitanism, tradition versus modernity and the mapping of “East” and “West” unto contemporary imaginaries of Palestine. When staging resistance to the Occupation, these performances were also about casting a moral judgment on an oppressive, colonial—and hence also taken as immoral and undemocratic—regime of Occupation. While humanistic ideals provide broad frameworks for Al-Kamandjâti’s cultural interventions in Palestine, each of the performances described below, depending on geographic location and venue, featured musical genre, discursive frames and local social context, provided opportunities for advancing a different aspect of Al-Kamandjâti’s work and ethical values. And, although each of these performances was a discrete event, performativity accumulates meaning through reiteration (Butler 1993). The case studies

48  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory presented in this chapter stand as examples for the long-term, incremental buildup of Al-Kamandjâti’s presence in, and influence on, public life in Palestine and beyond. In combination, these performative snapshots show how Al-Kamandjâti is poised between music and governmentality, resistance and state building, nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Introducing Al-Kamandjâti Al-Kamandjâti’s Ramallah center was one of the first buildings dating to the Ottoman period to be renovated in the Old Ramallah neighborhood, as part of the boom of architectural heritage preservation in Palestine.4 A beautiful structure combining Ottoman-era domed arches with innovative copper and glass, it is an edifice that, like the curriculum offered, fuses historical past with contemporary modernism. The center blends well with the dense layout of the Old City. Its architecture is magnified by the soundscape in which sounds of Western and Arabic musics float out from the center’s windows, mixing in with other sonic markers of the neighborhood, including the muezzin next door and the daily clatter of street life. The intensive sociality that characterizes Al-Kamandjâti also emphasizes integration with the Old Ramallah community: local kids play in the courtyard where teachers and students also hang out; neighborhood folks show up for concerts conducted on the center’s open-air rooftop performance space, and the young, imported cadre of Western music teachers and volunteers socialize with local staff and talent well beyond working hours. Since the founding of the Ramallah center (2004), Al-Kamandjâti has greatly expanded its reach. It established centers in Jenin and the village of Deir Ghassana, and is running outreach programs in several refugee camps in the West Bank (Jalazoon, al-Am‘ari, Qalandiya) and Lebanon (Bourj El-Barajneh, Shatila). Of the music conservatories in Palestine, Al-­Kamandjâti is the one most prominently focused on music education in the refugee camps, and has also developed basic music education programs for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and government schools.5 In the West Bank Al-Kamandjâti serves approximately 500 children. It also runs an atelier for the construction and repair of string instruments, the first of its kind in Palestine. At Al-Kamandjâti’s Ramallah office numerous posters highlight the history of the organization along with its founder, violist and bouzouq player Ramzi Aburedwan. Several posters chronicle the “Musiciens Pour Palestine” benefit concerts that took place in France in the period Ramzi had lived and studied there, when he first envisioned founding the Palestine music center. The poster that was displayed most conspicuously when I worked there contains a collage of images. Prominent among them is a picture of the eight-year-old Ramzi, then a resident of Al-Am‘ari refugee camp in Ramallah, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers during the first intifada (1987–1993). This photograph had been widely circulated as an iconic image of the intifada’s “children of the stones.”6 Above this floats a picture of the adult

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  49 Ramzi playing the viola, surrounded by images of children playing various instruments, one of them donning a kūfiyya and singing into a mic (see Figure 1.1). The transformation of a child embroiled in violence into an adult musician was further explicated on Al-Kamandjâti’s website, in a move that underscored Ramzi’s personal story to frame the organization’s mission,

Figure 1.1 Poster of Ramzi Aburedwan as an eight-year-old and as an adult violist. Photograph courtesy of Al-Kamandjâti.

50  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory highlighting the power of music to transform anger and violence into creative work and communal benefit: As an experienced street combatant on the make, Ramzi seemed destined for an Israeli prison or a Palestinian martyr’s poster. But fate decided otherwise. At seventeen, he was invited, by chance, to a music workshop at the Popular Arts Center, in Al-Bireh, directed by Mohammad Fadel, a Palestinian from Jordan. He fell in love with music and started to learn the viola.7 The drama enfolded in the turn from violence to music Ramzi has embraced is anchored in a devastating reality of painfully lived experiences. Ramzi lost a brother, a cousin and a number of friends during the first intifada.8 Yet, the juxtaposition of the potential shahīd (martyr) with the adult musician and educator that Ramzi has become is also positioned here in articulation with a long tradition of Western philosophy dating to Kant (1781), who viewed aesthetic and taste-making activities monitored by education as a means of producing universally valid moral principles and well-adjusted subjectivities. This tradition is echoed today in the discourses attached to Western aid that supports music projects in Palestine, which associate music making with higher moral ground, productive civic participation and universalized humanity. As Jessica Winegar writes: “In American elite circles, from the US government to universities and arts organizations, there is no greater contrast to the image of a suicide bomber than the image of an artist” (2008, 656). In the post-Oslo Palestinian context, this poster situates Ramzi and Al-Kamandjâti right within the core of Palestinian “authenticity” (the children of the stones), at the same time that it postulates culture as a prominent form of resistance and an alternative to armed struggle. The juxtaposition of the child, his expression one of terror and rage, his hand about to throw the stone, with the inwardly contemplative adult, his arms embracing the viola, crystalizes the idealized performance of Palestinianness as one enacted through music-making and its associated ethical frames. Coupling the development of cultural life in Palestine with the development of nonviolent modes of resistance is a discursive frame I have often heard advanced by Al-Kamandjâti staff, associates and students. It is important to note here that in the Palestinian context, there is something of a slippage of meanings assigned to this frame in its translation from Arabic to English. Palestinians distinguish between popular resistance (maqāwma shaʽbiyya) and armed resistance (maqāwma musallaḥa). In the history of the Palestinian struggle, one form oftentimes supported the other, forming a continuum based on strategy. This differs from Western discourses that commonly frame nonviolent forms of civil disobedience as the morally valid path to liberation, with leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King providing inspiration for this point of view. Yet at Al-Kamandjâti, presenting artistic endeavors as a resistive strategy and as

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  51 an alternative to armed struggle, is not projected simply for the benefit of the outside gaze. It is part of Al-Kamandjâti’s self-image, enveloped in the domestication process of discourses associated with post-Oslo international interventions in Palestine and also in the desire to shelter the children, as much as possible, from exposure to the extreme violence experienced by Ramzi and others when they were children themselves. In this context, coupling music making with nonviolent resistance gives “resistance” a new kind of ethical valence. This position resonates amidst both local community and foreigners. Among foreign nationals, Ramzi’s life story and the organization’s position have inspired such an aura of mystique and popularity that Al-­Kamandjâti has become a kind of a secular pilgrimage site. People from around the world—tourists, academics, volunteers, interns, journalists, writers and filmmakers—come to witness or to participate in the musical renaissance taking place in Palestine, and in the organization’s defiant nonviolent resistance. All this interest has thus far produced two documentaries, a stage show, a book about Ramzi’s life and the story of Al-Kamandjâti, and several North American concert tours that included readings from the book.9 For Ramzi and Al-Kamandjâti, the development of international networks and support is necessary for the continual development of Al-­Kamandjâti’s infrastructure. But perhaps of no lesser import, it is also a means of breaking the isolation imposed on Palestinian communities by the Occupation, travel restrictions, the separation wall and the blockade on Gaza. Having explained this sense of isolation to a group of visiting American scholars, Ramzi was asked what Americans could do to support. His response was: Really the best thing is to come here and cooperate and to meet the people. Because it’s not just about sending money and instruments, it’s a question of really having direct relationships. That’s why we encourage many people to come here, to perform, to work with us here, to discover… that we have a normal life … When people see the volonté (volition; a pleasure in) for living and for just doing as everybody in the world, it’s a very important thing…. (RA May 22, 2011) Ramzi’s argument highlights the importance of face-to-face, interpersonal encounters in a world in which Westerners oftentimes apprehend the Palestinian experience through the landscape of violence that dominates the media, or through the charitable aid economy, rather than the constructive ways in which Palestinians make their lives as both occupied subjects and citizens of the world. Moreover, developing an international network of cosmopolitan cultural exchanges is a means of countering the isolation of daily life under military occupation and of reaching towards open horizons. Hence, building cultural infrastructure for musical life at Al-Kamandjâti is entwined with building international relationships. This includes the international crew of Western music teachers on contract in Palestine, whose

52  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory dedication oftentimes manifested in a seven-day workweek, or late-night sessions in which teaching accessories were produced for the next day’s workshop at a refugee camp. Cosmopolitan exchange is intensified in annual festivals and high-profile Western music concerts during which musicians from all around the world come to workshop, mentor and perform with local youth.10 In addition to their role in classical orchestras, the international musicians often collaborate with Al-Kamandjâti’s professional musicians in special projects, and many of them return regularly to become part of Al-Kamandjâti’s long-term partnerships. While the visiting musicians get paid for their work, the returnees often become emotionally invested in their roles. In my conversations with returning musicians the meanings they attributed to this investment were diverse: the receptivity of the Palestinian children they taught; having witnessed the repressive occupation regime upclose; boredom with the classical music scene at home in contrast with its communal aspects in Palestine, and the sense that they were truly contributing to the development of cultural life and nonviolent forms of resistance in Palestine.11 One of the social functions of the annual music festivals then is to provide a host of opportunities for local-global exchanges and for generating support for Palestine abroad. Other functions include building and institutionalizing musical infrastructure in Palestine, showcasing cultural forms of resistance to the Occupation, providing access to live music in Palestine and promoting music-making as a value among all local populations. While these aspects form only a part of Al-Kamandjâti’s educational and performance activities, the festivals are events that maximize performativity, in both musical and sociopolitical registers.

The Music Days Festival The performative and discursive reach of annual festivals occurs through the geographical scope and range of venues in which they take place. During the 2011 Music Days Festival there were more than 50 concerts scheduled for different ensembles all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in locations ranging from the Ramallah Cultural Palace to children’s clubs in refugee camps, UNRWA schools, women’s associations, outdoor spaces, Red Crescent centers (equivalents of the Red Cross), village and municipal cultural centers and even a checkpoint. This span of geographical and communal variety the festival incorporated provided the framework for Al-­Kamandjâti to develop different areas, including “center,” “periphery” and East Jerusalem’s contested territory, into a continuous Palestinian cultural space, with artistic content molded on Al-Kamandjâti’s vision of cultural value. The festival then provided the context for the dual functions of mapping cultural continuity across occupation barriers, and of creating opportunities for developing Palestinian audiences, taste making preferences and listening practices on a national scale. In many peripheral locations live

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  53 music presentations are very new, and part of Al-Kamandjâti’s task is to disseminate live music as an important and valorized aspect of everyday culture. This involves pushing back against conservative traditions that equate music-making as either incompatible with Muslim beliefs or as a frivolous endeavor, as well as educating an uninitiated public about artistic content and concert etiquette.12 The emphasis on incorporating the “peripheries” is highly congruent with Al-Kamandjâti’s mission and specialty: providing music education to the disenfranchised. This mission is central to Al-Kamandjâti’s “daily work”—as manifested in the outreach programs in refugee camps and UNRWA schools—and is also viewed as important to the “democratization” of Palestinian society. Presenting music as a valuable, respectable and productive pursuit supports the development of local partnerships, recruitment of new talent, general audience appreciation, and dissemination of an egalitarian and integrative cultural citizenship. The stories and vignettes of the festival show how—through geographical scope, choice of venues and artistic content—Al-Kamandjâti’s music making interlinks and intersects with nation-building (locally and internationally), the politics of resistance, and governmentality, all under the flag of a single festival. I begin with a single day within the festival (June 22, 2011) in which three concerts of diverse programming—all in different venues in the contested space of East Jerusalem—provided opportunity for different kinds of cultural work and signification. The day in full, however, was about signaling a larger message of Palestinian entitlement to the city and overcoming the fragmentation imposed on Palestinian communities living on opposite sides of the separation wall. One day and three concerts in East Jerusalem: sounding Palestine in disputed territory The separation wall is a monstrous edifice that runs right through several Palestinian neighborhoods and towns that are either within, or contiguous with, East Jerusalem. It divides the city from the West Bank hinterlands and from some neighborhoods that are under Jerusalem’s own jurisdiction. While it is the most visible marker of state control, the wall is just one aspect of numerous policies that support Israel’s annexation project and impose hardships on Palestinians. Its effects are compounded by repressive urban development policies, including the construction of satellite settlements surrounding the Eastern (Palestinian) city and within it, regulations concerned with land and urban planning that include deferral of building permits, house demolitions and land expropriations, and much lower budget allocations for infrastructure and social services in the Eastern city. Added to these are policies targeting the individual status of Palestinian Jerusalemites, including the revocation of residency and social benefit rights of Palestinian Jerusalemites who spend more than seven years abroad or move to the Occupied Territories. The long-term goal of these policies is to change the demographic balance between Jews and Palestinians (40 percent) in the

54  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory city and to advance Jewish majority and hegemony (B’Tselem 2011; Council for European Palestinian Relations 2011; Fenster and Oren 2011). Cultural life in East Jerusalem has thus been greatly eroded by underinvestment, settlements and the separation wall. It has also suffered from the introduction of the permit system in 1993 and the curfews and closures of cultural establishments during intifada years (Diab 2012; Elias 1999; Hass 2002). At times, the Israeli authorities target Palestinian cultural production in East Jerusalem specifically to suppress its nationalist registers. For example, in 2009 Jerusalem was titled the “Arab Capital of Culture” by UNESCO and the Arab League, a title created to promote the arts in association with a different city in the Arab world each year. The Israeli authorities detained organizers of cultural events associated with a festival planned in conjunction with UNESCO’s initiative, and the Palestinian Literature Festival scheduled in tandem at the Al-Hakawati National Theater was raided and shut down. The authorities have also shut down Al-­Hakawati on numerous other occasions, oftentimes under the allegation that it received sponsorship from the PA. In 2013, a Palestinian children’s theater festival was blocked from opening for the same reason. In trying to maintain some autonomy, a few cultural producers have chosen the interiorization of cultural events as a strategy, producing events in inconspicuous, private spaces (Hass 2013b). Despite the devolution of East Jerusalem from a city that was once the center of political organizing and cultural life for Palestinians to its fragmented contemporary status, East Jerusalem remains the capital of Palestine in the national imagination (Taraki 2008). Al-Kamandjâti’s focus on Jerusalem on this day was an especially poignant move in a city which Rania Elias (1999) described as having been transformed from a one-time vibrant social and cultural center of Palestinian life into a city in which cultural life has all but vanished. In this context, Al-Kamandjâti’s performances were a collective resounding of Palestinian presence in the city and a means of reconstructing its isolated social geography as both vibrant and continuous with the West Bank. For Palestinians normally barred from the city, and for those who attended the performances, this was a momentary subversion of Israeli hegemony and its control over Palestinian lives, geography and cultural spaces. From Ramallah to East Jerusalem: permits and liabilities Organizing such a day was a highly complex logistical, administrative and musical effort, and not without risks. The Al-Kamandjâti Youth Orchestra, composed of students, teachers and festival guests, was scheduled to perform at the outdoor plaza outside Damascus Gate (Bāb al-‘Amūd). This area is the hub of Palestinian life in East Jerusalem. It is located right by the main entry into the Old City, near the Palestinian bus and service taxi depot that connects East Jerusalem with the West Bank (for those with permits)

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  55 and opposite a bustling market peopled by merchants and hijab-clad female shoppers, saturated with pungent smells of produce, fried foods and spices. The Ramallah Orchestra, a Western music orchestra focused on a more challenging repertoire and composed of students, teachers and visiting musicians along with students from other music schools in Palestine, was scheduled to perform at the Al-Hakawati National Theater later in the evening. A late-night booking for the Al-Kamandjâti Jazz Band was added at the last minute, at East Jerusalem’s trendy Askandinya restaurant. While there was much overlap between the personnel of these groups, each location addressed a different kind of audience and promoted different repertoires, as well as different aspects of the social and cultural work fostered at Al-Kamandjâti. Conversations at Al-Kamandjâti that morning centered on permits and risks. The venture was a risk taken against the Israeli authorities’ policies, which aim to control public gatherings of Palestinians and to limit access to the city for Palestinians who are not residents or Israeli citizens. Javier, one of the returning foreign musicians, recounted that during the previous year’s festival a Damascus Gate performance had also been scheduled. Although most of the musicians did receive permits to enter Jerusalem, the request to perform at Damascus Gate was denied. Al-Kamandjâti’s folks decided to go ahead with the performance anyway. While setting up at Damascus Gate, the musicians saw several plainclothes security personnel with walkie-­talkies surrounding them, but they did not intervene. Javier’s interpretation of the authorities’ choice to abstain from action was that their intervention in the concert, with all the orchestra’s children, alongside the merchants and tourists around, would probably have been too embarrassing an act of enforcing power, so the performance was held under their watchful gaze. Following this experience, Al-Kamandjâti’s staff decided not to request permits to perform at the Damascus Gate this year. Performing without a permit was perceived as an act of nonviolent resistance against an Israeli regime that forecloses public assembly on non-citizen Palestinians. Involving children in this enterprise was a concern. No one knew whether the authorities would show up or not, nor did they know exactly what legal or other consequences this might entail. But all were unanimously agreed that the concert should take place. Another topic of conversation that morning was the permit requests that had been denied or simply not replied to, for musicians and staff working with or performing in the East Jerusalem concerts scheduled for the day. It was left to each of the persons in question to decide what they were going to do. One person decided to try to “smuggle” himself on the musicians’ bus to make the concert, hoping to get through undetected in the clutter and the presence of so many foreigners (an effort that could land him in jail on a charge of infiltration). Another decided to skip it. A third associate of Al-Kamandjâti who had not received an answer decided to try and make

56  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory it through with me, as I was taking a yellow-plate taxi through a roundabout way in order to come out of Area C. At this checkpoint most of the cars coming through are settlers’ cars and checking tends to be laxer than at Qalandiya, which the musicians would be travelling through. Having to deal with such coercive restraints against a benign form of cultural production generated a palpable sense of collective purpose and communal pride among staff and musicians. Someone distributed tea to all who were present, another shared cookies and everyone helped with the logistics of loading instruments and accessories unto the bus. Al-Kamandjâti Youth Orchestra at Damascus Gate: classical Western music as an art of resistance My account of the concert at the Damascus Gate foregrounds the ways in which classical Western music has been appropriated as a dual site of national formation and popular resistance in Palestine. In the contemporary Western world, classical music is primarily the marker of elite cultural production, associated with hegemonic orders and cultural capital. Scholarly work on Palestine that has explored the relationships between music and resistance has by and large directed its attention to popular or traditional musics as obvious sites of resistance. Palestinian modes of nation-building and resistance are identified most prominently with folklore-derived genres and Palestinian dialect (Massad 2003; McDonald 2006a; Morgan and Kidel 1994; Morgan et al. 2006); mass-market productions of classical and popular Arabic music that originated primarily in Lebanon and Egypt and that have emphasized regional solidarity with Palestinians (Al-Taee 2002; Massad 2003); and global popular genres such as hip hop that have become prominent sites of Palestinian youth identity formation (Maira 2013; McDonald 2010b; Tawil-Souri 2011b). Al-Kamandjâti’s project shifts from such popular sonic markers of identity to collective music making that requires a specific set of professionalized skills and cultural abilities associated with translocal elite cultural production. It is a process of embracing a cosmopolitanized modernity that naturalizes regimes of knowledge associated with power, which, by shifting the terms of signification via performance contexts and discursive framing, is subverted to speak to power via an internationally valorized cultural form. Performing at Damascus Gate was a poignant act of civil disobedience, and for the West Bank Palestinian musicians who are normally barred from entering Jerusalem, a way of publicly reclaiming their right to the city while contributing to contemporary Palestinian culture in the Eastern city. Damascus Gate’s historical role as a hub of travel arteries that once substantiated a continuous cultural and geographical space across the Arab world—which since 1948 has been carved up both spatially and culturally— injected further layers of meaning into the choice of venue.

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  57 The layout of the area in front of the ancient gate, which forms part of the Old City walls, is well suited for an outdoor concert. A terraced section leading up to the street, where the orchestra set up, borders the rounded plaza in front of the gate. A natural audience consisted of people coming in and out of the Old City on foot (although at this time the traffic wasn’t as busy as it is on holidays or market days), traditionally dressed village women sitting in the plaza’s corners selling figs or other home-grown produce, sellers and shoppers surrounding market stalls (cheap shoes, phone accessories and cold juices). A bunch of listless shabāb (a group of male youth) and some tourists were also hanging out. While the orchestra and an Italian documentary crew were setting up, my travel partner to Jerusalem showed up with her niece; making it into the city provided her with a rare opportunity to visit her Jerusalem-based family. The entire orchestra stopped to cheer her for having made it. Such small acts of resistance gain much meaning in the context of collective activity, because they visibly reverberate through the entire group. All the orchestra members were smiling, and a number of them requested details of our encounters at the checkpoint we crossed on our way to Jerusalem. I looked around for security guys with walkie-talkies, but there were none. This performance was going to run without the authorities’ gaze, as they likely did not know the orchestra’s plans. In some ways, this could be interpreted as a small symbolic victory in the struggle to reposition the contested space of Jerusalem as a Palestinian domain. At the same time, their absence took the edge off the performative provocation intended in the choice of the venue. The Youth Orchestra, bolstered by professional musicians and conducted by Jason Crompton, Al-Kamandjâti’s piano teacher and Youth Orchestra director, started to play the opening piece: Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major. In comparison with the sections I had heard rehearsed in Jenin and Ramallah earlier in the week, the orchestra was playing very well. The children were completely focused, not paying attention to the street distractions around them. It was clear they were enjoying how the parts they had been rehearsing over the past weeks had come together, lifting their experience to a different level: they were now taking part in a potent orchestra. The Youth Orchestra’s takeover of this public space was amplified through both sound and visuals, as all members, adults and children, foreigners and Palestinians, were synchronized through music and formal black concert attire. The poignancy of this takeover was enhanced by the fact that this representation was a somewhat surreal play inverting time, place and expectations both sonically and visually: the sound of Western classical music seemingly anomalous in an open-air Middle-Eastern market environment, the formal concert dress incongruent with the outdoor setting and the sweltering afternoon heat. Soon a little crowd formed on the terraces at the other side of the plaza, and the Italian film crew was joined by numerous tourists who had also taken out their cameras. Midway into the Mozart Palestinian TV showed up as well.

58  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory The impactful Mozart opening was followed by Spanish-tinged selections from Bizet: Danse Bohême and the Habanera from the Carmen Suite, and Farandole from l’Arlesienne. While the orchestra continued to play well, the flurry of the audience’s attention was by now on the wane. It was not an especially busy time at Damascus Gate, and there were perhaps only 25 people who remained through the 40-minute program. The attention of most of the shabāb had dwindled; tourists moved on to other sites. I began to notice how the sound of the orchestra in the open-air space was a little dissipated, competing with traffic and other street noises. As far as audience draw and sonic impact, the end of the show seemed anti-climactic, although the few people who remained throughout the program clapped wholeheartedly. The performance generated different meanings for the actors involved. The children, who were playing amidst an international crew of adult professionals, wanted to know how well they had integrated into this milieu of skilled musicianship. They were more concerned with the musicality of their performance than in the surroundings or in the performance’s political meanings. When I asked some of them how the experience was for them, the unanimous answer was “it was really beautiful,” followed by requests for feedback on how well they performed. The adult musicians, most of them Westerners, were very happy with the performance, but their comments suggested that this was primarily because the performance was an act of solidarity and participation in Palestinian resistance that bolstered their own identity, rather than their artistic investment in it. The performance utilized a specific set of skills they had to offer and that gave them a sense of collective belonging to a just (and romanticized) cause. The Palestinian adults present, musicians and Al-Kamandjâti staff, were all West Bank residents who are barred from entering Jerusalem without special permits.13 For them the musically successful performance was both a defiant act of self-empowerment and a broadcast of this very message. Because Israeli security personnel were not present, the provocative edge of the performance had been attenuated. At the same time, while the potential of staging a confrontation between the public face of state power and the moral caché associated with making music did not materialize, the performance staged and sounded East Jerusalem as Palestinian domain. The contents of a Western classical music concert in this context had perhaps produced more meaning for the participants than for the accidental audiences that happened to be present at the Damascus Gate. While the visual and sonic impact of the orchestra had initially piqued the interest of the shabāb, they lost interest after some time, and most of the tourists did not remain for the whole event. However, the orchestra’s message was transmitted not only to a happenstance audience but also to the media, which would reproduce its own meanings attached to the event. The performance would be recycled and reinterpreted locally and globally through its reiterations on Palestinian TV, the Italian crew’s documentary and tourist documentation of mementoes. These reiterations of a classical Western music performance in East Jerusalem would advertise the national value of this form of cultural

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  59 production locally. It would also address global milieus in internationally understood values of cultural capital, accompanied by the visual imaging of Western-Palestinian solidarity, and framed by the picturesque Old City site now turned into a politico-cultural theater. Finally, the Damascus Gate performance shows how among contemporary Palestinian music institutions, the focus on Western classical music is a process in which socialization into musical collectivity is intertwined with the performance of Palestinianness and with the ethics of cultural resistance. This is underscored by a pedagogy that emphasizes the critical importance of participating in a group, in which the communal (social) and orchestral (aesthetic) contexts are intertwined. The heightened emphasis on ensemble and orchestral work is especially important to this project, both as an educational tool and as a potent means of projecting Palestinian collectivity and defiance. It is in the embodied presence of an orchestra coordinated both sonically and visually, that this collectivity is formed, sounded and performed. The second concert taking place that day was the Ramallah Orchestra at Al-Hakawati National Theater. If the Damascus Gate concert was a means of staging resistance to Israeli occupation, the Al-Hakawati performance was a prominent effort to reconnect Palestinian communities artificially divided by the separation wall, geographically, nationally and epistemologically. In both performances, classical Western music provided the anchoring aesthetic frame for promoting and projecting national unity.

Figure 1.2  Ramzi and the Ramallah Orchestra in rehearsal.

60  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory The Ramallah Orchestra at Al-Hakawati National Theater: connecting Palestinians across the separation wall, presenting Palestine to foreign powers At Al-Hakawati folks were in a last-minute rehearsal for the Ramallah Orchestra concert, which, along with the Al-Kamandjâti’s Youth and ­Refugee Camps Orchestras, would repeat its program the following evening at the closing concert of the festival in the 780-seat Ramallah Cultural Palace. Al-Hakawati is a modest yet intimate venue in comparison. A movie theater that had suffered a fire and was renovated in 1984 as a playhouse housing perhaps 200 seats, it is the longest established Palestinian performance arts space in East Jerusalem, and has been iconized as an important national marker of Palestinian cultural life in the city. This is due both to the political bent of the plays produced in the theater—which often brought on the wrath of the Israeli authorities—as well as to Al-Hakawati’s grassroots reach and activism amongst diverse Palestinian audiences (Snir 1998). The audience that had assembled on this night was relatively sparse for the venue’s capacity. Ramzi attributed it to the isolation of East Jerusalemites and the limitations of Al-Kamandjâti’s marketing reach across the separation wall. Many foreigners were among the audience, including representatives of the French and American consulates in East Jerusalem who often provide support for the festivals and are especially important in helping process permit requests for such ventures. Their presence highlighted how so much of the development of cultural work in Palestine, as well as the intermediation of this work with the world at large, is dependent on the aid economy that had been established in Palestine in support of the peace process after Oslo. Political commentary surrounding the performance advocated a Palestinian point of view about the meaning of the concert. When Al-Kamandjâti’s press agent went onstage to welcome the audience, she did so on behalf of Al-Kamandjâti’s students, teachers, administration, guest musicians and those who were absent due to denied permit requests. She also highlighted the importance of being able to celebrate Jerusalem with music at the sixth Music Days Festival taking place in Palestine. This was a reiteration of Palestinian perspectives to both locals and the representatives of the foreign powers, who were all well aware of Israel’s annexation policies in Jerusalem and the resultant contradictions inherent in their roles as supporters of the “peace process” and efforts to arrive at the two-state solution. The conductor that evening was Diego Masson from France, for whom this was the first visit to Palestine. Masson had greatly endeared himself to all over the past days of grueling rehearsals. Despite having celebrated his 76th birthday on this trip, his energy never failed nor did his patience, good humor and sense of solidarity throughout various challenges—­including difficult rehearsal conditions, repertoire far above the level of many of the young participants and last-minute accommodations for missing instruments or talent. In addition, Diego’s credentials as a member of the National

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  61 Liberation Front (FLN) during the Algerian War of Independence in the late 1950s, which landed him in jail, earned him the immediate affinity and respect of Palestinians embroiled in their own struggle for liberation. This concert’s programming was typical to many I have attended in the West Bank: a prominent focus on the Western music canon alongside works by Palestinian or other Arab composers highlighting a common heritage with the West, or works of contemporary Western composers who, having worked with Palestinian musicians, have incorporated Arabic music instruments or idioms into new compositions. This musical play of ethics and aesthetics serves to bolster local pride in its contributions to, and engagement with, Western (modern) traditions; to deconstruct the binary division between Orient and Occident, and to culturally (re)territorialize Palestine in partnership and in dialogue with the West. The first piece performed that evening was Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61. After the intermission came Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 36. This choice came of Ramzi’s decision to challenge the Ramallah Orchestra into performing two Beethoven Symphonies a year, until the orchestra would have the entire repertoire of Beethoven’s symphonies under its belt; the first symphony had been performed earlier in the year. The children, who had already been through a very long day, were not only holding up, but in complete immersion and concentration. The program ended with the Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife’s Suite Andalouse for Oud and Orchestra, which combines orchestrations of wellknown Arabic songs (“Lammā Bada Yatathannā”, “al-Bint al-Shalabiyya”) with flamenco-derived idioms and a Western orchestra. Khalife is one of the most popular and often-performed composers in Palestine, especially in concerts showcasing primarily Western classical music. An active supporter of the Palestinian struggle, Khalife had greatly endeared himself to Palestinians over the years by composing music to the poems of the beloved Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Khalife has rendered Darwish’s poems accessible to millions in the Arab world, encasing them in arrangements that transgress the divide between popular music and high art.14 And, as a prominent and prolific Arab composer also writing for Western orchestras and chamber ensembles, Khalife moves freely between classical Western and Arabic music styles, instrumentation and orchestration. While the Suite Andalouse was the Palestinian students’ favorite, many of the foreign musicians felt the piece to be laced with overblown, clichéd Orientalist flare. However, responses to the oud solo sections, both written and improvised, were telling. They were played by Dimitri Mikelis, a pianist and oud player originally from Greece who was a member of Al-Kamandjâti’s permanent staff and had made Palestine his home. Dimitri played with such sensitivity and delicate timing that several audience members responded with “Allah!,” indicating the sense of ṭarab he had inspired, while breaking with Western expectations of concert etiquette that require silent, inward contemplation until the last note of the piece is sounded. With these two ideals of reception

62  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory feeding into each other amongst the audience, the performance blurred the East-West binary (and its associated modes of cultural citizenship), for the attendant public. Programming Khalife’s music in a Western music concert was a means of highlighting East-West cultural exchange and creating a continuum between Oriental and Occidental, regionalism and cosmopolitanism: a meeting point of the great traditions at the very basis of Al-Kamandjâti’s work. The audience’s response to Khalife’s piece also indicated that this programming, which blurs perceptions of an East-West binary, provides a platform for a shared vision of modernity amongst Palestinian communities across a border that segregates them. For one audience member, an East Jerusalemite who sat next to me, the performance of this piece evoked memories of the kind of cosmopolitan ethos and cultural production East Jerusalem was known for “in better times.” As for the foreign delegates present, the successful synthesis of these valorized art forms could only poke at their inability to render the humanitarian values and discourses attached to Western interventions, along with their cultural significations, as transformative of the repressive terrain and power structures in which they come to (sonic) life. Palestinian music institutions’ prominent focus on ensemble and orchestral work—in both classical Western and Arabic music genres—serves as an important educational tool that also contains added sociopolitical value: orchestras and large ensembles are poignant representations of a unified Palestinian collectivity, in which each member has a distinct part that supports a synchronized whole. Such representations are cultural anchors for what Lindholm Schulz (2000) terms “homogenization,” a process characteristic of nation-building in which cultural production supports the creation of a common identity that legitimates the (proto)-state and is sanctioned by it. As illustrated by the Damascus Gate and Al-Hakawati performances, Al-Kamandjâti’s orchestral-focused work prominently advances this projection of the collective, within the dual frames of the Palestinian struggle for liberty and nation-building. The last concert to take place in East Jerusalem on this day was a performance of Al-Kamadjâti’s Jazz Band at a fashionable Palestinian bar-­ restaurant. While the Damascus Gate and the Al-Hakawati Theater performances provided a powerful means for configuring Palestinian collectivity through the caché of classical art forms and the embodied, unified presentation that moves to the beat of a single conductor, the jazz performance provided a means of working out the tensions and dialectics between individual subjectivity(-ies) and the national imperative in the post-Oslo era. Al-Kamadjâti Jazz Band at Askadinya: “you can’t be free in Palestine, but art makes you free.” Askadinya is a trendy establishment boasting oriental chic, featuring stone walls and hand painted Armenian tiles combined with low lights, cool artwork and ferns. On this night it was crowded with young Palestinian urbanites

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  63 in their teens and twenties; near the bar there was only standing room. This was a largely secular and liberal crowd. Many of the young women wore short skirts or bare-shouldered tops much less common in Ramallah, making the only girl with a hijab the exception to the norm at Askadinya. The Al-Kamandjâti Jazz Band was a student-teacher outfit, led on piano by Dimitri, who had established the jazz workshop just a few months back. David, a recent high school graduate from Germany now spending a year in Palestine as a volunteer teaching drums and percussion at Al-­Kamandjâti, played the vibraphone. The rest of the band was composed of Al-­Kamandjâti students, with Mu’in, now in his senior year of high school, on the drums, 15-years-old Malik on the trombone, his younger brother Fathi on ­clarinet and M ­ uhammed on bass.15 An exceptionally talented violinist who a­ fter five years of study was already teaching beginners at Al-Kamandjâti, Muhammed had picked up the bass just to join the jazz workshop, and had taken to the instrument so fast it seemed as though he had been playing it for years. They were joined by Ben, a trumpet player from the United States, here on his first trip to Palestine to work with the Ramallah Orchestra. The band kicked off with Miles Davis’ “Nardis” and continued with other standards, from “Blue Bossa” to “Straight No Chaser” and “There Will Never Be Another You.” Earlier in the week I had asked Malik what attracted him to jazz. He said he heard it on American films and wanted to grow up to be a jazz player. Malik knew little about jazz history and had little exposure to jazz other than through the movies, but was incredibly eager to learn. I had given him a list of trombone players to check out on YouTube, and tonight he was trying to use his hat as a mute, as he had seen online. Mu’in, who just a couple of months back was attempting to respond to basic cues, had by now worked in some solos and could cue the band back in when he was done without help. The audience at Askadinya, although pretty noisy and not incredibly attentive, was nonetheless highly supportive, cheering and whistling loudly for the band at the end of every number. The lack of attention to the music indicated that these young East Jerusalemites had come to Askadinya primarily to socialize, and jazz was probably not a genre they commonly followed. Their enthusiastic cheering was not so much a response to the music, but to their identification with the embodied presence of Palestinian youth from the other side of the separation wall— Palestinians normally barred from the city—and the sonic display of their presence in a “forbidden” space. The Al-Kamandjâti jazz workshop from which the band grew is not part of the institution’s core activities, but something that was born out of a convergence of teaching talent for whom jazz was a secondary skill, and interest displayed by students of classical genres. While Al-Kamandjâti’s focus on classical musics constitutes and projects collective unity, playing jazz brings in another dimension. Askadinya’s informal environment and its markers of secular cosmopolitanism, which are conducive to drinking and looser social codes, form the natural context for Al-Kamandjâti’s Jazz Band performances and is also a space in which new imaginaries for what it means to be

64  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory Palestinian can emerge. The band had also been booked at Ḥosh al-‘Elleya, a trendy bar and restaurant in the old city of Birzeit, and at LaWein, a nightclub in Ramallah, both hallmarks of the kind of secular, middle class urbanity that has developed in Ramallah since Oslo. These spaces are all magnets for alternative imaginations of urban lifestyles and sensibilities that diverge from the kind of respectable homogenization associated with classical ensembles of Western and Eastern traditions, and that provide new contexts for identity constructions for youth like Malik. They foreground existing tensions between collective and individual registers, and between pleasure and sacrifice, in the making of Palestinianness through music. This tension was highlighted in an article titled “Why Be Happy?”, written by Al-Kamandjâti’s press agent at the time, Lina Bokhary, for This Week In Palestine, in anticipation of the upcoming Music Days Festival: At times I fear that the next question will be: why be happy? You are a Palestinian! As if only a single dimension of self is permitted… As we honor our martyrs and our dead, it is also time to celebrate our living, who come from diverse and different walks of life. It’s time to celebrate our variegated colors and value our diverse backgrounds. And what better way to celebrate ourselves than by singing our songs, playing our music, and bringing together a wide palette of colors to paint the future to which we aspire? (June 2011, 58–59) Lina’s call for celebration, for cultural pluralism and for diversity as cornerstones of Palestinian futurity is a discourse that is enfolded within the very pull for homogenization among institutionalized cultural producers, while at the same time is seemingly in contradiction with it. The celebratory ethos is a departure from the decades-old formation of Palestinian collective identity associated with the dual markers of suffering and struggle (Lindholm Schulz 2000), ethics and affective states that were especially foregrounded in periods of heightened conflict and violence. Ramzi’s accounts of criticism he had encountered while on a home visit from his studies in France that coincided with the 2002 Israeli military invasion of Ramallah during the second intifada, exemplify this ethos, and for him, this was a moment of departure from it. In Ramallah the IDF occupied the Muqāṭaʽa, imprisoned president Arafat and his advisors, imposed curfews on civilian populations and curtailed movement of international humanitarian and medical personnel, human rights monitors and journalists (Esposito 2005). The forced interiorization of social life inspired Ramzi to play music to kids in the refugee camp. He was critiqued by older folks who thought it was wrong to play music at a time when obtaining food was difficult and curfew and exposure to violence prohibited any semblance of normal life. But Ramzi, seeing the children’s fascination and enjoyment, felt the critics were unjustified, and when he returned to France, he founded Al-Kamandjâti.16

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  65 The contemporary work of Al-Kamandjâti and other Palestinian cultural institutions is about creating a common identity that is not based solely on loss and suffering but on the insistence on living to enjoy cultural life and to normalize one’s existence, despite the routinized violence and hardships borne of the Occupation. This emphasis makes space for an inclusivity that reaches past parochial definitions of identity. Normalizing life is about enjoyment and living freely, rather than in anticipation of freedom. Mazin, an artist himself and owner of Birzeit’s Ḥosh al-‘Elleya restaurant where the jazz band had also performed, put it this way: “Culture is the only thing you can have which will set you free. You can’t be free in Palestine, but art makes you free.”17 And Lina’s call for diversity and pluralism as part of celebrating Palestinianness was a discursive move responding to a comment I heard another interlocutor make: “the Occupation has made us sick inside. The collective determines all.” Cultural production becomes associated here with two kinds of freedoms: collective and individual. The Al-Kamandjâti Jazz Band’s performance at Askadinya was a site in which the tensions between collective redemption, diversity and individual freedoms become part of the evolving nature of the project of “self-­ nationalization” (Jean Klein 2001), or part of the ways in which Palestinians individually choose to perform collective affiliation. The jazz workshop and the contexts in which the band performed, where individualized lifestyles and proclivities so removed from the ethos of austerity are created and constituted, are one such space for working out both collective and individualized aspects of Palestinianness. All these new social practices, and the meanings they generate, were produced within the framework of Al-­Kamandjâti’s daily work, highlighting the ways in which the process of nation-making is “on the move” (Bohlman 2004, xxvi). The jazz performance concluded Al-Kamandjâti’s musical interventions in East Jerusalem during the festival. Each one of these performances highlighted a different aspect of social value that Al-Kamandjâti invests in its musical productions: performing resistance, connecting segregated Palestinian communities, presenting Palestinian perspectives to global powers, making claims to modernity and cosmopolitanism and working out tensions between individual and collective registers. Yet, viewed together, these concerts were a cultural mapping of Palestinian entitlement to Jerusalem’s physical and cultural spaces, a means of chipping away at Jerusalem’s isolation from the West Bank hinterlands, and a projection of Palestinian unity across Occupation barriers. In this performance-packed day Al-­Kamandjâti used its single-day access to the city to its absolute maximum potential. From “center” to “periphery” at the Music Days Festival While the East Jerusalem performances were a means of transforming the spatial confinement of East Jerusalem into a site filled with Palestinian sound and agency, other performances within the festival provided

66  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory opportunity for leveling difference and social distances within Palestinian society via access to cultural production. In certain locations in Palestine— including refugee camps, rural areas, and towns that have not been prominent recipients of post-Oslo international aid and its associated processes of cosmopolitanization—access to live music is very limited. In addition, music making may be regarded with suspicion amongst religiously conservative milieus. By providing access to live music that is not differentiated by class, religion, social location or gendered boundaries in diverse locations in Palestine, the festival promotes the ethos of universalizing culture, or, in Al-Kamandjâti’s parlance, “democratizing” it. The language of democracy here is one that associates access to culture, and participation in it, with empowerment of individuals, the exercise of active citizenship and the promotion of social cohesion. In this framework the right to culture is bound with human rights, equality and civic participation. The idea of “democratization” aligns with the language of foreign donors supporting cultural production in Palestine, which is often matched by a paternalistic attitude and a problematic set of allegiances and interests in the context of Palestine-Israel. But the specific ways the term has been domesticated by Al-Kamandjâti are both ideologically and infrastructurally matched by the institution’s focus on providing music education and live music to those with least access to such resources in Palestine. Providing free live music in the diverse sites of the festival becomes an exercise in performing and disseminating what democracy and humanistic values mean and are aimed for at Al-Kamandjâti. Two performances of the Ramallah Oriental Ensemble, which consisted of advanced Al-Kamandjâti students—one at Abu Dis, the other at alAm‘ari refugee camp—provide the context for discussing Al-Kamandjâti’s interventions and the issues at stake. In Abu Dis, the performance was an intervention on models of cultural citizenship rooted in certain Muslim traditions that associate engagement with music as frivolous, immoral or unrespectable (al Faruqi 1985; Racy 2003), models that also confine gendered subjectivities. In al-Am‘ari, it was an intervention on refugee populations’ lack of access to many things, including Ramallah’s burgeoning cultural life. In both locations, inducting the audience to modes of engaged listening provided a means for promoting new modes of cultural citizenship. The Ramallah Oriental Ensemble in Abu Dis and at al-Am‘ari refugee camp Abu Dis is a beautiful town carved into the mountain in typical regional style, although as with other East Jerusalem towns, it has been dismembered by the separation wall that runs alongside its main artery. Its cultural center is a renovated Ottoman-era building with painted floor tiles, arched ceilings and large windows bearing old-style wooden shutters. We were ushered into a room that seemed a little small to contain both the ensemble and

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  67 the audience, which consisted of children aged four to six, their teachers and a few mothers. The children, who had to wait for another group of late arrivals, sat patiently and quietly on the floor. Among the advanced students in the Ramallah Oriental Ensemble, a couple had by now transitioned into professional roles in mature ensembles: Yanal, a young percussionist from the Jenin refugee camp, and Oday, a singer from al-Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, for whom the association with Ramzi and Al-Kamandjâti had changed the course of his life. The students included violinist Muhammed (featured on bass in the jazz band), who had arranged many of the ensemble’s pieces, his young student Aaliyah, Mu’in on percussion, Buhjah on the silver flute, and two oud players I had not met before.18 Yanal introduced the ensemble to the kids in a way that seemed formal for their young age. This emphasis on formal concert etiquette characterized the festival, no matter the setting and the audience. It was part of a process of training audiences to approach musical presentations as a serious and respectable endeavor, rather than a space associated with frivolity or extra-­ musical sociality. When the band began to play, the kids stared. They were so wide eyed it seemed likely this was the first time they were hearing a live band. Soon enough a few local shabāb crowded at the entrance, attracted by the sounds of the music. The repertoire consisted of well-known songs familiar to most in the room, although the majority of the audience members had probably not heard them live. Included were compositions by Marcel Khalife and the Egyptian Sayed Darwish (considered the grandfather popular Arabic music in Egypt and composer of the national anthem); covers of songs made famous by Lebanese singer Fairouz; and songs penned by Abu ‘Arab, an icon of Palestinian folklore and resistance, who after decades in exile had recently toured the West Bank. It was a repertoire of well-known songs that emphasized a regional continuity from Egypt to Lebanon inclusive of Palestine. Programming repertoire familiar to the audience provided an aesthetic anchor for a new, professionalized context of presentation. The music was so well received by both children and adults that after a couple of numbers, the initial formality had eroded. Oday had gotten the children to clap along, at one point getting right in the middle of the crowd of children and encouraging them to sing. Yanal also heightened the energy in the room by getting the audience to clap on emphasized percussion sections and rhythmic breaks. Right before the adhān (Islamic call to prayer) one of the teachers asked the ensemble to break until the prayer was over, and closed all the windows in the room. It was hard to tell whether she was concerned solely about disturbing the afternoon prayers or, more generally, about outside disapproval of the music being performed inside, but the shutters remained closed throughout the rest of the performance, indicating that live performances may not be unanimously approved of in Abu Dis. The kids sat quietly and in anticipation throughout this break, despite the stuffiness that overtook

68  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory the space. They were not the only ones enjoying this show. The adults in the room were smiling, and when the music resumed, they clapped and sang along. Their participation increased especially when the band played staple repertoire they knew all the words to, including “al-Bint al-Shalabiyye”, an Andalusian song popularized by Fairouz, and “Fawq al-Nakhl”, a song identified with Iraqi singer Nazeem Al-Ghazali which had since become localized all over the Middle East. By now, the energy in the room had uplifted to the point that people were almost dancing in their spots. Only one kid, who was sitting right under Yanal’s percussion, seemed so overwhelmed by the experience that he stuffed his fingers in his ears and at one point asked Yanal to stop. After the concert I asked Yanal if he thought this was the first time these kids had heard live music. Yanal said it was probably so; he too had not heard live music before Al-Kamandjâti came to Jenin and produced a few concerts there, right before the Jenin branch opened. It was a transforming experience for Yanal as live music had not been part of his surroundings, and he knew right away that he wanted to play. Yanal asked one of the kids if he had heard live music before, and the answer was no, never. One of the adult women told me this was the first time for most of the kids; it was in fact only the third time that she herself heard music in a concert setting, with all other times consisting of previous Al-Kamandjâti festivals. The only other context in which she heard live music was weddings, when a band consisting of keyboardist, percussionist and singer would play Arabic pop, providing a backdrop to wedding socialization. The woman introduced me to her little daughter Sara, who said she dreamed of studying the piano. “It must be wonderful for her to see older girls playing musical instruments,” I said. “Yes, it’s very special,” the woman replied. Sara was not the only little girl for whom this was a special occasion. The excitement of other little girls in seeing female players was obvious, as at the end of the show they crowded Buhja and Aaliyah. Buhja was showing them how to blow into the instrument and disassembled the flute for them, and Aaliyah let them pluck her violin strings, tuned in classical Arabic style. What Al-Kamandjâti was offering these girls was an imaginary of inclusion in public activities that runs against the current in a highly conservative, gender-segregated milieu.19 Although this could not be understood nor articulated by the little girls who surrounded the band’s female players, the impact on them was palpable: they simply didn’t want to leave. Differential access to music based on gender remains an issue not only in more conservative locales such as Abu Dis. A couple of teachers in Ramallah-­based music schools told me that some of the girls who studied with them were not permitted to continue after the girls came into puberty. By 2011, however, girls—including those in their teenaged years—did form a good percentage of the student body at the Ramallah branch. In the more conservative Jenin, Al-Kamandjâti’s parallel Oriental Ensemble included

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  69 only boys, as did the Jenin sections that formed part of the Youth Orchestra during the festival. The Abu Dis performance was an intervention on sustained traditional values, through a mixed gender presentation and the projection of respectability (hence Yanal’s formal introduction to the concert) associated with music making and cultural citizenship. By providing access to live music and models of respectable reception, over time such presentations produce new dispositions amongst different sectors of Palestinian society. Later in the afternoon, the Ramallah Oriental Ensemble was scheduled to play at the Child’s Club (nādī al-ṭufūl) of al-Am‘ari refugee camp in Ramallah. Like many of the refugee camps in Palestine, the camp is easily demarcated from the city surroundings. Al-Am‘ari houses 10,000 inhabitants in an area that covers less than one square kilometers (UNRWA 2011). A huge gateway decorated by Palestinian flags and the caption “al-Am‘ari Refugee Camp” provides passage to an urban mass of dense and unregulated construction. There are no open spaces outside the skinny alleyways and narrow main road, and the UNRWA schools by the camp’s entrance are enclosed by concrete and high wire-meshed fences. We were instantly surrounded by a group of precocious little kids who kept asking in English: “what’s your name?” and “where are you from?” over and over, a means of practicing the foreign language and receiving attention. One little boy, no more than seven years old, asked for a cigarette. By the time we got to the Child’s Club we were surrounded by a pack of 20 kids or so. The Italian documentary crew arrived shortly, and Paolo, who speaks Arabic, chatted with the children who wanted their pictures taken, the boys posing as tough guys exhibiting fists and muscles. The girls were not shy either, and they surrounded the women, touching our clothes and hair and using all the English vocabulary they had (at one point, exchanging names of soccer teams made up for lack of fluency between the girls and the visitors). Next to the village and town children I had met, who were shyer and appeared both healthier and more complacent, these kids seemed open, confident, animated and hungry for attention. Today it was both the Italian crew and a BBC crew who had to set up, which caused a delay of the concert’s beginning. As the film crews overwhelmed the Child Club’s little courtyard with all their equipment, around 50 kids and a few adults assembled on the benches and the stone floor. When the music started—the same line-up and program performed at Abu Dis— many of the children clapped to the music and some sang along. Others, however, continued running all over the place, and the few adults (mostly women) in attendance could not quite contain their energy. One little boy, perhaps four years of age, kept climbing onto the porch that served as the musician’s stage and walking right over their instruments. On a few occasions either Yanal or Oday tried to get the children to quiet down by instructing them on proper concert etiquette or alternatively, asking them

70  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory whether they wanted the band to leave. Yanal literally had to pick up children and toddlers who were walking or crawling around the musicians’ feet and place them back in the courtyard. Performing at such different environments provides great experience for young musicians in terms of sharpening their performance skills. Perhaps more importantly, these two concerts brought music to children who, like Yanal and Oday before them, would otherwise have had little opportunity to hear live music and even fewer opportunities to study it, in highly divergent contexts of reception. While each performance context presents its own challenges, in an annual festival that averages 50 performances, then in its sixth incarnation, there is a cumulative effect incurred in audience reception and participation, new recruits to music making, supportive local alliances and the naturalization of institutionalized musical culture among diverse segments of society and across different social and spatial barriers. The annual festivals, along with the outreach music education programs Al-Kamandjâti conducts in several refugee camps and basic music education programs it has launched in UNRWA schools, support a cumulative change in local attitudes about participation in secular, gender-integrated modes of cultural citizenship. In many locations that constitute a kind of “periphery” in terms of access to musical culture and the performing arts— whether due to conservative traditions as in Abu Dis or due to the economic and social marginality of the refugees of al-Am‘ari—Al-Kamandjâti is setting new standards for normative cultural values and providing a symbolic economy, that connects Palestinian center and periphery across an area zoned by occupation barriers on the one hand, and social difference on the other. It is a means of “painting the future Palestine,” to paraphrase Lina’s article, through the creation and distribution of its sonic imagery. Hence, in setting standards of cultural participation in diverse locations and contexts in Palestine, Al-Kamandjâti is not only providing access to live music, but propagating forms of cultural citizenship, social cohesion and national subjectivities that befit the institution’s ideals and conceptualizations of (cultural) democracy. The festival also provided an important venue for Al-Kamandjâti’s global advocacy for Palestine and the construction of Palestine imaginaries abroad. With all the international media present at these events—where at times performances seemed to be organized around the needs of the media rather than the other way around—one got the impression that in Palestine, the revolution will be televised. What we have here then are two dramas unfolding in tandem: the propagation of cultural citizenship that is bound with nation-making and resistance, and the mirroring of Palestine to the world. This is a dual process of subjectivity construction that projects to within and without, with local culture being created and constituted as it also gets interpreted through the mediated gaze. With children being the focal point of mediated attention, Al-Kamandjâti is promoting an image of Palestinianness that plays into, and also serves, what Jessica Winegar (2008) dubs

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  71 “the humanity game:” the children become representative of a Palestinian humanity that further foregrounds the inhumanity of military occupation and exilic experience. While children are obviously the raison d’être of an educational institution like Al-Kamandjâti, in this context, children also play an important representational role. In both the West and in Palestine, Children are perceived as moral and social symbols of redemption and hope for the future, subjects of instinctive identification. For Al-Kamandjâti’s staff and for the foreign media sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, the juxtaposition of music-­making children with all the obvious markers of violence and injustice that life under Occupation features—checkpoints, soldiers, the separation wall, living conditions at the refugee camps—is a compelling means of staging Palestine to the world. **** Music festivals are one important context for constructing and performing the nation. Other important sites are the national ensembles and orchestras established by Palestinian music conservatories in the post-Oslo era, specializing in either classical Western music or classical Arabic music. These ensembles take on the role of representing the nation despite being formed outside the purview of the PA’s bureaucracy and cultural funding allocations. While the PA has come into being as a governing body limited by the internationally accepted geographic boundaries of the oPt, cultural organizations’ unified imaginaries of Palestine are borderless and include all the Palestinian people, wherever they may be. Envisioned first by Ramzi, Al-Kamandjâti’s staff have put much effort into the formation of a national Arabic music ensemble.

The Palestine National Ensemble of Arabic Music (PNEAM):20 construction of national symbols Al-Kamandjâti’s national Arabic Music Ensemble is a prominent effort to re-establish Palestine as a node in the flows of Arabic culture and ideology that have been circulating the region for the past 100 years. Prior to 1948, Palestine was on the Arabic classical music touring circuit, which included visits by revered artists such as Umm Kulthum and Mohammed ‘Abed al-Wahhab. The PBS Jerusalem branch, established during the British Mandate (1936), supported an indigenous orchestra that became a hub of production and dissemination of locally composed and produced folk and classical Arabic musics (Beckles Willson 2013).21 As mentioned above, many of these musicians dispersed into exile in 1948. Until the establishment of music conservatories in Palestine in the 1990s, there were no institutions that provided formal training in Arabic music. Musicians received training by going abroad or through one-on-one instruction. Despite the lack of local music production, classical Arabic music

72  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory remained important to Palestinian national formation, most especially in the first two decades after the war, prior to the emergence of the PLO. During this time Nasser’s popular pan-Arab ideology supported the principle of Palestinian return (al-‘Awda) to historic Palestine, and this goal was promoted by numerous Arabic and Western orchestral musical tributes to the Palestinian experience, especially in Egypt (Massad 2003). For Palestinians, the majority of whom were now dispersed throughout the Arab world, this repertoire was a means for imagining a future inclusive of both a pan-Arab national renaissance and Palestinian liberation. The dual registers of pan-Arabism and Palestinian particularism have both formed important aspects of Palestinian identity, with different articulations of this duality corresponding to sociopolitical circumstances in different historical periods (Khalidi 1997). In the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Nasser’s pan-Arab aspirations crumbled and Egypt’s leadership role in the Arab world was in decline, Fatah, having emerged in the 1960s as an autonomous Palestinian entity disassociated from Nasser’s pan-Arab ideology and seeking its own path to self-determination, became the leading segment of the PLO (Cobban 1984). The musical repertoire that emerged as the salient national signifier closely associated with this turn was Palestinian folklore, which, along with other symbols of peasant life (kūfiyya, dialect), became closely entwined with the aims of national liberation independently of Nasser’s designs and focused on particularistic Palestinian symbolism. This turn to folklore was bolstered by a burgeoning movement of young nationalists seeking to recreate Palestine’s idealized and “authenticized” past as an inspirational model for the future state (McDonald 2013b). Yet, both registers—pan-Arabism and Palestinian particularism—continue to mobilize sentiment in contemporary Palestinian politics and in cultural production. The PNEAM’s cultural output is a testament to the newly invigorated salience of pan-Arabism in the process of authenticating and idealizing a regional past as the basis for mobilizing Palestinian futurity. Ramzi founded the PNEAM in 2010, and it soon became Al-­Kamandjâti’s flagship project. He viewed the ensemble as an important step in the process of reviving and institutionalizing Palestinian participation in the great traditions of the region. The PNEAM was set up to become Palestine’s topnotch orchestra, a permanent cultural and educational institution, a springboard for young talent and a cultural representation of Palestine locally and internationally.22 My description of a PNEAM concert features the ways in which Ramzi and members of the orchestra situate themselves within, but also diverge from, classical Arabic music traditions popular throughout the Arab world, as they adapt them to local conditions and ideologies. Martin Stokes (1996) points out that the construction of the nation’s musical legacies is a project usually undertaken by the state, which constructs selective historiographies that reflect state ideals, ultimately producing musical memory and nostalgia. But for a stateless, and therefore an a-historicized people, the prevailing sense is that, as historian Beshara Doumani writes, “…there is an urgent

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  73 need to write the Palestinians into history” (1992, 6). Here the project of “writing the nation” (or in this case, sounding it) occurs outside the oversight of official state institutions, and hence is the product of a particular music institution’s ideology and viewpoints. While the PNEAM is composing, arranging, and performing Palestine into history, as with all nation-making efforts, this is a selective process. The PNEAM creates musical memory at the same time that it alters its “authentic” models. Nonetheless, this creation holds great rhetorical power. My description details how such selections are made within the orchestra, and analyzes how this particular performance channeled sentiments of national pride and imaginaries of contemporary Palestinianness through political commentary, aesthetic choices and the ṭarab sensibility that it brought about. Ethnomusicologist and nay player Ali Jihad Racy (2003) defines ṭarab as both a genre and a body of classical Arabic music repertoire that developed in urban centers in the Arab world over the first half of the twentieth century, and a highly inspirational state or aesthetic bliss which this repertoire is meant to produce and evoke. Ṭarab’s ecstatic features are the hallmark of a classical Arabic music performance. As Racy says, the central role of performance in ṭarab culture is to mediate emotional transformation through “emotional extroversion, the evocation of powerful sensations, and direct interaction between performers and listeners” (2003, 2). It is also a specialized cultural domain and a “language of emotions,” that is a prime conveyer of “Eastern” (meaning Arab) identity. Through the mediation of ṭarab culture, The PNEAM’s concert at Ramallah’s Al-Kasaba theater provided the context for distilling a collective consciousness in which the duality of the Palestinian experience and pan-Arabness were fused once again. The PNEAM at Al-Kasaba theater Located in the heart of Ramallah, Al-Kasaba is a movie theater that had been converted into several multi-purpose performance spaces, gallery and a restaurant in 2000, although its lobby retains a decorative old-time splendor, with chandeliers and gilded decorations. Tonight (February 26, 2011) the venue featured the PNEAM. The audience at Al-Kasaba was largely made of families—many of which were of Al-Kamandjâti’s students—who had come with their kids and even babies. While Al-Kamandjâti was drawing on its natural audience, the attendance of whole families showed an overwhelming support for the PNEAM. Concerts produced in Palestine are often free and rely on sponsorships for funding, but this was a ticketed event, and for a family with several children, the tickets were not a minor expenditure.23 The 370-seat auditorium filled to near capacity. This was a relatively conservative audience; most of the women wore hijabs and older men were in suits and ties, as befitting a formal event. The younger (single) men in the crowd were more casually dressed. The MC who introduced the orchestra made a point of highlighting that the ensemble members hailed from “all of Palestine”—Nazareth and Haifa

74  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory (in present day Israel) along with Jenin and Hebron (in occupied Palestine). This got quite a response from the audience, the kind I would hear at other concerts, whenever the embodied presence of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, Israel and sometimes the diaspora was ceremoniously announced from the stage. A means of producing and circulating an embodied symbol of Palestinian unity in the face of Occupation barriers and dispersion, the participation of Palestinians from different arenas of the conflict was also highlighted in every grant application or publication that featured the ensemble.24 The orchestra consisted of four violins, bass, qanun, nay, a percussion section consisting of darbuka, daf and riq, Ramzi on bouzuq, and two choruses: a female chorus of four young women and two girls and a chorus of five young men. The concert began with a muwashshaḥ—a musical and poetic genre based on a strophic form that appeared first in tenth-­c entury Andalusia and that has since spread to the Maghreb and the Levant (Rosen 2000)—with the male chorus singing in unison. The ensemble was building a repertoire of muwashshaḥāt and other old poetic forms, including the qudūd ḥalabiyya—a lighter genre originating in Aleppo, Syria, that is simpler in in melodic and rhythmic structure. Jonathan Shannon (2003) writes that many consider the muwashshaḥāt to be the epitome of Arabic music, a symbol of Arab authenticity and the wealth of the musical and literary heritage of the Arab world. According to Ramzi, the PNEAM’s focus on genres viewed as cornerstones of poetic Arab forms was also meant to regenerate appreciation for poetry composed in old literary Arabic (fuṣḥā) among the ensemble’s singers and the general public.25 Apparently, this effort was greatly appreciated by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who had given his enthusiastic endorsement to the project. But the repertoire also became a focus for the ensemble’s instrumentalists, who collectively listened to different versions of archival recordings, selected the versions they felt were more correct, and transcribed and arranged them for the PNEAM. An exercise in the collective construction of models for appropriate interpretations of this material, the process also produced a sense of historical depth and continuity among contemporary Palestinian musicians, in a place where these traditions had not formed part of the matrix of cultural production since 1948. The first CD the ensemble recorded later in the year, intended as a marketing tool for the ensemble at home and abroad, was of muwashshaḥāt. Its production involved a lengthy process of listening, transcribing and adapting such pieces for the ensemble. The CD’s release was a constitutive act of affirming and projecting a historical legacy that was in fact being newly instituted in Palestine by the ensemble. The next piece performed was also a muwashshaḥ, but this time Amir, one of the chorus singers, came up front to sing a mawwāl—an unmetered vocal improvisation—at the beginning of the piece, with the rest of the piece

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  75 sectionalized between the solo singing, chorus, and instrumental breaks. His spirited delivery received an enthusiastic response from the audience. At the end of the piece Amir went back to his place in the chorus, and another soloist took his place. This return to the chorus after a solo performance is a marked departure from the performance practice established in classical Arabic music (ṭarab), where performances are structured around charismatic star singers. Partially due to genre constraints, and partially due to the ways in which the Arab media and music industry have developed over the twentieth century, this tradition foregrounds the centrality of voice and singer in Arabic music. By contrast, alternating soloists that emerge from the chorus would become a trademark of PNEAM presentations. According to Ramzi, it is a performance practice that provides opportunities for young talent and that also promotes the PNEAM as a teamwork effort in which the singer is just one of many, rather than a star fronting a subservient orchestra. Ramzi viewed this as both a performance practice and a pedagogical model that he expected would be picked up by other ensembles and for other performance contexts in Palestine. This new performance practice, in which the singer is equal in status to the other singers and the instrumentalists, was intended to project a model of community and an egalitarian ethos for society as a whole, a kind of performative modeling for democracy in performance. This idea was also how the PNEAM was presented to potential donors, with the added value of the PNEAM acting as a liberating agent of resistance and self-making against the Occupation that has cut Palestinians off from the region in which Palestine is embedded. A grant application I wrote based on Ramzi’s description of the PNEAM stated that: …people do not need to wait until there is a free Palestine for their personal redemption… with a whole community working in concert [emphasis mine], so much is possible to achieve in the immediate future… the audience also receives the message that despite the occupation, Palestinians are culturally linked to the world from which they been cut off for the past six decades, and as culture knows no borders, they can actively participate in this culture today.26 As with Al-Kamandjâti’s focus on ensemble and orchestral work in its approach to Western music education, the PNEAM too is a collective-­making project embedded in the experiences, sensibilities and ethical ideals of contemporary Palestinian musicians. Such sensibilities link aesthetic values and practices, as framed by the ensemble, to the set of social relationships that become its performative hallmark. The ways in which the ensemble engages in composing, arranging and listening to and for Palestinian national identity are enacted in performance through an ethos that is equated with a productive, egalitarian and participatory form of citizenship.

76  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory Following the muwashshaḥāt Ramzi greeted these audience with these words: Good evening and welcome! Tonight I want to express myself through music, to explain the situation in our country and the countries of the Arab world. Music conveys the beauty and many things abundant in the Arab world, and so in my name and the name of the Al-Kamandjâti ensemble [I dedicate this] to the Palestinian, Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan shahīds who will deliver us from the disrespect and injustice we live in and will return us to the old Arab lifeways. Mohamed Bouazizi… This statement got Ramzi a resounding response from the audience: claps, hoots and whistles. Ramzi’s introduction set up several frames connecting the PNEAM and the night’s program with contemporary politics, through a kind of back-to-the-future liberation trajectory framed via several parallelisms. The images he presented included an idealized past revived through the replication of a venerated culture associated with it, and the emplacement of Palestine within this patrimony of “beauty.” It also included the parallelism of shahīd iconographies within the Palestinian context of Occupation and resistance, as equivalent to the oppression experienced in other Arab societies. In bringing up Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vendor who had set himself on fire in protest thereby triggering the Tunisian revolution,27 Ramzi’s description framed the PNEAM’s work as a kind of parallel to the modes of resistance performed by the martyrs of the Arab Spring (Buazizi’s self-immolation) and the transformations in Arab consciousness they ignited. The subtext of this concert introduction places Palestinian identity within pan-Arabism both culturally and politically. It projects a post-Arab Spring Middle East as modelled after a glorious past in which Arabic culture was at its apex, and supposedly free of the injustice and disintegration brought on by (Western) colonial subjugation, a pristine past shattered by external forces. Ramzi’s statement made powerful links for the attendant audience, Palestinians currently living in isolation and under Occupation, who commonly apprehend Zionism and the policies of the Israeli regime as contemporary extensions of Western colonialism. This framing enabled them to nostalgically recall and construct a beautiful, imagined pan-Arab past as a model for their future, while they were attending a music performance. The rest of the evening’s program consisted mostly of qudūd ḥalabiyya pieces made famous by the Syrian superstar singer Sabah Fakhri. Fakhri has spent much of his career popularizing traditional forms such as the muwashshaḥāt and most especially the qudūd, which originate in his birthplace of Aleppo, among audiences old and young. Many of the qudūd are highly animated metric songs whose rhythmic energy propels even an audience that does not constitute the “inner circle” of avid ṭarab listeners, into a mode of instant participation (Racy 2003). The audience immediately recognized

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  77 Fakhri’s canonical staple “Sībūnī yā Nās” and clapped along. At the beginning of a qudūd ḥalabiyya medley that followed, Oday, who had become one of Al-Kamandjâti’s premiere singers, stretched the opening mawwāl section for almost ten minutes. Extending both melody and lyrics, he repeated segments of the verses with such emotional charge that the audience members almost seemed to be dancing in their seats, and they responded to him with claps and whistles. By now a sense of “collective effervescence” had taken over the hall, only to be topped by Monther, the next singer who came up front for another famous Fakhri number. “Khamrat al-Ḥobb” is based on a poetic genre called khamriyyāt (wine poetry), and the audience recognized it right away. The piece is anchored in an ostinato that gives the singer much freedom to elaborate melodically, and it gave Monther the opportunity to showcase his agile alternation between chest and head voice. Oday returned to solo over the next medley of popular songs joined by the shared mode of maqām ḥijāz.28 Placing his mawwāl in the middle of the medley rather than at the beginning, he raised tension and expectation in the room even further. Monther returned for the last medley, which opened with the mawwāl to the song “Qul li’l-Malīḥa,” yet another Fakhri staple. Improvisatory mawwāls made famous by superstars of Sabah Fakhri’s caliber are sometimes considered unsurpassable, and are therefore repeated verbatim by singers that cover them. Monther did take liberties with the mawwāl in some ways, segmenting it differently and lingering on certain words and lines. But his version overall recalled a performance in which Fakhri imitates a muezzin call, stretching it into an elongated “allāhu akbar,” thereby connecting the genre—which often describes the love for God in terms of earthly love and wine-based intoxication—with its centuries-old Sufi based intent and poeticism. Until this conclusive statement, almost no one whistled or commented, the silence in the hall indicative of suspense; when the “allāhu akbar” arrived, it got the audience out of their seats. At the end of the show, everyone in the audience was on their feet, applause continuing for quite some time. New nations (as well as old ones) call on ancient pasts (Gillis 1994). While this show prominently focused on muwashshaḥāt and qudūd ḥalabiyya, the scope of repertoire already performed and further planned for the orchestra was much greater. It includes traditional instrumental genres (samāʽiyyāt, lūnjāt), works made famous over the past century by composers and singers from the entire Levant and works written specifically for the ensemble. It also features lesser-known Palestinian composers such as Rawhi Al-­K hammash, who had worked with the Palestine Broadcasting Service as artist and producer until going into exile in 1948,29 and the contemporary composer and PNEAM member Khaled Saddouk. The PNEAM’s repertoire is always designed to emphasize a cultural genealogy of longue durée and provide a resonating image that constructs an essentialized and unproblematic duality of Palestinian nationalism and pan-Arabism.

78  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory In the year following the Al-Kasaba show, Ramzi, Al-Kamandjâti’s staff and the PNEAM musicians took important steps to further the orchestra’s goal of becoming a permanent, representative institution. The PNEAM recorded its first CD, toured in Palestine and embarked on its first tour abroad (France, January 2012). The process of institutionalizing the PNEAM as a performance and educational outfit is steeped in modern (Western-derived) techniques of preservation and transmission (recording, notation, transcriptions, etc.) that Ramzi and the ensemble musicians are developing as they study archival materials and adapt them to the orchestra. This process replicates those undertaken by other conservatories in the Arab world over the twentieth century with the transition from apprenticeship models of pedagogy to institutionalized formal training (Racy 2003). But in the case of the PNEAM, it is also a process that profoundly produces a collective historical consciousness through music-making. At the Al-Kasaba performance, the timelessness experienced by the audience through the participatory experience in ṭarab culture came to be equated with the timelessness of the panArab traditions on which it drew. The audience’s overwhelming response affectively bound the music performed by the PNEAM with discourses of liberation, the resurrection of regional affiliations Palestinians under Occupation have been denied, and an idealized pan-Arab past through which Palestine was re-created in the performative moment.

Al-Kamandjâti’s multifaceted project of resistance and nation-making “The fact that some of the members couldn’t come with us, and some of them came ‘illegally’ as they [the Israeli authorities] say,” said Ramzi, speaking of a PNEAM concert that took place in East Jerusalem’s Al-Hakawati Theater (February 27, 2011), “and the fact that we don’t have the power to really work in Jerusalem… that makes us feel like [Ramzi does not complete the thought]… but we put another kind of power in it. I think the energy we had, [is] what is beautiful in music— because [on our way there], there was a little bit of negative energy— which was [then] transposed into beautiful sound. That’s what I love about music.”(RA April 14, 2011) In this quote Ramzi was highlighting the power he sensed in musical performance to transform personal and collective experiences of repression and violence into creative and transforming collective energy, against all odds. This interpretive frame, interlinking both harsh personal experiences and “volonté,” or the pleasure in life, with the dual process of nation-building and resistance, is at the crux of the Al-Kamandjâti’s activities. It is also the frame from which values of productive and engaged citizenship, equal access to cultural production, the ethos of humanistic values and conceptions of democracy emerge.

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  79 Cultural resistance has an obvious focal point: the Occupation. In staging projects of resistance, Israel is positioned as the agent of brute state power, the antithesis of the moral caché of humanistic or democratic values embodied by music-makers (as exemplified by the Al-Kamandjâti Youth Orchestra Damascus Gate performance). Foreign powers, which are so important to the cultural renaissance in Palestine but also so bound to the failed Oslo Accords, serve as enablers of this renaissance, important witnesses to the brutality of the Occupation, as well as prominent agents in maintaining the status quo. The Ramallah Orchestra concert at Al-Hakawati pinpoints the inherent contradictions bound in this situation. Yet what comes to life in all these performances of resistance is the staging of moral caché through aesthetic practices, a collective affective transformation enabled by music making, the projection of a democracy in the making that is stunted by sheer material power, and the transformative and emancipatory power of music for performers or listeners. If staging resistance to the Israeli authorities is risky, the ways in which it galvanizes a collective consciousness is not. Nation-building, however, is a highly complex process that contains its own inherent tensions and contradictions, as it involves the negotiation and construction of collective modalities of cultural citizenship across heterogeneous populations. Al-­ Kamandjâti works hard to incorporate the burgeoning Ramallah middle class (as demonstrated by the Al-Kamandjâti Jazz Band), the more conservative populations of villages and towns like Abu Dis and the socio-­ economically disenfranchised refugee populations, as in al-Am‘ari (the Ramallah Oriental Ensemble concerts), into the national project. This work involves community building, performances that conjure it to life and the training of performers and listeners alike. In the process inherent tensions between individual freedoms and collective liberation, tradition and modernity, and Palestine’s location between “East” and “West” are also negotiated. Negotiating these tensions has not always been a smooth process. In 2009 Al-Kamandjâti’s Jenin branch, established just a couple of years earlier, was torched. Walls were blackened; instruments and equipment perished in the fire. Jenin is a conservative, insular community that had suffered utter devastation during the second intifada; this was likely the work of local militants who did not appreciate the secularist, Western bent of the school and its foreign teachers. The conservatory responded by resuming its work the following day, conducting lessons in the school’s courtyard. Over time, the Jenin branch has grown to service approximately 100 children from Jenin and its vicinity, becoming part of the local sociocultural matrix. Al-Kamandjâti intervenes on all the complexities involved in building cultural life under conditions of statelessness and military occupation, through its quotidian cultural work and practices. This work is a cumulative process of performative interventions that stages cultural resistance

80  Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory to the Occupation locally and on the global stage, at the same time that it seeks to consolidate Palestinian collectivity across occupation barriers, social distances in Palestinian society, and the construction of national symbols such as the PNEAM, that produce a Palestine that always already was.

Notes 1 Pseudonym. Names of all minors at the time of these events have been changed. 2 Personal communication, March 24, 2011. 3 Barenboim-Said Foundation Website. See http://www.barenboim-said.es/en/ foundation-barenboim-said/ (accessed September 3, 2017). For a critical view of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra see Beckles Willson “Whose Utopia”? (2009a). 4 The center was designed by Riwaq, an NGO dedicated to renovating historical buildings in Palestine for community uses. 5 UNRWA was created for Palestinian refugees in 1949. 6 This photo (photographer unknown to Ramzi) appeared first in Israeli papers, was then replicated in Palestinian papers, and was finally printed in posters used by Palestinian solidarity activists in Europe. See Tolan (2015, 30–31; 41; 59; 83 and 120) for a detailed genealogy of the photograph. 7 Al-Kamandjâti Website, www.alkamandjati.org (accessed February 18, 2012). 8 Interview, April 18, 2011. 9 The play “Al-Kamandjâti Show” was produced in 2008. The two documentaries include “Its Not a Gun” (2005) and “Just Play” (2012). The first US concert tour accompanied the publication of Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land (2015) by journalist Sandy Tolan. 10 In 2011 Al-Kamandjâti was producing two annual festivals: The Music Days Festival (June) and the Baroque Festival (December). 11 These impressions are based on conversations with returning musicians during the 2011 Music Days Festival and a formal interview with Peter Sulski, director of Al-Kamandjâti’s annual Baroque Festival (June 20, 2011). For an extensive discussion of foreign Western music educators and a critique of how they viewed their work in Palestine, see Rachel Beckles Willson’s Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West (2013). 12 See also David McDonald’s “Performing Palestine” (2006b) for the social tensions invoked by the national festivals, and more broadly, between the ethics and dispositions of cosmopolitan-oriented NGOs, the new cultural forms they introduce, and traditional values. 13 At the time of this concert, permits for minors were required only from age 15 and up. Later in the year the age barrier was dropped to three years old, with all children above this age requiring permits. 14 For more on Khalife and his activism, see his article (2004) “Defending Freedom: blasphemy trials and censorship in Lebanon.” 15 These are pseudonyms. 16 Interview with PARC visiting scholars, April 29, 2011. 17 Personal communication, June 2011. 18 Pseudonyms. 19 The importance of music education as a means of countering gender inequalities was affirmed by interviews conducted by a sociologist who grew up at al-Am‘ari refugee camp with girls from the camp who were taking music lessons provided by Al-Kamandjâti, which I also attended. The interviews indicated that studying

Al-Kamandjâti music conservatory  81

20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

music had increased the girls’ confidence and sense of worth. A teenaged guitar student told me she planned to use her music education as a means of becoming famous and breaking out of social confinements, including the future choice of marriage partners, that restricted her life at the camp. Arabic: Al-Firqa al-Waṭaniyya li’l-Mūsīqā al-‘Arabiyya. Following the establishment of PBS, local production of music, theater and educational programming comprised 70–80 percent of broadcasting in both Hebrew and Arabic hours of programming, becoming sites in which modern nationalized (and conflicting) subjectivities were propagated (Stanton 2014). Information on the PNEAM is partially based on personal communication with Ramzi over several months during which I was writing a grant application for the ensemble. Ticket prices were 30 INS ($8.5) for parents and 20 INS ($5.7) for students. See for example http://www.alkamandjati.org/en/article/1541/The-PalestineNational-Ensemble-of-Arabic-Music- (accessed September 3, 2018). The muwashshaḥ employs classical language in all strophes except the concluding verse; songs considered “proper” to the qudūd ḥalabiyya genre are in fuṣḥā, although more recently colloquial language has been introduced (Shannon 2003). The European Commission, Cultural Activities Programme Grant Application, EuropeAid/131-210/L/ACT/PS, p. 16. December 17, 2010. Maqām is a melodic mode that forms the basis of the classical Arabic music system. It defines both scale notes and patterns of development in a piece of music. Plural: maqāmāt. Compositions of Rawhi Al-Khammash were the first to be recorded by Nawa, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development on the 2011 album Hunā al-Quds (Here Jerusalem).

2

Coexistence, multiculturalism and pluralistic citizenship in Israel The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC)

…the work here is very challenging, both content-wise—dealing with East and West—and language-wise: we try to combine Hebrew and Arabic in all the songs… We perform at any place in which people want to show another side of Israel and another possibility for existence. We work through music because we all believe it is a language that reaches past and above everything, a shared space. —Idan Toledano, Musical Director, speaking of the Voices of Peace choir for Jewish and Arab youth, Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC), Israel1 The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC) provides a prominent example for Israeli institutions promoting Arab-Jewish coexistence through the arts. Music is a common framework for multiculturalist institutions engaged in Jewish-Arab relations, reflecting the belief that music’s universality renders it the ultimate medium for negotiating socio-cultural differences and promoting inclusivity. Idan’s statement exemplifies both the ethos of arts projects intended to improve aspects of Jewish-Palestinian relations in Israel and the aesthetic practices associated with fostering the value of coexistence: combining the native languages of all participants along with “East” and “West” in the musical arrangements. Offering an artistic template for inclusive citizenship, these multicultural performances showcase Jews and Arabs sharing the stage, interweaving artistic and linguistic repertoires and engaging in productive cultural exchange. Their aesthetic productions are meant to substantiate imaginaries of a different future for the country and the region (Cohen 1997), whilst enabling more immediate social transformations to occur at the local level. This chapter analyzes the interplay of multicultural ethics and aesthetics through which Arab-Jewish civic partnerships are imagined and constructed, as they are lived, sounded and performed at the Jaffa AJCC. Current focus on multicultural models of shared Arab-Jewish citizenship— rather than reconciliation between two nations—is both the outcome of the 1990s Oslo peace process, and the result of its disintegration. Historically, many aspects of public life in Israel, from the education system to party

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  83 ­

84  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center Palestinian anti-normalization campaign. In the absence of Arab-Jewish cultural dialogues involving Israel and the Occupied Territories, the multiculturalist ethos promoted by various organizations in Israel has been ultimately assimilated into, and also subordinated to, the conceptual unity of the Jewish state. Such projects have turned to focus primarily on resolving tensions between Jews and Israel’s Arabic speaking minorities (20 percent) and nurturing a sense of shared citizenship. Yet all these projects harken back, conceptually and aesthetically, to the 1990s cultural renaissance enabled by the peace process. In many ways, Israeli cultural politics since the 1990s serve as a study in contradictions. The overall trajectory has been of an ever-expanding diversification of the Israeli cultural field toward polyglot, multicultural music productions incorporating a host of regional (i.e. Arab/Middle Eastern) and globally inflected styles (Seroussi 2008–2009). Muziḳa mizraḥit—a hitherto marginalized hybrid pop genre created by Mizrahim that combines Arabic-­inflected vocals and regional instruments with Western song structures, harmonies and amplified instruments—has since the 1990s been incorporated into mainstream broadcast channels. Muziḳa etnit (ethnic music), consisting of “refined” “East-West” fusions, developed in tandem with the Oslo process and the global burgeoning of world music (Brinner 2009; Dardashti 2001; Regev and Seroussi 2004). And in the 2010s, third-­generation Mizrahi artists have been mining “forgotten” cultural heritages, with performances in Arabic providing sites for reclaiming “Arab-Jewish” identities in a postvernacular context for the language (Erez and Karkabi 2019). Other global-local permutations of popular musics drawing on international genres and assorted repertoires brought by communities of Jewish immigrants have also proliferated. On the surface, this pull for cultural diversity alludes to the fragmentation of “core” cultural representations of the (Jewish) nation into a more pluralistic (and tolerant) arena of artistic representations. Yet this is but one stream in a system of opposing aesthetic and ideational currents. Public discourses of reconciliation have, in the new millennium, been overshadowed by a sharp rise in anti-Arab sentiments, xenophobia and racism (Rouhana and Sultany 2003). This turn has been musically accompanied by occasional nostalgic recyclings of the SLI repertoire, a marker of Jewish ethnonationalism (Stein and Swedenburg 2005a), and during the second intifada, the rise of hyper-nationalist rap (McDonald 2013a). The annual Jerusalem Day Parade—when tens of thousands religious nationalists celebrate the city’s “reunification” in 1967 by dancing through its streets to Hasidic tunes and waving Israeli flags—has become a site of ever-increasing violence directed at Palestinian residents (Sermer 2015). In the post-Oslo era then, Arab-Jewish multiculturalist institutions have been operating within a public sphere in which ethnonational tensions have become ever more pronounced. The successive elections of right-wing

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  85 Likud-led governments headed by Netanyahu since 2009 have greatly contributed to these tensions, as its coalitions have been advancing the institutionalization and legalization of Jewish hegemony in Israel while also pushing for more authoritarian controls over voices of dissent. This is exemplified by a flurry of legislative measures devised to formalize the State’s exclusionary politics towards Palestinian citizens while clamping down on human rights organizations.3 The 2018 passing of the Jewish Nation State Bill—which codifies Israel as a country in which only Jews have the unique right to self-determination and which downgrades the status of Arabic from official language to one of “special status”—is a prominent marker in this trajectory (Lis and Landau 2018). All these create a legal framework and a public atmosphere in which citizenship for Palestinians increasingly becomes a contingency (or carrot), rather than a basic right, and dissent (by all citizens, Jews and Palestinians) a proposition of higher risks. Citizenship and cultural policy in Israel: the State vs. multiculturalist organizations State-funded cultural policies in the post-Oslo era have been promoting a neo-Zionist discourse underscored by a religious (or messianic) argument for primordial Jewish entitlement to the land (Newman 2005), and Jewish hegemony over physical and cultural spaces. In 2011–2012, my time in the field, the government was propagating the neo-Zionist narrative via educational and cultural programs so intensively it prompted one (critical) blogger to dub the government-sponsored lineup of events “the Zionist Festival” (Mohar 2012). Among these were high school student tours initiated by the Minister of Education to “The Land of Our Fathers,” a patrimony centered largely on West Bank (oPt) sites (Nesher and Levinson 2012). The Ministry of Culture introduced a new award category titled “Prize for a Creation on the Subject of Zionism,” (Ministry of Culture and Sport 2011) and the art video competition “Zion U,” which invited applicants to “express the values of Zionism.” Such programs exclude Israel’s Palestinian and non-Jewish minorities from the national narrative while advancing a vision of a Greater (Jewish-) Israel extending over the oPt. As journalist Rachel Neeman (2012) highlighted in her coverage of the “Zion U” contest, this approach reflects “a vision of Zionism as a project of becoming, a state in the stages of formation that must continue being built in Judea and Samaria, in the Galilee and the Negev, and everywhere else Arabs can be pushed out.” More recently the Minister of Culture appointed in 2015 Miri Regev has been lobbying for the defunding or closure of any cultural organizations and projects that are “disloyal” to the State (Griffiths 2016; Mazria-Katz and Zonshein 2018). In contrast to these exclusionary practices, numerous cultural organizations have been established since Oslo with the mandate of promoting Arab-Jewish collaborative work and creating alternative spaces in which

86  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center shared citizenship is imagined and enacted. Most of them are located in mixed cities or regions where Jewish and Palestinian populations live in close proximity, and their work intends to improve the quality of life and to foster productive relationships among the area’s residents. All these organizations are publicly funded, with contributions coming from municipalities in which they are located, Western countries invested in the peace process and Arab-Jewish cultural dialogues, or private donors. But they largely remain outside the purview and interests of the Israeli government. Some of these organizations focus specifically on music, while others have a broader program. For example, the Jaffa AJCC was founded to bring Arab and Jewish residents together for a variety of educational projects that underscore coexistence, music prominent among them. The Jezreel Valley Multicultural Music Center (JVMMC) is home to a choir of teen-aged Jewish and Arab girls and ensembles that perform Arab and Western classical music traditions as well as folklore. The Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra (AJYO) consists of players from the entire country performing original repertoire on a mix of Arab and Western instruments and idioms, and the Jerusalem Intercultural Center (JICC) produces an annual conference that workshops Arab-Jewish dialogue through the performing arts. This list is but a small sample of the variety of projects that promote Arab-Jewish coexistence by showcasing the musical diversity and collaborative work of the participants, with the laudable aim of promoting representational equality and cultural intimacy. Faced with the overwhelming pull of the neo-Zionist discourse, these projects provide a counter-model of shared life and physical, social and aesthetic spaces for cross-cultural encounters. While these organizations draw on multiculturalist ideals, it must be noted that multiculturalism is a relatively new discourse in Israel. Researchers began to take note of profound schisms between various groups (Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs) only in the 1980s (Mollov et al. 2004), and the turn to multiculturalism in scholarly debates occurred in the 1990s (Yonah 2005), in parallel to the Oslo peace process. Various organizations and educators have since attempted to apply its principles in limited contexts. But multiculturalism has never been adopted as formal policy by the Jewish state, which remains based in a profound ethnonational logic vis-à-vis its Palestinian citizens (Orr 2011), and an assimilationist one for Jewish immigrants. Institutions dedicated to multiculturalist Arab-Jewish projects in Israel, whether in the arts or other arenas, are hence working outside the frameworks of state policies, providing models for what they wish the state become, rather than how the state perceives itself.4 The inherent tensions between the state’s neo-Zionist cultural policies and those of multiculturalist Arab-Jewish organizations are the outcome of divergent conceptualizations of the nation-space. Israel was founded to secure Jewish national aspirations and was built on an assimilationist and homogenous model of state and society for its Jewish citizens. By contrast, Arab-­ Jewish cultural organizations are drawing on models of multiculturalism

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  87 that Western liberal democracies have adopted as both a principle of social organization and a theoretical framework for accommodating difference. Multiculturalism in these countries is a means of grappling with demands of minority groups or immigrant populations for equal rights, access to resources and cultural representation on the one hand, and the maintenance of national interests and unifying symbols, on the other (Crowder 2013). As several critics have pointed out, the institutionalization of multiculturalism in liberal democracies has been shaped by the power dynamics entangled in the attempts to settle inherent tensions between national imaginations and accommodation of difference. Critics claim that the pluralism invoked by multiculturalism emphasizes the right to be different but sidesteps crucial disputes in society, does not undermine the ideological hegemony of the dominant group and romanticizes or exoticizes the Other, without investigating the constitution of difference in the context of asymmetrical power relationships (Estrada 1993, McLaren 1995). Some scholars (Ahmed 2000; Hale 2002, 2005; Povinelli 2002) question the value of multiculturalism as both an ideal and a means of advancing the redistribution of power between majority and minority groups in liberal democracies. These scholars share the view that as multiculturalism becomes integral to the definition of the nation space and its self-image, it also becomes another means of extending the violence of authority and hegemonic authorship now masked by the discourse of equality and respect for difference. For these writers, the multicultural politics of recognition cannot be dislodged from the power of universality embedded in national ideology and neoliberal capitalism. As Sara Ahmed points out, while multiculturalism is “a way of imagining the nation itself, a way of ‘living’ in the nation and a way of living with difference” (2000, 95), it ultimately becomes about maintaining the hegemonic order in the most crucial domains multiculturalist interventions are meant to address: social justice, cultural identity and economic efficiency. While in the Western democracies critiqued above the limits of civic inclusion and of the national imagination are determined by distinct geographical boundaries, the work of multiculturalist Israeli organizations is further complicated by Israel being a nation whose borders (between State and Occupied Territories) are undefined. Within its blurred geographical boundaries, the majority of Palestinians have no citizenship rights at all, and the ethnonational logic that drives state policies imposes unsurpassable structural inequalities on its minority of Palestinian citizens. The work of Israeli Arab-Jewish multiculturalist institutions therefore remains in tension not only with state prerogatives but also with the state’s power to organize classificatory terms of identity (such as Arab and Jew) as both hierarchical and immutable categories. In a country in which tensions between nationality and citizenship cannot truly be decoupled, Culture is one arena in which multicultural institutions can work to affect change. They cannot even begin to address the social, political, legal and economic inequalities that structure majority-minority relations in liberal democracies

88  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center that have adopted multiculturalism as a starting point for addressing these inequalities. The boundaries that confine the work of Arab-Jewish multiculturalist organizations are reflected in the discursive framing of their projects. These projects are almost always presented as cross-ethnic (Arab-Jewish), multicultural or interfaith projects; Palestinian citizens of Israel are always referred to as “Arabs,” never as “Palestinians.”5 This representation is a means of including all of Israel’s Arabic-speaking minorities in the mix—Palestinians, Druze and Bedouins. However, it also presents Palestinian Israelis’ identity as denatured from its complex national register(s), a reductive mapping of ethnonationality unto a convenient space of citizenship, whereby difference is constructed solely in cultural and religious terms. Tagging these projects as “interfaith collaborations” between Jews, Muslims and Christians tallies with the State’s divisive mechanisms of classification, as well as with its interest in deflecting the progressive nationalization of Palestinian Israelis (Ichilov 2005; Jamal 2007; Rabinowitz and Abu Baker 2005). The Arab-­Jewish or interfaith frames of representation foreclose the preference of many Palestinian citizens to be counted as a national minority, and they obscure the structural inequalities that produce difference between Jewish and Arab citizens in the first place. At the same time, as I argue in this chapter, the cultural work of Arab-­ Jewish multicultural institutions, despite its limitations, is not to be dismissed in relation to sociopolitical and economic domains. It is a constitutive force in the construction of identities, in affecting belief systems and in transforming social relations. In a place where the essentialist bent of both Jewish and Palestinian national narratives has been epistemologically naturalized as a locus of ontological difference rather than a historical construction (Bekerman 2016), cross-cultural work chips away at, and in some cases shifts, the fixed Arab/Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli binaries and the zero-­ sum game such binaries enforce on all subjectivities. Israeli multicultural institutions do perform an important integrative role in the communities in which they operate, a testament both to the power of cultural work under conditions of ongoing ethnonational violence and to the important role of culture as a site of contestation. In trying to create symbols and imaginaries for shared life through Arab-Jewish musical representations, multiculturalist institutions often create alternative imaginations to the dominant order, project more inclusive models of cultural citizenship and facilitate local communal cohesion in times of heightened political tensions. They also enhance quotidian encounters ubiquitous to mixed environments, including the matrix of economic exchange, social services and higher education institutions. And, while the “Arab-Jewish” label used to describe these collaborations points to an essentialized, binary conceptualization of Self and Other, the intimacy that cultural work brings to the table often produces a life of its own for participants and audiences.

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  89 My ethnographic reading of the social life of the Jaffa AJCC musical projects points to a multitude of experiences, contingencies and mediations involved in the production of cultural meanings in a mixed Palestinian-Jewish urban environment, and more broadly, in multiculturalist contexts in Israel at large. It foregrounds culture as a space of negotiation and contestation that is central to the production of citizenship, rather than solely a representational construct or one to be read primarily through the majority-­minority structural frames of inequality that emerge from the critiques of multiculturalism cited above. By focusing on how the ethics of Arab-­Jewish integration are projected through attendant aesthetic content in specific performance contexts, I show how multiculturalist artistic production produces social value—or fails to—and the rich dynamics of culture and power negotiated in the process. Such dynamics determine whether the project becomes primarily a showcase of “culti-parading” or a successful basis for “multi-relating” (Baumann 1999). My analysis of the AJCC’s musical Arab-­Jewish projects demonstrates the Center’s important integrative role in this mixed Palestinian-­Jewish city, and also, the dissonances arising from striving towards universal conceptions of citizenship in a country where the construction of difference is always shaped by ongoing political and structural violence.

Musical projects of the Jaffa AJCC6 It was the end of a session in which a talent scout for a televised choir competition was interviewing and listening to older members of the AJCC’s Voices of Peace (VOP) choir, students in their last two years of high school. “Is there something funny or amusing you might want to tell me about?” she asked. “I can tell you some funny anecdotes,” said Idan, the choir director. “For example, that Mahmoud’s7 dream is actually to be a cantor.” “Can you give us a demonstration?” asked the interviewer. “Aaaaaa…” Mahmoud belted out his baritone voice into the small rehearsal space. “So you heard cantors in the synagogue?” the interviewer chimed in. Idan answered: “Mahmoud is Muslim and he ‘saw the light’ while we were on tour in Brazil this summer, where, on his first-ever synagogue visit, he heard this cantor… Since then we’ve been working on piyuṭim and Song of Songs.” Piyuṭim are liturgical poems; some have become a standard part of the Jewish liturgy, while others remain reserved for particular life cycle events, holidays and festivals. The body of melodies piyuṭim are sung to reflect diverse degrees of interactions between Jews and the musical cultures among which they lived throughout the Jewish diaspora. Modern piyuṭim originating from predominantly Muslim countries often resonate with, or are derived from, popular music repertoires easily identified by Muslims. As Mahmoud sang part of a piyuṭ with total concentration, everyone began to giggle. “nafshi tsme’a le’elohim” (my soul is thirsty for God), he continued, sending everyone in the room into hysterics.

90  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center “Let’s do something with Noam,” said Idan. The only 2 boys among the 15 members of the VOP choir, which consisted largely of girls, Noam and Mahmoud were the most unlikely, yet inseparable, pair. Their synergy was such that when you asked both of them a question, often one would reply and the other would just add: “I feel exactly the same.” Mahmoud comes from an observant Muslim middle-class Jaffa family; Noam, due to a difficult home life, spent several years as a foster child with a ḥaredi (ultra-­ Orthodox) family before reuniting in Jaffa with his mother, a single parent, thus returning to secular life. Mahmoud’s groundedness always seemed to balance Noam’s short attention span, as did his baritone (which he liked to belt out with the power and earnestness of a Red Army singer) against Noam’s counter-tenor. “We’ll do “Hava Nagila”” said Noam. A Hasidic dance tune set to a Hebrew text, the song was a staple in Jewish family celebrations worldwide well before the founding of Israel. The two broke into an energetic version of this Jewish folkdance melody, stomping their feet and clapping on the offbeats while Idan accompanied them on the piano. Mid-performance, Mahmoud started to sing a mawwāl based on the Egyptian composer Muhammed Abdel-­Wahab’s “Inta ‘Omrī”—which Umm Kulthum’s legendary performance has popularized throughout the Arab world—on top of Idan’s rhythmic accompaniment, that closed with Noam’s elongated evocation of a muezzin call to prayer: “Allāhu akbar.” The two returned to jumping and singing the “Hava Nagila” chorus, at which point Noam burst into the 1920s American Jewish shlager “My Yiddishe Momme”—an archetypal symbol of diasporic Jewish culture for most Jewish-Israelis—in a clear, powerful soprano register, after which both of them returned to the “Hava Nagila” chorus and ended the skit with a stomp. By now every person in the room was rolling with laughter. The warmth, openness and license to experiment that characterized this session is meticulously cultivated by the Arab-Jewish Community Center. Located in the heart of Jaffa’s picturesque and predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of ‘Ajami, across the street from the Mediterranean beach, the Center is an inviting place whose architecture blends well with the surroundings. Between its two buildings, a sculpture of a multicolored open hand appears to grow from the ground like a tree, its fingers branching out horizontally and serving as a jungle gym for kids during breaks from activities. The sculpture is symbolic of the Center’s mission: bringing together Jews and Arabs and educating for inclusivity and civic partnership. This inclusivity is evident in every aspect of the Center’s activities. Linguistic representation includes Hebrew and Arabic in all activities with English added on formal communications. The diversity represented by the staff is also representative of Jaffa at-large; Christians, Muslims and Jews, veteran Israelis and new immigrants from a host of diasporic origins. Educational programs offer dabke along with ballet, musical instruction on piano as well as oud. Major Muslim, Jewish and Christian holidays are

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  91 celebrated communally. On International Tolerance Day (November 16), the AJCC produced a colorful annual parade that snaked through Jaffa’s central arteries, showcasing a host of musicians and dancers from around the country and music ranging from dabke to jazz, flamenco to Bukharan folk dance. The Center provides arts education to schools peopled by students of low socioeconomic backgrounds and an after-school center for children at risk. It also provides afternoon and evening arts, sports, language instruction programs and activities designed to foster coexistence to groups of all ages. A unique model not yet replicated by any other community center in Israel, the AJCC services over 3,000 members. Arts, and especially music, have become the Center’s specialty over time. According to Hadas, the Center’s deputy director at the time and the driving spirit behind many of its initiatives, they have found the arts to be the best means of fostering creative and productive encounters in mixed groups.8 The Center’s two most representative music and coexistence projects, which form the ethnographic focus of this chapter, are the VOP choir, which combines Muslim, Christian and Jewish youth, and the Shirana Choir, an Arab-­ Jewish choir of adult women.9 The AJCC’s location in Jaffa’s ‘Ajami neighborhood is not coincidental. Its coexistence projects and activities are embedded in the complex dimensions of social relations in Jaffa, and in particular, the formation of a Palestinian-­Israeli enclave in this area. Jaffa: a short history of demographics and power relations In 1948, ‘Ajami became home to the original core of Jaffa’s contemporary Arab community, which numbers over 20,000 residents, out of a total of about 55,000 residents. This population is largely made up of the descendants of a community of 3,800 not displaced to exile during the 1948 war. Prior to 1948, Jaffa was a vibrant Palestinian urban center numbering over 70,000 residents (Goldhaber and Schnell 2007). Those who remained were Jaffa’s poorest; the community had lost its political and economic power base. After the war the Israel Land Authority (ILA) moved the remaining Palestinians to emptied luxurious homes in ‘Ajami the state had confiscated from the now-exiled Palestinian refugees. The ILA hastily divided the confiscated homes into multiple housing units, bringing Jewish refugees, primarily Holocaust survivors from the Balkans and Jews from Arab countries, to settle there as well. It was a haphazardly thrown together community in which coexistence became not only a necessity for Jewish and Palestinian families who often had to share bathrooms and kitchens, but was at times a means of surviving the poverty experienced by all. In 1950, the city was annexed to the Tel Aviv municipality now named Tel Aviv–Jaffa. The municipality has since undertaken gentrification projects intended to “Judaize” and “modernize” Jaffa, advancing policies the marginalized Palestinian residents, now a miniscule percentage of the

92  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center municipality, had very little say in. In the 1960s, the Old City just north of ‘Ajami, whose remaining Palestinian inhabitants had been forcefully relocated to ‘Ajami after the war, was rehabilitated to create residences and galleries intended for Jewish artists and provide a tourist attraction. Yet in ‘Ajami, between the mid-1950s and 1980s, most of the residents now living in confiscated Palestinian properties were not permitted to fix or upgrade their homes. Many homes became uninhabitable and the municipality tore down more than half of them. This deterioration transformed ‘Ajami into one of the poorest neighborhoods in Israel, riddled with drugs and crime. Many of the post-WWII Jewish immigrants left the area with the aid of public support not extended to the neighborhood’s Palestinian residents. In the 1990s, new gentrification pressures arose, driven by well-off Jews from Tel Aviv seeking Mediterranean views, quaint architecture and cheaper real estate than they could find in Tel Aviv. This migration was enabled by city planners’ turn to neoliberal policies, which included the privatization of state properties, deregulation of the real estate market and economic benefits offered to private developers. Several gated communities were built for the wealthy transplants. Local residents of ‘Ajami and adjacent neighborhoods have since been experiencing the pressures of rising rents and real estate prices, alongside privatization of the public housing administered by companies contracted by the ILA, which led to the displacement of many. All this came to a boiling point in 1995, when frustration about housing shortages, which Jaffa’s Palestinian community felt were the product of policies that targeted them, ignited a riot. Since 2009 tensions have also arisen due to the entry of a new element: religious Zionists linked to West Bank settler yeshivas who have established a community in the heart of ‘Ajami, which has become a new and provocative “frontier” for settler Judaization. In short, over the past several decades population growth and the municipality’s neoliberal gentrification policies resulted in a constantly shifting heterogeneous population mix in which different class, ethnic, religious and national stratifications play into its social dynamics not only in ‘Ajami but also in several neighborhoods to its east (Goldhaber and Schnell 2007; Kushkark 2010; Menahem 2010; Monterescu 2007a; Qaddumi 2011). The AJCC and its interventions in Jaffa The AJCC was founded with the mission to diffuse social tensions in Jaffa, create platforms for shared civic participation and provide educational opportunities for the underprivileged. While it is Jaffa’s Palestinian residents who have felt the brunt of ongoing structural discrimination by both State and municipality, Jaffa’s status as Tel Aviv’s underdeveloped stepsister has affected all its residents. This often leads to alliances in which local identity, built over decades of co-habitation, supersedes ethnonational differences. Locality is indeed a potent attachment among long-time Jaffa residents; both Jews and Palestinians tend refer to themselves as Jaffans (Yāfāwiyya in

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  93 Arabic, Yafo’ee in Hebrew) rather than as Tel Aviv-ans. The AJCC is a prime example for how this identity is lived and perceived amongst Jaffa residents. Originally intended for Jaffa’s Palestinian community, as its inauguration approached, local neighborhood leaders suggested designating the Center to service both Arab and Jewish populations, a suggestion upheld by 85 percent of the neighborhood’s residents in a poll conducted by the Tel Aviv municipality (Menahem 2010). Over the years, Jaffa’s demographic shifts have also affected membership at the Center. According to Hadas, when the Center opened in 1993, membership was 90 percent Arab and 10 percent Jewish. By 2012 the membership ratio was 60 percent Arab to 40 percent Jewish, due to the changing demographics of the neighborhood. While the Center is an important integrative institution in the community, some residents, particularly social activists, feel alienated from it. Criticism has not been directed at the Center’s pluralistic mission, but at its association with the Tel Aviv Municipality and mayor Ron Huldai. Since becoming mayor in 1998, Huldai, who supports the AJCC as well as educational projects designed for Jaffa’s Arabic speaking community, has also been advancing the municipality’s neoliberal, monied gentrification projects. The displacement of Jaffa’s (predominantly Palestinian) working class has been happening under his watch. In the summer of 2011 (August 7), while a social protest movement was sweeping over Israel,10 I attended an interfaith ifṭār (breaking of the Ramadan fast) dinner at the Center, where Huldai was one of the primary speakers, along with an imam, a rabbi and an archbishop. Following this dinner, just minutes away from the Center, Jaffa’s newly established tent city held an assembly to discuss a course of action against the ILA and municipality’s policies of privatization and forced evacuations. The Jaffa tent city was predominantly inhabited by poor Palestinians but also a few Jews who had lost their homes due to rising rents and privatization of public housing. For the tent city activists, the AJCC represented the mayor’s pretty poster, multicultural image for Tel Aviv–Jaffa, a view designed to showcase the liberalism and openness necessary for attracting investment and tourism, at the expense of the very people the AJCC was built to support. In a context of tremendous local mistrust of State and municipal authorities, Huldai had become for many the very symbol of brutal capitalist power and racist politics, and the Center’s multiculturalist projects were taken as complicit with the hegemonic neoliberal order. For the AJCC’s directors and staff, negotiating between the Center’s affiliation with the establishment and the values and ethics of the Center’s mission is an ongoing process of walking between the raindrops. This process necessitates consideration of the Tel Aviv municipality, which funds the center, the sensitivities of the AJCC members, the different positionalities of the Center’s staff and directors, and the development of appropriate and sensitive multiculturalist artistic and social content. Tensions intrinsic to these negotiations come to life most prominently around public performances of music, as this is when the Center’s ethical frames, aesthetic production and sociopolitical role in the community are most closely scrutinized from both within and without.

94  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center

The Voices of Peace (VOP) choir: performing multicultural Israel On a 2011 summer evening (August 11), I arrived at the Tel Aviv Art M ­ useum to document the VOP choir. Spotlights had been set up at the back of the museum’s upscale restaurant, lighting up two interfacing staircases that fanned out to the second floor, which would serve as a stage entrance for the choir. The restaurant’s back doors were open, leading to a blooming garden where a bar had been set up to cater to diplomatic guests. A few were there already, some in traditional robes indicating their African countries of origin, while others had accents that pointed to various countries in Latin America, Europe and the United States. All were mingling with Israeli officials. According to Idan, these were diplomats from the entire world who were either stationed in Israel or brought there on a Foreign Ministry junket for a week to be shown “a different side of Israel.” Nothing was publicly said during the evening that indicated the reason for the junket. However, with only few weeks left to the upcoming bid for Palestinian sovereignty at the UN (September 23, 2011)—a period when the Israeli government was working frantically to harness support for Israel at the UN—the timing of the event indicated this was a likely a hasbara (public diplomacy/propaganda)11 campaign intended to sway different countries against the Palestinian move. Soon everyone was called in for dinner. The evening’s MC came upfront; he did not introduce himself, but was obviously known to many of the diplomats assembled, as he acknowledged many of them on a first name basis. The MC began by calling on an American diplomat to welcome the attendants, which I interpreted as a move showcasing Israeli-American solidarity (and international political clout) to all those present. Following these preliminaries, the MC introduced the group: And now ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce to you the Voices of Peace choir of the Arab Jewish Community Center in Jaffa… The choir is a mix of Jewish, Christian and Muslim teenagers. They sing in three languages: English, Hebrew, and Arabic, and they bring through music a message of brotherhood, tolerance and multiculturalism. They have performed in many places in Israel, and are going soon to Brazil. We are delighted to have them here tonight… Ladies and gentlemen, the Voices of Peace choir! The choir members quickly made their way on the staircases leading down from the second floor. Once the children were lined up, Idan started playing the accompaniment to “Blowing in the Wind” on the keyboard. Unlike singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s gritty solo delivery of the protest song, this choral version emphasized sweet harmony. The first verse was sung in English, the second in Hebrew and the last in Arabic. The members were not completely in synch or in tune, likely because of new additions to the choir. The AJCC had just recruited a few new Jewish girls, as they wanted to have

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  95 a more balanced representation of Jews, Christian and Muslims in the mix for the upcoming Brazil tour. The need to recruit Jewish members was, according to Hadas, a product of the demographic balance in ‘Ajami. Jewish families that had moved into the area in recent years were predominantly young families, so while the balance of young Jewish and Arab children was relatively equal, there were few Jewish teens attending the Center’s activities. The AJCC did not want to go on a tour hosted by the Jewish community in Brazil with a choir that had few Jewish members. It was harder to draw on Jewish youth from other parts of Jaffa, because of the stigmas associated with ‘Ajami and the right-wing bent of Jews living in its peripheral areas. The new Jewish recruits came from Tel Aviv, rather than from close-by Jaffa neighborhoods. For most of them, this was their first opportunity to socialize with Arab youth. Next was a joyful but campy version of “Life is Beautiful” (“ha-Ḥayim Yafim;” “La Vita è Bella”), the title song from the 1997 Italian film, which the choir sang in Hebrew and Spanish, this time more in synch and in tune. For the third song, Idan switched to the oud, starting with an evocative taqsīm—an instrumental improvisation characteristic of Arabic music which establishes (or deliberates) the piece’s musical mode and mood for the upcoming singer. Luna, one of the choir’s veteran singers, stepped up to sing the first verse of “Zamān al-Salām” (Time for Peace)—the song that marked the 1994 signing of the Gaza-Jericho Accords between Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and PLO leader Yassir Arafat in Oslo. Written by Amon Aboutbul, Fathi Kasem and Yair Dalal, in Oslo the song was performed with a choir consisting of Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli children under the baton of Zubin Mehta. The song had since taken on an anthem-­ like meaning amongst leftist circles in Israel, and is often performed on shared Arab-Jewish stages and events associated with the Israeli left. Luna’s clear voice and passionate delivery soared over the oud that continued to improvise underneath her, grabbing the crowd’s attention: most of the diplomats stopped drinking or talking and were watching intently. Solos continued to be passed around among the choir’s more experienced singers, against a harmonization that provided a responsorial, hymn-like backdrop. When Idan switched to the keyboard in the middle of the song with gospel-­ inspired harmony, the anthemic quality of this secular prayer became yet more emphasized. Both the choir and Idan received much applause for this rendition, after which the MC invited the diplomats to eat. Although this was but a sampling of the choir’s repertoire, it was a representative one. The choir’s songs are multi-lingual adaptations of a variety of genres that include international, Arab, and Jewish-Israeli sources, a mix that is key for projecting its multicultural ethos. Adaptations of rock/pop songs such as the Carpenters’ “Top of the World” and Steve Seskin’s “Don’t Laugh at Me” are prominent. Popular Arabic folksongs and classics include staples such as the Lebanese Marcel Khalife’s “A Sparrow Stood at My Window” (“‘Aṣfūr Tall Min al-Shubbāk”) and the ubiquitous “Fawq al-Nakhl,” a

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Figure 2.1  The VOP choir performing at the diplomat’s reception.

song made famous by the Jewish Al-Kuwaity brothers, who were principals of the Baghdad Radio Orchestra prior to their 1950s relocation to Israel. The song had been locally adapted in numerous Arab countries, and I have heard countless renditions of it in both Israel and Palestine. Also included in the choir’s repertoire are Israeli popular songs such as Aviv Gefen’s “Song of Hope” (“Shir Tikva”) and Ehud Manor and Arkadi Duchin’s “A Day Will Come” (“Yom Yavo”). In combination, this is a multicultural body of songs that thematically deal with love, hope, coexistence and tolerance, but avoid lyrics with overt political critique. The aesthetic trajectory of the VOP highlights harmonious representations, aims for prettiness rather than grit, and looks and sounds good on formal, ceremonial stages. The Center’s directors view the choirs it nurtures as its cultural ambassadors promoting the Center’s working model elsewhere, despite the tensions surrounding the terms of representation. As Hadas said: I think this Center can do amazing work, but at the end of the day, it stays within the neighborhood. And if we look at getting out what we do here—so people will actually know about it—it happens only with these kinds of representative projects that we go out and perform with… we think of this as our identity card outside. (HK January 4, 2012) Because of their aesthetic profile, the VOP are sometimes asked to perform at events in which the Center’s values of coexistence may be leveraged by state or municipal bodies as representations of an ideal that is far from being implemented in daily life. Besides the diplomats’ junket featured here, the VOP performed at prior events such as the Peres Center for Peace’s Ten Year Gala (2008), for Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Israel (2009),

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  97 and at a memorial ceremony for the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (2011). At the diplomats’ reception, the VOP found themselves in the role of cultural ambassadors representative not only of the AJCC’s in-house image of country, nation and models of citizenship, but also as agents of state propaganda. When asked about tensions that may occur between the AJCC’s ethics and the meanings circulated by such performances, Hadas answered: We check out each [performance] opportunity and there is no single answer that covers all cases. We don’t say yes to every performance… We’re very sensitive to this. At the same time, I often think that we actually should be in these places, to show a different kind of model. It’s true that there are Jewish Agency representatives all over the world, and they work as representatives of the state. But I saw it in Brazil and I saw it in Brussels: when this group comes, the performance of [formal representation of state ideology] is less important. What is important is what happens before and after the performance: conversations with the people, the audience that sees an example for something different that also happens [in Israel], not only the [foreign] media that tells everybody how bad and violent Israelis are. This is where we come in: the face-to-face interactions, the youth, which is all our future. (HK ­January 4, 2012) Hadas also argued that if Israel were to be represented by an all-Jewish choir, the likely alternative if the VOP did not perform, this would be what the world would see as representative of Israel. Showcasing the VOP, a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious group to diverse audiences attending such occasions, was something that she saw as an opportunity, despite her dislike of the current regime. Hadas’ bringing up the Jewish Agency’s role in the VOP’s tours abroad further foregrounds the inbuilt tensions the AJCC must navigate between serving its constituencies and working within the Israeli establishment. The Jewish Agency is a government body in charge of nurturing relationships between Israel and the Jewish diasporas, facilitating Jewish immigration to Israel and enhancing Jewish identity. Its agenda is hence built on an ethnonational logic that seeks to preserve and enhance Jewish hegemony and does not align with the Center’s pluralistic mission. Just days before the Tel Aviv Arts Museum show, a Jewish Agency representative previously stationed in Brazil came to speak with the choir members about the country, in preparation for their tour. One of the things he said was that how they would connect with people in Brazil was more important than how they sang, because part of their mission was to bolster the Brazilian Jewish community’s connection to Israel and Zionism. Repeating this message, he brought up a Jewish girl from the United States who had made ‘aliya (ascent)—the term used for Jews moving to Israel and taking on Israeli citizenship, automatically

98  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center granted under the Law of Return—as a successful example of such interactions. Neither the children nor the adults in the room (Hadas and Idan) seemed to register the irony of his asking Christian and Muslim (i.e. Arab/ Palestinian) children to act as delegates of Israeli policies seeking to ensure a Jewish majority in the country. When I later pointed this out to Idan, his first response was: “But these kids don’t feel Palestinian, they feel Israeli.” Giving it a second thought, however, he said: “You’re right. He overdid it. He went over the top. I’ll talk to him about this.”12 It may not be so surprising that the children in attendance did not react to the subtext of the Jewish Agency representative’s lines. They were excited about the tour and more interested in learning about Brazil than in the politics of their travel. But the fact that the (Jewish) adults present did not register the contextual insensitivity of the Jewish Agency’s representative was surprising to me, as both worked hard at instilling an egalitarian and pluralistic environment at the AJCC. Their lack of response spoke to slippages that occur between wanting to represent (and constitute) Israel as they feel it should be and working within a whole matrix of state and municipal authorities in which hegemonic perspectives of Jewish exclusivity are naturalized. In a country in which the values of “democracy” and “Jewishness” have long been intertwined in narratives of origin, education, public discourse and legal practices, and are absorbed into the hegemonic order as unproblematic and non-conflictual (Jamal 2002, 2007), the discourses and practices associated with the state’s nationalization project seep even into environments that promote pluralism and civic partnership, rather than an ethnonational basis for inclusion in the national narrative. In this particular moment, replication of the Israeli dominant order stemmed from the internalization of hegemonic perspectives among two of AJCC’s staff members, such that the dual aspiration for social change and reproduction of power relations became one. This anecdote also points to the complexities faced by an institution that depends on public funding and support, and wants to promote its ideas and work locally and internationally. Being located within a mainstream Israeli institutional sphere such as the Tel Aviv municipality and its attendant discourses of (neoliberal) pluralism, and drawing on international networks supported by the state, enables the institution to flourish. As Hadas had pointed out to me, there were numerous independent coexistence projects that have come and gone over the years, but the AJCC has been open and operating every day since 1993. In the context of Israeli institutional politics, the survival and growth of multiculturalist institutions depends in part on rendering their frames of representation acceptable to the dominant order. At times, as exhibited by the VOP performance at the diplomats’ reception, this means suppressing the contradictions that arise from performing the Israel these institutions want it to be, and representing the Israel that the current government or municipal bodies wish to present.

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The VOP choir: recording pluralistic citizenship Located in the basement of a South Tel Aviv high-rise, the Eshel Studios are a commercial audio-recording establishment and home to the AJCC’s inhouse talent’s recording projects. One Sunday (December 4, 2011) the VOP gathered there to record a track titled Kulanana. The recording was sponsored by Merchavim Institute, an NGO whose multilingual logo (English, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and Amharic) declares it is the “Institute for the Advancement of Shared Citizenship in Israel.” The institute’s mission is to equip young Israelis of all backgrounds to build a shared future by learning about their fellow citizens, appreciating the diversity of Israeli society and working together to make their classrooms, schools and communities fairer—for the benefit of all. (Merchavim Institute 2011) My primary aim in featuring the Kulanana recording story here is to unpack the differences between a multiculturalist politics of recognition, as implemented by Merchavim in this project, and a multiculturalist politics of participation, as advocated by the AJCC and implemented in its daily work. What brought the two organizations together in this project was the joint belief in music as a space in which symbols of shared and pluralistic citizenship are produced and enacted. Yet Merchavim’s Kulanana project articulates the aesthetic and social dissonances that arise when community-­ anchored participation and negotiation are remiss from the process. When I arrived at the studio, audio recordings were going full swing, with two or three kids at a time in the recording booth. Merchavim’s staff were also presiding over video recordings taking place in other rooms, in which the choir members spoke about their lives, the choir and personal takes on coexistence. Roi, Merchavim’s Vice President of Operations and Finance, explained the project to me: [Kulanana] comes to deal with the problem that there is no common sense of belonging to all the people who are citizens in this country; no sense of citizenship as common identity. Each group has a crystallized identity of its own, but there is nothing that pours meaning into the status of citizenship, [nothing] that makes one feel a part of the State as its citizen. We don’t have symbols; we don’t have a toolbox—affective, analytical, ideational—that would create a sense of this partnership, of living together in the same State. This [understanding] was the basis of “sowing up” the idea of doing it in a creative way, through an [applied] program, rather than through abstract ideas or an abstracted ideology. And it started with a word… Today, when Jews say “kulanu,” and when Arabs say “kullnā” each person is referring to his own group. There is no generalized word that relates to all citizens as a unified collective that has its own meaning. So, in order to represent something that

100  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center doesn’t actually exist, we wanted to create a new word, one that won’t be the same old and confusing “kulanu,” which is not clear whether it [signifies] “my” group or all citizens… Kulanana is from the beginning something that is shared by all citizens of Israel.13 Roi also explained that while Kulanana was a Merchavim initiative, it included a coalition of approximately 20 partner organizations that combine a broad spectrum of objectives, including Arab-Jewish partnerships, integration of Ethiopian immigrants, rights of the LGBT community and others. Each of these organizations was developing its own Kulanana-affiliated project. By providing an umbrella for so many minoritized groups Merchavim was aiming for the inclusion of all contesting voices in its conceptualization of Israeli citizenship. Merchavim, which started the coalition, was developing further partnerships and at the same time, its own project: the propagation of the Kulanana concept through music.14 Roi said that the reason for choosing music was its experiential aspect and capacity to gain broad popularity, especially among youth, their target audience. The project began with a media campaign via Kokhav Nolad (A Star Is Born)—Israel’s version of American Idol—that is broadcast on one of Israel’s premiere TV networks (Keshet). Throughout a whole season, audience members were asked to send phrases, words and ideas that related to the concept of common citizenship to the program. In parallel, Merchavim also turned to an Israel-based Arabic website (Panet)15 and to Scout Tribes of different denominations, asking them for similar contributions, in order to include input from sectors not likely to follow a mainstream Hebrew channel TV show. A songwriter adept at writing pop hits was contracted to turn this audience-based input into a song ultimately produced by the TV show for the season finale, and sung by all of the season’s participants except the three finalists.16 I asked Roi how Merchavim expected to promote a multicultural citizenship agenda through a show that catered to the hegemonic mainstream and a song with a pop aesthetic that would appeal primarily to this mainstream audience. Roi replied: We want to turn multiculturalism into something that is mainstream [emphasis his]… Our vision of shared citizenship is looking ahead for a time when it won’t be radical, when it will be one of the basic values of Israeli society. It’s our aspiration for change. And going to things that are popular is intentional on our part. We don’t want to remain once again in [our] most natural, basic, and taken for granted target audiences. Roi’s aspirations for multiculturalism to become a basic value in Israeli society, rather than a radical departure from state ideology and institutional practices, speak to the discursive and sociopolitical void within which multiculturalist organizations are operating in Israel. However, Roi admitted

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  101 that while Merchavim appreciated the exposure granted by Keshet (1 million viewers) the representation of diversity in its final video clip was not to Merchavim’s taste; they felt it was “artificial.” In order to make it more of grassroots project that targets the youth communities they wanted to include, the second phase of the project was to re-record the vocals on the song in five different sites in the country, using youth from diverse backgrounds (religious Jews, Muslim Scouts, Negev Bedouins, etc.) for their embodied visual presence and vocal participation, and to mix a final version based on all these voices: …what we’re doing now is very complicated logistically. And it’s also expensive… In every site we insisted on having a group that has variety. In order to “do” variety it’s not enough to put a few pictures of different people and to call it a variegated representation. We took the more challenging track here, of taking folks from so many different groups, so that all of them will participate in the process and be a part of it. And the clip—both visually and in terms of their embodied participation—also represents this idea. The participants are active and it builds on their voices… This reflects the [kulanana] idea more intensively. So it’s clear that balances always need to be made between wanting to reach many groups and between staying loyal to your message. Merchavim translated the all-Hebrew Kokhav Nolad version into Arabic for a bi-lingual representation and at the same time, was in the process of producing additional clips from the recording sessions and from interviews taken during them, in order to create further traction on social networks media and showcase the participants’ authentic voices. I split the rest of the evening alternating between documenting the recording process and listening in on the interviews. It was evident that the “artificiality” that the Merchavim staff sensed in the original Kokhav Nolad phase continued to hamper the new version of Kulanana as well, manifesting in artistic obstacles that surfaced in the recording process. The kids in the recording booth, including the most experienced singers, were having a hard time singing on pitch, let alone expressively. There were modulations in the song that were hard for non-professionals, and the recorded arrangement was not in a key that accommodated the singers’ ranges. Also, the Arabic lyrics translated by Merchavim did not wholly fit the meter and melodic line. Idan coached the children with characteristic gentleness and infinite patience. However, after the recording day was over, Idan and Roi agreed to pass the lyrics on to Shirin, one of AJCC’s vocal coaches, director of a younger AJCC choir and a good lyrics translator, so she would create a version that is both meaningful in Arabic and works musically. Creating the final version, with Arabic lyrics appropriate to the music and the message, delayed the video’s release. The VOP members returned to record the

102  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center updated version in May 2012, and the song was finally mixed in October (incurring further expenses for Merchavim).17 These artistic problems were reflective of the social shortcomings of the Kulanana project, a product of mismatched cultural and aesthetic registers involved in this work. Merchavim was trying to create an economy of symbols through a media campaign in a top-down process that has no direct and established resonance in the everyday life of the participants or intended audience, neither socially nor aesthetically. If the youth in the recording booth could not sing it, they would also not be able to incorporate it in their lives, their vision of the world or their sense of belonging. Merchavim was trying to turn multiculturalism into a mainstream ethos in Israel, without state support yet through the state’s hegemonic mainstream media channels. The institution was aiming for a politics of recognition that could not transcend contemporary cultural hierarchies in Israel nor provide resonating content for the social symbols it tried to construct, let alone enable new models of citizenship in a deeply divided society. Without engaging the communities involved both socially and aesthetically in the very process of meaning-making rather than solely in its performance, Kulanana would remain a word devoid of symbolic significance and affective charge. “We’re into this thing of togetherness…” While the recording process revealed the artificiality inbuilt into the Kulanana project, Merchavim Institute’s interviews with the VOP members demonstrated how the very essence of the values that Merchavim wished to instill among the mainstream Israeli public and all its marginalized sectors was lived within the choir. The children’s self-presentation seemed a natural extension of how they felt: they were not supervised by AJCC’s staff in this process, and what they had to say was not rehearsed. The small groups that were being interviewed organically organized themselves in mixed Jewish-­ Arab configurations, including the Jewish girls who had joined the choir just six months before. As they spoke, they often hugged or touched each other, and supported each other when one would suddenly get shy in front of the camera. They spoke in their language of choice (although the interviewer was not fluent in Arabic and questions were presented in Hebrew). Their statements, some of which I present below, highlighted their togetherness, the choirs’ messages of peace and tolerance, and their hopes that their performances would resonate in the world in the same ways it had brought them together: Interviewer (nodding towards one of the newer girls): So the three of you are from Jaffa and you are from Tel Aviv? E.  (Age

14, Jewish, from Jaffa): “Tel Aviv-Yafo is one city! We’re into this thing of togetherness…”

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  103 A sample of other answers given to a generic set of questions reveals more of the children’s feelings about the social world that participation in the choir has opened up for them: (Age 14, Jewish, from Tel Aviv): “This is a choir of Arabs and Jews, there are Christians, Muslims and Jews, but we don’t consider religion, only the human being.” C. (Age 15, Arab, from Jaffa, speaking in Arabic): “When we come together, it shows the world how we are one body, how we are together. When we show the world, and all the people, and the audience, that we are one body, and together, maybe that can stop the violence in the world… and the violence that is all over the country, from happening.” L. (Age 13, Jewish, from Jaffa): “A lot of my girlfriends, who are from central Tel Aviv, told me I shouldn’t [join the choir] because there are Muslims there, but they don’t know what I know, which is that next to my home there is a Muslim school, a mixed school, an English school and a Christian school and so I know what it’s about and I really didn’t listen to them. What you bring to the table, and how you relate, that’s what’s important, not what religion you are or what your skin-color is. It’s that you’re just a person, like me.” F. (Age 14, Arab, from Jaffa, goes to a Jewish school in Tel Aviv): “My girlfriends [from Tel Aviv] sometimes I bring them to Jaffa. And I show them how, Arabs and Jews—yes, together! Arabs and Jews do get along… It’s our way of showing [coexistence] in music, showing this peace, expressing this peace. There are different ways of doing it. Some people express it in writing, some in dance, some in conversation. We express it in singing. It’s fun!” Y.

In sum, these interviews highlighted that for its members, the VOP choir was an integrated space of belonging and togetherness, where difference is sublimated by the common humanity of all, and music-making becomes both a means and a practice of communal life. This sensibility was borne out of shared practices in daily life so cultivated at the AJCC, whose symbols were constructed through these very practices: these kids did not need a new word (toolbox in Roi’s terms) to define their sense of collective belonging. What this studio episode highlighted, to use Gerd Baumann’s (1999) terminology, was the difference between “culti-parading” and “multi-relating.” “Culti-parading” is the (most commonplace) organized showcasing and representation of cultural difference, a reductive imposition of social criteria that ultimately serves to reify and naturalize difference. By contrast, “multi-relating” is the product of small-scale, quotidian practices of shared life, out of which new meanings and contestations emerge. This process by default propels different subjectivities to recognize both Self and Other as complex, contingent beings, rather than as reified representations of naturalized categories. The VOP

104  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center are an example of a (successful) multicultural setting that had transgressed hegemonic paradigms of culture and identity and had created a space in which all the participants felt at home—a commendable inclusivity that is rare in Israel today, and a testament to the importance of cultural work in shaping such encounters and spaces. The kids’ comments also underscored the relative shelteredness of their environment, and the ways in which they had internalized the AJCC’s frames of civic partnership and depoliticized, or denationalized, discourses of coexistence. The construction of difference in their testimonies was cast in terms of religion, race or ethnicity, not nationality. When they spoke about violence, it was pointed to as something that was “out there” in the “world,” or in the “country,” far removed from their immediate environment. This has to do with the pluralistic atmosphere cultivated at the AJCC, which fostered their sense of belonging and safety, and which also framed the prism through which they saw the world. But I believe it also has to do with the children’s own backgrounds. The majority of the VOP members come from middle-class or well-off families, where education, both formal and informal, is highly valued, and is also viewed as a springboard to economic and cultural mobility that can, to some extent, mitigate the structural inequalities experienced by Palestinian citizens. For Jaffa residents scraping by, inclusive citizenship can take on a very different meaning, predominantly defined in terms of access to basic resources, and the structural violence imposed on the (predominantly Palestinian) poor. For me, the ironies presented by the Kulanana recording were magnified by the fact that it was taking place during the same time that Jaffa’s poor had taken to the streets. At the Jaffa protest site, a short distance from the AJCC: mother of three on hunger strike! On the morning of the Kulanana recording, I visited the Jaffa tent city, a site whose unfolding human (and musical) dramas I had been following since the beginning of the social protest that swept over Israel in the summer of 2011. At this point, the movement that had gained so much pull six months earlier seemed to be on the wane, capturing no headlines in the media. Those still living in the Jaffa tent city had nowhere else to go. A handwritten message on a big sign at the park’s entrance shocked me. It stated: Mother of three, on hunger strike for six days! The hunger striker was Wafa‘, a Palestinian Israeli who had been living at the Jaffa tent city with her family, and running its operations and social life, since July 2011. Wafa‘ told me that after endless meetings with Israel’s public housing companies (‘Amidar and Ḥalamish), city planners and lawyers, which had all come to nothing, she decided to launch her hunger strike. Wafa‘ did not want a reasonable exit from the tent city for herself only, but for all those living there who had nowhere to go. At this point, the Jaffa tent

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  105 city also included Jews from the nearby cities of Bat Yam and Holon whose original tent sites were destroyed by municipal authorities. Wafa‘ said she intended to continue with her hunger strike until there would be a solution for all the tent folks, or until she died. Her testimony provided a stark contrast to what I would witness at Eshel Studios later in the day, invoking both an entirely different poetics of inclusive citizenship and embodied proximity to violence. Wafa‘ reiterated: “If the death of an Israeli citizen [emphasis mine] might change something [in the system/for those around me], then I have done right by my principles.”18 The difference between Wafa‘s position and the message embedded in Merchavim’s Kulanana project highlights the detachment of Israeli multiculturalist institutions from the material realities that shape Israeli constructions of citizenship, along with the starkest spaces and conditions in which “coexistence” is produced and lived. For Wafa‘ and those in the tent city, class is not only an important factor, but is closely intertwined with ethnonational and religious affiliations. While the AJCC manages many programs that service low-income youth, the VOP choir remains mostly the privilege, and perhaps the luxury, of the middle class. If for Wafa‘ citizenship meant the right to a decent shelter for both Palestinians and Jews sharing the public space of the tent city, for the choir kids it meant an erasure of difference into a middle-class mainstream. At this stage in their lives, the bonds and world views of the VOP members had not yet been intruded upon by the trials of adulthood, when the Jews among them would be drafted into the army, and the Arabs would likely face the structural inequalities that permeate Israeli society, and their own divided solidarities of citizenship and nationality. This points to the crux of the unsolvable problems inherent to Arab-­ Jewish multiculturalist projects in Israel, the very ones they wish to address. While they can promote the value of civic partnership as well as inter-ethnic socialization, they cannot address the structural and political inequalities that necessitate their work in the first place. Under such circumstances, culturalization of the conflict blanches principal criteria of difference that cut across both ethnonational fault lines and systems of economic stratification, which are themselves structured through ethnonational and religious classifications.19 **** I now turn to the AJCC’s Shirana, a choir of adult women who have chosen to negotiate the inherent dissonances between multiculturalism and ethnonational politics in Israel on their own terms, bringing gendered nuances into the mix.

The Shirana Choir On a Tuesday evening one of the AJCC’s classrooms becomes saturated with women’s voices and energy. Tables are put aside and 20 women form

106  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center a circle. They spend the next few hours together loosening up their bodies, practicing solfège, learning a new song, exchanging banter, sharing food brought from home and catching up with each other’s lives. ‘Alyah, the only hijab-wearing woman in the group, flings her scarf aside. Conversation centers on the choir’s upcoming album recording. The women don’t feel quite ready. “If we had a deadline, like the Voices of Peace had with the Brazil tour, we would also get ready quickly,” says someone. “They’ve been doing it for six years,” says another. “So? We’ve been doing it for three,” comes the answer. “We are like wine, we get better with time,” jokes Gal, whose pregnant middle was caressed by many of the women in the moments before the rehearsal started. “As long as we don’t turn sour with all this time, maybe [a tour abroad] will happen for us too,” someone replies, which puts everyone in stitches. This feminine conviviality is characteristic of the working atmosphere created by the women of the choir. The name Shirana combines the Hebrew word for song or poem (shir) with the Arabic word for song (ghanā’). Yet beyond the Arab-Jewish umbrella, the choir encompasses a wide range of diverse experiences of Muslim, Jewish (Mizrahi and Ashkenazi) and Christian women whose ages range from 20-something to 60-something. Among them there are full-time mothers, career women and retirees, single, married and divorced women, religious and secular. Since the choir’s inception there has been very little turnover, and many of the women have formed close bonds that extend well beyond their shared singing. While there are a few pre-existing communal and kinship ties (mothers and daughters as well as sisters) among the members, the familial sensibility and enjoyment of this women-centered space extends to all. Working through all these criteria of difference, and particularly, the Arab-­Jewish divide, was a process that had taken time to mature, as Badria, one of the members, described to me. But sticking it through was a transforming experience for her, and based on her perceptions, it was a similar experience for other choir members: [Now] we are a true family. It’s amazing, what is happening. When you go deep, it’s not always smooth. We are people, there are families behind us, we are not alone. There are those who grew up in homes where being with Arabs [would not be acceptable]… When the choir was younger all kinds [of problems came up]. Now we’ve changed, we’ve crystallized, matured… And: Music is life. When I sing I don’t think; I enjoy it, in all languages, Hebrew too. And I enjoy seeing the “other side” singing in Arabic. And there are women that you can really see how much they connect; that they are not just coming for shufūnī al-nās [Arabic: so that people see me], really not. (BB January 2, 2012)

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  107 “We don’t talk politics, we’re a kind of family:” politics at large, politics within Shirana Considering the Arab-Jewish framework of the choir, and how safe and at home the women felt in this space, I was surprised that over the months I spent time with them, political events or potentially charged calendar markings (Israeli independence/Nakba commemoration day) were never brought up in the choir setting, despite their overriding domination of the public sphere. These women were not young and naïve like the children of the VOP choir, and some were politically active elsewhere. When asked about it individually, the women’s answers were similar: over their time together, they had developed a tacit understanding of what to keep outside what they often referred to as their “bubble.” They came together because they were interested in an Arab-Jewish and all-women framework, but they also wanted to create a space of respite from the endless barrage of violence, the pain and potential discord such discussions would bring into their space, and the personal stresses of their own lives. As Mika, the choir’s musical director, founder, and confidante to many of its members, said to me: I think that they are right in not wanting to talk about politics. They say: we came to sing. They all know where each other stands [politically]. And just like they accept [so many things] in each other—I don’t mean ideologically, I mean each one with her baggage and sensitivities—­they [are able to] contain everything… Once in a while I used to interject things that are a little provocative into the space, and the women would ignore it. Over time, I understood that they—in a way that is really smart I think—they decided, without talking about it, that here, in this room, we don’t talk politics. We’re a kind of family. We don’t know what kind of choices each one makes at the voting booth. We’re not interested in it. We accept and respect each other as women, as humans. There is total agreement that war is bad, that we don’t want any more people to die, neither here nor there. We won’t agree about other things, and it’s not important either. (MD, January 11, 2012) While the choir’s members did not often initiate political discussions, performance invitations and the meanings they generated often brought politics back into the frame. Towards the end of 2011, the choir was invited to Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in the July 2012 biennial World Choir Games, an international competition of choirs modeled after the Olympics.20 The competition includes thousands of participants representing their countries of origin, and culminates with a Parade of Nations, in which choirs carry the flags of their countries. Winning choirs get their country’s national anthem played at the concluding ceremony.

108  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center Hadas and Idan were excited about the invitation. Mika, however, was vehemently against the project. In part, she did not appreciate the biennial’s competitive format. More importantly, she did not want to participate in anything that meant representing the State of Israel, which, in her words, was like putting the stamp of approval on a beast. It’s literally like doing untruthful propaganda for the state; like saying “look, Israel isn’t what you thought it was. This is Israel, here—you have Jews, Arabs, this is the real face [of the country].” And it’s a blatant lie.21 Moreover, Mika did not want to participate in an overseas performance likely to be partially funded by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which utilizes cultural exports as a strategy to mitigate Israel’s negative image around the world.22 She knew that she was voicing not only her concerns but also those of some of the choir women, and Abu-Shindi, the Center’s director, supported her position. In order to reach a compromise, the Center explored alternative representations for a while, such as parading with the Center’s flag and performing an “invented” anthem. Singing the national anthem (“ha-Tiḳva”), regardless of the context, would be problematic for a joint Arab-Jewish project as it speaks of the 2,000 years old Jewish yearning for a national homeland in Zion and does not include non-Jewish narratives. In the end, the project was dropped, and the choir did not participate in the competition. This incident shows how the Center’s politics of representation are outcomes of daily negotiations of different subjectivities’ politics of personhood visà-vis the outside world, beyond the safety of the “bubble.” Ultimately, in a setting that strives for consensus, the VOP would perform the multicultural nation on the government’s stage, while Shirana would not. While some performance opportunities generated contestation, others were unanimously agreed upon. When conflict-related violence hit home in Jaffa, the choir performed in solidarity with its victims. Singing against violence: sociopolitical context The years 2011–2012 saw a sharp increase in “price tag” attacks. These are acts of violence and terror committed by nationalist-religious settlers driven by extremist ideology against Palestinians, and sometimes, against Jewish-­ Israeli peace activists and even the IDF. “Price tag” refers to the price these settlers wish to exact from any person or authority they view as standing in the way of their settlement enterprise, and to the graffitied inscriptions they often leave emblazoned on their sites of activity. The perpetrators are usually young adherents of extremist rabbis heading settler yeshivas and are dubbed “Hilltop Youth,” as they tend to come from outposts on West Bank hilltops deemed illegal even by the state. While most price tag violence has

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  109 targeted Palestinian sites in the West Bank, in 2011–2012 it became increasingly more commonplace within the Green Line.23 In October 2011, graves in Jaffa’s Muslim and Christian cemeteries were shattered or defaced with “price tag” and “death to the Arabs” graffiti (Shaalan 2011), threatening the fragile equilibrium of existence in this mixed city. This was followed by a Molotov cocktail thrown at the roof of a synagogue, assumed to be an act of retaliation for the desecration of the cemeteries. Next, the Abu El-‘Abed’s restaurant, an establishment that had serviced Jaffa residents for decades, was torched, its façade defaced with the captions “price tag” and “Kahane was right” (Khoury 2011). Rabbi Kahane is considered either the founder or inspiration for modern Jewish terrorist groups and extremist religious nationalism.24 When the restaurant reopened, Shirana provided the musical content for the celebration. The AJCC sent out the following Facebook invitation, captioned “Shirana Against Racism”: The Abu El-‘Abed restaurant exists since 1949 and specializes in Palestinian-­Lebanese cuisine. The restaurant has catered to thousands of loyal customers throughout the years, some of whom are Jaffa residents and some from elsewhere, among them Christians, Jews, and Muslims. During the night between 10/30/11 and 10/31/11 the restaurant was torched by unknown perpetrators and defaced with the hate graffiti “price tag” and “Kahane was right.” A week earlier, in another incident, graves were damaged and desecrated, and on them was written “death to Arabs” and “Kahane was right.” In light of the racist incidents that are multiplying in the country, and in Jaffa especially, the Jaffa AJCC decided to retaliate with positive, anti-racist actions at the site of injury. We are therefore inviting the public to a special solidarity performance of our mixed women’s choir Shirana at Abu El-‘Abed’s renovated restaurant. The women will sing the best of the repertoire and together we will also celebrate the first day of the holiday— ʽīd al-aḍḥā al-mubārak (referencing Feast of the Sacrifice, a Muslim holiday). The Shirana women’s choir and the Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center are coming out against all incidents of racism or incitement; we encourage mutual support and strengthening of the ties, acquaintances, and understanding among all Jaffa’s residents. This statement highlights the AJCC’s ethos of community building, solidarity, coexistence and shared citizenship. It also highlights the ways in which the AJCC depoliticizes its representation due, I believe, to its dependency on the “establishment,” but more broadly, due to the accepted limits of discourses of coexistence amongst the mainstream leftist consensus in Israel. Price tag terrorism is not just an expression of racism as presented by the invite, and as media coverage of such events within the Green Line often does as well. It involves violence aimed at achieving political goals that

110  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center include the establishment of Greater Israel and the Judaization of the entire geographical space between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The founding of a settler yeshiva in ‘Ajami in 2009 is part of a newer trend taking place in mixed cities within the Green Line that aims to displace its Palestinian citizens, under the guise of supporting religious education and faith-based charities (Gorenberg 2011). In limiting the discursive framework to “citizens,” “residents” and the interfaith basis of the restaurant’s decades old clientele, the concert invite promotes its vision of shared citizenship and democratic pluralism without naming the ethnonational motives of the violence that hit Jaffa. This sidesteps the deeper political premise and aim of price tag terror, which is based on an ideology that denies all Palestinians, citizens and non-citizens, rights and stakes in a country viewed as an exclusive Jewish birthright. Decoupling racism, citizenship and faith from ethnonationalism is for the AJCC a means of avoiding the elephant in the room: the problematic basis of rights of citizenship in a country that defines itself as both “Jewish” and “democratic”—the democratic aspects of which price tag adherents wish to highjack by force. On the evening of November 6, 2011, Abu El-‘Abed’s restaurant soon filled to capacity, approximately 50 people. Idan introduced me to Avi, one of the audience members. A (Jewish) man in his early 60s, Avi is a member of Combatants for Peace, an organization founded in 2005 by former IDF soldiers and Palestinian freedom fighters from the oPt determined to end the cycles of violence and the Occupation through joint civil action.25 Avi was having difficulty moving or turning his upper body due to an injury sustained two weeks prior at the West Bank village of Jalud, where he and other activists had gathered to help local villagers with the olive harvest. Their work was disrupted by three hooded settlers and a security coordinator from a nearby settlement, who started to shoot at them and then proceeded to beat up those trying to move from harm’s way, while a nearby IDF jeep provided cover for the settlers with teargas bombs. After he sustained a head injury, the settlers clubbed Avi to the ground, leaving him with broken ribs, and took his camera and glasses.26 Avi’s story articulates how the discourse of shared citizenship cannot be decoupled from its ethnonational registers, within a conflict situation and a geographical space that includes different hierarchies of citizenship based on ethnonational categories within the Green Line, and citizens and non-­citizens, also divided by ethnonational categories, in the Occupied Territories. The price tag events in Jaffa show how unchecked settler terrorism— directed in the West Bank primarily against defenseless non-­citizens—had inevitably spilled over into the Green Line where all are deemed protected by citizenship. Price tag events flag ethnonational hierarchies in the face of any vision or practice of shared life, and their violence inevitably shapes geographies of identity for all subjectivities in the region. As the choir members organized themselves in a half circle, the audience took to their seats. The great majority of them were Jews, not a

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  111 representative picture of the restaurant’s every-day clientele. This was commented on by one of the Muslim women in the choir months later, while discussing the higher stakes involved in political activity for Palestinian citizens: “…nobody was there of the people I wanted to see. And it was for Jaffa! It’s because of fear….” A schoolteacher, she recounted to me how a politically engaged Arab friend and colleague was almost fired after Jewish co-­workers saw her Facebook posts about demonstrations she had attended. This choir member, currently raising four children on her own, felt that she could not afford to engage directly in political activity for fear of repercussions and losing her livelihood, although she wanted to. The choir provided her an important outlet as a space in which she felt safe and free from self-­ censorship.27 Whether or not it was fear that had kept Jaffa’s Palestinian residents from showing up to support the restaurant and Shirana, this woman’s association of their absence with her own fears speaks to the sense of insecurity in the rights awarded by citizenship to Palestinian Israelis. Her comment also points to another aspect of the narrow sociopolitical space that Israeli multicultural organizations must navigate within. Maintaining a depoliticized discourse may not be just about adapting to the consensual limits of coexistence in Israel, but also a means of protecting their Palestinian members and audiences in a context in which the democratic rights of citizenship are not a universal given. Singing against violence: aesthetic context The aesthetic dimensions of Shirana’s performance at Abu El-‘Abed’s are a product of the women’s collective negotiation of both aesthetics (repertoire), and sociality (community building), amongst themselves. Shirana’s work is a collaborative remapping of sonic, ideational and affective identifications that are deemed incompatible by hegemonic national narratives, a process constructed within their “bubble.” In detailing this process alongside the reception of their performance at Abu El-‘Abed’s, I show how the Shirana women project the shared life they construct in their private rehearsal space, unto a public performance. In this event, they succeeded in remapping the restaurant’s social and physical space for the wider community as well, turning it into a site of healing and togetherness, despite the violence that had been flung unto its midst. The first song performed by the choir was Jewish-Israeli singer-­ songwriter Ehud Banai’s “ha-Yom” (“Today”)—an uplifting song that speaks of acknowledging love in the moment, its chorus presented in both Hebrew and Arabic. Idan accompanied the choir on accordion and his friend, there to support the event, played cajon, substituting for a more extensive percussion section in this tight space. Next was the well-known Arabic muwashshaḥ “Lammā Bada Yatathannā,” starting with Idan playing a long taqsīm on the oud and delivered entirely in Arabic, its Western-styled choral arrangement suggesting a musical fusion of East-West nonetheless.

112  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center The crowd at the restaurant, completely drawn in by the familiarity of the music and the women’s animated delivery—so intimate in this close-knit, stage-less ­setting—was cheering and clapping along. Folksongs from around the world followed: “‘Asham”, a Jewish Yemenite folksong in a 5/8 meter, was dovetailed by “Song Drives the Darkness Away” (“Shir Megaresh et ha-Ḥoshekh”), a Georgian folksong rendered popular in Israel by Chava Alberstein, a Jewish-Israeli singer-songwriter whose artistic range draws on international folklore, SLI, rock, and klezmer. During a unison rendition of “al-Rozānā,” a song considered native in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, one of the women picked up a def drum (Middle Eastern tambourine), while the others clapped the rhythm; the unison vocals and percussion-only presentation accentuated the folkloric feel of the song. Soon a choir member was dancing in the middle of the half-circle, the whole presentation reminiscent of women’s traditional folklife celebrations throughout the Middle East, which brought more smiles and cheers from the crowd. Without a break, the women went into “Eggplants.” The choir’s only original song, it is based on recipes for pickled eggplants that the women have shared among themselves. The recipe instructions have been cut and mixed by Mika into an antiphonal, part-spoken-part-sung percussive arrangement designed to depict neighboring women sharing daily Hebrew-Arabic banter across Jaffa’s balconies, with additional percussion of cooking utensils in the singers’ hands further projecting intimate, interpersonal exchanges characteristic of domestic life. The song is seemingly lighthearted but contains lyrical nuance that points to the ways in which the Shirana women negotiate the political charge of their project. The word for pickled in Hebrew is kvushim, which also means “occupied.” Mika recounted to me that when she first brought the song to the choir, she had inserted some allegorical lines, including one that said: “You can keep them in the fridge a year, two, even 40.” The women did not pick up on the allegories, instead laughing hysterically at lines they interpreted as double entendres with sexual referents, including the reminder that it is wise to choose eggplants that are “long but not soft.” When Mika pointed out her original intent—the 40-plus years of Occupation—Pauline, one of the Arab women, said “Why 40? Why not 60?” (meaning since 1948 instead of 1967), adding that while she understood Mika’s intentions, she didn’t think the choir needed to sing this, so Mika changed the line in the song. Pauline’s comment and Mika’s response are a testimony to the women’s need to guard their haven both socially and artistically, as well as the communal effort that goes into shaping the choir’s repertoire. At Abu El-Abed’s the song’s performance was received with loud cheers, and even Avi, for whom it must have been a physically painful move, rose from his chair to clap for the women. The restaurant’s owner took the opportunity to say: “Thank you so very much. First, I want to thank you because you are so enchanting… It’s good you’re singing about eggplants and not mansaf (lamb cooked in yoghurt),” he joked, “its OK to give away the

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  113 secret of the eggplants….” laughter and more jokes circled the restaurant. “It’s the song I most connected with,” he said, adding: I really want to thank Hadas and all the wonderful girls here. They heard about what happened and said they wanted to do something. And it’s really very important that every person does something in his own medium. And all the folks here… I’m really moved by this, and I’ll continue [working], I won’t disturb you anymore but truthfully, I [needed to say that] I connected so much with the eggplants. This was a moment in which food and song most amplified the shared space and the sense of community the women’s performance brought to the restaurant. It was also a moment that foregrounded how the fabric made of the Shirana women’s web of small-scale quotidian encounters and daily practices, breathes life and meaning into the ideals of shared existence in Jaffaat-large, outside of the women’s “bubble.” Here, a mundane subject such as eggplant recipes and a communal songwriting project succeeded in creating the social resonance and the kind of community that the Kulanana project, with all the money poured into it, could not. Idan picked up the accordion again, and the women launched into “Ḥad Gadya,” a staple in their repertoire. The song is a new take on a traditional Passover song, common to all the Jewish diasporas’ Passover Seder ritual of reading and singing the Haggadah—the book that retells the biblical story of the Israelites who had been delivered from slavery in Egypt. Originally in Aramaic, the song describes a violent, shaggy-dog chain of events that begin with a kid goat purchased at the market that is devoured by a cat, ending with the Angel of Death in this version, and with God in others. Shirana’s version of the song is associated with Chava Alberstein, who, in the midst of the first intifada, released an album titled London (1989), which included several songs that protested the IDF’s violence in the Occupied Territories and the general Jewish-Israeli consensus on the right to violence. Alberstein’s long career, initially as an SLI singer, and her prolific discography had rendered her into an icon of artistic and social integrity within the Israeli mainstream imagination; her inclusion of protest songs made quite a stir. Her version of “Ḥad Gadya,” inspired by an Italian folk version of the song, was personalized and sung in modern Hebrew instead of Aramaic.28 For some time, the song was banned from the popular IDF radio station, which, despite its military designation, did not often censure musical content (Moshe 2012). The ban was due to the following narrative Alberstein added to the song, which plays on another traditional Passover text—“Ma Nishtana.” This text singles out Passover from every other night of the year, through the reiteration of four questions and answers, usually recited by children: And why, all of a sudden, you’re singing Ḥad Gadya? Spring hasn’t arrived and Passover is not here yet

114  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center So what has changed for you, what has changed? I have changed this year. In all the [other] nights [of the year], all the other nights I asked only four questions [But] tonight I have another question: Until when will the cycle of terror continue? The chaser gets chased, the beater gets beaten When will this insanity end? I have changed this year I once was a lamb, a serene kid-goat Today I’m a tiger, a carnivorous wolf I’ve already been a dove, and also a deer Today I don’t know who I am. Shirana’s cover is sung in both Arabic and Hebrew, using a layered arrangement that starts with a section of the choir and builds up to Alberstein’s added verses, where soloists alternate with the choir singing in unison. The Arabic-Hebrew version of this song, embodied by Palestinian and Jewish Israeli women singing together, changed the meaning of Alberstein’s ­original protest, which was intended as an intra-national critique of Israeli policies. Without naming the source of violence, this performance personified an all-women front that protested ethnonational violence, in a voice that deconstructed the boundaries between perpetrator and victim so common to the discourses that surround the conflict, such that chaser and chased, beater and beaten, and finally, Arabs and Jews, became one.29

Figure 2.2  The Shirana choir at Abu El-‘Abed’s restaurant.

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  115 At Abu El-‘Abed’s the performance of “Ḥad Gadya” was received with much applause, and the women moved to a choral version of the optimistic “If We’ll Know How to Love” (“Im Neda Le’ehov”) by Yossi Banai, Israel’s closest approximation to Jacques Brel—a choice intended to conclude the evening on an uplifting note. But the restaurant crowd had not had enough, and with the demand for more, Mika said, “Okay, so we’ll conclude with something yet more uplifting,” and the choir closed with “Shabb Daʽabak,” a traditional Yemenite women’s song, accompanied by percussion and clapping only. By now the atmosphere at the restaurant had warmed up so much that one of the women in the audience centered herself among the Shirana women and danced until the performance ended (see Figure 2.2). This performance highlighted the power of music to create and to foreground community in a situation that rendered the community most vulnerable to fragmentation. While perhaps there were not many Palestinian citizens from Jaffa in the audience, the performance generated press in both Arabic and Hebrew media.30 In an interview on Hot Cable TV, Abu El‘Abed’s owner stated that …sanity will win here. Jaffa has always been an island of sanity. Here Hilltop Youth with a match will not succeed in setting Jaffa on fire. Jaffa has always been united and it is an island of sanity in this madhouse that surrounds us. He also spoke at a demonstration against price tag terrorism that took place facing the Anatot settlement in the West Bank, considered a hotbed of price tag initiatives, about the solidarity he experienced following the torching of his restaurant as something that brought him out of despair, and that characterized the fabric of life in Jaffa.31 For Abu El-‘Abed’s owner, the solidarity and community that Shirana’s concert brought to his restaurant had not only reaffirmed his trust in shared life in his home city, but had also propelled him to give voice to this message in a highly politicized and potentially perilous context. The joint Arab-Jewish communal aspect of the event was facilitated by the repertoire that the women had built over their time together, which resonated so well with the audience at this performance. Although Mika, as the artistic director, had final say in repertoire choices, it nonetheless drew on different core repertoires that represented the ethnic mix of the choir, was sometimes suggested by the choir members and was crafted in a dialogic process with them. Mika told me that this was a process that had taken time to mature. It took her time to familiarize herself with Arabic music and to understand the choir’s power was largely in presenting folklore, due both to the timbres of the women’s voices and to the absence of prior vocal training among the choir members. She acquired a sharpened sensitivity about sociopolitical representations in lyrics, as, for example, in songs that highlighted Hebrew place names that have displaced pre-1948 Palestinian locales, which

116  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center were now listened to with a new set of ears. And while initially she was leery of including “peace songs” devoid of political critique, over time she understood that both choir members and audiences wanted and expected their inclusion. Shirana’s repertoire was crafted with much input from Shirin, the choir’s vocal coach and the choir members themselves. All in all, it was a community effort, and it (re)-sounded best in communal events such as the performance at Abu El-‘Abed’s restaurant, both socially and musically. Ultimately, the performance at Abu El-‘Abed’s was successful not only as a performance of artistic content in a particular setting and context, but also in the ways in which it temporarily transformed the restaurant from a space that services atomized groups of customers into a community. This came about not only through the sociopolitical framing of the concert but also through the projection of affective intimacy that the Shirana women have been cultivating in their own safe space, or within their “bubble,” unto a public space, transforming it from a site of violence into a space for community building. The idea of “safe space”—separate sites in which marginalized groups could speak and act freely, cultivate a collective consciousness and generate strategies for change—emerged in the women’s movement and has since been adopted in feminist, queer, civil rights and educational contexts in the West, in response to underlying threats of violence (The Roestone Collective 2014). In the case of the Shirana women, this idea echoes in the “bubble” they have created for themselves, and it is primarily the violence embedded in ethnonational conflict which they have chosen to leave outside their space, rather than the violence of patriarchy. Yet the two realms intersect here. The safe space the women have created is built on feminine solidarity and a gendered response to violence. As Badria, quoted earlier in this chapter has noted, for some Jewish members joining the choir meant transgressing the boundaries of accepted sociality between Jews and Arabs, that is the (oftentimes male-determined) norm within their homes and families. For ‘Aliyah, the one ḥājja (Muslim woman who has been on pilgrimage to Mecca) among them, the choir was also a space in which she asserted her right to perform in public as a devout Muslim, despite the critiques of Jaffa (male) Muslim traditionalists. Some of the other Arab women were also critiqued for taking time from their home duties to participate in the choir. In contrast to the hardened boundaries between Self and Other the women encounter elsewhere, their “bubble” is a space characterized by multiplicity, possibility and the relational work that creates and maintains it. This solidarity is anchored in the seemingly mundane production of everyday life (from sharing food and recipes, to the celebration of life cycle events, to group support in times of personal crisis), and most importantly, to the ways in which they seek consensus within the shared space of song. In a context in which violence is apprehended on multiple registers of oppressive experiences, the Shirana women’s proclivity to leave “big P” politics

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  117 out of their safe space seems less an act of avoidance or escapism but rather the product of their tacit, if also strategic agreement, that community (and consensus) is built on the currency of intimacy and affect, not on abstracted convictions that reify ontological differences between Self and Other. If, as Bourdieu (1989) suggests, symbolic struggles are violent struggles over the power to produce and impose the legitimate view of the world, the Shirana members have chosen to distance themselves from the violence and power struggles shaping the symbols that circulate and dominate the public sphere. By steering away from the violence embedded in ethnonational criteria of difference, they are free to create alliances and solidarities based on the kind of affect-based intimacy that produces and protects their “bubble.” It is from within the intimacy of this safe space of rehearsal that they have constructed for themselves that they commit themselves to public performance. According to peace scholar Malvern Lumsden (2000), the potential of the use of arts in conflict is located in the possibility to explore threatening material within a safe space of poiesis, play and exploration, in which new meanings and relationships can be tested before they are applied in the real world. The stories, banter and collective ways in which the Shirana women negotiate the nuanced meanings of their repertoire are all important aspects in the production of their “bubble,” where meanings and relationships are both tested and transformed. Their debate on the different twists of meaning in “Eggplants”—and their final preference for sexualized banter over political commentary—is a testament to the ways they negotiate the need to guard their space from a painful political reality, and also the need to confront this reality, as both different subjectivities and as a collective of women. The process of adapting covers to their repertoire is also one in which experimentation transforms and evolves their cultural meanings. When singing love songs (Ehud Banai’s “ha-Yom”) the songs are no longer about boy-girl love, but about women singing to each other as friends, a transposition that recasts what constitutes a primary relationship. Likewise, the Hebrew-Arabic exchange they apply to Palestinian folk songs or ones anchored in Jewish traditions (“al-Rozānā” and “Ḥad Gadya”) empties these songs from the hardened ethnonational markers of identity so closely associated with folk repertoires, projecting an all women front against the violence lodged in over-determined nationalist representations. Media and art scholar Mary Ann Hunter describes the creation of safe space through performance as “a processual act of ever-becoming: a space of messy negotiations that allow individual and group actions of representation to occur, as well as opportunities for ‘utopian performatives’” (2008, 16), through which individuals and groups can imagine and feign what they want to become. The collective ways in which Shirana’s repertoire is crafted are a process of “messy negotiations” in which all the women develop a “new set of ears” and build what they have come to think of as their family. While “utopian performatives” bring to mind the depoliticized peace songs so

118  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center dear to the Shirana women and their audiences, it is ultimately the charge of the familial intimacy cultivated in their “safe space” they then bring to performance, that enables their successful intervention in a contested and violated space such as Abu El-‘Abed’s. On this occasion, Shirana’s embodied and sung utopian performatives produced a “safe space” that became a transformative process of ever-becoming for the audience as well.

Between the wolf, the dove and the deer: concluding thoughts on coexistence, citizenship and “messy negotiations” The AJCC case studies presented here represent a sampling of Arab-Jewish multiculturalist music projects in Israel. Such projects promote an ethos of civic partnership highly contradictory to decades of government policy and most especially to the escalating entrenchment of Jewish-centered hegemony characteristic of the post-Oslo era. They also provide a means of building community, partnerships, productive alliances and social imaginaries based on a conceptualization of a universalist humanity that is rare within the ethnonational grids of Israeli society. The community that materialized through Shirana’s performance at Abu El-‘Abed’s restaurant and the interviews with the VOP choir members described above attest to the important roles such partnerships play in the bifurcated post-Oslo sociopolitical climate, especially in mixed Palestinian-Jewish environments in Israel. Yet the process of culturalizing the conflict by the AJCC poses challenges that can be generalized to all Arab-Jewish multiculturalist partnerships in the Israeli context, be it in the arts, education, civil rights or other spheres of public life (Agbaria 2011; Jabreen 2002; Orr 2011; Yonah 2005), which are all compromised by the same Gordian knot. If, as Sara Ahmed (2000) has pointed out, multiculturalism is a way of imagining the nation as a container of multiplicity and difference, none of the Israeli organizations that aim for civic partnership can truly reconcile between the ethos of universal rights of citizenship, the bi-national context of conflict and the ethnonational basis for the Jewish State. As demonstrated by the story of Shirana’s performance at Abu El-‘Abed’s, this situation is further complicated by the State’s jurisdiction over the oPt and the lives of millions of Palestinian non-citizens. While multiculturalist projects today are by default limited to frameworks of citizenship and inclusion in the national narrative rather than inter-­national reconciliation, such efforts are constantly intruded on by the violence of the Occupation, extremist ideology and the perceived threat of the relationships between Palestinian citizens and non-citizens, which place Palestinians citizens outside the “nation.” In Israel, all these factors join to complicate efforts to de-ethnicize and de-nationalize concepts of multicultural citizenship(s). As long as narratives of origin and common destiny providing the basis of an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) are attached to the conceptual Jewishness of the state as an ethnonational community, Palestinian citizens cannot become

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  119 full members of this community. And, as long as the Occupation continues to blur the geographical borders between citizens and non-­citizens, (Jewish) ethnonationalism will continue to be codified legally, structurally and culturally against the “enemy” within. This serves to destabilize not only the “safe spaces” that multiculturalist music projects in Israel seek to create within such confined conditions, but also the very possibility of the “imagined community” they are aiming for. As Nira Yuval-Davis states (1997, 21), “Citizenship rights are anchored in both the social and the political domains. Without ‘enabling’ social conditions, political rights are vacuous.” At the same time, multicultural work should not be discounted as secondary to, or derivative of, structural transformations dictated from above, nor as a mere representation of a politics of recognition devoid of transformative potential. Successful examples of multiculturalist Arab-Jewish collaborations demonstrate the power of cultural work to negotiate and subvert the deterministic power of the “imagined national community,” one in which— as per the Anderson paradigm—citizens are abstracted from their specific social positions. Instead, they create bottom-up spaces that are inclusive of diverse subject positions and that do form a true community. The bonds created within the VOP choir and the Shirana choir, and the ways such bonds can resonate in larger circles, are a glimpse to what shared life can look like if the all-encompassing shadow of the “nation,” ethnically defined, would be dismantled, and its symbols replaced with ones that build on participation and negotiation. While today the boundaries of the nation and the Palestinian/Arab-Jewish/Israeli binary are a zero-sum game of violence in Israel-Palestine, these Arab-Jewish coexistence projects show how easily entrenched tribal affiliations can be productively transformed, and emergent modes of citizenship enacted, if the messiness, contingencies and multiplicities of human life are given a public voice.

Postlude: in between Israel and Palestine On May 12, 2011, I was driving from Jaffa to Jerusalem, en route to Ramallah. There was work waiting for me at Al-Kamandjâti. It was just three days before Israel celebrates Independence Day and Palestinians commemorate the Nakba. Tensions were high. For days, the Israeli media was full of speculations regarding the potential outbreak of a third intifada. Troops were mobilized, checkpoint security beefed up, closures announced. I turned on the radio hoping to find out what might be going on at the checkpoints, specifically Qalandiya, which I planned to cross on my way to Ramallah. On the news, a PLO official said that the PA may not be able to contain the anger of the population and that a third intifada could possibly ignite on Nakba commemoration day. The next news item was about an organization I had never heard of before, called “Im Tirtzu,”32 an ultra-­nationalist Jewish-­Israeli organization that had printed hundreds of thousands of

120  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center booklets intended for distribution at Israeli schools and universities. The booklets denied the Nakba narrative and blamed the Arabs for starting the aggressions in 1948. The organization had also come up with a jingle, sung to the tune of the American classic rock song “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye,” a song used in stadium settings worldwide, which featured next in the news report: Na-na-na-na, / Na-na-na-na / Hey-aay-aay / Nakba kharṭa. The chant reverberated in the car and through my body. Its implied meanings were so crass and so violent, that hearing it on the radio made my hair stand on end. The word kharṭa means bullshit, and it comes from Arabic slang, long incorporated into Hebrew slang as well. Im Tirtzu had dipped into profanity in order to discursively highlight its ideology of exclusion. The group was seemingly unaware that by appropriating the vernacular of the Palestinian Other for this purpose, they were portraying themselves in the very image of the crass Palestinian they wanted to project. Their borrowing of a song from the Israeli soccer fields, where fan-based violence is common and usually underpinned by racial and ethnonational tensions— most especially anti-Arab sentiments (Sobelman 2012; Sorek 2007)—­further highlighted for me the threat of violence embedded in the slogan. I later found out that Im Tirtzu’s legal and defamatory media campaigns, targeting UNRWA, Israeli civil rights organizations, left-leaning academics and university departments, and dissenting voices of Palestinian citizens, had been gaining traction and political clout in Israel (Arad 2011; Handelzalts 2012; Hasson 2012; Kashti 2010; Katz 2011). From my liminal, in-transit position between state and militarized Occupied Territory, hearing this news story brought to the surface a focal point in the complex sonic geography in which I had been travelling for some time. This geography mapped unto different musical expressions and associated discursive terrains: Palestinian nation-building, liberation and resistance; Arab-Jewish multicultural coexistence efforts alluding to post-national imaginaries; Zionist imaginaries of the nation; and violent negations of the ethnonational Other. In this moment of transition, all these jumbled around me, like a shifting map whose “aural borders” consist of overlapping and contradictory lines, none adhering to the solid boundaries a map is designed to portray. Each of these terrains can be described as fixed or discrete musical scenes, and most scholars have treated them as such. But, as Josh Kun (2005) highlights, music is a spatial practice that may produce maps, but they are maps that move. These musical scenes are constructed both because of, and against, the public display of contesting discourses and their contingent sociopolitical meanings. By constantly moving between these terrains, I was experiencing their very dialectical relationality. Whether based on the power of affirmation for both Self and Other or on the power of negating the Other, put together all these scenes of cultural production disrupt

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  121 the exclusivity that characterizes both Palestinian and Israeli narratives of nation formation (Stein and Swedenburg 2005a). Helena Lindholm Schulz (2000) defines Palestinianism and Zionism as nationalist “ideologies of conflict” that are directly related and constructed in relation to the Other (p. 13). And Ian Lustick (1996, 198) describes the formation of Israeli and Palestinian national movements as ones that “reflect nothing so much as they do their relationship to each other.” For me, in this moment of transition, mapping the divergent sonic expressions and ideational geographies both between and within the Green Line and the oPt—notwithstanding power differentials and contingent exposure to violence at play—had (painfully) brought this point home. I parked my rental car, which did not carry insurance for the Occupied Territories (as is customary with most Israeli car rental companies). I was in the public parking lot facing the police station at Neve Ya‘acov, a Jewish settlement (effectively annexed after 1967) in East Jerusalem. As I was leaving the car for several days, parking it in front of a police station was the best guarantee of finding it in place when I returned. Neve Ya‘acov’s proximity to Qalandiya checkpoint and to the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina, home of Nadir, the taxi driver who accompanied me in or out of Ramallah over several months, were other considerations for the choice of parking location. On our way to Qalandiya, Nadir advised to me to come back before May 15, Nakba commemoration day, and we debated whether it would simply be safer to stay put in Ramallah until after the commemoration. As we drove through the checkpoint, the soldier at the entryway had his machine gun cocked and ready, something I had not yet experienced on this often-travelled route. **** This transition between State and Occupied Territory frames the subject matter of the next chapter, which focuses on borders not just as material reality, but as a master trope in Palestinian life. Here musical narratives intertwine with stories of borders, checkpoints, and the quest for personal and collective autonomy.

Notes 1 Interview with a television production company representative, December 28, 2011. 2 Examples include Haifa’s Holiday of Holidays Festival, established in 1995; The Jerusalem International Oud Festival, established in 1999; and the Culture of Peace Festival, established in 2002 in Tel Aviv. 3 During my fieldwork (2011–2012) such legislative moves included new fiscal requirements of human-rights NGOs that receive funding from foreign governments (“Funding from Foreign State Entities,” February 2011); legalizing the state’s right to withdraw monetary support from organizations sponsoring events that “undermine Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, ­v iolates its symbols, or mark the day of its establishment as a day of mourning” (“Nakba Law,” March 2011); establishing the state’s right to revoke citizenship

122  The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center from citizens convicted on charges of terrorism or espionage (March 2011), and a law authorizing the state to withdraw public status from NGOs supporting boycott politics (“Law Preventing Harm to the State of Israel by Means of Boycott”), among others (ACRI 2012). 4 The fact that there are only six bilingual Arabic-Hebrew schools in Israel accredited by the state, all of which rely on NGO funding rather than the state for their specialized curricula, exemplifies this point (Bekerman 2016). 5 See: The Jezreel Valley Multicultural Music Center Brochure, http://www.­ emekyizrael.org.il/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/broshure.pdf (Multicultural Center for The Arts 2012); The Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra, https://www. youth-music.org.il/the-arab-jewish-orchestra (accessed June 5, 2011) and the Jerusalem Intercultural Center, https://jicc.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/ jerusalem-foundation-windows-december-2010-speaking-arts.pdf (accessed December 2, 2012). Heartbeat, a more grassroots-oriented program founded in 2007 under a Fulbright-MTV grant, provides an exception to this rule (see http:// heartbeat.fm, accessed September 3, 2018). 6 Hebrew: Merkaz Ḳehilati ‘Aravi-Yehudi. Arabic: Al-Markaz Al-Jamāhīrī Al-‘ArabīAl-Yahūdī. 7 A pseudonym. Names of all minors (at the time) have been changed. 8 Information and quotes from Hadas are taken from a January 4, 2012 interview. 9 Members of the Shirana choir featured here have since left the AJCC; their choir is now known as Rana. The AJCC retained the name and has a new women’s choir called Shirana. 10 The 2011 social protest movement is the focus of Chapter 4. 11 Hasbara is Israel’s official advocacy or propaganda apparatus and campaigns. 12 Personal communication, August 8, 2011. 13 Quotes by Roi are from a December 4, 2011 interview at Eshel Studios. 14 For an updated description of the Kulanana project, see http://www.machon-­ merchavim.org.il/the-art-of-kulanana/?lang=en (accessed September 27, 2018). 15 See http://www.panet.co.il/online/index.html (accessed May 12, 2012). 16 See (with English subtitles): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXfWZeTdF9g (accessed September 29, 2018). 17 Personal communication, October 4, 2012. 18 Personal communication, December 4, 2011. 19 See Oren Yiftachel and Avinoam Meir (1998) for top-down, centralized policies that structure how multiple criteria of difference refract in Israeli society. 20 See http://www.cincyusa.com/2012worldchoirgames (accessed June 13, 2012). 21 Quotes by Mika are taken from a January 11, 2012 Interview. 22 For Israeli foreign policy and cultural exports see Belkind 2010. 23 See Americans for Peace Now’s (2012) partial chronicling of the escalation of price tag events in 2011–2012 on both sides of the Green Line. For the history of the Hilltop Youth see Ori Nir (2011) and David Khalfa (2009). 24 Meir Kahane was an American-Israeli Orthodox rabbi. He founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a self-ordained vigilante movement aimed at protecting Jewish neighborhoods in the United States (1968), and the Kach party in Israel (1971), which was banned from maintaining its parliamentary seat in the 1988 elections for being racist and undemocratic. In Israel he was detained several times for allegedly planning armed attacks against Palestinians. Kahane was assassinated in 1990 while in New York (Afterman and Afterman 2015; Sprintzak 1985). 25 See Combatants for Peace website at http://cfpeace.org/ (accessed October 1, 2018). 26 For Avi’s full testimony in English see the Facebook post: http://www.facebook. com/notes/%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%97%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%

The Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center  123

27 28 29 30

31 32

9C%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9D/testimony-of-a-61-years-old-peaceactivist-who-was-robbed-and-beaten-badly-by-se/277913818898252 (accessed May 12, 2012). Interview January 2, 2012. For a cultural history of this Passover song, along with Alberstein’s take on it, see Seroussi and Ronen (2014). The song was re-recorded by Chava Alberstein with Shirana years after she first released it. See Yafa Al-Yom: http://www.yomnet.net/ShowNews.php?id=10227&Cid=2 and Hot’s cable TV internet news channel promotion for the concert recycled on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJhjweHGzMo&feature=youtu. be (accessed November 10, 2011). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVBuPBPGg_g [Hebrew] (accessed December 2, 2011). Im Tirtzu means “If you will it.” The name is taken from a famous line by Theodor Herzl, considered the founder of the Zionist movement, which says “If you will it [the founding of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine], it is not a dream.”

3

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine Checkpoints, occupation bureaucracy, subjectivity

If space is endless and abstract, a place is what we carve out of it, a “conceptual fusion of space and experience” that is crucial to both our identity and our sense of agency. —James M. Jasper (1997, 93)1 The quintessential Palestinian experience… takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified. What happens to Palestinians at these crossing points brings home to them how much they share in common as a people. For it is at these borders and barriers that the six million Palestinians are singled out for “special treatment,” and are forcefully reminded of their identity: of who they are, and of why they are different from others. —Rashid Khalidi (1997, 1)

Figure 3.1 Poster depicting the distance to Palestine’s non-existent International airport, expressing the desire for self-determination and freedom of movement. The poster also provides ironic commentary on Palestine’s proto-state status, which has not brought new freedoms to Palestinians, but rather, further confinement. Photo taken at Birzeit’s Ḥosh al-‘Elleya restaurant.

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  125 As historian Rashid Khalidi writes, borders, checkpoints and barriers are fundamental experiences embedded in the structures of feeling that characterize personal and collective geographies for Palestinians. This is perhaps most salient in the oPt, where the “barrier” frame—from material checkpoints staffed by armed soldiers to the insurmountable bureaucratic paper trail involved in obtaining passes, visas, permits and residencies from the occupying power—is not only a major preoccupation but also a deeply embedded signifier of identity in people’s psyches, bodies and sense of collectivity.2 Here, personal geographies are bound with statelessness and lack of civic rights, restrictions on spatial mobility primary among them. Narratives of music making by Palestinians and foreigners working with them, compete and interlink with stories of borders, checkpoints and the oppressive practices of the Occupation. In my interlocutors’ stories, music making is foregrounded as one activity that offers a certain sense of freedom, and a means of cultural territorialization that asserts personal and collective autonomy. With all the difficulties, music making still affords some—although in highly limited and oftentimes Kafkaesque circumstances—movement through restricted space. More importantly, as an embodied practice and field of specialization, music provides means for constructing subjectivities, collectivities and modes of resistance that are not overdetermined by the violence that frames the conflict, and hence creates alternative means for re-mapping, or reterritorializing, its confining spatiality. Al-Kamandjâti’s day in Jerusalem, described in Chapter 1, provides one example of a cultural reterritorialization that collapses spatial boundaries to emphasize Palestinian unity. Spatial restrictions are also temporal restrictions, markers of lost time. There is time spent waiting at checkpoints, whose arbitrary closures and technologies of human processing render it a soul killing time, or, in the case of those trying to reach a hospital, a potentially deadly time. There is time spent traveling on the segregated roads, where short distances are converted into long, circuitous routes. There is time spent filling paperwork or waiting for various permits which may or may not arrive, a time of limbo and uncertainty about one’s very livelihood, education or commitments to family and community. Or, as in the case of a Europe-based Palestinian musician scheduled to perform with the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music’s (ESNCM’s) Palestine Youth Orchestra (PYO), there was the stress incurred during several days spent at a European airport without getting on a succession of scheduled flights, because the required visa had been withheld until the very last moment. Over all these daily, personal experiences of time lingers the collective temporal experience: the unending “temporariness” of five decades of military occupation, and the always-suspended national time with its everreceding promises of national emancipation. During my time in the field, this tension was acutely felt, as the deferment of Palestinian independence was occurring at the same time the PA was intensively building proto-state institutions and lobbying them internationally, in supposed preparation for an independent state. As Helga Tawil-Souri (2017) points out, national time

126  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine remains a loop leading nowhere, while Palestinians are waiting for waiting to end. Music, however, moves in time, an element of infinite accumulation whose directionality no one can check, control or enclose. In occupied Palestine, music also provides a temporal experience that places agency in the hands and ears of its makers and listeners, rather than in the hands of the occupier. As Timothy Rice (2003) suggests, music changes as the subject moves through time, providing for a personalized experience, demarcation and narrative of time: making (and listening to) music is time spent, not time lost. The temporal autonomy of musicking stands in perpendicular relationship to the spatial and temporal restrictions imposed by the Occupation. When music is performed collectively, it provides this narrative experience for the group. If, as Edward Casey (1996) argues, space and time come together in the experience of place, music-making in Palestine binds place, space and temporality with the construction of subjectivities and collectivities articulated in response to, in spite of, and also outside of, the Occupation. This is the focal point of this chapter. Gestalt of domination, gestalt of resistance, and the performance of space-time Cultural geographer Steve Pile points out that spatial technologies of domination are instituted to control aspects of “distance and closeness, inclusion and exclusion, surveillance and position, movement and immobility, communication and knowledge” (1997, 3). Authority produces space by cutting it up, using and abusing its borders and markers. In the process, it also produces scales of domination—from the body to the region, the nation and the globe. Pile’s analysis is especially relevant to the West Bank, where the Israeli production of space is not only a matter of “security” but of a gestalt of domination and sense of primordial entitlement to the territory. The cartography commonly seen in Palestine-Israel illustrates this well. Israeli maps distributed in tourist locations replace the West Bank and the 1967 borders—a territory designated to be part of the future Palestinian State by the Oslo Accords—with “Judea and Samaria.” Maps one frequently sees in Palestine also tend to present Palestine as including the entire territory “from the River to the Sea” and usually contain the territory’s pre-1948 Palestinian locales rather than the Jewish towns that have replaced them. But while the Palestinian maps are often artistic representations serving primarily as emblems of collective memory and aspirations for national unity, the Israeli erasure of Palestine is prescriptive and authorial. This is most evident in Israel’s control over cyberspace. Maps provided by Israeli search engines, from google.co.il/maps to mapa.co.il, may show the larger Palestinian towns of the West Bank, but do not recognize specific streets and addresses (effectively erasing the people who presently live there), while

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  127 the settlements contain all relevant details. The routes to Palestinian towns listed on these maps do not account for the separation wall, checkpoints or other identity-based barriers, and are therefore useless as practical tools of navigation. And try to input your destination as one of the Palestinian towns that Israel has annexed into the “Unified Jerusalem”—for example, Shoafat—and the cybermap automatically replaces your destination goal; like it or not, you are going to Jerusalem.3 The cartographic erasure of Palestinian space is also temporal, an erasure of Palestinian memory and history and a means of institutionalizing hegemonic (Jewish-Israeli) time. As the Occupied Territories become “Judea and Samaria” and frontier of Jewish settlement, Shoafat part of the “unified” and Judaized Jerusalem and biblical locales or archeological sites are construed as two-­m illennium-old cornerstones of Jewish national redemption in the modern era, Palestinian history and memory are vacated from time. This willful emptying of historical time is bound with the moralized justification for halting Palestinian movement in space, in the name of Jewish-­ Israeli security. By controlling the temporal flows of the present, Israel furthers its control over space, and in the process is working to foreclose Palestinian futurity as well (Jamal 2016; McMahon 2015). If control is a spatio-temporal matter, however, so is resistance. As Edward Said has noted, territorial struggles are also about “ideas, representations, rhetoric and images” (1988, 1). When it comes to images, global spectators are most familiar with Palestinian performances of resistance associated with episodic violence. Starting with the first intifada (1987), images of children facing tanks and machine guns with stones, and later, the martyr cult of suicide bombers, have become icons of Palestinian resistance in the mediated geography of violence that features the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Much less attention has been awarded to forms of civic resistance, which have always existed alongside violent struggle and which constitute primary modes of resistance in periods of relative calm (Hallward and Norman 2011; Qumsiyeh 2011). Such forms of resistance are culturally bolstered via narrative production, through the use of poetry and prose focused on memory, nostalgia and historiography. Narrative production provides a medium through which Palestinians have formed a shared consciousness despite their spatio-temporal fragmentation, and a discursive means of resisting Zionist hegemony over space and temporality (Jamal 2016). The performing and visual arts add further depth and dimensions to written narrative, as it is here where the interstices between ideas, imaginaries, symbols and affects fully come to life. In Palestine, it is precisely in these interstices that music making has become a prominent medium through which new representations of Palestinian spatiality, subjectivity and modes of contestation are constructed. The growth of cultural institutions since the Oslo Accords, particularly in the aftermath of the second intifada (2000–2005), has catalyzed into a prominent

128  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine institutionalized mobilization of the arts within the struggle over identity, images and representation, in what is sometimes framed colloquially as “cultural intifada.” The term was coined by the famous actor and theater director Juliano Mer-Khamis, who had established the Freedom Theatre in Jenin in 2006, but is broadly understood as a means of empowerment, of regrouping identities for subjectivities and collectivities and of resistance to cultural annihilation through education and creative work.4 These performative projects emphasize community building, cultural caché, skill and resilience, serving as the basis for new readings of Palestinianness both at home and abroad. The ethnographic accounts presented below focus on the intersections of spatial and temporal regimes of control with music making in Palestine. Each case study presents a different aspect of how space-time is produced via music making in this context: in relation to the authorial violence of geographical boundaries, to the impenetrable occupation bureaucracy, and to embodied experiences of violence and domination. These stories also highlight the transformation of such intersections into sites of agency, the coalescence of national collectivity, and modes of resistance that are locally shaped but which resonate in the global arena.

Checkpoints, mobility, music I begin with an account that features the relationship between music and the symbolic struggle over space and territory: a performance by the Al-­ Kamandjâti music conservatory’s Youth Orchestra at Qalandiya checkpoint. The Youth Orchestra’s performance (June 23, 2011) reterritorialized the checkpoint as a Palestinian space by confronting its disembodied surveillance technology with embodied, collective sonic power. Beyond confronting the brute hierarchies of the Occupation, the orchestra challenged the national, social, temporal and moral orders that undergird its logic. Mozart at Qalandiya checkpoint: the politics and aesthetics of a Palestinian musical intifada As described in Chapter 1, Al-Kamandjâti is one of three prominent conservatories in Palestine. Its network of multiple branches, outreach programs, national music festivals, ensembles and orchestras—where musical activity is coupled with the construction of Palestinian collectivity highly entwined with resistance and nation-building—situate Al-Kamandjâti as an important actor in the orchestration of cultural resistance. The institution is also well positioned to act as Palestine’s cultural ambassador in the global battle over images and meanings, as its partnership with foreign donors and the presence of foreign Western music teachers and musicians imported for major productions attract ongoing Western media attention. The unique story of Ramzi Aburedwan, Al-Kamandjâti’s founder, and most particularly his

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  129 ascent from a stone-throwing refugee child to an internationally renowned musician and educator, magnifies Al-Kamandjâti’s iconic appeal as a symbol of cultural resistance and perseverance. The Qalandiya checkpoint performance was part of the annual Music Days Festival, which magnified the presence of foreign musicians and international media. In this performance, the Al-Kamandjâti Youth Orchestra’s members were joined by their teachers and festival guests. The concert was covered by an Italian film crew making a documentary about Al-­Kamandjâti; NPR journalist Sandy Tolan, here to write a book about music in Palestine;5 a journalist from Japan, and Palestinian television, among others. On the morning of the show, Al-Kamandjâti’s courtyard was buzzing with activity, as kids, adult musicians, staff and film crew were loading the bus and cars headed to Qalandiya checkpoint for a concert scheduled at noontime. Referred to at times as the “mother of all checkpoints,” Qalandiya was chosen as the venue for this performance because it represents an archetypal model of the Occupation’s brutality and site of injustice for Palestinians. Located right by the refugee camp that bears the same name, Qalandiya is one of the busiest checkpoints constructed along the separation wall. It sits at the junction of arteries connecting Ramallah and the northern West Bank, along with the eastern West Bank, to Jerusalem. It is also the only point of passage for tens of thousands of residents of a number of Palestinian neighborhoods that are part of the Jerusalem municipality jurisdiction (and have Israeli residence ID cards) but are separated from the city and their jobs, health centers, schools and extended family, by the wall. The construction of the wall and checkpoint, beginning in 2001, has disrupted West Bank life in a process that Rema Hammami likens to a “tectonic explosion that caused a massive web of ruptures across infinite networks of social and economic relations” (2010, 39). Qalandiya is a source of daily frustration and humiliation for approximately 20,000 Palestinians that must subject themselves to endless queues and the demeaning technology of Israeli securitization (ACRI 2011), and a newly constructed marker of the lived trauma of exile for the camp residents now barred from the city (Abourahme 2011). It is hence one of the most combustible points of friction between Palestinians and the Israeli army, border police and security personnel that staff the checkpoint. On the bus to Qalandiya, the mood was pretty cheery, and the kids in the back soon broke out into song, accompanied by percussion. Ramzi interrupted the singing to provide directions on how folks must conduct themselves upon arrival. Sounding like a commander giving orders to a troupe of soldiers in a military operation, he said: What we do now: we arrive to Qalandiya checkpoint, and we’ll stay on the bus until we build the instruments outside [music stands, timpani]. Then everybody can leave his case on the bus, just take his instrument. Once we finish building the stands—we stay on the bus, really don’t go

130  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine out, because we don’t want to attract any attention—once we get the stands and the big instruments are ready, everybody can come with his music, his instrument, and then we’ll start immediately. If you can tune on the bus, it will be amazing. Following these instructions, the singing resumed, only to be interrupted again by Sandy, who asked: “what happens if they come and tell you to stop playing, have you told them what to do?” “Yes, just to play,” Ramzi answered. “What if they say stop?” Sandy repeated the question. “If they say stop, you don’t listen, you just go on,” said Luca, an Italian cellist and festival guest, reiterating Ramzi’s earlier instructions to the musicians. Ramzi continued his reply: “You don’t listen. We go on exactly as if they’re not there. If they say something in the speaker, we don’t listen. We produce sound. That’s it.” “Who’s gonna say stop?” Someone asked. “Nobody, I think,” answered someone else. “They might stay stop on the microphone, tell us to go away or something,” Ramzi said. “We don’t listen. But normally there will be many people there [at this time], which is gonna make it more safe, ya‘ānī.” This reiterated emphasis on how the orchestra members were to conduct themselves was not only a means of making sure everyone understood their role, but of underscoring an image of binary oppositions: music against military might, the ethical essence of what Ramzi has dubbed “a musical intifada.” Juxtaposing music with orders barked over a loudspeaker is poignant here, as it sets up the frame for the politics of resistance about to take place at the checkpoint. Orders filtered through the checkpoint’s loudspeaker system are oftentimes not understood, whether due to the language used, the disembodied sound which lacks directionality—such that one is not always sure who is being addressed—or the amplified distortion. Moreover, the misapprehension of such orders can be perilous. The discursive contrast Ramzi set up played on the commonplace (Western) assumption that music is the highest expression of humanity and civilization—an ordered, organized and sensical expression of the world—here repositioned in opposition to the brutal, unintelligible and hence uncivilized checkpoint. In a normal world, one does not listen to what is unintelligible. But in a context in which meaning and syntax are dictated by the checkpoint apparatus, the act of not listening becomes an act of resistance. Ramzi’s discursive frame painted a sonic picture that juxtaposes Palestinian human dignity with a Foucauldian political economy of an antiseptic and remote-controlled technology of domination exercised by the Israeli authorities from behind loudspeakers, bars and bulletproof glass. Yet while Foucault highlights surveillance and visibility—the unequal gaze—as a metaphor for control through a corpus of disembodied knowledge rendered “scientific,” “we produce sound!” transfers the metaphor to the sonic realm. It challenges the relationship of inequality by inverting the location of knowledge and power from the abstracted loudspeaker to the embodied form of trained musicianship.

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  131 Sandy went about the bus with his tape-recorder asking each person on board what they were thinking of at the moment. Douglas, an American clarinetist who had previously lived in Palestine while teaching at the Barenboim-­Said Foundation, and who arrived a few days prior to play with the Ramallah Orchestra during the festival, said: “I guess transposing the A clarinet part to a B-flat clarinet part. Other than [the music] I’m fine, not thinking about anything else.” With all the considerations of performing at Qalandiya, this answer was probably what Sandy least expected to hear. When I told Sandy my thoughts were about what taking over this public space would be like, Douglas added: “it’s a little like a musical ambush,” echoing the clipped operational language and metaphorical juxtapositions of Ramzi’s earlier instructions. Douglas was preparing for the event by focusing on his body of knowledge and expertise: the production of sound organized through systems of knowledge completely outside, and seemingly irrelevant, to the realm of the checkpoint control apparatus. The meanings to be generated by this action were a secondary afterthought. While Sandy continued to record the moment, music resumed at the back of the bus and was getting louder, perhaps a collective response to the rising tension. Jamil and Yanal, young guys who through their studies and association with Al-Kamandjâti were now in the process of becoming professional musicians, led the singing and percussion with repertoire that moved from Khaled’s “‘Ā’isha” to Palestinian “standards,” with 16-year-old Malik6 soon adding a vocal beat with the mouthpiece of his trombone. The song that marked our approach to the checkpoint was “Yamā Mweil al-Hawā” (mother, a little mawwāl of love), a folksong that highlights the bitter refugee experience of humiliation and dislocation. Once at Qalandiya, Ramzi summoned some of the guys off the bus to help set up, while everyone else concentrated on tuning their instruments. The sun hit our eyes as we got off; it was a scorching-hot day. We walked over to the foot-passage waiting area at the checkpoint where the concert would be taking place. Foot traffic at Qalandiya is segregated from car traffic lanes by a high fence; West Bank residents, who do not have Israeli ID cards nor Israeli yellow license plates, are required to cross the checkpoint via the waiting area. This part of the “terminal,” as it is dubbed in the sterilized language of the IDF, was a dusty area consisting of a corrugated zinc roof and a concrete floor enclosed by vertical bars on the right. Beyond the bars there was a narrow passage, forming a corridor-like enclosed cage within which only a single person at a time can comfortably pass, its floor-to-ceiling turnstiles electrically remote-controlled. A sign hanging on the bars inside the waiting area advertised in Arabic and Hebrew that this is the “humanitarian track,” meaning the passage lane for Palestinians needing medical attention (although its turnstile and width were no more wheelchair-friendly than the other cages passengers were sorted through). Past the bars was a glass-­ windowed booth manned by soldiers with machine guns.

132  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine Excepting the few benches in the waiting area—one of them was now occupied by a few hijab-clad mothers and their children waiting for passage and by the orchestras’ cellists—this waiting area resembled a cattle corral, rather than a place constructed for humans. The two poured-concrete drinking fountains were dry, and during the whole time we spent there, no one tried to use them. As the summer progressed, the hours of waiting for passage under this metal roof could only become increasingly unbearable. A couple of entrepreneurial kids from the Qalandiya camp were peddling bottles of water inside the waiting area. Their presence extended the large informal market for goods and transportation spurred by the construction of the checkpoint on the Palestinian side, into the “terminal.” This was not the checkpoints’ busiest time. Outside the orchestra members, there were perhaps 20–25 people lingering about, including the water-­ bottle merchants, the mothers waiting with their children and a few other folks—some waiting for passage, others drawn in by the commotion created by the orchestra’s setting up. Past the bars, a soldier was looking in from the plexiglassed booth. She was wearing sunglasses so her expression couldn’t be discerned, but she was clearly concerned and was communicating her concerns to someone, I surmised, over her cell phone. The scene forming in front of her was markedly surreal: inside this dusty, garbage-littered compound, past the barred corridor, an orchestra made up of children and adults dressed in formal black and carrying trumpets and trombones, cellos and violins, was in the midst of setting up. The timpani were already stationed at the back of the waiting area to her right, and the cellists were sitting at the bench directly across from her, in the company of the women and children. If checkpoints metaphorize a space of liminality (Berger 2006), the soldier’s confusion momentarily rendered her, rather than the Palestinians she was watching, the subject of inverted dislocation: in this situation, she was the outsider looking in. The orchestra was set up in a matter of minutes. The program was the same as the concert played at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate the previous day: Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 and selections from Bizet’s Carmen Suite and L’Arlesienne.7 Jason lifted his baton, and the Orchestra sounded the first bars of Mozart’s symphony. In this small, zinc roofed area, the sonic impact was very powerful, literally bouncing off the surfaces. The tension leading to this performance also seemed to have put the musicians on their toes, their energy coming off so pointed that I felt my hair stand. When the first movement concluded, the crowd responded with loud claps, hoots, bravos and foot stomping. They just loved it. After the spirited first movement, the second (andante) and third (minuet) movements lowered the energy somewhat, although the musicians’ energy still came across edgy and pointed. When the third movement concluded, claps were more hushed. The soldier in the booth was now using her phone to film the concert. But with the symphony’s fourth movement, a kind of elegant air took over the orchestra. By now the orchestra members seemed to simply be into the

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  133 music, not taking note of their surroundings. They still sounded intent and edgy, but their energy seemed more the outcome of an inner focus, rather than the tension associated with playing in a “forbidden” space, manifesting in highly improved intonation. With the musicians becoming so tuned to the music and synched with each other, the Qalandiya concert, it seemed to me, ceased being primarily an act of resistance to the Occupation. Instead it became a collectively constructed experience of time and space that was unfolding autonomously with and through the music itself. The focused energy remained throughout the selections from Bizet’s Carmen Suite and L’Arlesienne, which were received with loud claps and calls of encouragement. During the entire march section of the Farandole from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne, which marked the closing of the program, two soldiers with machine guns and walkie-talkies standing right on the other side of the bars were checking it out. They talked among themselves, but they did not interrupt or interfere with the music. This re-appropriation of space by sound marked the ultimate irony, as from within the waiting area, it seemed as though the soldiers were the ones segregated from the locus of (sonic) power. They were looking in from behind bars created by the powers of “the sovereign” on a march performed by and for stateless civilians lacking not only an army, but the very “right to have rights” (Arendt 1951). Thundering applause, cheers and whistles from an audience now greatly augmented, marked the end of the show and reverberated throughout the waiting area. Lina, Al-Kamandjâti’s press agent, notified the audience that the performers were Al-Kamandjâti’s students who would be performing again at the Ramallah Cultural Palace that night, stimulating yet another round of cheers and applause. After the concert the Palestinian TV interviewed Jason, who had obviously just experienced a total catharsis: this was the moment he had been working towards with the kids for the past several months. Jason said: The kids, with all the trouble they have to live with, still they were able to come here and, [despite being] surrounded by all of this, the Occupation, they can make beautiful music. To me, there is nothing better than this. When the TV journalist asked him: “do you think this can bring peace, change the hatred?” he answered laughing: I wish it were that simple. I don’t know if it will bring all that, but it can bring many good things and that is why I’m here. To bring music to these kids… to be part of that, to be with the kids, to be playing here today, it beats everything. While Jason was being interviewed, everyone else was breaking down instruments and stands and taking them to the bus. Maddalena, Al-­Kamandjâti’s flute teacher, said with tears in her eyes: “I thought the walls would come

134  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine down!” On the bus, putting away his trombone, Malik said this was an amazing experience for him. That all these kids facing soldiers with guns and united in the music was the greatest message they could send out; he was so proud to be a part of this. Helen, a US-based violinist on her first trip to Palestine, said: “This was the best gig I’ve ever done.” Jason arrived when almost everyone was on the bus. He looked so elated, it seemed his feet were almost lifting off the ground. Everyone on the bus broke out in a spontaneous and boisterous cheer for him, and Jason jumped to touch the hands stretched out from the bus windows. On the way to Ramallah, the bus was taken over by a collective adrenaline rush, the singing and percussion louder and more boisterous than on the way to the checkpoint. Javier, a Boston-based cellist here for the festival, borrowed someone’s violin, Maddalena pulled out her flute and they joined the party on “Yāllāh Ḥabībī.” Those not performing were clapping and cheering. While the walls of Qalandiya obviously did not come down, the euphoria experienced by the Qalandiya concert participants was an expression of a collective sense of moral victory: it was a confrontation in which the staging and performance of symbolic capital was juxtaposed with brute structures of coercion that successfully (if momentarily) re-appropriated the checkpoint as the Palestinians’ public space. Steve Pile defines resistance as something that moves across spatial technologies of domination, rather than confronting them directly, seeking to “create new meanings out of imposed meanings, to re-work and divert space to other ends” (1997, 16). If the Israeli authorities dictate the rules of the game that govern the checkpoint—the sensory panopticon of surveillance—the success of this confrontation (or “musical ambush”) was the product of sidestepping the rules. Its modes of engagement were generated by the Palestinians and dislocated from the terrain of material hegemonic power. Drawing on bodies of knowledge outside the practices of domination creates spaces where modes of resistance converge with trickery, aesthetics and pleasure to redefine space that is instituted by others (de Certeau, quoted in Pile 1997, 15). The aesthetic dimensions of this subversive performance were played out through the transference of performativity from the checkpoint’s exhibition of material power to the sonic realm. In this transference, music, the ordered organization of sound, becomes the arbiter for what represents the sound of “civilization” in a binary opposition that constructs the checkpoint system as a representation of “noise” or chaos (Attali 1985). The choice of an orchestral classical Western music program (rather than one played by an Arabic takht, for example) supported the meanings generated by this performative context, both visually and sonically. Visually, the size of the orchestra, and the fact that its members (outside of the cellists) were standing in ordered sections, dressed in concert black, the string players synchronized in their bowings, horns and woodwinds in their entries, and all adhering to the cues of the conductor, created a powerful representation of collective Palestinian unity in motion. Likewise, the sonic power of a

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  135 Western orchestra, propelled by tympani, horns and a large string section, could not have been matched by a small ensemble or Arabic takht without amplification. The sheer volume generated by the orchestra supported the subversion of the domineering logic and sensory experience of the checkpoint. Finally, in a context in which Israel presents itself as a Western enclave of democracy in a turbulent Middle East (“villa in the jungle” is one of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s frequently used metaphors), the orchestra was speaking to power (or playing to it) in a Western musical language. In this site of brutality, the performance disrupted Israel’s claims to (Westernized) moral authority, turning them inside out. This performative transference changed both the experience of violated space generated by the checkpoint, and its temporality. By taking up the time of the folks waiting for passage, the time of the soldiers watching, the time of the musicians playing and the music unfolding, the orchestra created its own narrative of time. In this interval the orchestra and its audience stepped out of the occupier’s time to create their own temporal space, moving to its rhythms, controlling its tempi and cadences and performing (or listening to) its directionality. The symbolism of this ephemeral victory, which would later be recycled in its mediated retellings across the globe— along with images of children facing gun-toting soldiers with violins and trombones, rather than stones or bombs—resulted from the checkpoint apparatus having been stripped of its catalog of potential reactions. The checkpoint remained silent. Between Ramallah and Jerusalem, checkpoints and concerts: the Doppler effects of checkpoint spacio-temporality As the Qalandiya checkpoint story may suggest, the English term “checkpoint” does not quite capture what such passage point experiences entail, logistically, sensorially and affectively. “Checkpoint” suggests a flow that is resumed past its point of being “checked.” But the Hebrew word “maḥsom”—long nativized (colonized?) in the Palestinian dialect, including its Arabic plural “maḥasim”—as well as the Arabic term “ḥājīz” are closer fits with the English cognate “barrier,” a term that suggests total blockade, opacity, and in Palestine, also fragmentation and imprisonment. Besides the wall and checkpoints, the “barrier” frame is reinforced by frequent total closures at times the authorities consider as prone to higher levels of resistance (e.g., dates surrounding Nakba commemoration day, Land Day or Jewish holidays during which travel routes are heavily safeguarded for Jewish travelers), and by the segmentation of the West Bank via routes connecting primarily Jewish locales with each other and to Israel, often termed “Apartheid roads” by Palestinians. These are segregated roads that bypass Palestinian locales, resulting in the isolation of Palestinian communities from each other and in roundabout routes which, for Palestinians, often turn a very short geographical distance into a haphazardous journey that

136  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine may last many hours or be closed off at a moment’s notice. Travel restrictions are implemented by permanent checkpoints, “flying” checkpoints, differentiated license plates and biometric ID checks (Hass 2002). Material barriers such as the checkpoints and the separation wall are sites that create a kind of Doppler effect, through which additional circles of violence and misery radiate well beyond the checkpoints’ immediate vicinity or function as passage points. This became most evident to me as I drove with a friend from Ramallah to East Jerusalem’s Al-Hakawati theater to attend a concert of Mustapha Al-Kurd.8 Credited with having created a new musico-­ poetic genre of Palestinian resistance music in the 1970s, Al-Kurd had spent nine years in exile in Europe, before being allowed to return to Jerusalem, his native city. This evening the Palestinian folk hero was showcasing his new recording, an ode and homage to Jerusalem. We left Ramallah around 5 PM to make the 7 PM show. There were two reasons for leaving so early to transverse a short, 16-kilometer distance. First was my need to make a detour and drive through the Hizme checkpoint, which is located in Area C and often used by settlers, and thus was where I was less likely to be apprehended for my presence in Area A. More importantly, we knew that towards the evening the bottleneck formed by cars and trucks returning from the oPt to Jerusalem via Qalandiya checkpoint, which we needed to bypass, can stretch for several kilometers. Under these circumstances material barriers, despite the short distance, create a momentous intervention on continuous geographical space—physically, temporally and mentally—even for someone who is not subject to the restrictions on mobility that oPt-based Palestinians are subject to, for whom going to Jerusalem requires a special permit. By the time we were in El-Bireh, the town adjacent to Ramallah, we were inching our way through and spending much of the time in complete standstill. Around Kufr ‘Aqab, which borders on Qalandiya checkpoint, the road became overrun with dozens of boys, some very young, some teenagers. All were zigzagging between the cars, trying to sell items ranging from water and tea to trinkets or pirated CDs, to the immobile car passengers. This was an extension of the informal market established this side of Qalandiya checkpoint since the construction of the separation wall. Some of the kids, perhaps from the Qalandiya refugee camp located across the street, were only six or seven years old, old young men out to make ends meet for their families. They were so small they could have easily ended up under the wheels of large vehicles—many were trucks and SUVs—undetected in all the commotion. One of these little kids approached my open car window, trying to sell a trinket. I kept refusing because it didn’t seem advisable to pull my wallet out in this situation, but the kid would not take no for an answer. Soon an older boy came and cuffed the little kid; the older boy was marking his turf, letting the younger kid know who was in charge. Shortly after, the little boy came back to my window, asking for money and sticking his hands inside the car.

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  137 At this point, my anxiety levels rose and I rolled up the window. The boy was not hurt, but he made a little scene: pretend-crying, pressing his hand and nose to the glass window, a transparent manipulation. A whole band of little kids joined him and were gesturing to show that I had hurt him and needed to provide compensation. They kept walking by the car and trying to get me to open the window, making aggressive gestures; one of them mimicked a throat slit. This went on for quite some time, until we reached the fork in the road where those going through Qalandiya turn to the checkpoint crossing, and others continue elsewhere. Twenty minutes later, at the Hizme checkpoint, a tall female soldier with a machine gun waved us through. We arrived at Al-Hakawati two hours after leaving Ramallah, just as the show was starting. Al-Kurd’s show was beautiful, and the East-Jerusalem audience was clearly mesmerized, responding frequently with enthusiastic clapping and vocalized “Allah!” approvals. Personally, after the ride there, I found it difficult to focus on the music. The image of the little boy, who, like many others, must try to eke out a living at such a young age among disgruntled car passengers and tough boys over twice his age, was on my mind. This children’s labor market was a consequence of the now inaccessible adult labor market that existed for West Bank Palestinians before the construction of the wall and checkpoints. It was also the product of illicit profiteering enabled by the checkpoint’s intervention on the flow of traffic, in the municipally abandoned Jerusalem neighborhoods cut off by the separation wall and left to contend with mounting garbage, irregular water and electricity supplies, crime and other social ailments on their own (B’Tselem 2011, 2016). Al-Kurd’s songs, many of which highlighted his love for Jerusalem yet were also laced with political commentary, in this experiential moment, foregrounded for me the multiple and incongruent spatial, temporal and social distances shaped by the violence of imposed boundaries in and surrounding the city. The late-night return to Ramallah, which took all of 20 minutes, only compounded the disorienting production of distances and temporalities constructed by the wall and checkpoints system.

Playing through bureaucratic violence While the checkpoints, separation wall and bypass roads are the most visible signifiers of spatial and temporal technologies of domination in Palestine, they are only partial components of a broader system of controls that shape the habitus, formation of subjectivities, and construction of collective identities in Palestine. In the West Bank, this is due to the porous nature of the Israel-Palestine borders, where Jewish settlers are part and parcel of Israel’s civil, national and economic life, yet are spatially bounded with the territoriality of a military occupation over stateless Palestinians. In this context, material forms of control can only be made effective by being supported by a host of other spatial and temporal technologies of governance

138  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine and surveillance over human bodies. Most prominent among these is a colonial-styled bureaucracy that manages a mind-boggling labyrinth of paperwork required for obtaining passes, visas, permits and work-related residencies, a process that oftentimes necessitates visits to Civil Administration District Coordination Offices (DCOs) located in settlements that are hostile to Palestinians. Journalist Haim Levinson (2011) counts a remarkable 101 different types of permits issued by the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) that govern Palestinian mobility within the West Bank, between the West Bank and Israel, and beyond State borders. For example, there are different permits for worshipers attending the Friday prayers at ­Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, clerics working at the site, clergy and church employees. There are also different permits for physicians, ambulance drivers, emergency staff, medical staff in the “seam zone,” escorts of a patient in an ambulance and escorts of a patient not travelling in an ambulance. The list goes on and on. The ongoing production of new rules and regulations by the occupation bureaucracy (always without forewarning) also affects ­music production in Palestine. One example out of many is a 2012 concert of the ESNCM’s Jerusalem Children’s Orchestra (children from the West Bank and Israel) that was scheduled in Jerusalem. The concert had to be cancelled because Israel lowered the age at which non-citizen Palestinian children need permits to enter the city (previously 15), and the new regulations could not be met in time. The COGAT bureaucracy is only one of the agencies of spatial control, with the military, border police and Shabak—the Israeli Security Agency— often intervening with COGAT’s bureaucracy, due to conflicting interests and/or miscommunications.9 Yet all the civil, military and state security systems involved in the governance of Palestinian mobility operate on the assumption that every Palestinian, by nature of being Palestinian, poses a security threat. I now turn to these “invisible” forms of authorial making of space to explain how they reinforce physical and temporal barriers, as well as how their demands intersect with the lives and identities of musicians and with music making in Palestine. Bureaucratic control, the making of space and time and musicking in Palestine One summer afternoon, we were sitting in the garden that provides a bucolic setting to the Birzeit boarding school the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM) uses for its summer music camps.10 Among us were ESNCM personnel and a few foreign musicians, here to coach the Palestine Youth Orchestra (PYO)’s children and prepare the orchestra for a concert tour. That evening, the orchestra was scheduled to perform in Nablus. As usual, checkpoints and crossings dominated the conversation.

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  139 Ahmad, a Jordan-born Palestinian oud and cello player, soon joined us; he was carrying a thick wad of papers. Ahmad had been instrumental in developing the ESNCM’s Oriental Music Department in its early years. In 2002, in the midst of the second intifada, he was forced to leave Palestine, and the Israeli authorities refused to renew his work permit. Unable to return, he eventually found refuge in Sweden. Ahmad was carrying yet another visa application he needed to complete so that he might be able to stay for a few more days in Palestine, in order to perform at a newly scheduled concert. He described the difficulties entailed in completing the application, including intrusive questions about his past experiences and personal details about his entire extended family. Ahmad then recalled how the musicians involved in a recent CD recording he was a part of decided that they were going to write about their lives outside of music in their publicity materials, rather than about their musical careers. Ahmad elaborated on what he described as his “second career”: filling up visa applications, passage permits and right to perform applications. “It feels like my whole life is taken up with this!” he said. Getting Ahmad to perform with the PYO in Palestine had not been an easy task. Tim, the orchestra manager who since arriving in Palestine had also developed a “second career” as the ESNCM’s “permits man” on top of his duties in selecting repertoire and talent, arranging music and overseeing logistics, described the process to me. In retelling the story in all its fatiguing twists and turns, I aim to demonstrate the inaccessibility and opacity of the permits (Arabic: taṣrīḥ) bureaucracy, as well as its effects on the subjectivities involved:11 Ahmad… hadn’t been in Palestine for ten years…we had applied for permissions [but] They weren’t giving [Ahmad] his visa. They weren’t refusing it, or accepting the application, they just weren’t issuing it. And it was just two days [before] the concert, and we were all very twitchy about whether this was gonna work. So, I called up Beit El (a settlement near Ramallah that also houses a COGAT Headquarters and a DCO) and said that I was giving a television interview that afternoon, and that what I said was gonna depend on whether they issued his visa, or didn’t issue his visa. An incredibly American sounding soldier at Beit El said, “first of all it’s illegal to extort the military. We will arrest you for extortion if you talk to us like this.” I explained that it wasn’t extortion because money wasn’t involved. [I also explained that] it could be construed as blackmail, but [that] actually it wasn’t [blackmail] because what I was trying to avoid, was falsely accusing them of not giving a visa, on television, when they actually were in the process of giving a visa. At the same time [I said], I was [still planning on] doing the television interview… then the Beit El officials gave me their mobile numbers. I [now] have mobile numbers of people working in Beit El, we’re on first

140  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine name terms… And [the visa] did come through, not that day, but the next day, and [Ahmad] did perform. This part of Tim’s story foregrounds not only the inaccessibility of the permits system but also his role as a mediator. The pressure Tim had managed to exert on the officials at the DCO, drawing their attention to the situation, rested on the fact that he himself was not Palestinian and could therefore mediate on Ahmad and the ESNCM’s behalf. This is a common occurrence. The occupation bureaucracy oftentimes forces Palestinians into a position in which they cannot speak for themselves; they have no direct access to the system that controls vast aspects of their lives. This is why Palestinian cultural organizations often require the intervention of foreign consulates for permits, work visas and residencies. Tim’s tale also highlights the happenstance circumstances that converged that day to support his goal, without which the visa may not have been issued. He happened on a soldier whose native tongue was English, and on whom he impressed his background in law as well as his access to the media. In other words, Tim was demonstrating cultural capital that the DCO soldier felt he could not simply sweep aside. This is not likely to have occurred had the soldier been speaking with a Palestinian supplicant, where cultural and ethnic hierarchies would be determined by the soldier’s power as an agent of sovereign authority. Assuming that this exchange created channels that Tim could use again when the occasion necessitated, I asked: “So now you have people you can call whenever you have a problem?” Tim answered: No. The people I was speaking to were from the international organizations (NGOs) department and we’re a Palestinian organization…. It’s very hard to talk to these people. I was just lucky that day with an official who, I think, is American and who was probably quite naïve—he probably thought that the Civil Administration could be some wonderful sort of colonialist thing… What was weird about that day was that [while] I was in the office of the Palestinian Deputy Minister of Civil ­A ffairs [to try to push Ahmad’s visa through] the minister spent almost all his time talking on the phone in Hebrew with someone he said was the Deputy Minister of Defense in Israel. Because they’re the people that [get] the visas through… It’s a surreal thing to see, because officially there’s no cooperation between [the PA] and the Israeli g­ overnment. And now, the only hour that I’ve spent in a Palestinian Minister’s office, he’s on the phone [the whole] time laughing and joking in ­Hebrew. [The two ­officials] obviously knew each other well. And then, on the next level down, there was one of my colleagues, Muhammed Fadl, who was talking to the PA’s liaison officer in Beit El. And I was talking on the mobile phone to this guy called Lauren, the officer in the International Organizations department. But there was

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  141 a lot more communication going on say, between the two ministers, than between the Israeli minister and the Israeli officer at Beit El, [or between] the Palestinian minister and myself. So officially there’s this divide between Palestinians and Israelis but actually, there’s a divide in hierarchy that is a lot stronger… [The ministers] had information they refused to tell us. The Palestinian Minister would say: “I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you”… about the things he had said to the Israeli Deputy Minister of Defense. [At some point] Lauren called me [asking] what have you heard? I said I heard it’s [gotten to the level of] a fourth office now, but no one’s allowed to tamper with it, no one’s is allowed to push it through. So there are four offices that the permit is processed through… And Lauren says: “you’re hearing the same things from the Palestinian side that I’m hearing from the Israeli side, so it’s obviously the truth.” …So finally, it was well, “at least your people are telling you the same story that my people are telling me.” It was a really strange situation… Tim’s description resonates with numerous aspects of the occupation bureaucracy as analyzed by Yael Berda (2018), a lawyer specializing in constitutional law and human rights, who has represented many West Bank Palestinians in Israeli courts. Berda apprehends the inchoate relationships of civil, military and state security systems involved in the governance of Palestinian mobility as rooted in principles of colonial regimes, whose local practices of governance and jurisprudence Israel inherited from Mandate Britain. Such regimes assume that every colonized subject poses a security threat, which leads to a racialized hierarchy and an ethnicized colonial system of governance. This influences all the system’s characteristics, bureaucratic practices and core principles of governance. The first principle of governance in such contexts is administrative flexibility, whereby the bureaucracy (or executive branch) gains unchecked legislative and judicial powers. The second is the principle of personalization, by which due to the lack of ministerial responsibility for decision making, getting through bureaucratic red tape requires personal connections and also expands sovereign powers into the hands of individuals, the police or other institutions involved. The third principle, which allows for the lopsided distribution of powers within the system, is the institutionalized permanence of “emergency situation” rules of conduct and governance. Under the “emergency situation” edict, judicially inherited from British colonial rule, normative rules of conduct governing civilian populations are suspended for the sake of “security.” Because all Palestinians are considered a potential security risk, the process of obtaining rights to mobility becomes one of contesting such a classification, rather than placing the responsibility of proving one’s “guilt” on the authorities. This process catalyzes into the ongoing production of “exceptions to the emergency situation” as the principle that governs Palestinian rights to mobility. Berda adds that in

142  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine Israel-­Palestine the role of the Shabak within the system is central, as the Shabak relies on the permits bureaucracy for surveillance and for recruitment of informants and collaborators. As the Shabak can deny any permit request on grounds of security with no requirement for transparency visà-vis the Israeli judicial system or occupation bureaucracy, the institution remains free to exercise mass profiling and data collection, collective punishments and forcible recruitment of informants. All of these produce the occupation bureaucracy’s two main characteristic phenomena, which Tim’s story highlights so poignantly: the “invisible sovereign,” meaning, the impossibility of locating the agent(s) with the power to make decisions, and “effective inefficiency,” whereby numerous agents constantly produce contradictory and conflicting instructions and information governing Palestinian non-citizens. In the case of Ahmad’s permit, Tim was “lucky” that day to happen on a Civil Administration office responsible for liaisoning with international NGOs, and also “lucky” to have the television interview card and a background in law. But none of these would have gotten Ahmad the necessary visa without the intervention of top echelon Palestinian and Israeli functionaries who finally produced Ahmad’s visa as an “exception” to the “emergency situation” and the racialized status by which all Palestinians are counted a security risk. The “invisible sovereign” and the “effective inefficiency” syndromes of the occupation bureaucracy, Berda points out, are not the byproduct of institutional failures. Rather, they are syndromes that ultimately serve the overall goal of the system: the reduction and slowing down of Palestinian spatial mobility at large, which enables the effectiveness of Israeli surveillance. By immobilizing Palestinians in a web of arbitrary, unpredictable and erratically applied restrictions, the occupation bureaucracy is immobilizing them in both space and time. Under these conditions, producing a concert tour in Palestine involving musicians from the entire Palestinian diaspora (PYO) becomes a surreal feat of accomplishment, a marker of Palestinian perseverance (and the perseverance of foreign nationals working with them) and a tour-de-force of national unity. During the concert that took place that evening in Nablus, when Suhail, the ESNCM’s director, introduced the PYO by asking the musicians to stand up in turn according to their country of origin—­ Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Argentina or Spain, and finally, Palestine—­h is introduction was received with great applause, the excitement in the auditorium physically palpable. This performative introduction turned the production into a showcase of moral high ground: locally, as an emblem of national unity, and more broadly, as cultural commentary on the Occupation. Its moral subtext situated the PYO not only within a unified Palestinian imaginary that surpasses spatial distinctions, but also within an international cultural community hailing from all corners of the world. From this cosmopolitan cultural angle, the Occupation’s restrictions on musicians’ mobility are an abhorrent affront to individual freedoms, as it is taken as self-evident that “music knows no borders,” that engagement in

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  143 cultural activities poses a threat to no one and that culture is about opening horizons, not imploding them. Taken in this light, Ahmad’s two professional identities—the musician and the permits supplicant—could not be more in dissonance with each other. During the soundcheck for the Nablus concert, after facing an incompetent soundman for a long time, Ahmad, already exhausted from days spent at the airport and the stress involved with his permit, stormed out. But during the concert, Ahmad seemed to be in an entirely different emotional place. The piece that featured him, Fī Dhikrā al-Ḥarām (In Memory of the Holy Sanctuary), was commissioned by the orchestra, and written for Ahmad by his Swedish colleague Roger, who was also present to conduct it. It was an orchestral journey of textural and gestural developmental techniques that abstracted Christian religious motifs out of traditional harmonic progressions and/or sectionalized movements that are longtime hallmarks of Western orchestral traditions. This was Roger’s way of melding “East” and “West” and dissolving traditional aesthetic forms and boundaries to provide musical space for the Orient and Ahmad’s oud. Ahmad’s sensitive performance, so attuned to the dramatic gestures of the unfolding music as well as to its silences, was completely present and in the  moment, highlighting, once again, how music making may transform the fragmented temporality of movement through space in, to and from Palestine. If, as several writers have pointed out (Hass 2002; Peteet 2008), the Occupation robs individuals and communities in Palestine of both space and time, this performance reclaimed them both in its specific configuration of local and diasporic and in projecting Ahmad and Roger’s imaginative, mixed portrayal of timeless, spatially distinct traditions. Occupation bureaucracy extended: foreign musicians, mobility and the cosmopolitanization of cultural life in Palestine Since 1993, when the ESNCM first opened its doors, many foreign musicians and teachers have been contracted by Palestinian music conservatories to make up for the lack of qualified local talent in classical Western music. In the highly internationalized setting of Palestinian conservatories, foreign musicians and teaching staff have become important partners in the buildup of cultural infrastructure in Palestine, and also in the politicized bent that shapes its discourses. Exposure to the suffering of Palestinians and the injustices of the Occupation tends to align them ever more closely and intimately with the Palestinian cause. The daily impact of erratic restrictions and routinized violence on the lives of the children they teach compounds this sentiment. And, the difficulties involved in maintaining and developing cultural life, along with their own personal encounters with the Israeli matrix of controls, further cement this bond. Foreign nationals working in Palestine generally enjoy a much greater degree of mobility than do Palestinians. During the time of my fieldwork,

144  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine they could move freely between Israel and the West Bank and beyond State borders. In 2012 heavier restrictions were placed on foreign nationals working for Palestinian organizations and living in the West Bank. Some music teachers were issued “Judea and Samaria”-only visas upon entering the country or upon renewal of their work visas, which bar them from Jerusalem and Israel except when flying in or out of the country (Hass 2013a). But beyond these restrictions, “guilt by association” renders them subject to harassment by security personnel at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and other border crossings, as well as to the random arbitrariness that characterizes the process of obtaining visas and work permits Palestinians are subject to. Tim himself was detained for four hours and interviewed by eight different security officials upon his first-time arrival at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport.12 Having been subject to lengthy interrogations on two other times upon leaving the country, Tim started flying out of the region from Amman. He preferred the hassle of the Israel-Jordan bridge crossings—where he had often been detained for hours as well—and the economic burden of higher travel costs, to the hassles of the Tel Aviv airport and the worry that interrogations would prevent him from getting on his scheduled flight, or worse, from returning to Palestine. As for his work visa, after numerous attempts to sort out his status, Tim found out that the official rules published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs were that an automatic six-months entry visa is to be granted to foreigners with a Palestinian Authority work permit, after which the employee must leave the country and obtain a new PA work permit and subsequent right of entry. If the foreign worker exits the country before the six-month period, his or her permit is null and void. Most COGAT officials Tim encountered were not familiar with these rules, and he found himself explaining them to security officials in all his comings and goings. At the time of this interview, Tim had recently been told by border security that this would be the last time he would be allowed entry with a single-entry visa, and that he would need to get a multiple entry visa for the next time he would be traveling out of the country. Tim recounted: So, I said to them, where can I get that? And they said East Jerusalem Ministry of Interior. [Based on my experience] I said, [but] they wouldn’t help me [there] because I live in the West Bank. I have to go to the DCO and you have to queue for ten days to get into the DCO… That’s where Palestinians have to go to deal with the military authorities… Or if I go to Beit El or to Gush Etzion (settlement block near Bethlehem, where Tim lives) I’ll wait by a turnstile in a long queue and then they’ll just close it… And I’ll repeat the process until I finally get through after [maybe] six days of waiting… What they’re saying to me now is that although they don’t have the right to decide who works in West Bank towns, they have the right to

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  145 decide who enters to go work in West Bank towns. They’re saying to me—that’s how I knew when I sought out a multiple entry visa that they were gonna refuse me—that they think it’s unfair to me. To keep coming, spending hours on the [Allenby] bridge (the crossing point to Jordan). I called Beit El recently trying to sort out my multiple entry visa, like they told me to do. But no one there knew what I was talking about, no one sent me to the right office, and I just got passed from office to office until eventually it was the office on Allenby bridge, where the soldier who picked up the phone sounded completely stoned. I asked, “is anyone with you”? “No.” “Do you know which department you’re in the military”? “No.” He didn’t know what his job was, there wasn’t anyone with him, [and] he didn’t know what I was talking about… So I still don’t know how to [get a multiple entry visa] officially. Tim’s account of trying to sort out his status points to the ways in which the occupation bureaucracy extends past its management of security concerns vis-à-vis Palestinians, to include anyone associated with any representation of Palestinian life. His experiences at Ben Gurion airport, at the offices of the West Jerusalem Ministry of Interior and East-Jerusalem’s Ministry of Interior, also align with Berda’s final conclusion: the occupation bureaucracy exists not only in the oPt, but rather, its racialized principles and practices have “leaked” into the very core of governmental, judicial and other sites of both centralized and privatized governmentality practices within the Green Line as well. This includes the IDF headquarters, government offices, police stations, the courts, border patrol jeeps and Israeli buses in which Palestinian passengers are profiled via visual indicators. To this list, one might add the authorities that deal with foreigners who are “guilty by association.” For anyone working under these constrictions, the bureaucratic managerial practices of these borders foreground the mundane banalities of the Occupation, as manifestations of its appalling dimensions. Tim’s conclusion to his visa story was that “everything here is geared to make young people hate the place and want to leave… If everyone leaves, then mission accomplished. [The Israelis] can set up their own country [in the oPt].” This idea paraphrases opinions I have often heard in Palestine about the occupation bureaucracy and Israel’s policies. The commonplace view is that such policies are created to render the lives of Palestinians (and those working with them) so miserable, that they will capitalize on any chance to leave and thus absolve Israel from the costs incurred in direct modes of ethnic cleansing— costs measured in international legitimacy, military expenditure and fragmentation of Jewish-Israeli consensus. For Tim and other foreign nationals working within the Palestinian cultural community, the Occupation’s practices of spatial control are experienced not only as blatant violations of basic human rights but also as a vendetta against cultural production in Palestine, both of which are deeply

146  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine abhorrent to fundamental humanistic world views. The more familiar foreign musicians become with life in Palestine, the more politicized they tend to become in their roles as cultural producers and disseminators. Tim’s take on the political meanings of the Palestine National Orchestra (PNO) serves to highlight this point: …I think there’s something for the Israelis to be genuinely scared about [because it is] successful culture… the national orchestra we’ve created really has the potential to be a fantastic chamber orchestra. And it carries such a strong political message: that Palestinians, even though they’ve been decimated and are [scattered] all over the world… in the States, in South America, in Europe, in refugee camps in the Middle East, working in professional orchestras in Syria or in Italy or in NY, they still have something that can unify them… [for Israel], a country that doesn’t have a legitimate claim to being a democracy… it’s not to [Israel’s] advantage for something so successful culturally, a Palestinian national “something,” to be going out. Tim’s analysis of the reasons the PNO poses a threat to Israel marks the obvious ways in which cultural production has come to be apprehended in Palestine: a means of countering spatial fragmentation and channeling paths to Palestinian futurity, of showcasing resistance, of nation-building and of legitimizing and remapping Palestine in the eyes of the world. But his analysis also reveals how foreigners working in Palestinian conservatories—many of whom originate in cosmopolitan settings in which nationhood plays a very negligible aspect of their professional identities—often come to view their role in Palestine not only as providers of a music education but also as participants in the creation and buildup of this Palestinian national “something.” Through enculturation into the practices of the Occupation foreigners often become ardent Palestine advocators and prominent agents in the global mediated struggle over representations and meanings. They also become partners in the construction of cosmopolitanized Palestinian national imaginaries and the politicized roles of cultural endeavors within those imaginaries. In the globalized post-Oslo era, the Occupation’s s­ patio-temporal regime serves to bind foreign nationals to local communities in what becomes a joint cultural construction of Palestine and Palestinianness.

Spatio-temporal violence, embodiment and creativity Under conditions of shrinking spatial and temporal horizons, as Amira Hass (2002) points out, people can never plan ahead: their capacity to act spontaneously, a human right no less basic than mobility or food, also shrinks; mundane survival (perseverance?) can become the end game, the ultimate act of resistance. Hass wrote this article when Palestinian society in the oPt was undergoing the peak of the devastation incurred during the

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  147 second intifada. She maintains that the loss of spontaneity and ability to improvise affects creativity and shrinking horizons may come to dictate one’s social, spiritual and cultural life. In this way, forms of domination and control become part of the internalized horizons ingrained in Palestinian subjectivities. Hass is right in pointing out that life under Occupation is experienced as suffocating confinement at every level—embodied, spiritual, creative and social. With the ever-tightening Israeli spatial grip over the West Bank, the sense of confinement becomes more acute every day, even in times of reduced violence. But the ethnographic accounts presented in this chapter, perhaps because they are snapshots of cultural life occurring in the decade of social regrouping in Palestine that followed the intifada, reveal how cultural production inserts agency, resistance and insistence on the expansion of personal and communal horizons into lived realities. This creative drive is experienced and lived well past the order of mundane survival or the ṣumūd (steadfastness) and suffering ethic emphasized by Hass and other scholars (Allen 2008; Halper 2006). At the same time, I do not wish to downplay the psychological internalization of spatial and temporal violence Hass speaks of nor the difficulties of trying to maintain a sense of normalcy in the midst of perennial uncertainty and routinized violence. These have become what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) refers to as the “habitus” for all oPt-based Palestinians, as they negotiate the terms of their lives. Bourdieu’s term is especially salient in discussing the lives and subjectivities of musicians in Palestine, because of its emphasis on embodiment. Domination and violence, as well as musical practice, are profoundly distilled and sedimented in the body and its memory, and they also have much to do with disciplining both body and psyche. The obvious difference between them is that violence intends to break body and spirit, while music making enhances it. This relationship of paradoxes, set in the nexus of the body, the psyche and one’s conceptualization of personal horizons, became most explicit to me in my conversations with Ramadan, a double bass player from Ramallah who was then working at the ESNCM. Ramadan often constructs his relationship to the Self by distinguishing the “physical” from the “mental,” while discussing how life choices are made through the understanding of both. This construction comes up when Ramadan describes his experience of incarceration in Israeli jails—where he spent over a year as the first intifada was winding down (1992–1993)— and most especially, when describing the 27 days he spent in solitary confinement. It also comes up in relationship to how he succeeded in becoming a professional bass player despite the fact that he took up this challenge late in life in musical career terms, when he was already in his mid-twenties. Both experiences required “working my physical and my mental in a different way.”13 And both experiences were about where and how he gathered his resources to exercise a modicum of personal autonomy. In Ramadan’s story, this oblique reference to the “physical” and “mental” maps his experience in

148  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine solitary confinement onto the resilience that has prepared him to deal with the task of taking up music professionally late in life. In Bourdieu’s terms, these are dispositions and practices that are incorporated within the body, and are later regenerated through the embodied work and competence of the body. In Ramadan’s story, the violence he has experienced shapes the dispositions and practices he has cultivated over time, in what becomes a dialectics of confinement and creative (re-)generation, repression and inspiration, sheer survival and expanded horizons. A (very partial) sketch of Ramadan’s life shows how the Occupation’s scales of spatio-temporal domination are exercised, resisted and transformed in the nexus of one individual’s body and mind and in relation to music making. Ramadan: “the mental, it’s our liberty” “I never really had a childhood myself,” said Ramadan. “So, I have to invent a childhood to teach them [the children].”14 Ramadan started working when he was 11 years old to support the family, and his youth and early adulthood were shaped by the first intifada. In my conversations with him, stories of violence were recounted in short, emotionally distant(-ed) anecdotes: the story of an uncle who, at 43 years old, was pushed out of the window of a sixth floor apartment by Israeli soldiers in front of his children; stories of Ramadan’s own experiences of being arrested for throwing stones, of living through solitary confinement and of the numerous transfers from one jail to another over the course of his incarceration, without any recourse to legal representation nor trial. The conversation would ultimately always circle back to the future, a future linked with the children he teaches: of how he wanted them to grow up having a childhood, how he encouraged them not to paint flags and soldiers or be immersed in the adult world of politics and how he hoped to pursue another degree in pedagogy so he could provide them the childhood he never had. Interestingly, several members of Ramadan’s family had chosen secondary careers involving youth and the arts, either as alternatives or in addition to the business they grew up in, the family owned car garage. Ramadan’s brother Muhammed was a founding member of El-Funoun, one of the bestknown Palestinian dabke dance troupes, later becoming its artistic director. His nephew Raed, who had been incarcerated in Israeli jails for five years, was now working with a children’s puppets theater. “I’m doing [this] because I don’t want to see my children killed,” Raed said over coffee we had at the garage, echoing Ramadan’s concern for the next generation, and the ways in which youth and the arts are linked in imagining and channeling a different kind of future in Palestine.15 Ramadan’s commitment to music, however, happened almost by chance. He knew Suhail, the ESNCM’s present director, from El-Funoun, where they were both involved in dance or its choreography. In 1996 the ESNCM, which had established an Arabic music department a couple of years earlier,

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  149 was beginning to expand into Western chamber music. Ramadan was invited to the Ramallah-based Popular Arts Center established by El-Funoun to see the new instruments that had arrived. He was encouraged to take up the double bass, and began to play, at first viewing it as a sideline venture in his life. There was no pool of double bass instructors established in Palestine yet. “I started the double bass with a violin teacher, he showed me the names of the strings, and after it was with a cello teacher. I tried to do my best,” Ramadan said. Ramadan soon received a scholarship for a summer workshop at Apple Hill,16 a chamber music educational center in New Hampshire, where he met Michael, a double bassist who lived in Jerusalem with his Jewish-Israeli wife and their family: … he asked me if I was interested in having lessons with him. I told him, yeah, why not.… for me, it’s hard to get permission to go there [Jerusalem]. But you can come here [to Ramallah], I asked [of] him… he said, “Ramadan, I think I [don’t] have the courage to come to Ramallah.” So I said, “OK, no problem, I’ll come to Jerusalem.” I started to go to Jerusalem through the checkpoint, without permission… When I was there, it was a surprise for his wife to see me in their home… I said, “hi, my name is Ramadan,” and you know—when you hear “Ramadan,” you feel it’s like, a [potential] kamikaze [laughs]… It was really very nice. [Michael] tried to help me, ya‘ānī, in the music. In some ways this story begins as a true “music knows no borders” tale. Ramadan braves the checkpoint; Michael’s Jewish-Israeli wife accepts him in her home, despite whatever ingrained fears and preconceptions of the Palestinian Other she may have. Because Ramadan cannot get a permit to enter Jerusalem, Michael “arms” him with a letter. The letter includes Ramadan’s ID, Michael’s credentials as an instructor at Tel Aviv University, his confirmation that Ramadan studies the double bass with him and his declaration that he is available to answer any further questions if needed. But on Ramadan’s third or fourth visit to Jerusalem, this bubble bursts: … Michael, he leaves me at Bāb al-‘Amūd (Damascus gate, where Palestinian service taxis to the West Bank await passengers)… I take the paper [Michael has given me], I take my partition (score), I take my bow, I go down, I [cross] the route, and I take the [taxi] service. The service moves, and it’s like, two kilometers, and there is—the police. He stops us. It was the special police. The car was a GMC, not army, civil[ian], civil[ian]. He looks inside the [taxi], and he looks at me and tells me “come down.” He doesn’t ask any other person to come down. I go down, and he [tells] the taxi—“leave.” He asks me [for] my paper; I give him my paper. I give him the paper from Michael. He takes me upstairs near the colony—I think near Maḥne Yehuda, if I remember the place,

150  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine upstairs. I stop, I wait, and after this, another car comes. [There are] three or four children [in that car]. You’re talking about [children who are] fifteen, sixteen years [old]. Young people. [The policeman] takes Michael’s paper and tears it up. My partition (score), the same. And he attaches me to something. And he says to the boys: “we found a terrorist here.” He starts to hit me…17 Ramadan does not remember what happened during the time the security man and the teenagers had their way with him; he lost consciousness. His next memory is of waking up in the West Bank, past the checkpoint leading to Hebron, where he was left bloodied and unconscious, by the side of the road. What he does remember well is that “I found the head of the bow in my hand. It was broken, and I have the head.” This line was repeated almost verbatim in both recorded accounts I have of this story. These precise reiterations, it seems to me, were attempts to grasp the ungraspable: the body as an illusory vessel of the Self, the connectivity between the Self’s “physical” and “mental,” so central to Ramadan’s construction of selfhood, too fragile to retain. It was the broken bow, its remnants still in Ramadan’s hands, rather than his beaten body, which carried the testimony for what had happened to him, providing material witness for the violence he had endured. Although I have heard this story recounted on more than one occasion, it was, and in some ways still remains, ungraspable to me as well. When in the field, interlocutors’ stories typically bring many other questions to my mind, but with this story, I froze and shut down. The implications were too horrific to contain in situ and remain outside the full scope of my analytic comprehension. Elaine Scarry (1985) qualifies the incomprehensibility of pain in relation to it being an experience that resists verbal objectification, one that brings about a reversion to a state anterior to language. She also highlights how violence permits one person’s body to be translated into another person’s voice, where human pain is converted into a regime’s fiction of power. How then does one engage with such extreme experiences of another, without appropriating the voice and agency of the Other? And yet, disengaging from a discussion of another’s pain is also a form of silencing another person’s experiences. In trying to present Ramadan’s story in these pages, I have been juggling between these frames. It is this very unsettledness that I wish to bring to this account, whilst hoping that in presenting the story I am honoring the trust that Ramadan had gifted me in its telling. Ramadan managed to hitch a ride back to Ramallah on a truck carrying vegetables to market, where he spent several days in a hospital. Despite this horrifying rupture in his musical education, he did not give up on music making. Eventually, he received a one-year scholarship to study in Angers, France. The conservatory director noticed his talent and dedication, and Ramadan remained there for five years, completed his diploma and became a teaching assistant. Later he moved to Paris to work and complete his secondary studies at another conservatory. A decade after leaving Palestine

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  151 Ramadan returned, began teaching at the ESNCM and taking part in building the national orchestras affiliated with the institution—the PNO and the PYO. For obvious reasons, he has never tried to brave the checkpoints clandestinely again. When I asked Ramadan how he managed to live with all these experiences, he said: How I live? I don’t know. [I think] I’m supposed to partition myself in two ways. In a way, I like life, I’d like to stay in life. The second [aspect of this is to] understand my physique and my mental [capacities]—I don’t need to become crazy with all these things. And I hope there will be some magic, for change [to happen] and [for people to want] to start living life differently, [a change that must happen] between all people. Ya‘ānī, what I decide[d]—I [could have] decide[d] to [end up] dead—or to try to teach something, do something [positive], to feel ùtile dans la vie (useful in life). I prefer to continue [life]. I cannot kill any person, because I [wouldn’t] like somebody [else] to kill me, [or] to kill anybody else. I think the [most important thing] for me, is my liberty. Before, [I thought] like [other] people, they think liberty [is the freedom] to go and to come… But I think that liberty is mental first. In Ramadan’s story and experiences, the process of authoring borders and spatio-temporal relations in the context of the Occupation involved having them brutally inscribed unto his body. Much has been written about the relationship between sovereign monopoly over violence and embodied experience. Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality in modernity is intimately linked with “biopower” (Foucault et al. 2002)—the power to regulate human life. This has been elaborated on by Mbembe, who notes that the process of colonial territorialization involves relegating the “colonized into a third zone between subjecthood and objecthood” (2003, 26). For Mbembe, this process places individuals within a system that combines the disciplinary, the biopolitical and the “necropolitical,” a term by which he defines the fundamental attributes of sovereignty as having the power not only to regulate life in the Foucauldian modernistic sense but also, to arbitrate life and death on the basis of human disposability vis-à-vis sovereign interests. Several scholars have written about the unique biopolitical aspects of the occupation regime in Palestine. Helga Tawil-Souri analyzes the color-coded or numerically coded regime of ID cards as a means of “social/political control and social/political exclusion” (2011a, 235). Julie Peteet (2015, 18) describes Israel’s policies of closure and enclavization as a “spatial expression of bio-power” that aims to disrupt the fabric and rhythms of quotidian life, ultimately facilitating spatio-temporal domination. Sari Hanafi (2010) interprets the Occupation as a process that constitutes Palestinians as “deterritorialized bodies” under a regime of “spacio-cide.” Other scholars highlight the colonial reduction of Palestinian civilians to biological representations

152  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine of “bare life,” teetering between their status as subjects undeserving of political representation (Ghanim 2008) or in the case of Gaza, even a standard level of calorie intake (Bhungalia 2010). They also highlight the mutual interests of both occupier and occupied in deflecting a full-fledged humanitarian disaster (Ophir et al. 2009). Many of these accounts focus their analysis on the macro-level architecture of spatial regimes of power, and thus apprehend Palestinian space— and Palestinian bodies—through the lens of the Occupation (Harker 2009). But what Ramadan’s story represents for me is the human body as a site of individual agency, where scripted horizons are produced, resisted and creatively transformed within an individual’s body and psyche, in this case through musical practice. Raed’s comment about the reason he had taken up puppeteering suggests the empowering role of embodied performing arts more generally, in the remaking of personal and collective geographies under extreme conditions of spatio-temporal confinement.18 For Ramadan, the space for individual choices is circumscribed by the need to survive, as the choices are truly between life and death. Yet in taking up life, the binary dichotomy of the “physical” and “mental” maps unto the choice to live, opening one’s horizons to produce a variety of possibilities. In Ramadan’s vivid poetics, this means that: You know, maybe for people [who don’t] have the problem of war in their country [it] would be different… a French musician, he plays music [because] he likes music, end point. But for us, it’s how we live, we rèspire (breathe) what we live. So we have it in the music… I can talk it in [the] music… in Brahms. Brahms, he’s a Jewish composer. But when I play [this music], I feel the same. I feel my existence…j’ai le droit a jouer cètte musique (I have the right to play this music). A exprime avec ça (to express with this)… because when we’re talking about Brahms we’re talking about music. About something international. No white, no black, no left, no right…19 It’s not only [about making] intifada or about [the issues of] Palestine, no… for us, [its] to show, or to feel first, [that] we have this culture, we like to [play this music]. Like any painter [who] makes his painting, like any person [who] cooks his chicken, whatever [laughs]. Ya‘ānī [there are] a thousand [ways] to construct life, I think. Scripted boundaries, as well as a horizon of open worlds, are at the basis of the embodied trajectory by which Ramadan has shaped his lifeworld and conceptions of “liberty.” For Ramadan, making music and teaching— changing the life trajectories of the next generation and producing new visions of the future—had become the frames for “feeling useful in life,” for creativity and for the self-fashioning of the space and temporality in which one lives. One early evening, Ramadan took me to a lookout in Ramallah, from where the lights of Tel Aviv can be viewed on a clear night, so near and yet so far. He told me that when he was young he used to come here

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  153 with friends; they would have a beer and imagine what it would be like to go to Tel Aviv, visit its beaches. From the vantage point of this expansive view, what seemed most poignant to me was how despite all he had endured, Ramadan could still imagine a thousand ways by which to construct life.

Concluding thoughts on music as an agent in Palestinian (re)making of time and space On March 19, 2013, just days after he participated in a big concert production in Nablus honoring the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Oday, an up-and-coming Arabic music singer associated with Al-Kamandjâti was arrested by IDF soldiers.20 Oday was charged with throwing rocks at the soldiers, during their confrontation with local youth at Al-Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, Oday’s family home. Oday claimed he had been waiting for a friend with whom he had made plans to get together. He didn’t run away when the soldiers began to pursue the offenders, because as a bystander he did not expect to be taken into custody or be charged with any violations of the military justice system. Oday initially pleaded not guilty in military court.21 For all who know Oday, the very idea that he was involved in this altercation seemed truly unreasonable, because singing is and had always been Oday’s single devotion and mode of self-expression. The grounds on which he was arrested and which the military court accepted as the basis to proceed to trial involved him being identified as one of the stone throwers on the basis of his clothes: jeans and a t-shirt. This attire forms the ubiquitous “uniform” of Palestinian youth and was likely to have been worn by most of the offenders (Ben-Zeev 2013). The absurd basis for implicating Oday in the incident rendered the charges against him even more preposterous to his community of supporters in Palestine and abroad, which coalesced to intervene on his behalf. Oday’s trial had been postponed twice as the soldiers involved did not bother to show up for the first two hearings. They did show up to the third hearing however, one at which he would have been released had the prosecution not produced its witnesses. Seemingly, contradictions in the soldiers’ testimonials led the judge to show “leniency” by offering Oday a plea bargain. Had Oday not accepted the plea bargain, he could have been placed in administrative detention indefinitely, or alternatively, faced a much harsher sentence. Administrative detention, part of the “emergency rule” edict, allows for the incarceration of Palestinians who are considered a security threat for endlessly renewable six-month periods. Evidence against them is not disclosed and there is no recourse through litigation or trial.22 Oday accepted the plea bargain. He was released on June 4, 2013, and was made to pay a 1500 NIS fine over and above his legal fees.23 The point of closing the chapter with Oday’s story is that this episode highlights the inherent cognitive dissonance this writer has experienced

154  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine while writing about music as an agent in the empowering reconfiguration of time and space in occupied Palestine. During the time I initially spent writing this chapter, Oday was in jail, the spatial limits of his horizons bounded by the Ofer prison walls, the normative temporal course of his life and career suspended, his body turned into yet another site of violence on which constructions of the nation and its boundaries take place (Hyndman 2004). The project of writing against the grain of macro-level anatomies of the Occupation, in favor of inserting Palestinian agency in the reclamation of time and space, is always subject to the rude awakenings and hyperreality of hegemonic material—and by extension, spatial and temporal—power. At the same time, I believe in engaging with the alternative ways in which space and time are creatively constituted by the people who make their lives within the Occupation (Long 2011), and in the primacy of embodied experience as a catalyst for conceptualizing violence, domination, resistance and also, transformation. The case studies included in this chapter foreground the empowering potential of expressive culture under conditions of extreme confinement, for the process of refashioning personal and collective geographies and for new forms of political subjectivities to emerge. Musical practice provides a potent resource for the remapping of spatial boundaries; for generating new meanings and contestations of national frontiers; for advocating for and shaping a different vision for the future; for building networks, infrastructure and community locally and internationally, and for transforming embodied experiences of domination and violence into sites of creativity. Music’s inherent aesthetic dimensions circulate past the harsh conditions of confinement into local discourses of emplacement and displacement (as in Ramadan’s comment on Brahms), the subterfuge of statist ownership (and authorship) of moral and spatial hierarchies (Al-­ Kamandjâti’s concert at Qalandiya), and into the global arena (the PYO and PNO). All these reflect, produce and introduce a multi-dimensional Palestinianness that counters macro-level readings of the Occupation, as well as commonplace mediated representations in which Palestinians appear either as violent perpetrators or as helpless victims. The contexts and framings of musicking in Palestine provide living examples for Jacques Rancière’s (2001) conceptualization of politics, as well as his articulation of the relationship between politics and aesthetics (2005). For Rancière, political struggle is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable, in a context in which people are not acknowledged as meaningful subjects. Political action aims for the redistribution of the rules that govern what can be seen and heard in specific social and political contexts; in the process, it transforms policed places into spaces in which subjects and communities appear. For Rancière the political move has an inherent aesthetic dimension, while the radical aesthetic move is essentially political, because both are about “the attempt of reconfiguring the partitions of time and space” (2005, 13), to bring about, and into public view, new forms and subjectivities. In Palestine, the politics of aesthetic production

Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine  155 provides a contrastive image to the policed (and flattened out) image of Palestinians under Occupation. Through aesthetic activities, Palestinians emerge as full-blown beings and communities engaged in creativity, artistic vision and local constructions of modernity, universality and “liberty,” albeit conceived and performed under the harshest of circumstances. In sum, the politics of music making in Palestine constitute of filling up spaces prescribed as “empty”—whilst the people who occupy these spaces are forcefully absented—with human sound and agency. Temporality is a potent aspect of rewriting space, for, to quote Edward T. Hall, “time is a core system of cultural, social and personal life” (1983, 3). If the Occupation robs people of time and spontaneity, music making rewrites personal and collective time both unto the rhythmic and intervallic experience of time and unto epistemologies of the present, the past and the future. In Palestine, musical narration binds space and time to the creative social construction of place against, in spite of, and outside of, the politics of its erasure.

Notes 1 The “conceptual fusion of space and experience” in Jasper’s quote is taken from J. Nicholas Entrikin’s The Betweenness of Place (1991, 6). 2 I am speaking in this chapter primarily of the West Bank, home to over 2 million Palestinians. The Gaza Strip has been under blockade since 2007 and its nearly 2 million inhabitants are living in what is often described as an “open air prison.” 3 Cyber-representation has not changed much since my time in the field. Following the UN’s recognition of Palestine as a non-member observer state in November 2012, Google replaced the tagline on its Palestinian website from “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine” in both English and Arabic, but the search engine’s cyber-maps remain devoid of detailed representations. And, my 2018 attempt to navigate to a Bethlehem locale via the popular Waze application caused the application’s meltdown: the (Israeli-developed) application is configured to redirect travelers out of Area A, rather than lead them to their destination within. 4 For Mer-Khamis the assault on Palestinian identity was the intended and most destructive product of the Occupation, and establishing the theater a means of empowering youth in an area which suffered more than its share in loss of human lives, homes and infrastructure during the second intifada. The son of a Jewish mother and a Palestinian-Israeli father, Juliano was a controversial character for both the Israeli establishment and conservative groups in Jenin. He was assassinated in April 2011, and as of yet his killer has not been brought to justice. For the cultural community in Palestine Juliano is an emblem of cultural resistance and the movement’s celebrated martyr. 5 Tolan is the author of The Lemon Tree: an Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (2006), and he runs a blog titled Ramallah Café about his experiences in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East (see ramallahcafe.com). Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land (2015) was the outcome of his research at this time. 6 Names of all minors at that time have been changed. 7 See Chapter 1. 8 December 1, 2011. 9 See (for example) Amira Hass 2012. 10 August 18, 2011.

156  Music and the politics of spatiality and temporality in Palestine 11 All quotes by Tim are from a November 10, 2011 interview. 12 The security officials were suspicious of Tim because he had produced music in Pakistan, and hence had a Pakistani visa in his passport. And Tim was wary of letting them know the true reason for his arrival—working in Palestine—lest he be barred from the country. 13 Quotes by Ramadan are from a December 1, 2011 interview 14 Personal communication, October 6, 2011. 15 Personal communication, October 9, 2011. 16 See http://applehill.org (accessed June 20, 2018). 17 In another telling of this story (October 10, 2011), Ramadan said he wasn’t worried about being singled out by security initially, because he was sure the security man knew exactly what he was doing in Jerusalem, and would therefore have no interest in harming him. Ramadan believed he was taken to the Russian Compound, a detention and interrogation center for Palestinians close to the Maḥne Yehuda open-air market. He had no idea who the youth that had arrived in the second car were. 18 The theatrical stagings that characterized the village of Bil‘in’s struggle against the construction of the separation wall on confiscated village lands provide further examples for the deployment of art to intervene on spatio-temporal violence in Palestine (Jawad 2011; Roei 2011). 19 Brahms was a Lutheran, but his disposition was liberal. He abhorred the xenophobic and antisemitic bent of the rising ultra-nationalism in late nineteenth-­ century Vienna, along with the new musical expressions associated with it, as exemplified by Wagner, his contemporary rival. Due to his dispositions, Brahms was labeled a Jew by Wagner and other supporters of German ultra-­nationalism (Notley 2007). Although Ramadan was mistaken about Brahms’ identity, he clearly resonated with the kinds of arguments and dispositions Brahms stood by when faced with extremist nationalism. 20 Oday appears in Chapter 1 of this book. 21 Under Section 212 of Military Order 1651, a person convicted of throwing stones at another person, or at another’s property with harmful intent, can face up to ten years in jail. 22 According to the Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association Addameer (2013), in April 2013 there were 168 administrative detainees out of a total of 4900 political prisoners. These numbers have since ballooned: in February 2018 there were 427 administrative detainees in Israeli prisons (Sagiv 2018). Since 1967 approximately 40 percent of the male population of the oPt have been incarcerated by Israel’s penal system (Khalidi 2014); almost every household in Palestine has been affected. Political prisoners are hence emblematic of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and a source for widespread identification around which various civic mobilizations have galvanized. 23 Approximately $420. Information on Oday’s story is based on personal communication with Ramzi, Al-Kamandjâti’s founder and Oday’s mentor, and the circle of Oday supporters that formed during his incarceration.

4

On music, politics and social justice Israel’s J14 social protest movement and its imaginings of “home”

My Bibi has three apartments Three apartments my Bibi has If he didn’t have three apartments Maybe I would have one of my own —Twist on the children’s song “My Hat has Three Corners,” sung by marchers during the social protest; Bibi is the nickname of Prime-Minister Benjamin Netanyahu I love artists and criminals, because both don’t accept reality as it is. —Speaker at a 350,000 rally in Tel Aviv (September 3, 2011) quoting Stanley Kubrick, to acknowledge the role of artists in the protest There is no social justice without the end of the Occupation! —Rally signs of the socialist-oriented, joint Arab-Jewish political parties Da‘am (support in Arabic) and Ḥadash (Arabic: Jabha), during the protest On July 14, 2011, Daphni Leef, a young film editor from Tel Aviv who couldn’t find a reasonably priced apartment, pitched a tent on the promenade of Tel Aviv’s upscale Rothschild Boulevard. Leef’s protest followed several grassroots mobilizations driven by social media against the high cost of living in Israel, but hers was the first to move from social media networks to shared public space, and it sparked the imagination of a whole nation. Rothschild Boulevard filled with hundreds of tent dwellers, protest tent cities were established all over the country, different public sectors went on strike, and weekly marches and mass rallies were organized by the movement now dubbed J14 or the “Protest Tents.”1 These events attracted tens of thousands, culminating in a September 3, 2011 rally in which 450,000 Israelis participated. With 6 percent of the country’s citizens in the streets, this was the largest protest in the history of the State (Rosenberg et al. 2011). The tent cities became sites of democratic self-management and public discussions of social affairs,

158  On music, politics and social justice fostering a sense of community, empowerment and common purpose that was palpable on the streets, for the first time in decades (Gordon 2012). The 2011 Israeli protest occurred as several social movements rocked different sites around the world: Spain, Greece, Chile, the United States and numerous countries in the Arab world. Modeled on the Occupy Madrid Movement’s culture of conduct (discussion circles, voting), the Israeli protest leaders also acknowledged the Arab Spring’s spiritual influence on their protest (Matar 2011). This was evidenced by the “Rothchild corner of Tahrir” sign posted at the Rothschild tent city and banners floating messages such as “Walk Like an Egyptian” (Azulay 2011). It was the first time that events in the Arab world inspired a civic movement within Israel that had achieved such a broad consensus. The Egyptian struggle’s resonance within the Israeli protest implied that despite Israel’s pride in being “the only democracy in the Middle East,” its democracy is highly flawed and afflicted by ailments similar to its regional neighbors. While the Israeli protest ignited because of the high cost of living in Israel, it quickly became the site of an emerging public discourse regarding the relationship between power and one’s home, whether a physical shelter or one’s relationship to place, community and country. This discourse brought about new imaginaries to the universe of meanings associated with home, homeland, citizenship and nationality. The new conceptualizations that surfaced in the protest challenged hegemonic definitions of the Israeli home and provided frameworks for action. At the same time, the nature of the counter-hegemonic imaginaries the protest produced was negotiated among the protest’s constituencies, highly demarcated by class, ethnic and ethnonational affiliations. The universalized idea of every citizen’s right to a home had to be mediated across entrenched fault lines in Israeli society: “center” and “periphery,” Ashkenazim (Jews of European origins) and Mizrahim (Jews from predominantly Islamic countries), Jews and Arabs. Theorists of new social movements often differentiate symbolic action and the politics of representation from instrumental action aimed at strategic, political goals, in a way that dichotomizes the “cultural” and the “political” (Beuchler 1995), or, as anthropologist Ted Swedenburg (2012) complains, that assigns expressive culture a subordinate, backdrop role to political action. This chapter is an ethnographic exploration of the ways expressive culture provided the engine for collective visions and political action within the protest, and also, developed sites of contestation regarding the very nature of the collective vision. My focus on expressive culture pays tribute to the artistic creativity that generated the protest, was generated by it, and contextualized political action within it. I begin with the discursive, visual and musical representations of the protest to show how “home” became a central metaphor for a host of associated references, from material dwellings to conceptualizations of citizenship. I follow the home metaphor from the predominantly Ashkenazi, middle-class based Rothschild version of the protest to Jaffa, a “mixed city”—the Israeli

On music, politics and social justice  159 term for cities of both Jewish and Palestinian populations. In focusing on the predominantly Palestinian, working-class tent city in Jaffa, I show how new conceptualizations of “home” were contested in Israel’s peripheral margins. The “home” envisioned by the mainstream (Jewish) consensus tied citizenship rights to economics alone. It did not challenge Israel’s foundation as a Jewish national home as the country’s core principle of belonging. In Jaffa, ethnonational divisions, which also structure economic access, were openly negotiated, pushing the limits of Israeli conceptions of citizenship. A close focus on a performance by the hip hop collective System Ali at the Jaffa tent city demonstrates how artistic expression catalyzed the Jaffan perspective of “home,” encompassing inclusivity of diverse subject positions while negotiating the class, ethnic and ethnonational tensions that characterized the Jaffa tent city events. I conclude with reflections on the protest as a potential agent of change in the fundamental (re-)structuring of Israeli society.

From housing to home, to different kinds of home The primary motivation for the social protest was the high cost of living in Israel, the outcome of economic problems building up over several decades. These included market monopolizations and indirect taxes causing inflated prices of food and fuel, unregulated alliances between capital and government, and ongoing privatization of education, natural resource management, health care and other social services. This state of the economy was precipitated by decades of neoliberal policies beginning in 1977, when Labor, for the first time since the founding of the State, was replaced by a Likud-led coalition. Neoliberalization greatly accelerated during Benjamin Netanyahu’s service as finance minister (2003–2005) and later, when he became Prime Minister in 2009 (Alimi 2012). The government’s policies brought about the progressive proletarianization of the middle class and a growing gap between the top echelons and the country’s poor. By 2010, Israel ranked among the highest in OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) reports on social inequality, with 20 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line (Ronnen 2011). The cause around which the public’s anger coalesced most was the skyrocketing cost of housing, reflected in the slogans attached to the protest. While the slogan “The People Demand Social Justice!” led the protest, it was seconded by “Fighting for Our Home!” The convergence of meanings attached to “housing” and “home” was linguistically inbuilt in the Israeli context, as the cognate words bayit in Hebrew and beit in Arabic carry meanings associated with the conceptualization of both. As the protest built up, the Hebrew letter bet, standing for both “bayit” and for “beyaḥad”—meaning “together”—became the protest’s symbol. It was inspired by a well-known children’s song intended to teach the alphabet that begins with the line “Alef, [a]ohel (tent); Bet ze bayit (bet is house/home),” appropriated by the protestors for its ironic, contextual resonance. An array of creative iconographies

160  On music, politics and social justice

Figure 4.1 Social protest iconographies of “home.” the lines written on the cardboard houses are twists on poetry and songs etched in (Jewish-) Israeli collective memory. For example, one of the three-dimensional houses reads: ‘We are the silver platter on which a state was given to the wealthy.’ This message plays on a well-known line in a poem by Natan Alterman that is often recited in memorial ceremonies for Israel’s fallen: ‘We are the silver platter on which you were given the Jewish state.’ Photograph taken at a Tel Aviv rally, July 31, 2011.

signifying home and homelessness became the protest movement’s prominent visual features, amplifying this message. Among them were banners of three-dimensional cardboard houses, Israeli flags on which a sketched house replaced the Star of David, a flyer shaped like a paper house and subtitled “we are all coming out for housecleaning,” tents pitched on top of cars leading the marches and many more. The signage, iconography, speeches and music that accompanied the protest catalyzed into a symbolic economy that emphasized “beyaḥad” and called for a broad, unconditional civic entitlement to both private (house) and public (shared) spheres (see Figure 4.1). The support the protest received from the arts community in Israel was overwhelming. A constant stream of artistic production, forming a new cultural guerilla, propelled this new symbolic economy, conceptually and affectively. At the protest tents sites in the big cities (Rothschild most visibly so), the protest’s artistic flare approached the carnivalesque. Amidst Freirelike study circles of Marx and political economy, writers read books to children, professional singers and musicians jammed with tent dwellers, drum

On music, politics and social justice  161 circles and poetry readings flourished. Artists and musicians performed at the rallies. Poets (among them Jews and Palestinians) participated on the Internet and offline; some of their creative output was printed on cheap paper booklets and handed out gratis at the bigger rallies. A multitude of videos, featuring either new protest songs or creatively crafted messages intended to get people into the streets, flooded the Internet. Thirty-one artists compiled an album of songs written in support of the protest and titled “Great Tents” (Ohalim Adirim), which was made available for free download.2 While the protest was building up, it diversified socially. The initial protesters at the Rothschild tent city came from backgrounds of relative privilege, and were predominantly young, Ashkenazi and middle class. But the protest soon extended to what is usually termed Israel’s “periphery.” In the Israeli context, the term is most associated with “development towns” created in the 1950s by the government then eager to secure and “Judaize” territories acquired in the 1948 War. These towns were mostly peopled by Mizrahi immigrants shipped there by the government, far from the country’s geographic, economic and power centers. Development towns remained distinctly underdeveloped, bringing about intergenerational cycles of poverty and neglect for Mizrahim (Horowitz 2010; Yiftachel 1997a). The term “periphery” also encompasses underserviced Palestinian and Bedouin towns and villages in the northern Galilee region and the southern Negev, poor and predominantly Mizrahi neighborhoods that developed on the margins of urban centers and mixed Arab-Jewish urban environments like Jaffa and Lydd. As the protest developed to encompass working-class Mizrahi neighborhoods and towns, mixed cities (Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, Lydd) and later on, some of the Arab towns (Oum El-Fahem, Nazareth, Qalansuwa, Tira), class, ethnic and ethnonational tensions surrounding the meaning of “home” surfaced as well. The slogan “we are all periphery,” also deployed during the protest, was an attempt to unite all disenfranchised groups, whether living in development towns, centrally located urban ghettoes (primarily Palestinians and Mizrahim), or presently, occupying the Rothschild tent city. With this slogan the protest leaders aimed to propel a new imaginary of beyaḥad inclusive of all citizens. But as the protest expanded, the makeup of this new “we” was both negotiated and contested within its activities. Participation of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the emerging movement was hesitant and gradual, and remained partial. Structural inequalities in Israeli society have affected this sector of the population the most, prominently in relation to land and housing shortages. While in its early decades the State viewed provision of housing as essential for supporting the incoming Jewish immigrations—an arrangement that had largely eroded in the years of neoliberalization—state housing policies always sought to undermine what the state viewed as competing Palestinian claims to the land (Allweil 2013). This disposition reflected in decades of discriminatory policies towards Palestinian citizens in land allocation, zoning plans and infrastructure (Yiftachel 2006a; Zureik 1993) and more recently, in mixed

162  On music, politics and social justice cities’ urban renewal policies that disadvantaged them most (Leibovitz 2007). Palestinian citizens have been experiencing these practices as the ongoing continuation of the Nakba, and many felt disconnected from the contemporary protest movement’s representations of inclusivity. Their hesitation had to do with the protest’s disengagement from issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the (unacknowledged) status of Palestinian Israelis as a national minority and importantly, their perception that the protest’s intent was to reshuffle the cards without challenging Jewish/Zionist hegemony (Khattab 2011). This perception was partially due to the discursive scope and focus for action taken by the social protest leaders. While presenting affordable housing, social welfare and solidarity as the common basis of the home and civil society they wished to form, the protest leaders muted the relevancy of factors such as ethnic and/or ethnonational categories, geographic location, class, and nativist attachment to locality in determining access to power and resources. In trying to keep the new “we” as inclusive as possible, they highlighted socio-economic issues positioned as universally applicable to all citizens, and avoided issues considered “political.” In Israel, emic conceptions of the “political” relate to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the nation’s ethical foundation as a Jewish homeland. The “political” hence encompasses the Occupation, the settlements, Israel’s securitization project, the primacy of “Jewishness” as a criterion of citizenship and social rights, and the irrelevance of Israeli “social justice” for Palestinian non- citizens of the oPt. These “political” topics also factor significantly in Israel’s economic problems, as the disproportionate allocation of resources to the settlements and to Israel’s securitization project in the Occupied Territories comes at the expense of those living within the Green Line. The protest leaders’ systematic avoidance of these issues lines up both with the historic structural marginalization of Palestinian citizens and the total lack of civic rights in the oPt. The so-called apolitical nature of the movement was a strategic move on the part of the protest leaders in their aim to maintain socio-economic issues a top priority on the public agenda and promote consensus around them. Historically, discourses centered on economics and social welfare have been considered “neutral.” On the other hand, discourses on security and “politics” have not only caused the most enduring cleavages in Israeli society, but have also provided excuse for successive governments to set aside social agendas in the face of “existential threats.” The story of Israel’s version of the Black Panthers illustrates this well. Formed in 1971 by a group of Mizrahim hailing from a Jerusalem slum, the Black Panthers protested the systematic discrimination of Mizrahim in Israel. Their movement was sustained and broadened for two years, bringing issues of poverty and ethnic (Ashkenazi-Mizrahi) power imbalances to the front and center of the public sphere. But during the buildup towards the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and growing fear of outside threats, the movement lost its public presence and momentum (Alimi 2012).3 By not addressing the

On music, politics and social justice  163 “political,” the 2011 protest leaders hoped to keep socio-economic agendas on the front burner. They also hoped to construct interest-based alliances that cut across historic cleavages in Israeli society long entrenched by the political system: Mizrahi vs. Ashkenazi, Arab vs. Jew, secular vs. religious, right vs. left wing. Despite this strategy, “political” commentary did appear within the movement, in public discussions, bilingual banners, mediated commentary and artistic production. Tent #1948, referencing both the Nakba and ’48 Palestinians, was established at the Rothschild tent city, also forming as a separate Facebook group under the same name.4 “Political” commentary was most obviously present in the outpour of artistic production, as artists active at the high-profile protest sites used the newly formed tent city context to frame political speech and to connect the missing links between the Israeli government’s political platform and its social agenda. For example, actor Mariano Idelman, known for his impersonations of public figures including Prime Minister Netanyahu on the satire TV show Eretz Nehederet (A Wonderful Country), visited the Rothschild tent city dressed as his impersonation of “Bibi,” in a mock performance of the Prime Minister coming to address the people’s grievances. His speech sardonically highlighted how the government’s welfare programs, infrastructure development and tax breaks differentially favor certain populations. “Until today,” he said, “budgets went first of all to the settlers, then to the Haredim (the ultra-Orthodox community), and only then to all the rest. This situation cannot continue! From today on, priorities will be changed. Budgets will first go to the Haredim. Then to the settlers. And then to all the rest. That’s the coming order.”5 Idelman was foregrounding the connection between the cost of Israel’s settlement and securitization project and the lack of social justice within the Green Line, as well as the disproportional State funding allocated to the Haredi community in the name of a country that defines itself as both “Jewish” and “democratic.” Hadag-Nahash is a popular funk/hip hop/rock collective known for its social activism, texts that shift from sharp critique of sociopolitical and moral orders (including the Occupation) to satire, and hip, well-edited music videos. They conducted participatory jam sessions in several of the tent cities and performed at a number of the big rallies, often substituting a megaphone for a mic. The song “The Good Ones Will Win” (ha-Tovim Yenatsḥu), which came out of their tent city jams, was a critical sweep of the political system that tied the government’s corruption and economic failures to the political impasse that has characterized its approach to peacemaking with the Palestinians: …Alef is [a]ohel (tent), bet is bayit (home) This protest is organic, tree and olive, Over the Old Order’s body, a vulture is circling… …There is no trust in the one who sold the beachfront [to the real estate tycoons],

164  On music, politics and social justice In the one who has provided cover to sex criminals for years,6 There is no trust in the one who says the Conflict has no solution, That we have tried everything and [the present situation] is God’s decree… …But one thing is clear, the good ones will win, I feel it in my blood, the good ones will win….7 Yair Dalal is a composer, oud and violin player known for his collaborations with Palestinian artists on both sides of the Green Line during the 1990s peace process. Yair spoke on Voice of the People, an Internet-based radio station established to promote the protest, that broadcast from the Rothschild tent city, in between his performances at the different protest sites. His speech received much applause. Among the issues he addressed, he stated the following: …I want to declare that we want peace with the Arabs. I am using the word A-Ra-Bs [emphasis his]. We want peace with the “Arabs”, not with “The Sector.” And not with “coexistence,” and all the pretty names that are used… Enough with this damned war that has been going on for over 100 years! There are guys in Jaffa (meaning Arabs) who would have loved to be here, and some are here but no one knows who they are. I know them from Jaffa so I recognize them. And they would love to be part of this, but they are a little afraid. Afraid of what people will say about them here, and afraid of what people will say about them in their community… But we must embrace them. [And I declare it] We want peace with the Arabs! (YD, Rothschild tent city, August 1, 2011) In this speech, Yair connected the missing links absented from the protest leaders’ speeches. By emphasizing the words “Arabs” and “sector” (migzar)—a Hebrew term that literally signifies something that is “scissored off” a larger cloth—Yair was pointing to government policies that have historically sectorialized and pitted different segments of the population against one another. In lieu of such policies, Yair was suggesting an Arab-Jewish civic partnership not defined by Jewish (and unequal) hegemonic frames for “coexistence.” He was also pointing to the reasons that Palestinian Israelis may not feel “at home” within the protest: the systemic reduction of universal rights of citizenship to ethnonational categories within the Israeli sociopolitical system, and the unstated relationship between the government’s expansionist political platform and the lack of social justice or prospects for a better future for all. As the these examples show, various artists active at the large, highly mediated protest tent sites made numerous references linking social justice to the political situation. Their references, however, often remained generalized or somewhat elliptical, broad-stroke frames of the “political.” Tent #1948 did provide a space for discussions centered both on the Occupation

On music, politics and social justice  165 and on the marginalization of Palestinian citizens, but it was one voice sublimated by the polyphony of grievances and demands presented at the protest’s premier site. This was not the case at the “periphery” sites of mixed Arab-Jewish populations like Jaffa, my home at the time, to which I now turn my attention. Here, inclusion in new imaginaries of “home” and civic partnership was negotiated by those most excluded from power and occupying the bottom rungs of the Israeli pyramid, historically constructed through highly entwined economic, ethnic and ethnonational categories. In Jaffa, the stakes involved in social justice, home and homelessness, were experienced in the starkest conditions of lived realities. From the Rothschild “center” to the Jaffa “periphery.” At Gan ha-Shnayim park one nation patiently waits Wh ile another nation, estranged from “Middle Eastern time,” flows by hurriedly A nation for whom the families planted at the park are invisible Just like the ghosts of those exiled for generations have also been invisible Along with the ghosts running from the demolitions And the ghosts of those evacuated by contractors And the ghosts of those trampled on by the luxury apartments And the ghosts of those rendered invisible by racism, and those slaughtered by corruption, And the ghosts inhabiting the edges of Zionism And the ghosts turned desperate by crushing, and those crushed by desperation All are donning a metaphorical key, And waiting for a home. —Part of a poem by Jaffa’s (Jewish) resident, poet and activist Nimrod D. Evron, inspired by the residents of Jaffa’s tent city. The poem above links social justice to political justice in no uncertain terms, a perspective that reappeared in Jaffa tent city events throughout the life of the protest. The metaphorical key Evron evokes is a multiplex symbol. For Palestinian refugees forced to leave their homes in 1948, it symbolizes their right to return; for ’48 Palestinians, it symbolizes the struggle to not be swept away by Israel’s ongoing policies of disenfranchisement. In the following pages, I chronicle one evening (August 7, 2011) witnessed at the Jaffa tent city site. This evening highlighted the ways in which music reflected and produced new imaginaries for the universe of meanings associated with “home,” in a place where Palestinian presence, and unequal resource allocation, presides. Of the numerous Jaffa tent city events, this evening best encapsulated the inherent dissonances involved in Jaffa’s participation in the protest’s visions for social justice and inclusive citizenship.

166  On music, politics and social justice In this mixed city context, the complex relationship between the “political” and the “social” implicates class and national affiliations in highly contradictory ways. Jaffa Palestinians identify with Jaffa’s pre-1948 iconicity of Palestinian national modernity and the contemporary Palestinian struggle for emancipation. But their daily existential struggle for survival in a city and country in which they are marginalized, and the primacy of quotidian communal relations in a residentially mixed Palestinian-Jewish environment, complicate exclusivist nationalist narratives, while also providing alternative models of modernity, citizenship and belonging for different subjectivities (Sa’ar 2006). Urban anthropologist Daniel Monterescu’s reading of Jaffa as a mixed city highlights relationality as the basis for the unstable and ongoing construction of political, social and moral (dis)orders, in a place in which State and municipal efforts have failed to define the city as a Jewish one, at the same time that the Palestinian community has failed to effectively mobilize Jaffa as a Palestinian city. This understanding of Jaffa counterpoints widely upheld readings of Israeli society that are based on categorical dichotomies and assumptions of ethnonational exclusivity in a segregated “dual society” (Lockman 1996; Shamir 2000), or an “ethnocratic system” defined by structurally deterministic systems of power (Yiftachel 2006b; Yiftachel and Yacobi 2003). The “dual society” model has been critiqued by historians (Lockman 1996; Shamir 2000) for its implicit acceptance of both Zionist and Arab/Palestinian nationalist historiographic and sociological readings of Palestine/ Israel. Such readings describe both societies as pre-existing, self-contained, uniform entities prior to 1948, thus obscuring the historical interconnections and dependencies that existed between different groups across both societies. The “ethnocratic system,” as defined by political geographer Oren Yiftachel (2006, 3), is one that “promotes the expansion of a dominant group and its domination of power structures while maintaining a democratic façade.” In this model, ethnicity rather than citizenship constitutes the main criterion for the distribution of power and resources (Yiftachel and Kedar 2006). The relationality Monterescu speaks of follows Lockman and Shamir’s understanding of politicized subjectivities as mutually constructed, the outcome of historical interconnections between Palestinians and Jews that have shaped both societies. This complicates accounts that are explicitly or implicitly undergirded by national mythologies. It also complicates post-nationalist critiques of Zionism such as Yiftachel’s, which retain the assumption of top-down (national, municipal) production of hierarchical orders as the sole determinant in the construction of nation, class, citizenship and locality. In Jaffa, systematic discrimination of Palestinian citizens on one hand, and shared urban life on the other, have catalyzed into what Monterescu (2007a, 174) has characterized as “spatial heteronomy”—a contact zone that through its contradictory logic, destabilizes the hegemonic ethnonationalist principles of the Jewish State. These dynamics were expressively foregrounded during the evening described below, as discourse, action and

On music, politics and social justice  167 music reinstated the interrelationship of the “political” and the “social” into the public sphere. The imaginings of home produced in Jaffa—sonic, visual and experiential—were fraught with dissonances pertaining to citizenship, class and ethnonational affiliations, pinpointing the artificiality of the division between the “social” and the “political” constructed by the protest leaders. System Ali’s performance fleshed out these dissonances, staging a potent, incongruous brew of Jewish-Palestinian solidarity, Palestinian nationalism and the confounding circumstances of ghettoized poverty. The performance, anchored in the conflicted yet overlapping identities that shape the Jaffan perspective, produced a universe of meanings associated with the Jaffan “home” that, perhaps momentarily, affectively cemented the primacy of Palestinian-Jewish relationality for the tent city audience. The tent city was located at Gan ha-Shnayim, or “Park of the Twosome,” across the street from the predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of ‘Ajami. Due to its Mediterranean beachfront location and predominance of pre-state (Arab) architecture considered “quaint,” ‘Ajami had been subject to an intense and cruel process of gentrification—here also meaning affluent “Judaization”—that had not yet peaked. Those living in the tent city’s 15–20 tents were families rendered homeless by these processes. They were supported by a number of social activists. Most of the residents were Palestinian, at least one family was Jewish. The majority had been settled in ‘Ajami by the State during the 1950s in homes confiscated from Palestinian refugees who had left during the 1948 war, which the State subsequently turned into public housing. In the 1970s and 1980s many of these properties were torn down, reducing the availability of subsidized housing. Privatization of public housing became policy in the 1990s, a process that accelerated further under the watch of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa mayor Ron Huldai in the 2000s. This was cause for the displacement of many, whether due to the privatization of the homes in which they had lived under protected tenancy for generations, or to the inflated rents that urban renewal policies had brought to Jaffa (Levine 2001).8 The name Gan ha-Shnayim, like many street names in Jaffa, is indicative of the city’s complex history of Jewish-Palestinian relations, pointing also to the ongoing erasure of the city’s Palestinian history. The “twosome” references a Jewish schoolgirl who in 1992 was attacked by a Palestinian from Gaza brandishing a knife, and a local Palestinian Israeli by the name of ‘Abed El-Ghani who tried to intervene. Both he and the girl died in the attack. Nearby there is an alley named after him, subtitled: “1946–1992, died protecting Arab-Jewish coexistence.” Locals still tend to refer to Gan haShnayim as “Gaza Park,” an old nickname given to it when it was a pick-up site for Palestinian day-laborers from Gaza. This labor market ceased to exist with the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza following the rise of Hamas to power (2007). The ally named after ‘Abed El-Ghani is one of the very few Arab street names in a city that is 40 percent Palestinian; ‘Ajami itself abounds with street names commemorating famous Jewish rabbis or Zionist themes. I lived near the park on Gaza Road, which signifies this route’s pre1948 function, but my block was situated between Nes la-Goyim (Miracle for

168  On music, politics and social justice the Goyim) and Bikurey Tsion (First Harvests of Zion), a blatant, arrogant territorial remarking in a mixed Palestinian-Jewish area. This cartographic remaking of Jaffa is a constant reminder to Jaffa’s Palestinian residents that they are guests in their own home. The tent city included a dozen or so small tents. Two larger ones were used as the protest’s headquarters: a mourners’ tent the Islamic movement provided and a Jewish sukkah (a temporary hut used during the holiday of Sukkot) donated by the homeless Jewish family at the park. Another large, three-sided tent provided shade in the daytime and a communal kitchen, and the central, open area was covered by mats. The park was overrun with signs and banners in Hebrew and Arabic: “Enough to house evictions in Jaffa!,” “A for [A]ohel, B for Bibi, when there is no prime minister there is no bayit,” “Arabs and Jews demand public housing,” “There are 496 eviction notices in Jaffa, 3000 people with nowhere to go!” Other signs denigrated mayor Ron Huldai, and the two most prominent banners stated: “Tel Aviv municipality destroys Jaffa!” One of these banners showed a bulldozer at a demolition site, the other a Palestinian woman holding her hand out in supplication, policemen flocked near her, the partial contours of the house she is being evicted from in the recessed edges of the photograph (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2 Banner at the Jaffa tent city: “the Tel Aviv municipality is destroying Jaffa!”

On music, politics and social justice  169 In an ironic twist on the signage at the park, a new banner, courtesy of the municipality, hung across the street at the entrance to ‘Ajami, wishing everybody a “Ramaḍān Karīm” in Arabic and a small-lettered “happy holiday” in Hebrew underneath. This celebratory portrayal of the city’s cultural diversity during the month of Ramadan disregarded the fact that the municipality’s gentrification policies were undermining this very diversity. The dissonance inherent in the artificial division between social and political justice papered over by the protest leaders manifested itself early that evening. Approximately 150 people were assembled as a public discussion took place in the central area, the speakers passing a megaphone around. This circle broke up in a matter of minutes, with part of the group reassembling on the side, arguing heatedly in Arabic. One speaker, a young woman, was talking about this struggle being a social one, not political, and that this was not the moment to turn it into a political game. A young man responded by yelling at those present, especially at the woman who had talked about this being an apolitical cause, while waving a homemade Palestinian flag painted on a piece of cardboard, lacquered and glued to a broomstick. This argument was the residue of events that took place the night before at the Tel Aviv march and rally, the largest one yet in the course of the protest—numbering 2–300,000 people across the country. The Jaffa participants planned to march towards the Tel Aviv rally site with demonstrators from two other low-income, predominantly Mizrahi neighborhoods in South Tel Aviv, ha-Tikva and Kfar Shalem. This was an unusual alliance, as these Mizrahi neighborhoods are considered the traditional base of right-wing, Jewish-nationalist politics. Despite the cultural commonalities shared by Palestinians and Mizrahim, the marginalization of both groups has oftentimes catalyzed into Mizrahi identification with the isolationist hyper-nationalism of the Likud-led government and racialized animosity expressed towards Palestinian Israelis. Such sentiments are the outcome of Mizrahim’s historical marginalization by the State’s (Ashkenazi, Labor-oriented) founding fathers, who sought to image Israel as a Western enclave in the Middle East, viewed (Arab) Mizrahi culture(s) as inferior and channeled the incoming Mizrahi immigrations into disadvantaged socioeconomic and cultural positions in the new State. The Mizrahi immigrants, as Ella Shohat puts it, “were prodded to choose between anti-Zionist Arabness and a pro-Zionist Jewishness for the first time in history” (1999, 149). In 1977, it was the Mizrahi vote that for the first time since Israel’s founding brought the right-wing Likud party to power, a paradigmatic shift in Israeli politics. The Mizrahim’s vote primarily voiced their frustration with the ruling Labor regime, but their electoral power has largely remained with right-wing blocs since then. Competition for low-skilled jobs in the labor market, also peopled by Palestinian Israelis (and after 1967 by oPt Palestinians as well), along with increasing identification with Shas—a religious party and growing Mizrahi power base—have all contributed to such attitudes (Chetrit 2000; Peled 1998).

170  On music, politics and social justice Over the past two decades a growing discourse has been developing among what intellectual Sami Chetrit dubs the “New Mizrahim.” This discourse paints both Mizrahim and Palestinians as victims of (Ashkenazi) Zionism, and seeks to redefine Mizrahi identity not in religious terms, but in terms of cultural resonance with the region and sociopolitical justice for all. Thus far however, this perspective remains largely the purview of artists and intellectuals. It has not developed into a political force on the Israeli map (Behar 2008; Chetrit 2000). The collaboration between the three tent cities marching together, all from Tel Aviv’s impoverished South, was hence a new and rare reconstruction of Israel’s social mapping. This alliance was built on conditions of stark poverty, generations of neglect and suspicion of Rothchild’s Ashkenazi, middle class-based protest leadership’s ability to truly identify with their struggle or represent their grievances. Prior to the march, a long discussion took place between the different tent city representatives about the terms of representation. The decision, arrived by consensus, was that no one would wave flags, Israeli or Palestinian; their coalition would use the tent as its symbol. This was an attempt at building consensus that cuts across ethnonational boundaries and re-signifies the meaning of Israeli citizenship. Their collaborative spirit inspired Reuven Aberjel—a founding member of the 1970s Black Panthers movement now back on the streets as protest organizer—to begin his speech at the joint rally with the words: “Ahlan wa-sahlan Jaffa, and welcome. Ahlan, dear ha-Tikva residents. All the oppressed—one arm, one struggle, one victory!” (Klein 2012). During the march however, Udi Aloni, an Ashkenazi filmmaker and pro-Palestinian activist, pulled out a Palestinian flag. Aloni wanted “to prevent the solidarity between Jaffa and ha-Tikva from dissipating the solidarity between Jaffa and Ramallah” (Foyer 2011), or in other words, to bring the Occupation to the center of the debates on social justice. But his action disrupted the fragile alliances built between “periphery” communities who were redefining home and belongingness on their own terms, a process that could only take place outside the symbolic economy of ethnonational fault lines. While the different South Tel Aviv tent cities continued the march together, the ethnonational tensions this event had raised now pitted Jaffa Palestinian activists against each other.

From discourse to music: System Ali “builds the house anew” at the Jaffa tent city The argument circle broke up while System Ali was setting up to perform. An eclectic mix of people, now numbering 200 or so, occupied a row of plastic chairs or the mats behind: kids, parents and grandparents, religious and secular, Jewish hipsters donning dreadlocks or Indian clothing, Palestinian students dressed more conservatively. A woman in traditional black Muslim

On music, politics and social justice  171 clothing and hijab sat in the front row, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, a toddler in her lap. Based in Jaffa, the band came together from workshops conducted within the framework of Sadaka-Reut (friendship in Arabic and Hebrew). The organization is a non-profit affiliated with the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE) party (Ḥadash in Hebrew, Jabha in Arabic) that seeks to empower “Jewish and Palestinian Israeli youth and university students to pursue social and political change through bi-national partnership” (Sadaka-Reut, n.d).9 According to Neta, one of the band’s founders, the workshops sought to provide options for creative encounters that can contain numerous stories, narratives and languages and are devoid of the hegemonic exclusions and erasures inherent in programs funded by the national educational system or the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality. The need for creating such platforms became most palpable to Neta while he was recruiting members for the youth movement by visiting schools and youth centers. He was aghast when he saw a sign posted in a vocational school’s classroom stating it was forbidden to speak Arabic or Russian in class, even though over 90 percent of the students were either Palestinian citizens or immigrants from the FSU.10 The multilingual platform of the band was a politicized response to these oppressive cultural policies. With the municipality’s permission, Sadaka-Reut established its youth center at the public bomb shelter right on the edge of the park now transformed into a tent city. A potent allegory of space and temporality for participating youth, the bomb shelter became an alternative home where difference was welcomed and friction channeled into creativity. System Ali formed out of the center’s music jam sessions. Their first public performance in 2008, held on the shelter’s roof, was a response to a wave of eviction and demolition notices served to ‘Ajami’s predominantly Palestinian residents, among them families of the group’s members.11 Shortly after, the municipality shut down the youth center, effectively evicting the voices of dissent.12 System Ali’s continuous search for a “home” that contains multiple narratives, access to physical spaces and community building predated the social protest and quite literally embodied the stakes involved in Jaffa’s version of the protest. My description of this performance highlights how System Ali has channeled their imaginary(ies) of “home”—one that includes a multiplicity of voices and subject positions on all their dissonances—into expressive practice, aesthetically, linguistically and performatively. The performance’s effect on the park audience is also described, as it demonstrates how the fraught relationality of lives both “shared and shattered” (Monterescu 2015) is experientially and epistemologically constructed in Jaffa. Introducing the band members is essential to understanding the diversity of voices that have come together in System Ali. At this point in time, the band members are all in their twenties, but otherwise, they comprise of one of the most eclectic collectives on Israel’s musical map. Of the ten members, three are women. Tall, blonde, feminine Liba plays violin and provides

172  On music, politics and social justice back-up vocals. She is Ashkenazi, the daughter of an icon of Israeli cinema and author of leftist leanings. Originally from Nazareth, dark haired Luna plays guitar and sings. She is the only Christian member and only Palestinian in the group who plays an instrument. Amneh, from ‘Ajami, raps primarily in Arabic and dresses masculinely, in a baseball cap, t-shirt and sneakers, a visible transgression in the Jaffa context. Her rapping style dances around the backbeats with profound musicality. Redheaded Neta, a leading force in the band, spent his early years on a kibbutz and a Jewish town in the Carmel; his activism in Sadaka-Reut brought him to Jaffa. He plays accordion and beatboxes, and sings and raps in Hebrew, Arabic and at times, in Russian. There are two Muhammeds in the band; both are from Jaffa, and both rap in Arabic and occasionally in Hebrew. Muhammed A. is tall; his performativity has a nonchalant but defiant edge to it, albeit masking a sensitive soul. Muhammed M. is short, animated and often serves his lyrics with a smile. US-born Yonatan is the lead guitarist, and he sings as well as raps in Hebrew, English and Arabic. His collaborations with band members extend beyond music, to include a poetry book written jointly with Muhammed A. and theater projects with Neta. A second Yonatan is clearly comfortable remaining in the background, his bass lines solid nonetheless. Bassist Yonatan and drummer Moti are the two Mizrahim in the band; Moti provides a musical focus that complements Neta’s emphasis on sociality, and his big Star of David pendant broadcasts his identity. One member was absent this evening. Enchik, an immigrant from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, raps in Hebrew and Russian and is also an accomplished break-dancer. Currently doing his compulsory military service (as a cook), Enchik would sometimes go directly from base to rehearsals, showing up in fatigues. He had not managed to obtain leave from the army for this performance.13 This eclectic alliance is an anomaly on the Israeli scene. Arab-Jewish musical partnerships have proliferated since the 1990s Oslo Accords. However, they have primarily been created as formal projects designed to foster “coexistence,” or within the muziḳa etnit (ethnic music) genre of musical fusions inspired and enabled by the peace process and the development of a market for world music (Brinner 2009). The majority of bi-national partnerships created on the margins, without the oversight of the establishment—in genres such as hip hop, electronica or indie rock—have not survived the increased polarization between Jews and Palestinians and the disappointment in the failed peace process (see for example McDonald 2013a). Unlike the “sanctioned” multiculturalist musical narratives, System Ali’s presentations do not aim for static, harmonious images of coexistence— there are no “peace songs” in their repertoire—nor for sublimation of individualist voices, but rather for grit, friction, energy and motion. The band provides an open platform for all its members. They all get to solo and to express themselves in their linguistic idioms and musical styles. They are committed to each other, musically as well as socially, and their synergy,

On music, politics and social justice  173

Figure 4.3 System Ali at the Jaffa tent city, August 7, 2011.  From left to right: Luna, Muhammed A., Liba, Muhammed M., Neta, Amneh, Yonatan D., Moti, Yonatan K.

typically found only among groups that have been together for years, makes space for this diversity. The main theme that emerges out of their songs is a conceptualization of “home” that is eclectic, diverse and full of contradictions. This is the energy that they also bring to the workshops they offer to younger youth (see Figure 4.3). The System Ali alliance was especially poignant here at the Jaffa tent city, providing a counter-image for what the protest at large had not managed to achieve: a true merging of “center” and “periphery.” Within the protest, it was not the middle-class Rothschild tent city that the Jaffa tent city has chosen as its primary ally in the struggle for social justice, but rather ha-Tikva and Kfar Shalem, the other “peripheries.” By contrast, System Ali manifests itself on stage as a productive alliance between the haves and the have nots. It is mostly the Jewish members, and the one Christian, who have benefitted from musical education and provide the live musical backdrop. And Neta’s leadership was borne not only from his charisma and talent but also from his wide breadth of experience in social activism and artistic cosmopolitanism. Despite these differences, what comes through in System Ali’s performances is that each voice within the band is essential to the group’s social identity and artistic output. My description of the System Ali performance on this night covers all the songs performed at this event, as each song foregrounded a different theme that received additional meaning and amplification via its performance in the context of the protest. Overall however, the performance projected a vision of a “home”—textually, musically and performatively—that is unconditionally inclusive of all subjectivities. This inclusivity was anchored in the construction of Palestinian-Jewish partnerships on an equal basis and

174  On music, politics and social justice rooted in awareness of historical injustices. It also placed the struggle for social justice within broader regional conflicts, including the struggles of Palestinians living under Occupation and Middle Eastern countries currently undergoing the tumults of the Arab Spring. Finally, the performance foregrounded the profound, albeit conflicted, pull of nativist attachment to place and locality in Jaffa. This manifested in the ongoing performative juggling between Jaffa’s portrayal as a Palestinian city—whose pre-1948 status looms large in the imagination of its currently minoritized Palestinian residents—and Jaffa as the city whose politics of inclusivity is most aptly described by one of its Arabic nicknames—“ʾum el-gharīb” (Mother of the Stranger), or everyone’s home. The band launched into their first song, slated to be the single from the upcoming (first) album: “Building the House (-home) Anew!” It started with Amneh improvising rhythmically in Arabic: “we are Arab, Arab… we have been ḍarab, ḍarabnā (beaten); we are ṭabīb, (healers), Palestine’s wound is not healed.” Neta answered in broken rhymes delivered spoken-word style to a backbeat ostinato: Revolution will come because of my love for my community, Not because of my hatred for people who step on me, on my friends, Who emasculate criticism, shut my mouth.14 Building up into a shout and rapid-fire rapping he belted out: Walak, shut my mouth? Ashkenazi redhead, what are you so angry about? Shut up and go be a soldier, be a pilot, When you’ll be grown up every month a check the size of Dan Halutz’ pens will be deposited in your account, You’ll do whatever you feel like, you’re the trainer, no need to be polite, People live in cages here, the culture of a circus, Even if you rape a 13-year old on an air-force base there will be no accountability nor trial nor penalty, It’s a disease! And System Ali is the antibiotic; until another generation will rise here I will not be appeased Only God and I will decide who my enemies are and into whose army I will be drafted here, All the violence, impotency and ignorance I hang on a high tree at the city plaza for public denunciation! Neta’s critique of Israel’s national culture as one based in militarism, conformity and brute force inserted the “political” into the context of the protest in no uncertain terms. The reference to General Dan Halutz is important

On music, politics and social justice  175 here, as Halutz, who became Chief of Staff of the Air Force in 2000 and General Chief of Staff in 2005, embodies the lopsided Israeli power structure in which militarism, capital and political power are closely and destructively aligned.15 On the bridge to the chorus, the band joined Neta in unison: “Public denunciation! Public denunciation!” followed by: “System Ali is building the house anew!” (X3 in Hebrew), with Neta delivering the final chorus line: “On everybody’s lips the same song is playing…” Amneh rapped the second verse in Arabic, highlighting slivers of life experienced by a girl raised among Jaffa’s dispossessed: I wondered the world, I saw a lot, Girls do not have a destiny, What is happening, what has happened to us? Great destruction, my house was demolished, not a crumb left, We are hard, our blood our destiny, like the heroin That we snort up our noses. Rat-a-tat! And news have come to the Arabs, A knifing range has happened among us And shootings; one day we will seek our revenge. Heed strangers! we are the Arab forces of depression. In these verses, Amneh linked her gendered experiences of oppressive poverty and the violence prevalent among Jaffa’s Palestinian poor (drugs, knifings, shootings) to the collective (Arab) rage over historical and contemporary experiences of dispossession. She also highlighted the potential for this rage (the forces of depression) to explode on “strangers” (khawājāt), here meaning Jews. Underneath her, distortion guitar crescendoed to high volume and the ostinato turned into a powerful backbeat. The second chorus was delivered in Arabic, the entire band now jumping and waving. The move from the prominent protest slogan “Fighting for our Home!” to the one in operation here “Building the House Anew!” is potent in the context of the protest. “Fighting for our home” by default consists of pre- existing (Jewish) imaginaries of what this home consisted of before the neoliberal era, including the social welfare State of the early decades following Israel’s founding and Jewish nostalgia for bygone days imagined as characterized by social solidarity. “Building the House Anew” is a message that upstages nostalgic imaginaries. It seeks an entirely different social and moral order, one that expresses the bi-national and perhaps even the post-national eclecticism of the voices assembled in the home of System Ali, along with their forceful delivery of music and texts. The centrality of individualized subjectivities to the project of “building the house anew” emerges from the diverse personal narratives included in the song—from Neta’s conscientious refusal to be drafted to the Israeli army and the Zionist narrative, to Amneh’s coupling of the historical wound

176  On music, politics and social justice of Palestine with her own contemporary experience of home demolitions, intra- communal violence and collective Arab rage. Amneh’s implied threat of the “forces of depression” taking revenge on those who have oppressed them was here enabled by the musical partnership of all members of System Ali, Jews and Palestinians, pointing to the complex angularities of shared life and communal relations in Jaffa. System Ali’s in-your-face delivery of music and texts experientially compounded the message that the band was building a home that could contain all subject positions, no matter what they had to say, a truly democratic platform muted within the protest at large. Loud cheers and claps marked the end of the song. The tent city audience was riveted. The song featured next, “System Ali ‘Ala Bālī!” (System Ali On My Mind), is most representative of the band’s artistic commitment to multi-languaging as both a dissenting political statement and as a cultural tool for change. The song was introduced by Muhammed M.’s improvised Arabic rap— “Bibi yā ghaddār, ʾim idek ‘an hādi ad-dār” (Bibi you backstabber, take your hands off this house)—as he encouraged the crowd to join him. He did not get much of a rise from the audience, perhaps because some did not understand the lyrics and some could not transition from being an audience to being participants so early in the show. But the chorus, belted forcefully in unison Arabic, stirred the audience, which bobbed to the beats, many right hands lifted in agreement: System Ali ‘ala bālī In my imagination remains dear My words don’t run on empty I photograph myself A messenger onstage Passing a lesson To every tired poet Whose story is passé…

System Ali ‘ala bālī Bitḍallhā ghālīye fī khayālī Kalimātī mish ʿal-fāḍī Mṣawwer anā ḥālī Rasūl ʿa-l-manaṣṣa ba-qaddim hiṣṣa La-kul shāʿer hīrān Khlṣatlu al-qiṣṣa

From here on the song featured an Arabic/Hebrew bricolage of inter-textual substitutions, whose affective meanings derived as much from the rhythmic drive of the music as from whatever each audience member (mono-, bi- or multi-lingual) could understand and deconstruct from the bricolage itself. When Muhammed A. took hold of the mic to sing the first verse, his bandmates emphasized the ends of his lines in unison, while his Hebrew-Arabic rhyming floated freely back and forth: The System Ali era is falling on the microphone, [Hebrew] Like a phosphorous bomb, a tsunami-hurricane, a flood, Until passed out, defeated or victorious, I will continue singing, I wake up Enchik for a war of tongues, Our words fire and brimstone, [Arabic] Something new in the lexicon.

On music, politics and social justice  177 On every house, residence, palace [taken down], We will build you a castle, [Hebrew] Instead of the old, drafted, unimaginative noise, We will build you a palace. We bring the message all the way from ‘Ajami to Hebron, Because we came to dismantle the Wall, And from the heartbreak, We will construct another song, This is how we write the law… [Arabic] 16 Muhmamed’s Hebrew-Arabic flow distilled the home that System Ali was building: a conflicted space (“our words fire and brimstone”) that Jewish immigrants (Enchik) and Palestinian natives creatively construct together, a palace of solidarity built on the ruins of destruction and demolitions, and a front for a struggle in which social justice also envelops Palestinians of the oPt (“from ‘Ajami to Hebron…we came to dismantle the Wall”). His frequent code-switching amplified the pluralism entailed in this home and its struggles. Verses passed around the band, from Muhammed A. to Neta and Amneh who was now holding the hand of the toddler previously sitting in the front row woman’s lap. Distortion guitar improvised throughout the Hebrew-Arabic bricolage, over which the associated lyrics became a metaphor for dismantling both the physical separation wall imprisoning the oPt and the inner walls within which individual identities are confined everywhere. As the song progressed, the crowd began to jump up and down to the lyrics and the rhythmic ostinato; by the end of this song System Ali had completely brought the park audience into their fold. The next song began like a ballad, the guitar and violin playing in harmony, a ska backbeat soon joining in to twist around the ballad feel, the rhythm section powered by the bass, drums and accordion. Amneh rapped in Arabic: Salām ʿalykum Arabs, do not carry regrets For all who have been beaten, Because we are all standing on the earth, Residents, those who were robbed, those not sleeping, Why is it only us [Palestinians] who are brought down? STOPPPPP [in Hebrew]! Blue and understanding skies, [back to Arabic] We are all the children of Adam and Eve you and I, Breathing air, I live in a house with no light; With five children, khamsa in the eye,17 Why are they expelling us from our homes? This earth is not blaming us.

178  On music, politics and social justice It was only when Amneh ended these lines and Neta began to sing the first verse of “The Girl from Gadot” that the original identity of the song was revealed. The song is a classic from the Songs of the Land of Israel (SLI) repertoire, strongly associated with Zionist nation-building efforts during the first decades following Israel’s founding. Gadot is a kibbutz located below the Golan Heights. Well known to most Jewish Israelis, the song was written after the 1967 war and Israel’s conquest of the Golan Heights from Syria, and it celebrates the conquest as a return to a normalized life for Jews previously living in close proximity to the Syrian border. But System Ali’s bilingual ska adaptation, gritty delivery and added texts provided commentary on the original. In the process, the original song’s intended meanings were entirely transformed: The last rocket blew up and all was quiet; silence enwrapped the valley; A girl at Gadot came out of the shelter; there are no homes left on the grange; Mother we had a green house; there was daddy, also a doll, and a loquat tree; The house is gone and daddy is far; mother, are you laughing or crying? Look up my daughter towards the mountain; the mountain that became a monster; There are still cannons on the mountain my girl; but now they are threatening Damascus; Lift your eyes to the Golan mountaintops; there are still soldiers there but henceforth; Their flag is [Israel’s] colors of blue and white; daddy is laughing and crying there too. At this point Yonatan the guitarist flared into a Hebrew rap on top of the ska beat: The last rocket has blown up and turned silent, And the blood that was pounding is the blood still here, They teach us that only the one who fights exists, So a paradise was given and a paradise was taken, At the end you will realize that one way or another, It’s only a question of time until the cannon is pointed at you, My daughter isn’t crying, isn’t laughing, Only quietly represses the rage, In the blue ink fountain Black and white, Neither in Damascus nor in Washington, The fight for our home, Will begin right here….

On music, politics and social justice  179 The group returned to a lyrical delivery of the original song’s second verse, vocally harmonized on top by Liba. But underneath the lyricism, the ska beat continued distorting the song’s SLI aesthetic nonetheless: We will have a green house, my girl; with daddy and doll and a loquat tree; And no more terror, my girl, my girl; my daughter, are you laughing or crying? The Jordan River is flowing, winding like a drunkard; blossoms wrapping the valley; And no one will turn its water backwards; my daughter, are you laughing or crying? Towards the end of the song the ska beat was replaced by chordal emphasis of the downbeats, while distortion guitar and violin improvisations built up underneath Neta’s fiery delivery: “Look up at the mountain my daughter, walak, mother who are you spinning around? Nothing will bring back daddy, the house too has drowned in the blood of the homeland…” The song ended with all the instruments in an intense polyphonic jam, the syncopated ska beat replaced by a rock modality, until the last chord was struck. The aesthetic bricolage System Ali created in this song—both linguistic and musical—completely subverted its original meanings. Musically, SLI aesthetics tend to feature Eastern European modalities and lyricism molded in the vein of the musical preferences of Israel’s Ashkenazi founding fathers (Regev and Seroussi 2004). System Ali’s rendition, through the rock and ska rhythms along with the rapping, turned the genre’s emblematic symbolism in Jewish Israeli life inside out. Neta’s accordion playing here further articulated this subversion, as the instrument is highly associated with the SLI repertoire, being a readily available accompanying instrument among the original Eastern European settlers in public gatherings and sing-alongs. The dissonant polyphonic jam at the end was the final musical statement that completely undermined Jewish exclusivity framed through the lyricism of SLI repertoire. System Ali’s intense delivery, added texts, Hebrew-Arabic rhyming and the embodied representation of Jews and Arabs “onstage” drove the point home. Their version not only parodied the original but also transformed it into an entirely different kind of representation, one that completely negated the Jewish/Arab dichotomy and that drove home Amneh’s opening message: “We are all the children of Adam and Eve you and I.” The song got quite a rise from the cheering audience. By now many were jumping and waving to the offbeats, including a little Palestinian kid who had joined the band “onstage” and was jumping and gesturing among them. While “Girl from Gadot” disrupted the hegemony of Jewish collective belongingness associated with SLI, the next song, “Guevara Māt!”, featured an aesthetic and ideological dialogue with icons of Arab culture. It highlighted Jaffa Palestinians’ identification with the region and culture from

180  On music, politics and social justice which they have been cut off in 1948, and more contemporaneously, in the context of the protest, with the civic struggles engulfing the Arab world. If the mainstream protest’s homage to the Arab Spring remained a loosely defined “spiritual inspiration” that appeared largely in slogans and signage, this song performatively projected a shared cultural and expressive platform upon which such links could affectively and epistemologically come to life. Yonatan the guitarist addressed the audience in Arabic—“Salām ʿalykum Yāfā, iḥna ktīr mabsuṭīn hon maʿākum al-yom” (Salām ʿalykum Jaffa, we are very happy to be here with you today) —and the band went into a driving instrumental intro over a rock two-beat, the kid previously jumping on the “stage” now standing behind them and gesturing along with the instruments. Muhammed A. took the mic, spelling out a tribute to Che Guevara in Arabic, mounting a sharp critique of today’s leadership and calling for a collective struggle. Liba and Neta played a drone underneath, while the rest of the band accented all the downbeats and some of the lyrics (“Guevara is dead!”). Muhammed’s tribute to Guevara was a reference and homage to Sheikh Imam, a celebrated Egyptian singer and composer, and his partner, poet Fuad Najm, who had penned a eulogy to Che Guevara famous all around the Arab world. The duo began collaborating in the 1960s. Their songs highlighted experiences of the oppressed masses and indicted the ruling class, and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war also criticized the Egyptian government for its conduct during the war. Banned by the mass media in Egypt, these songs were nonetheless widely distributed in the Arab world through the informal cassette market. This repertoire also influenced the development of political protest song in Palestine. Both Sheikh Imam and Fuad Najm were jailed or banned from leaving Egypt in various periods for their refusal to collaborate with the authorities (Booth 1985; Morgan and Kidel 1994). In between Muhammed’s verses the band came in with the chorus, which drew on some of the lyrics and melody that appear in Sheikh Imam’s original, here turned into a sung Arabic-Hebrew bricolage delivered in rapid double time: Yā shārdīn, w-maḥrūmīn, yā msalsalīn, yā mitkhabyīn, min rijlikum la-l-ras, Khalaṣ, khalaṣ, malqūsh khalāṣ ghīr al-banādiq w-l-raṣāṣ… You who have escaped, you who have been banned, you who hide, from your feet to your head, [Arabic] Enough, enough, you have nothing but guns and bullets, The downtrodden slaves, the shackled, those who aspire, seeking a tomorrow, [Hebrew] There is no alternative, nowhere to run, make ready the “army of enough,” [Arabic]

On music, politics and social justice  181 Say to the world enough is enough, This is the dawn that rises from the darkness, [Hebrew] It’s a horizon that stretches from our hearts to beyond any wall. [Hebrew/Arabic] The combined tributes to Che Guevara and Sheikh Imam and the System Ali musical envelope in this context linked the local Jaffa tent city struggle— and the Israeli protest—to regional struggles, the Arab Spring, and more generally, the history of international struggles against capital. Liba began to improvise intensely over Muhammed A.’s second verse, and rest of the band was now emphasizing every downbeat. When the band returned to the chorus, it delivered it in half time, which, coming out of the fast, harddriving rhythms, created a sense of suspense. On the return to the instrumental intro Muhammed A. switched into spoken word mode, clearly the outcome of the heat of the moment, while holding up his kūfiyya print scarf, edged with a drawing of the al-Ḥaram al-sharīf mosque and the colors of the Palestinian flag: “I got sick of the situation, and when I woke up, I asked myself why? because I’m Arab,” and he gestured at various folks in the audience: “Another Arab, another Arab, … I say what’s the outcome? They are good for nothing, they have no roots.” Muhammed was speaking here of the Zionist erasure of Palestinian rootedness in the land, but also foregrounding fissures internal to Jaffa’s Palestinian community, as a good number of its Palestinian residents have been internally displaced from other locations in historic Palestine and are perceived of by “old timers” as lacking roots. “I say no, no, no, I’m an Arab from Palestine, I’m an Arab from Palestine, long live Jaffa!” The tent city audience cheered him. Muhammed was foregrounding collective Arabness as the base of belonging to city and country, but also setting it up as a platform for a shared communal struggle that eclipses all hierarchies of nativity:18 “We see the Arab Spring and it’s time to bring the revolution here. It’s time for every person to live in dignity, in honor, without racism! (more cheers). I have a small message to the Jaffa family…” Switching here from colloquial Arabic to fuṣḥā: “If you haven’t known the worst, it is coming, and if you had already known the worst, what is coming is the absolute worst.” And back to colloquial speak: Everyone sees what’s happening in Jaffa. 500 houses will be demolished and no one can say anything. Today it’s my neighbor, tomorrow it’s my house. Let’s stand together for the better. Let’s not depend on the ministries or the political parties. Together! Our hands together! While he was saying this, someone passed the Palestinian flag featured earlier in the argument circle over to Amneh. She took it and gently laid it on the monitor next to her. The band closed with the chorus.

182  On music, politics and social justice Muhammed A.’s musical/textual tribute to Sheikh Imam and Che Guevara, and his speech at the end, inserted a number of politicized elements into the context of the social protest. It not only linked the local protest directly to the Arab Spring but also highlighted the need for Palestinian Israelis to reconnect, culturally and politically, with the region from which they have been isolated since Israel’s founding. His improvised speech and the emergence of the kūfiyya print scarf and the Palestinian flag at this moment were not coincidental. Coupled with his statement “I’m an Arab from Palestine: long live Jaffa!” the performance located Jaffa, and Muhammed as its contemporary resident, in cultural and historical continuity with the fight for equality and representation of citizens across the Arab world. The chorus’ reference “to beyond any wall”—using the Arabic term jidār (wall) in the midst of a Hebrew line—enfolded the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories in this struggle too. The home visualized here was one that had faced generations of suffering and multiple forms of displacement, and that explicitly sought its points of reference within regional affinity and resonance with Arab culture. Moving from the regional to the local, the next song, “Yāfāwwiyeh hi Hawwiyye” (Jaffa is identity), zeroed in on the primacy of place and habitat in the construction of nativist attachments to the city and the subjectivities who inhabit its streets. The song’s performance expressively projected Jaffa’s perspective on the meanings of “home,” fleshing out the pull towards Palestinian nationalism on the one hand, and pluralistic inclusivity on the other. The song started with Amneh rapping in Arabic over a slow walking bass, soon also doubled in the violin, while Neta provided beatbox effects and Moti embellished Neta’s vocal bass on the high-hat: I am Yāfāwwiyyeh (Jaffan) my flag is always raised, Breaking all discriminating laws, its call loud and clear, Yāfā is not to be governed without her parents, The rage of her men will be heard from the hills, Yāfā the bride that cried on her wedding day, Yāfā who has raised all her children alone, Yāfā the venerated lady who has kept her head raised. Amneh’s verse spoke to the primacy of Jaffa as an emblem of Palestinian identity, a city that will not be governed without her “parents”—the Palestinian community that created her. In describing Jaffa as “the bride who cried on her wedding day,” Amneh was playing on one of Jaffa’s Arabic nicknames, “Bride of the Sea” (ʿarūs al-baḥr). Jaffa was “wedded” to sovereign Israel in 1948, and to the Tel Aviv municipality in 1950, a means of further disempowering the few thousand Palestinians left in Jaffa after the 1948 war. For Amneh, Jaffa “has raised all her children alone” because this wedding only precipitated decades of neglect and disenfranchisement for Jaffa’s Palestinians. And yet, via Amneh’s lyrics, as the “venerated lady”

On music, politics and social justice  183 who keeps her head high and her flag raised, Jaffa retains its Palestinian pride, fighting the (state/municipal) forces that seek to govern her and erase her Palestinian-ness. The band went into the chorus: Anā al-hurriyye, Yāfā hawwiyye Yāfā al-hurriyye, anā hawwiyye

I am freedom, Jaffa is identity Jaffa is freedom, I am identity

Muhammed M. took the mic, rapping about Jaffa, freedom and juvenile delinquency: “Fights in the yard, and you are sent home… every time you see a match, you light it up; why child, have you become like a cat after a mouse….” Verbal solos kept passing around the band in a multilingual Arabic-Hebrew-English ode to Jaffa, a city that is bent over, scarred and crumbling, that is eating up her streets and her people, a city whose language is written in plaster, tehini and dirt, whose grammar is made of a thousand splinters of identity, the daughter of a thousand shoemakers who walks barefoot, the city they will never leave. Yonatan’s English verse posed a counter-vision to this image of Jaffa’s decades-old corruption: …Open your ears hear the truth thrown at you, Keepin’ it real with the System Ali crew, You gotta keep your heart open and deep and blue, Like the Suez Canal we are comin’ through, Stirrin’ up a storm mixin’ up a new form, Of a newborn Mediterranean brew… So be a Pharaoh, if the future is a Nile, We are Mr. bulldozer, Israel’s in denial, Nothing but a matter of style… It ain’t no truth if it doesn’t have a groove, It ain’t no truth if it doesn’t have a groove…. This song spoke to local identity(ies) in the most visceral way. By now many in the crowd were taken up by the musical adrenaline rush and were jumping to the beat. Amneh launched into another rap cycle that highlighted her identity as both Jaffan and Palestinian, and her anger over a history of dispossession. The song suddenly came to a halt. Muhammed took his kufiyyehprint scarf off and wrapped it around the toddler’s neck. Amneh lifted the Palestinian flag from the monitor and displayed it proudly, addressing the crowd in Hebrew: “This is what is called Jaffans. We are the original Jaffans and we are Palestinian!” Muhammed A. re-emphasized her words—“ya‘ānī, yāfāwwiyeh hi hawwiyye” and Amneh continued in Arabic—as she caressed the head of the toddler next to her: “The crown of our head is Palestine, the crown of the head of every little child!” This moment seemed to dissipate the band members’ energy, a hushed awkwardness engulfing them. Besides Muhammed A. who was identifying with Amneh’s position and nodding in agreement, the rest of the band

184  On music, politics and social justice seemed unsure of how to proceed. As a band System Ali tended to stay away from flags, the only means of building the kind collective solidarity of eclectic voices and the home they have been fostering for years. Amneh’s coupling Jaffa with Palestine and the national flag was a reassertion of national exclusivity that belied the partnership established by the band, and that prioritized the Palestinian national struggle for a homeland over the struggle for inclusive citizenship and rights to domicile. This was a reenactment of the earlier rupture I had witnessed among the tent city folks, but this time, on this makeshift stage, for all eyes to see. Moti the drummer was the first to get a hold of the situation, his powerful backbeat cueing everyone back to the chorus: yāfāwwiyeh hi hawwiyye, yāfāwwiye-wiyeh-eh, yāfāwwiyeh hi hawwiyye. Muhammed M. then took up the solo, which mapped out Jaffa neighborhoods by their Arabic names, a means of foregrounding nativist Palestinian pride: “I am yāfāwwiyeh, my head is held up high; from Jabaliyya to Maḥmūdiyya, from the beach to liTasso;19 my heart full of dignity, no one can disconnect it, no one can break it….” The lyrics passed again around different members of the band, until all (Jews and Palestinians) were chanting together “System Ali is here, from the house of Jaffa, from the house of Jaffa….,” many in the crowd chanting along. The kid behind them was now so adrenalized he was jumping and waving among the band members. Liba was the last one to deliver her lyrics: “…from ‘Ajami to Heart of Jaffa [adjacent mixed neighborhood] everyone speaks the same language,” and everyone joined the final chorus: “yāfāwwiyeh hi hawwiyyeh….” The crowd cheered the band and both Muhammeds thanked the ensemble and Jaffa’s residents. The front row woman picked up the toddler who had been with Amneh most of the show, and Amneh grabbed the mic, wearing Muhammed’s scarf and addressing the crowd in Hebrew: One second!… we’re also here because right now there are 500 houses [under threat of demolition]—until now the demolitions in ‘Ajami continue! And where have you been (meaning, the Jews present)? Why haven’t you been thinking about this until now? Yāllāh, I want to hear from everyone here! Muhammed A. was smiling for the first time in the show. The crowd responded by cheering Amneh instead of taking up her challenge. They were not ready for the concert to be over, and they kept clapping and asking for one more. The band obliged them, although they had started to dismantle their equipment. It seemed that getting through the ruptured performance of Yāfāwwiyeh had taken its toll on the group, and once Amneh had put the challenge to the park audience, the rest of the band members expected the event to move away from the musical to the discursive. But the continuous cheers got the two Muhammeds to address the audience: “We are all Yāfā, System Ali is here with you….”—an act of acknowledgement both of their

On music, politics and social justice  185 Jewish partners in the band and of the mixed audience, which was asking for more of their experiential expression of Jaffan identity and “home.” Luna started to sing softly in Russian, her breathy voice all lyricism and nostalgia, while Neta played the accordion underneath her, a high contrast to the energetic performance of the previous number. But the Russian lyricism soon transformed into accented downbeats, with Muhammed M. rapping on top, a eulogy to a lost friend: “OK child, motherfuckin’ life, it comes like a breeze and doesn’t ask, just takes the good young ones away….” He was followed by Yonatan the guitarist, whose rap linked Palestinian Jaffa to the Eastern European one. Yonatan’s metaphorical geography elliptically referenced the European holocaust refugees that were settled in Jaffa after 1948 and the post-1948 systematic erasure of Palestinian Jaffa, to highlight the ways in which multiple trajectories of displacement, absence, memory and forgetting are intertwined in the construction of Jaffan identities: …Between Jaffa and Siberia, between pillars of smoke and fire, On Jerusalem Boulevard (Jaffa’s central artery) a spider is once more divining destiny, In Arabic mixed with Yiddish, who is murmuring ḳadish over who?20… …In Israel’s water-well you were my lifeline, (referencing the early Jewish settlement’s reliance on Palestinian knowledge of the land) Now my beloved’s voice is silenced… …Your clock still tick-tocks inside me, sometimes slowly, sometimes like a machine gun In the attrition war between memory and forgetting, The future coils into a fist, To beat your absence forever, Like a drum. This was followed by Neta rapping in Russian, substituting for the missing Enchik, and the whole band joined to sing the Russian chorus: “you were our ideal (idialam); and you went your way; I will not see you in my gaze; what is gone cannot be returned.” Liba began to improvise percussive violin lines, while Neta provided beatbox effects for Amneh and Muhammed A. who rapped in Arabic. Muhammed’s rap was a tribute to a beloved friend who did not survive life in ‘Ajami’s Palestinian ghetto: The day Samir died, don’t say—ʿashān līsh (because why)? Our mothers sitting crying don’t say—ʿashān līsh? Living in the ghetto, don’t say—ʿashān līsh? Sitting, watching, but not seeing—ʿashān līsh? The band joined Muhammed on the rhetorical questions in what built into a kind of secondary chorus of the song, but one that was rapped: ‘ʿashān

186  On music, politics and social justice līsh? ‘aysheen el-yom bi-getto (because, why? [because] living in the ghetto). Muhammed continued: …Here went rage and dreams; here were joy and regrets, Night after night I wait for the cloud to pass by, My voice is calling, the family stands behind me, Wherever you will go—your name is in my heart, As long as you’ll be gone—you’ll be in my head and in my life, Wherever you will be—look at me I’m here, I miss the voice that once was a human being. When the rap cycles ended, the violin returned to the lyrical melody that started the song, and the song closed with its Russian chorus to the robust cheering of the tent city crowd. In this song System Ali produced a textual-musical cartography that located Jaffa on the basis of its human constituency, rather than its geographical location, between the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This cartography enfolds within it numerous experiences of exile and dislocation. It includes the Jewish holocaust refugee experience, as most of the refugees that were settled in Jaffa after 1948 were from Eastern European Balkan countries; the recent “Russian” immigration21 and local Palestinian experiences of dispossession and minoritization. Through a multi-lingual and multi-styled bricolage of juxtapositions System Ali created an experiential space that contains all its inherent contradictions: the “diasporized” indigenous Palestinians, exiled and ghettoized on their own land, and the indigenizing immigrés, exiled or driven from their faraway homelands. The lyrical Russian chorus whose subject matter was a eulogy to a departed hero served as the aesthetic springboard for voicing localized experiences of multiple dislocations and grief over loss and separation. In this context, the multiple citations of the ghetto reference not only the daily price exacted from those living in Jaffa’s (predominantly Palestinian) contemporary ghettos, but also a whole history of ghettoized experiences that have converged in Jaffa. For in an ironic twist on history, ‘Ajami was the first Arab neighborhood to be labeled “the ghetto” by the conquering Israelis following the 1948 war, when the remaining (4,000 out of a population that exceeded 70,000) poor Palestinian residents of Jaffa, mostly from the Old City and Manshiyya neighborhoods, were concentrated into abandoned (upscale) Palestinian homes in ‘Ajami. Their previous homes were either destroyed or peopled by incoming Jewish refugees. These indigenous Jaffans now became renters in the homes expropriated by the state and were also subject to military rule for two years, a situation that meant strict restrictions on their movement in and out of the fenced “ghetto” (Humphries 2009). The rest of Jaffa was quickly populated by poverty-stricken Jewish holocaust refugees, who came to Israel to escape their own experiences of ghettoization and genocide. They too were housed in Jaffa’s abandoned and

On music, politics and social justice  187 confiscated Palestinian properties. Discrimination and neglect have since transformed a number of Jaffa’s neighborhoods into the crime-ridden contemporary urban ghettos that come to life so potently in Muhammed A.’s lyrics. While all this convoluted history had not been directly spelled out, the song’s polyglot aesthetics delivered its inherent meanings nonetheless, including the anger over present and past dispossessions, the multiplicity of identities that make Jaffa home for both Palestinians and Jews assembled at the park, and the collapse of different experiences of ghettoization and exile into a single, joint home in Jaffa, a home threatened yet again by neoliberalism. The song marked the end of the show and the end of the tent city activities for this evening. No further discussion took place in response to Amneh’s and the Palestinian flag bearer’s challenges. This song, and indeed System Ali’s entire performance, had discursively, symbolically and affectively reenacted the relationality of lived realities in Jaffa, one which Monterescu (2011, 270) describes as a field “in which nationalism and urbanism, identity, and place are simultaneously contested and confirmed in everyday interaction.” This field also generates subjectivities and political actors in mixed cities like Jaffa. System Ali’s presentation did not conceal, wash over or reconcile the paradoxes and sharp angularities that constitute Jaffa’s multiplex identities. Rather, it fleshed them out within an affective, cohesive musical envelope that both voiced and contained its divergent subjectivities and contingent ruptures. While further discussions on appropriate representations would continue to take place both among the band members and among the tent city folks, in this moment of catharsis, nothing further was called for.

The art of being “Yāfāwwiyeh:” the home that is the contact zone You can say it like this: Life is Jaffa. Jaffa is my life and inside my life there is the home… System Ali is the door to the struggle and the door to my home. The struggle goes out from there and that’s where it comes back. —Muhammed A.22 For the Jaffa tent city residents, System Ali’s performance provided an expressive and affective distillation of the human toll involved in experiencing domicide. Porteous and Smith’s definition of domicide includes the materiality involved in the destruction of homes, as well as the loss of objects, structures and habitats that “nurture the self, support the continuity of life, and act as props to memory and identity” (2001, 6). The development of a common struggle against domicide by the different South Tel Aviv tent cities—which despite the Palestinian flag incident continued throughout the life of the protest—and System Ali’s multi-voiced presentation, so well

188  On music, politics and social justice received in this context, testified to the ways in which communal identities are continuously constructed in Jaffa. In this city, the pull of inclusive communal attachments occurs within a larger field of social relations that have nonetheless differentially affected various groups among both Arabs and Jews in South Tel Aviv/Jaffa. Monterescu (2011, 279) describes the resultant dynamic as a “twilight zone of borderline sociality.” The social construction of borderlands has been richly explored by Chicana cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) as zones where the social production of place and emplacement is created by the emotional residue of unnatural boundaries and deep mistrust of state and authorial institutions (as exemplified by Muhammed A.’s commentary on ministries and political parties). Borderlands are spaces that are subject to repressive powers but not determined by them. While the border that looms large in Anzaldúa’s writing is the North/South US-Mexico geographical divide, her designation of borderlands is not cartographical. It is a dynamic, interstitial space that resists the monolithic, where the embodiment of a double consciousness manifests in expressive practices that deploy a “multi-languaging” from which the border is colloquially theorized, offering new epistemologies. In that multi-lingual, multi-styled performance System Ali deconstructed pre-given (Arab/Palestinian-Jew/Israeli, indigenous-colonizing) dichotomies in order to construct a new imaginary, or value system, that both highlights individual(ist) subjectivities and re-embeds them in images and symbols that produce a home. It is because of this interstitial space that they occupy that ruptures—such as Amneh’s performance with the Palestinian flag—are ultimately incorporated into the creative process of “building the house anew.” Unlike scripted forms of multiculturalist representations of coexistence projects highlighting “harmonious” representations, the very logic of borderland multilingualism defies both scripted linearity and the sublimation of individual voices. The borderland is a space of nonconforming juxtapositions. The home that System Ali is “building anew” is by default one that is provisionary and in flux. This home is not scripted in static materiality, but on how this materiality is lived, in the interstices and tensions between real and ideal, the pre-given and the chosen. As anthropologist Michael Jackson puts it, home “…conveys a notion of all that is already given, the sedimented lives of those who have gone before—but it also coveys a notion of what is chosen—the open horizons of a person’s own life” (1995, 122). Jackson’s description highlights action, agency, and dynamism as the basis for the experience of home. System Ali’s artistic rendition of home-making is a raw, in-motion presentation that constantly shuttles between the making of an ideal home as a secure space for both individual voices and community, and anger over the confining impositions of the hegemonic home (and homeland) with its erasures, colonizations, repressions and demolitions. Their adrenalized, open-ended performance style is, in a sense, the aesthetic portrayal of conceptualizing freedom as action, thus catalyzing the beginning

On music, politics and social justice  189 of something new (Arendt 1998). While none of the audience members at the park could understand all that was being said, sung, rapped, code switched and performed that night (in Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and English), what came through loud and clear in this performance was that “building the house anew” is a dynamic, action driven process, and that the focus is in the process itself. For a group like System Ali, living and performing the borderlands perspective has been a tough professional road and social commitment to maintain in the post-Oslo sociopolitical and cultural climate. While in Jaffa they were a household name, and in Tel Aviv’s hipper circles they were also well known, forging their way into wider circles was difficult. Decision-making about almost every performance or marketing opportunity transcended considerations of a purely professional nature. Such opportunities were discussed by the whole band, and decisions on what they participate in were based on consensus. The band had refused to take part in events in which they were presented as lip-service tokenism for diversity, including Tel Aviv municipality sponsored festivals. They had also refused interviews on mainstream, government-sponsored radio stations, which possess the broadest band waves and mainstream listenership. At the same time, because they are a Palestinian-Jewish collective, they have sometimes been rejected in places whose struggles they identify with most. In 2010, they were invited by solidarity activists to perform at an antidemolition/anti-occupation demonstration in Sheikh Jarah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem where house demolitions are an ongoing and blatant product of government and municipal policies to Judaize the predominantly Palestinian Eastern city. The band decided unanimously to perform there, even though the performance was likely to be conducted under the symbolic weight of the Palestinian flag. In this particular urban environment, where ethnonationalism is the prevailing determinant of social and political life, some Palestinians regarded the band an artifice of “normalization,” and band members were physically attacked. In the end, the band’s presentation was well received by many of those who heard them.23 Living on the borderlands’ seamline in the post-Oslo era is a fraught and complex professional endeavor. As Neta described it, “…the further we go [professionally], the more the Palestinian audience has a hard time swallowing a bi-national band in any way or constellation… We’re not DAM, we’re not the flag… [And on the Jewish end] they’ve come to us in the middle of a performance and said, thanks, this is enough… this happened at [a 2009] festival in the Jaffa harbor while we were performing “Building the House Anew!”… So it’s become more of a “no” from both ends, because there are few who want to, and can, contain this. On the Jewish side its [only] accepted as long as it’s a “Seeds of Peace” kind of thing. The moment it becomes clear it’s not, a lot of doors close in that direction too. (NW, September 25, 2011)

190  On music, politics and social justice Neta’s references to DAM and Seeds of Peace articulate the difficulties System Ali encountered in making inroads to larger audiences. DAM is the pioneering Palestinian hip hop group that popularized Palestinian hip hop in Israel/Palestine. During the second intifada (2000–2005) DAM had by and large moved away from challenging Jewish hegemony as citizens of the state to highlighting their identification with the Palestinian national struggle. Seeds of Peace is an international organization dedicated to educating youth in conflict ridden areas to become future leaders and enable change.24 As agents of the (international) establishment, harmonious representations of “coexistence” are emblematic of the future leaders Seeds of Peace are meant to foster. System Ali’s platform does not fit any established route for gaining wider audiences, as neither the Palestinian nationalist ticket nor the “coexistence” label can provide the springboard for such a borderlands project. The problems faced by System Ali in their professional development is the product of the work and lived experiences of a musical ensemble whose quest for a home long predated, and in some ways perhaps prophesized, the tent city protests. I do not wish nor do I intend to project System Ali’s specific imaginaries of home-making and their rootedness in the borderlands experience, onto a social movement of national proportions, which attempted to blur the margins between participating groups and avoid the “political.” However, I do see parallels involved in the efforts to create new epistemologies for constructing subjectivities and visualizing home—along with the internal and external pressures that become aligned to pull such epistemologies apart—as having similarly affected the career of the Israeli social protest movement at large. At the protest’s apex, during the largest rally on September 3, Daphni Leef addressed the hundreds of thousands gathered at Tel Aviv’s Kikar ha-Medina and delivered a speech that electrified those present and many others watching it at home on television. Among her messages of solidarity and demands for social justice, she highlighted: “The citizen is not small, the citizen is the largest there is!” and “the responsibility is on each and every one of us! …Because by all of us taking to the streets, we have found home!” While initial public response to this event seemed to indicate a momentous change of consciousness in Israel, the external and internal pressures that precipitated the fragmentation of the movement’s broad-based alliances were also there from the beginning.

And so, between the Jaffa “periphery” and the Rothschild “center,” where did the social protest go? On August 13, 2011, while the social protest was gaining tremendous momentum, PA president Mahmoud Abbas declared that Palestine would submit its bid for sovereignty at the UN on September 23, the following month. Months earlier, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak had characterized this possible eventuality as an impending “diplomatic tsunami”

On music, politics and social justice  191 that compounded the “threats” posed by the “regional earthquake” of the Arab Spring (Mozgovaya 2011). Government channels and official media discourses became permeated with causes for existential fear and insecurity intended, at least partially, to counter the social protest’s demands to divert funds from security to social welfare. In response, leftist ex-MK and op-ed writer Yossi Sarid (2011) commented sarcastically that, “when you’re fighting for your home, you can’t also fight for housing.” A violent flare-up on Israel’s southern borders provided further fuel for the official discourse: on August 18, a terrorist attack near Israel’s Egyptian border claimed the lives of eight Israelis; Israel responded by bombing Gaza, killing seven, and rockets were fired from Gaza in retaliation. This was the first event since the social protest began that clearly foregrounded the inherent tensions between citizenship, nationality and social justice involved in redefining the Israeli “home.” Mainstream media was quick to predict the end of the protest. In Tel Aviv, the following weekend rally took the form of a quiet march with torches and candles, in solidarity with Israel’s (Jewish) southern periphery citizens now confined to bomb shelters, but the protest continued to build. In contrast with Rothschild’s perspective, in Jaffa, the fence surrounding the tent city park became cluttered with homemade signs drawn in the colors of the Palestinian flag and scripted in Arabic, highlighting Gaza’s suffering. Signs such as “Ghazza ḥabībtī” or ‘kulnā Ghazza (“we are all Gaza”) alternated with those about “one struggle” (ma’avaḳ eḥad) of all citizens’ right to housing and social justice, wrapping themselves around the entire park, with no apparent contradiction between them. There were currently about 40 people living in Jaffa’s tent city, I was told by Wafa‘, the Palestinian woman who over the past few weeks had emerged as the Jaffa tent encampment’s leader and regulator of its social life. The sole breadwinner for a family of five, Wafa‘ had been on the never-materialized list of those determined eligible for public housing for the past 13 years. Wafa‘ said she had debated her participation in the protest with a friend who lives in Ramallah, who felt that the demand for social justice in Israel distracted people from the real misery experienced by non-citizens under the Occupation. Wafa‘, however, felt that her friend’s perspective was wrong and that everyone should be struggling for the right to a decent life and a future for their children.25 Wafa‘s point of view catalyzed in the continued collaborations with ha-Tikva and Kfar Shalem in all the marches, demonstrations, concerts and events initiated by the Jaffa encampment during the protest. The government went on a multi-tiered campaign to sway public opinion in its favor by trying to co-opt the protest and by promoting the orchestrated manipulation of symbols of national solidarity on the one hand, and existential fears on the other. A committee for “social and economic change,” which dialogued with the protest leaders and their trusted academia-based advisors, was appointed in August 2011. This was followed by a highly publicized government-orchestrated exchange of over 1,000 Palestinian

192  On music, politics and social justice prisoners for Gilad Shalit, a soldier abducted by Hamas over five years prior who had come to symbolize the national consensus on the meanings of Israeli solidarity (October 2011). This deal occurred despite numerous prior statements by Prime Minister Netanyahu that he would never negotiate with Hamas, and his rejection of a similar deal offered two years earlier. Shortly after came obsessive debates about Iran’s nuclear armament program, as Netanyahu made it the top priority item on his agenda. His calls for preventive military action and the publicized calculations of the possible price to be exacted from Israeli civilians once Iran retaliates, swung the fear barometer in Israeli society into the zone of existential dread. Yet the cyclical way in which the (very imminent) Iranian threat has either dominated the public sphere or been tabled off—just like the opportune timing of Shalit’s return—testifies to the government’s manipulative efforts to harness public opinion in its favor. In many ways this strategy was successful. The media festival surrounding Shalit’s release and the debates on the Iranian threat knocked the social protest onto the recessed pages of the dailies and off the radar of the main TV channels.26 In tandem, pressure from both government and municipalities, which had already begun to forcibly evict tent cities in some of the poorest, least able to resist “periphery” sites, was intensified following the largest rally on September 3. Some of the protest leaders decided that the tent cities had run their course, and it was time to dismantle and channel the protest via other routes of action. The Rothschild tent city was demolished in early October. The brutality of the municipalities-directed police forces towards the leaders and supporters of the most vulnerable tent cities such as ha-Tikva, whose residents had nowhere else to go, drew on techniques used by the military police in the Occupied Territories (Allweil 2013). Removal of the tent cities from public space—especially the largest, most publicized middle-classbased tent cities—deflated the protest, which splintered into a number of directions. Two of Rothschild’s tent city protest leaders ended up joining the Labor party, despite their earlier disdain for party politics and Labor’s association with the Histadrut—Israel’s largest and most powerful trade union—which had also been longtime implicated in government- directed public sector and big business private sector interests. The Jaffa tent city was one of the longest remaining encampments, perhaps because its residents had nowhere to go, but most likely, because the municipality was reluctant to forcibly remove the site in a place where combined class and ethnonational tensions could easily turn the situation combustible. By late October, there were fewer tents but the ones that were there were larger and more permanent, some looking more like squatters’ shacks, all connected to water hoses and electricity taken from the public bomb shelter. A couple of families were newcomers, Jews from the nearby towns of Bat Yam and Holon whose tent cities had been destroyed and who had nowhere to go. Wafa‘, the tent city leader, said there were no more public discussions or concerts. Exhausted, on the one hand, by the living conditions and the

On music, politics and social justice  193 need to constantly mediate between the hardened personalities at the tent site, she was now energized by last night’s protest—in which Jaffa marched with ha-Tikva alongside 45,000 people—and by the current negotiations taking place with the public housing companies.27 By the end of November, however, Wafa‘ was so demoralized by the endless meetings with public housing companies, city planners, lawyers and MKs, none of whom had real solutions for the tent city folks, that she went on a hunger strike. When I saw her (December 5, 2011), she was on her 6th day of hunger-striking and trying to fix a torn hose in order to be able to shower. None of this brought much media attention; at this point the social protest seemed to have been all but forgotten. By the middle of January 2012, Wafa‘ and the other families who had weathered the winter in the tents were depleted by the struggle. They relented to the measly buyouts offered by the municipality: 20,000 INS (approximately 5,000 USD) as partial subsidy of one year of rent. The large families at the park consented to the buyouts. The single men living there were offered nothing, and scattered.28 On January 31, 2012, what remained of the emptied Jaffa tent city was bulldozed. Folks stood and watched, no one resisted. The next day tractors were at the park to toss over the earth and lay new rolls of grass.

Reflecting on the social protest According to sociologist Yehouda Shenhav (2012), the 2011 social protest failed because it refused to be political. Shenhav believes that Israeli society has long been anesthetized by its successive governments and access to what appears to be a formal democracy. It has been trained to think monochromatically, seek (Jewish) consensus and refrain from challenging the very foundations of the system of governance and political economy. This has manifested not only in the protest’s deflection of the political conflict and the Occupation, but also in its failure to challenge the ongoing “emergency situation” within Israel, which has increasingly provided legislative justification for racializing legal rights and eroding its democratic aspects. Shenhav likens the protest to Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1968) structuralist analysis of the medieval carnival. Designed to create a sense of renewal and contestation of authorial hierarchy, carnival suspends all rules and regulations that determine everyday life. It blurs the lines between art and real life such that life itself, temporarily, becomes the carnival. It inverts dichotomies such as the sacred and the profane, chastity and eroticism, rich and poor, life and death, to provide a sense of anarchic liberation, and is characterized by overtaking public spaces to highlight its universalist propriety. Carnival permits a polyphony of contesting voices because, like the summer encampments, it is temporally restricted and as such, it serves as a safety valve for controlling dissatisfaction, in which both authority and contesting voices play pre-determined roles that reinforce the ongoing hierarchical order. For Shenhav, the modern-day carnival, which takes place in neoliberal societies

194  On music, politics and social justice like Israel where there is freedom of speech but no real freedom of thought, completely loses its subversive potential. Shenhav may be right in his analysis. Netanyahu’s consecutive victories in Israel’s 2013, 2015 and 2019 elections can only serve to uphold his findings. However, Shenhav’s point of view is based on scrutinizing the central events and characters that propelled the social protest, later followed by its partial co-optation, in the same way they were “wrapped” and delivered by the official media for the consumption of the mainstream consensus. His analysis overlooks the voices of the “peripheries” who live outside the monochromatic mainstream. Shenhav ignores the new alliances the social protest produced between Palestinian Israelis and Mizrahim in their common struggle against domicide, an alliance that certainly did not conform to this vision of Israeli society. The value of artistic expression is also dismissed by Shenhav, who regards the artistic bent and theatricality of the protest as indicative of a party that everyone knows will soon be over. Bakhtin’s own interpretations highlight the carnivalesque as a space of ambivalence, where closure is converted to constant possibility through the regenerating power of folk aesthetics and creative manipulation of diverse modes of discourse. These bring changes in consciousness that can only reveal themselves through long-term processes. Here too, it is important to listen to the voices of the “periphery,” as exemplified by System Ali’s quest for home. Whether such changes of consciousness can truly emerge in the Israeli context, only time will tell. But in the meantime, one music critic that reviewed a System Ali show at an alternative club in Tel Aviv has proclaimed: “the future of Israeli music sings in Arabic” (Shalev 2011a). -----The following chapter focuses on another kind of contested “borderzone:” the voices and artistic products of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Their particular experiences of exile and indigeneity, of the local and the global, and of nationality and citizenship provide for different frames of ethical and aesthetic expressions that combine relationality, alterity and resistance politics in the production of alternative social imaginaries and epistemologies.

Notes 1 The movement’s website, http://j14.org.il, has since moved to Facebook. See https://www.facebook.com/j14.org.il/ [Hebrew] (accessed June 6, 2018). 2 http://ohalimadirim.bandcamp.com (accessed June 7, 2018). 3 Golda Meir, then Prime Minister, is famous for characterizing (and infantilizing) these activists as “not nice.” One of the 2011 protest offshoots, started by activists dissatisfied with the protest’s consensus-driven, “polite” manner, was dubbed the “Not Nice,” a means of connecting the contemporary movement

On music, politics and social justice  195

4 5

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9 10 11 12

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to the Black Panthers’ historical protest (see http://www.facebook.com/lo. nechmadim/info [Hebrew] (accessed March 13, 2013). https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tent No-1948/145119862236730 (accessed December 10, 2012). One of the “breaks” secured by the Haredim is indefinite postponement of military service while they are studying at a yeshiva (religious study center), amounting to de facto exemption. Moreover, yeshiva State subsidies resulted in little contribution from this sector to the GNP, the workforce and the Israeli tax-base. As this is the highest growing sector of the population, in the long run this situation is untenable. However, Haredi parties have wielded power in successive right-wing coalitions, resulting in disproportional allocation of resources to this sector. See Idelman’s performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJjPb QErCG8 [Hebrew] (accessed December 12, 2012). Referencing ex-president Moshe Katsav, convicted for rape and sexual harassment. All Hebrew-English translations are by the author. For the historical and economic trajectories affecting the Palestinian population of Jaffa, and ‘Ajami in particular, see: Goldhaber and Schnell (2007), Kushkark (2010), Leibovitz (2007), Menahem (2010), Monterescu (2007), and Qaddumi (2011). See http://www.reutsadaka.org/about-us-2/ (Accessed March 2, 2013). Information and quotes by Neta are based on a September 25, 2011 interview. In 2007, 497 eviction notices were served to residents hitherto living under protected rent-to-own leases (Bimkom 2009). The band has since become a non-profit organization focused on expanding the System Ali community and educational models for the benefit of marginalized youth. In 2011 they inaugurated their “New Home” (Bayit Ḥadash/ Beit Jdīd) in the adjacent city of Bat Yam. Following Bat Yam’s municipality’s declining support, the group moved Beit System Ali to the Center for Digital Arts in Holon, another adjacent town. See https://www.beitsystemali.com/home-eng (Accessed May 16, 2018). Since 2011, several members have left the band, while others have shifted or expanded their roles as instrumentalists, producers or contributors of lyrics. Yet as of this writing (2018) the band has sustained a core group of members for the past 12 years. Hebrew and Arabic transliterations of System Ali texts not included here are provided on the e-resources page posted on Routledge’s website. Neta’s lyrics reference several controversies associated with Halutz. In an interview about a 2002 air force attack on Hamas leader Saleh Shehada in which 14 civilians, including children, were killed, Halutz was asked about the moral validity of such choices. His response was that the only thing he senses as a pilot dropping bombs is the feedback felt on the airplane from the bomb’s release (Levy-Barzilai 2002). Another controversy relates to the reluctance of the airforce under his command to investigate the rape of a 13-year old by numerous personnel on an air-force base (Azoulay 2006). Finally, Halutz sold his investment portfolio on the first day of the second Lebanon war (2006) when he was the IDF’s Chief of Staff (Greenberg 2016). After the war Halutz retired and went into business. In transliteration: Ha-idan shel System Ali akhshav nofel ‘al mikrofon, [Hebrew] Kmo ptsatsat zarḥan, kmo hurikan-tsunami, shitafon, ‘Ad ‘ilafon hefsed o nitsaḥon ani amshikh lashir, Et Enchink ani me‘ir le-milḥama shel ha-lashon, Kalamna nār wa-hadīd, [Arabic]

196  On music, politics and social justice Ishī jd īd bi-l-lexicon, ʿAla kul bīt damār akīd, Nivne lakhem armon [Hebrew] Bimkom ha-ra‘ash ha-yashan, ha-meguyas, ḥasar dimyon, Hevenu et ha-besora me-‘ajami ṿe-‘ad ḥevron, Ki banu le-hapil et ha-ḥoma umi-shivron Ha-lev nikhtov ‘od shir, Hīk bnuktub al-qānūn. [Arabic]







5

Strangers in their homeland On the lives and musics of Palestinian citizens of Israel

You come out of all this with a clear, sharp feeling that you are a stranger in all of this. Your real homeland is in exile… So you start to search for it, to create it, in the music, in musical language…In the end you understand that identity you don’t inherit, you make, you create. And if you say you create your identity then your identity comes from the future, because creation comes from the future, not from the past. For me Palestine, whatever it’s called, is something very individual. The Palestine I grew up on and demonstrated for, for me it doesn’t exist. Today I understand that there is Palestine of the Hamas, and Palestine of Abu Mazen, and there’s the Palestine of Juliano and the Palestine of Mahmoud Darwish. Every person has his own Palestine. And of course, Lieberman and Netanyahu have their own Palestines [too]. In the end its all utopian. —Wisam Gibran1 I don’t need to leave Israel, to leave my home and my village, Kufr Yassif, where I was born and where my parents raised me, in order to feel Palestinian or to create in my own language. This is actually my biggest statement, because a lot of Palestinian artists feel like refugees inside Israel. —Amal Murkus2 … if you really want to look for Palestinian culture and Palestinian music— including Palestinian protest music, and the whole subject of the development of culture under Occupation—then it is here (’48 territories)! To search for it there (in the oPt) is a kind of romantic solution, or an illusion created over the years that “over there” is where occupied Palestine is. —Jowan Safadi3 These tropes of exile, strangerhood, Occupation and dislocation represent voices of individual artists who are Palestinian citizens of Israel. They also portray distinct structures of feeling that are the outcome of the unique position occupied by Palestinian citizens (or ’48s) vis-à-vis Palestine and the Jewish state, of which they comprise approximately 20 percent. Wisam’s comment was made while discussing his position as an artist and as a Palestinian citizen navigating the post-Oslo political and cultural climate.

198  Strangers in their homeland He was disappointed with the Israeli cultural establishment, which tended to call on him when it needed “an Arab” to highlight a multicultural façade without offering him real inclusion on the basis of his talents. Yet because of his ties to the Jewish establishment—having been a Prime Minister Prize for Composition recipient (2004) and the founder of the Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra—Wisam had sometimes been rejected in Palestinian circles. At the time of this interview his performance opportunities came primarily from overseas invitations. Amal was highlighting the difficulties of forging her way as a Palestinian artist in Israel, where little infrastructure for artistic development existed for Palestinians within a society that discriminates against them. The survival struggles of the remaining Palestinian community after 1948, along with its physical isolation from the Arab world, have greatly dampened the normal course of cultural developments (Regev 1995). For Amal, the success of her career was measured, at least partially, in terms of her managing not to be uprooted from her Galilean birthplace in order to develop it. Jowan was reminding me that geographic divisions between what is now internationally accepted as Israel vs. occupied Palestinian territory (conquered in 1967) is a new construct that obliterates history, and that culture is important to asserting national hegemony, outlines of geographical borders and historical narratives. He was also highlighting how ’48 Palestinians have been overlooked in thinking through the relationship between music, Occupation and resistance; for him, historic Palestine (now Israel) had never ceased to be the center of gravity of Palestinian musical developments despite the minoritized position of Palestinian citizens. While these artists differ in their positions on the role of art and artists in public life, their statements all point to a profound sense of dislocation and the dissonances between ethnicity, citizenship and nationality experienced by ’48s. Palestinian artists who are Israeli citizens—in the post-Oslo era perhaps more than ever—are subject to competing and contradictory associative frames of citizenship and ethnonationality. On the one hand, they identify with the Palestinian struggle for emancipation and seek ways by which to contribute to it. On the other hand, their citizenship status embeds them in other sites of struggle, including the fight for universalist rights of citizenship evermore encroached upon by an exclusionary legislative and discursive bent to “Judaize” the country, and the need to expand Palestinian visibility and push the margins of civic inclusivity in Israel. The sense of exile and dislocation is not unique to artists. It is experienced by all Palestinian citizens, who live the duality of being feared as the internal other, or a fifth column, in Israel, and as suspect of sacrificing their Palestinian identity for integration into the Israeli polity by Palestinian nationalists of the oPt and the diaspora (Rabinowitz and Abu Baker 2005; Rouhana 1997). The cycles of violence following Oslo, and the attendant process of nationalization—or Palestinianization—among Palestinian citizens, have

Strangers in their homeland  199 magnified the inherent tensions between civic and ethnonational affiliations experienced by ’48s. Scholars cite the shooting of 13 Palestinian citizens who, at the outbreak of the second intifada (2000), participated in demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians under Occupation, as a watershed moment that galvanized the nationalization of Palestinian citizens (Bishara 2001; Zreik 2003). This moment brought about political mobilization centered on Palestinian citizens’ demands for recognition as a national minority in Israel. Since 2009, the ramping-up of discriminatory policies and Israel’s colonization project in the Occupied Territories by Netanyahu’s successive governments has only served to increase Palestinian citizens’ sense of alienation from the Jewish state. For ’48 artists and musicians, these tensions are magnified by the conflict’s increasing internationalization, which has also been paralleled and supported by its culturalization. In this context, Culture has become a bitterly contested sphere, in which the conflict and its associated narratives are constructed and debated more heatedly than ever, both locally and internationally. 2011 marked a certain peak in this process. It included the campaign for Palestinian state membership at the UN, Palestine’s acceptance as full member at UNESCO, threatening Israeli responses to UNESCO’s move and US withholding of funding from the organization (Irish 2011). It was also the year in which Israel started to take the expanding reach of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement seriously, allocating funds to fight BDS and enacting the “Law for Prevention of Damage to State of Israel through Boycott.” With growing support for BDS and the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) locally and abroad, Culture became not only a resource but a harnessed weapon, the very terrain of battle. The tensions evoked by the increasing foregrounding of the cultural terrain in the struggles for political legitimization are experienced by ’48 artists most profoundly. As Israeli citizens, they are embedded in quotidian Israeli spheres of cultural production, including institutional and economic spaces (conservatories, universities, music festivals, NGOs concerned with civic pluralism, performance venues) of cultural activity. Yet as public figures they are constantly subject to scrutiny by Palestinian communities and solidarity activists. When contemplating Palestinian critiques of normalization, a number of artists and cultural producers have noted to me that while Palestinian citizens who work in other public sectors, like hospitals or schools, are not subject to criticism for their engagement with Israeli institutions, artists are a different matter. Wisam put it this way: There are a million and half Arabs in Israel and they all work in Israel. All the Arab doctors work in Israeli hospitals. All Arab academics work in Israeli universities. All the teachers work in Israeli schools, get their salaries from the government, pay taxes… you’re enmeshed in this country. Where should I be working?

200  Strangers in their homeland On the other hand, vis-à-vis the Israeli establishment, artists who are Palestinian citizens are always scrutinized by the ever-vigilant Israeli security apparatus and by discourses dominating the public sphere. Those who foreground their Palestinian identity in performance are often targeted by Israeli right-wing media outlets, and in two cases I know of, have been interrogated by security as suspects of incitement to violence. A good example of how ’48 artists are affected by these tensions occurs within academic spheres of music-making. The few departments in Israeli universities that offer “Oriental” music in their curriculum form a natural source of income for ’48 musicians specializing in Arabic music. Because Israeli academic institutions are viewed by PACBI as agents of, or complicit with, the Occupation, and are included in its boycott policies, this entails hard choices for ’48 Palestinians who have by-and-large received their education within these institutions. Professor Edwin Seroussi of Hebrew University’s Musicology Department noted to me that in recent years Palestinian citizens who had graduated from the university’s music department have either joined an Israeli institution or alternatively “disappeared” from the university and Israel’s cultural circles into the oPt and Palestinian-only circuits. Maintaining presence in both circuits had become unsustainable.4 One musician I knew who did work at an Israeli university as well as at a West Bank conservatory kept his Israeli engagement muted in the West Bank. The few people at the conservatory who knew this never referred to it publicly. For ’48 artists then, culturalization of the conflict incurs high stakes. This situation compounds a professional predicament arising from the historical isolation of ’48s from the Arab world and current inability to tour in countries considered enemy states, where many of them may have an inbuilt audience. Between 1948 and 1967 Palestinian citizens were cut off from Palestinians of the diaspora and the Arab world. Today they remain cut off from Gaza (since 2007) and much of the diaspora. The contemporary climate of boycott/anti-normalization that dominates the public sphere sometimes increases their isolation. As a Palestinian promoter and producer told me, even with Egypt and Jordan—countries that have established relations with Israel and other economic transactions between them abound—when it comes to artistic exchange, “all barriers are raised.”5 Artists with Israeli citizenship are often not welcomed there, and artists from these countries avoid coming to Israel either because they don’t support normalization with Israel, or because they fear that if they share the stage with Palestinian citizens they will not be welcome in other markets. In local and international circuits and domains that are open to ’48s, or within scenes they have fostered on their own, every artistic engagement becomes an ideological and affective political commitment, and artists must carefully choose their paths and spheres of activity. Despite this confining political and cultural climate, ’48 artists also perform important, transgressive roles that cut across a multitude of social, political and geographical boundaries. In the process, they create numerous “sites of disruption,” by which I mean performances that

Strangers in their homeland  201 unsettle different registers of insularity and their attendant epistemologies amongst Jewish and Palestinian communities, and in divergent geographical and social spaces. Such events produce shifts in consciousness in which ’48 artists play the role of catalyzing agents. To begin with, ’48 artists are the only local (musical) actors who can move freely across the Green Line. While the prohibition on entering Areas A in the West Bank encompasses all Israeli citizens, this is not often enforced upon Palestinian citizens (Anderson 2013). ’48 artists are hence the only agents that bind the isolated and isolating geographies of Israel and Occupied Territory in embodied fashion, providing live music to Palestinians on both sides of the border. This position carries important sociopolitical resonances as it disrupts the isolation Israel imposes on oPt Palestinians and provides a channel for affective unity between Palestinian citizens and non-citizens, at the same time that it introduces new aesthetics and discourses to local terrain. ’48 artists also disrupt different registers of ethnonational and communal insularities inside Israel. In situations of mixed Jewish-Palestinian audiences, they introduce discourses of alterity and belonging that contest hegemonic paradigms. In the face of Israeli discourses and practices aimed at de-nationalizing its minorities while maintaining Jewish hegemony, ’48 artists provide a voice for the “stand tall generation” of Palestinian citizens (Rabinowitz and Abu Baker 2005), who are becoming more vocal and defiant both in their resistance to discriminatory Israeli policies and in foregrounding a nationalized Palestinian identity. They also insert alternative modes of Palestinian-Jewish relationality to mixed audience contexts. Such audiences may include Mizrahim who enjoy and share a heritage of classical Arabic music with Palestinians, youth interested in non-conformist genres such as hip hop or metal, or Jewish-Israeli lefties for whom cultural engagement with Palestinians is part of a broader gambit of a politicized lifeworld. Such performances enable cultural encounters that transcend the boundaries of the quotidian Israeli context, which is structurally segregated on many levels. Finally, by the very nature of their complex position and (perhaps at times, uneasy) biculturalism, ’48 artists also present a heterogeneity that complicates exclusivist “utopian” Palestinian narratives, and/or the sublimation of individual identities to the overdetermined national collective. At times this reflects in resistance to the overwhelming burden of collective representation, in favor of the inclusion of intra-communal critiques of “traditional” values, or practices anchored in religious, patriarchal or political authority otherwise sublimated into the more urgent struggle of national liberation. It also reflects in an emphasis on aesthetic content that foregrounds individual expression and engagement with a wide array of local and cosmopolitan genres, rather than genres and idioms that have been most prominently drafted to the national cause. Such perspectives inform cultural life in the West Bank as well.

202  Strangers in their homeland It is from the liminal space of living the simultaneous experience of indigenous pride and exile that artists who are Palestinian citizens create and negotiate their own ethical and musico-aesthetic positions, challenge or affirm exclusivist national discourses (and oftentimes, they do both) and their associated artistic frames, and mediate both intra and inter-national debates (McDonald 2010b). Whatever paths they choose to take, ’48 artists must continually reassess the cultural spheres in which they choose to participate. My aim in this chapter is not to catalogue the myriad scenes, music genres or cultural politics that ’48 artists engage with, but rather, to highlight individuated trajectories of artistic experience, agency and negotiations of the sociopolitical complexities encountered by specific artists in a highly charged political and cultural climate. I focus on the artistic production and personal geographies of two artists who are Palestinian citizens—Amal Murkus and Jowan Safadi—in relation to their biographies and the postOslo cultural and sociopolitical environment. The ways in which individuals construct their autobiographies is an ongoing and changing project (Hall 1996, 1997). For artists, this process is intimately related to their aesthetic output. Hence, artists’ creative work mediates between personal geographies and the emergence of different publics and collective identities. In focusing on the lives and musics of these two artists I am foregrounding the heterogeneity and complexity of individual voices they bring to a region so accustomed to totalizing imaginaries of the “nation,” and their roles in generating emergent public spheres. I feature Amal and Jowan because they occupy different socio-artistic cachés and spheres of activity, in which they maintain important roles. Each is associated with different musical genres, audiences and political ideologies. Hence, to paraphrase Wisam, they have their own personal, individuated sense of Palestinianness and also of their roles and aspirations as artists, a product of their personal biographies and artistic proclivities. In addition, both artists have been artistically active throughout both the Oslo and the post-Oslo periods, and hence, they could discuss with me how their ethical dispositions and artistic emphases have shifted in articulation with sociopolitical trajectories. And, as both were active during my fieldwork, I was able to attend their performances in diverse sites and contexts in both Israel and the West Bank, view their negotiations of aesthetic content and social circumstances and gauge audience reception at different settings. Personal synergy has also enabled trust, friendship and long-term engagement with these artists and their work. Amal Murkus has, from a young age, developed as an artist within Israel’s bi-national communist party. The story of the extraordinary contributions the communist party has made to the development of Palestinian culture and the arts has yet to be told; my focus on Amal provides a glimpse to a much larger tale. The party enjoys a history of Jewish-Palestinian partnership that predates the State and that had lasted through various reincarnations of the party, although relative rates of Jewish and Palestinian

Strangers in their homeland  203 participation have waxed and waned depending on local and geopolitical developments that have also caused the party’s split along the way. Importantly, the party’s ideology foregrounds solidarity based on common social agendas and secularist civic partnership, rather than the ethnonationalist and/or or sectarian teleologies embraced by Zionist parties, Palestinian nationalists, fundamentalist Jews and Islamists. Starting in the mid-1980s, Palestinian electoral support for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE, Jabha in Arabic) declined, due to internal reasons and the dissolution of the Communist Block. But the party had for decades provided Palestinian citizens a space of progressive politics and belonging, participation in cultural and political life and higher education opportunities in the Soviet Block (Ganim 2001). Being attentive to Arabic culture and language (Bashkin 2017), the party formed a natural breeding ground for prominent Palestinian intellectuals, activists, artists and MKs, among them the national poet Mahmoud Darwish, MK, journalist and novelist Emile Habibi, MK and poet Tawfik Ziad, poet Samih Al-Qasim, historian and journalist Emile Touma and actor-director Mohammed Bakri, for whom the communist party provided a stage and a productive network. Amal is Israel’s premiere Palestinian singer. Inspired by the cultural and ideological repertoires of her upbringing, including Palestinian folk, classical Arabic music and a variety of genres associated with the international left, Amal has experimented with several styles. Her more recent albums (Baghānnī, 2011; Fattaḥ al-Ward, 2015) fall in between classical Arabic music (as a muṭriba, or singer of ṭarab) and a broader world music aesthetic. Lyrically these albums feature texts by past and contemporary Palestinian poets. Musically, they are anchored in a musical envelope based in a core of Arab idioms and instruments supplemented by guitar, upright bass, a trap set and cajon, at times augmented by other Western instruments, including sections of strings or woodwinds. Amal is well known in Israel, has forged numerous paths to international markets and is well respected by the cultural community in the oPt. Jowan Safadi has traveled other circuits in his life and music. Born in Nazareth and currently living in Haifa, Jowan is an urbanite who cherishes the lifestyle freedoms the city provides and whose ear is tuned to a variety of international indie music genres. Jowan is likely to cite Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain as a prominent musical inspiration, rather than Palestinian folklore or classical Arabic music, along with their cultural indexing of Palestinian rootedness in the land and regional pan-Arab affinities. A singer-songwriter whose overall artistic production defies generic categorizations but draws on genres ranging from electronica to punk and Arabic hard rock (he dubs his work ḥafla-rock), Jowan’s music also includes intimate ballads, occasional blues or reggae grooves, and twists on Palestinian folkloric references and Arabic media soundscapes. The overall aesthetic that emerges from his work features musical intertextuality, memorable melodic hooks and lyric irony.

204  Strangers in their homeland Music became a serious endeavor for Jowan in the 1990s, during the Oslo period, and his career trajectory is embedded in both the denationalized cultural spheres Oslo inspired and in the defiant Palestinian cultural milieu that developed following Oslo’s disappointments. Today Jowan is closely aligned with the Palestinian alternative music scene of which Haifa is an important node of cultural production. It is a relatively young, urban scene that seeks to create autonomous Palestinian cultural spaces while emphasizing inclusivity, pluralism and subalterity within them. The scene fosters both a transgressive politics of identity and an emphasis on the right to be festive that counter the longstanding ethic of ṣumūd (steadfastness) and suffering as markers of Palestinian authenticity (Karkabi 2013). This small scene has created traction in other sites in Israel, the West Bank and beyond, with Amman, Jordan, providing a space for pan-regional encounters that is both proximate and legally accessible to ’48s. A few artists who have emerged from this scene, among them Jowan, have toured in the West. What emerges from the life and work of these two artists are highly divergent representations of Palestinian “roots and routes.” For anthropologist James Clifford, the “roots and routes” lens offers a conceptualization of diaspora as a signifier of political struggles that define the local “as a distinctive community in historical contexts of displacement” (1994, 308) rather than one of transnational movement. His understanding of diaspora is hence based on alternate public spheres, or forms of community consciousness and solidarity created by minoritized groups, that “maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference” (ibid.). While Palestinian citizens have not undergone the geographical dispersion that has been the mainstay of Palestinian experiences elsewhere, the tropes of exile and Occupation that open this chapter, and the artistic productions of Amal and Jowan, exemplify this understanding of Diaspora as an experience of displacement that politicizes forms of community building. Living as exiles on their own land shapes the unique experience of Palestinian citizens, the artistic production of ’48 artists and the communities that they generate. My focus on individual biographies and artistic trajectories foregrounds the sociopolitical dynamics involved and the “sites of disruption” ’48 artists create within these dynamics. It also highlights the innovative bent ’48 artists inject into their music, and their quest for being recognized first and foremost as artists rather than as “authentic” representations of ethnonational iconicity (Swedenburg 2013).

Amal Murkus “My mother says I sang before I talked,” said Amal,6 and she has proof: a filmmaker who had come to interview her father for a documentary about the leaders of the Palestinian minority that remained in Israel after 1948 recorded the talented two-year-old singing a lullaby to her doll.

Strangers in their homeland  205 The performance was Amal’s first entry into a public life immersed in political and cultural activism in a communist home. This home nurtured her social awareness and artistic proclivities, but also a Palestinian identity deeply ingrained in an attachment to the land her parents, the ’48 generation, struggled so hard to retain: I’m a Palestinian woman singer, born as an Israeli citizen, because my parents stayed in the village after ’48, they refused to leave. I belong to that generation of parents who insisted on staying… clutching to their land, maintaining the language, culture, everything that could be preserved of Palestinian heritage, [despite] the State of Israel. It’s also a generation that fought to get the Israeli ID and receive civic status… so they wouldn’t be thrown out across the border. (AM, May 6, 2011) Amal’s bond with the land was cemented through the proximity to nature and the folklore associated with the agrarian and social life cycles in Kufr Yassif, a Palestinian village in the Northwestern Galilee located near the Lebanese border: …This was a multicultural home and yet totally Palestinian insofar as daily life: the fallāḥīn (peasants), planting trees, raising animals, fruit picking…. I experienced [the legacy] of the previous generation insofar as folk life, in the most beautiful way you can imagine… What comes alongside this is respect for the person who lives in nature, the human being. (AM, February 21, 2012) The interplay between deep attachment to Palestinian indigeneity and a universalized identification with the struggles of the oppressed fostered in the communist party, was paralleled by the cultural and educational resources available at Amal’s home and close environment. Joan Baez, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Pete Seeger, Victor Jara, Fairouz, Abdel-Wahab, Umm Kulthum, Tchaikovsky and Theodorakis were some of the musical, literary and/or politicized figures Amal was raised on. Musically, these were supplemented by Hebrew songs rehearsed in school or those Amal heard in the Israeli media in the days before satellite TV brought Arab culture from all over the Middle East to Palestinian homes in Israel; Russian songs she learned in the communist youth movement, and Palestinian folk songs performed in lifecycle rituals. Other influences included literature and poetry published in the Arabic language communist party magazines; the politicized artistic circle that convened at her family’s home or the party’s events, and Hebrew literature and poetry taught at school. At the performing arts college she attended as a young adult, despite being the only Arab student, Amal was encouraged to sing, act and perform in her native language. According to Amal, all these built her up as a person and as an artist.

206  Strangers in their homeland The Hebrew literature, poetry and songs that Amal had learned in school were part of a curriculum established by Israel’s education system for Arabic-language schools. Until the late 1960s these schools were required to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. “Sensitive” topics such as national identity, the Nakba or civic rights remain censored until today, while the Hebrew language, Jewish literature and history are vigorously taught, and teachers are pressured to comply with the official line (Al Haj 1995). Yet perhaps because of the bi-national political and cultural partnerships fostered in the communist party, Amal views these repertoires as cultural resources, rather than solely as tools of oppression. The party was a space of belonging that also channeled Amal’s politicized identity: At the age of 14 I lived in a summer camp [in the Soviet Union] for a month … I learned Russian, [sang] songs in Russian, met kids from all over the world—Laos, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Canada. I learned socialist principles of peace and friendship… for me, it was the first time I felt part of the world. [The experience] took me out of a discriminated space and planted me in a place in the world, on the Yalta island, with children from around the world, and together we spoke of art and politics and culture and how we all came from [diverse] backgrounds … I emphasize this to bring out that universalism, humanity, is primary. More than anything nationalistic, is how I began my way, and it has affected my music, until now. (AM, February 21, 2012) Amal was raised on the consciousness that art is both an important part of life and a weapon of the dispossessed. Starting at the age of five, she performed in demonstrations or communist party events which carried political and social charge: Nakba commemoration Day; the first Land Day (1976, when she was eight years old); International Women’s day and May Day, the most important holiday celebrated in her family home. “I have pictures of me at the age of eight… there were always banners behind me for the freedom of all people, for a Palestinian State, for women’s liberties. Artistic life was accompanied by a strong political consciousness,” Amal said. As a child Amal sang covers at these events, usually performed a capella: Joan Baez’s version of the spiritual “We Shall Overcome,” the politicized songs of Fairouz and Marcel Khalife, Palestinian folksongs, and Russian martial and folksongs in Arabic translation. Later Amal met Nizar, who became her partner in life. A talented amateur musician, Nizar was the first to write songs composed specifically for her or adapt them to her vocal talents and range. These songs spoke of Palestinian collective memory, of the first intifada and of core issues in Palestinian life. In the process, Amal began to define herself as an artist who sings original content, rather than Arab classics or standards of folk repertoires. Amal waited many years to release her first album. Amal, which means hope, was internationally released in 1998. She was by then in her late

Strangers in their homeland  207 twenties, married and a mother. This long hiatus was because Amal wanted to release a quality product, not a cheaply made cassette common among Palestinian singers for promotion within the weddings circuit, the primary production, dissemination and performance circuit then available to Palestinian citizens (Brinner 2009). Her dream was realized when Alon Olearchik, a (Jewish)-Israeli songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer, volunteered to produce the album with no upfront pay. The album centered on Arabic texts and poetry chosen by Amal, and a collaborative production of top Jewish and Palestinian musicians excited by the musical encounter, who volunteered their time to the production. Arrangements were built from this talent, and the final product was a well-crafted, haunting album that sonically indexed both localized Palestinian experiences and a jazzy, pan-Mediterranean sound. The aesthetic hybridity and boundary blurring of the album reflected the muziḳa etnit (ethnic music / world music) aesthetic of the 1990s, projecting a borderless region. The album was released on Israel’s NMC label and licensed to EMI International. It produced local Palestinian and Jewish audiences, and importantly, it launched Amal’s international career. She has since performed at many international festivals and shared the stage with prominent artists, among them Joan Baez and Mercedes Sosa. With international recognition came the rewards of freedom from depending on the Israeli cultural establishment. “This became my calling card to the world… it enabled me to feel free, because the moment my album crossed past Israeli borders no one could stop me,” Amal said. In the two decades and several albums that followed, Amal continued this hybrid experimentation with diverse genres and instruments. But the musical and textual core increasingly foregrounded a distinct neo-Palestinian aesthetic developed by contemporary poets and a generation of Palestinian musicians who have been educated in both Arabic and Western musical traditions. Among them is composer, oud and violin player Naseem Dakwar, who, starting with the second album Shauq (Longing, 2004), became Amal’s long-lasting musical partner. Na‘na ya Na‘na (Peppermint, 2007) was a tribute to Palestinian folklore that featured innovative, updated arrangements. Naseem was apprehensive about presenting folklore due to the overexposure it has received as the soundtrack accompanying Palestinian national formation in the oPt, and to the artistically limiting wedding circuit Palestinian musicians had until recently been confined to. But Na‘na was like “getting a special appreciation award from my people… little children knew it, adult women liked it, 80-year-olds danced at the show… many parents told me that their babies wouldn’t go to sleep without it.” For Amal Baghānnī (I Sing, 2011), released during my fieldwork, was the crown of her maturation as an artist. Amal sought to provide opportunity to new Palestinian talent, and the album includes texts by established Palestinian poets such as Mahmoud Darwish and Toufik Ziad along with younger, lesser known names. Naseem’s musical direction is supplemented

208  Strangers in their homeland by the work of younger composers, among them Mahran Mor’heb, whose arrangements “took the authentic Arabic ensemble and gave it the expression of a full symphony orchestra, without turning it into Western music.” The recording took place in an ancient house in Kufr Yassif, under the classic arches, on top of the well, and in the patio, a communal occasion that brought shared moments and joy to local inhabitants, Amal, the musicians and the technicians involved. The texts are saturated with images of homeland, exile and poetic conflations of one’s love for people with love for the land. The overall product is a well-packaged, sophisticated ode to Palestinian collective memory and longing for liberation. Amal views her artistic trajectory as the convergence of several dispositions. First was her insistence on recording quality, well-produced albums and original material. Second was the need to present texts by Palestinian poets that foreground Palestinian voices and experiences censured from Israeli curriculums and absented from the Israeli public sphere, while emplacing them in a universalized context of human dignity. Starting with the second album Shauq, her albums emphasized Palestinian identity more prominently, textually and sonically. This turn occurred partially because Amal wanted to foster the creativity, originality and partnerships of her first Tel Aviv band among Palestinian musicians, as a bountiful crop of academiaeducated musicians was graduating into a void in infrastructure for Palestinian cultural production. But it was also animated by the cycles of violence, Israeli repressive measures and increased polarization between Palestinians and Jews following the Oslo period. “The level of discrimination against the Palestinian people has reached such [intolerable] stages that it is much more foregrounded for me than my universalist agenda,” Amal said. At the same time, Amal continues to work in both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian circuits, and Jewish musicians, producers and engineers contribute their talents to her productions, sometimes becoming long-lasting musical partners. In my band there are Arabs and there are Jews, but it’s not something I put on a banner. They are with me because they are human. If I need a beautiful guitar player, or double bass player, it doesn’t matter to me whether he’s Jewish or Palestinian. (AM May 6, 2011) Amal empathizes with the reasons for cultural boycott, but for her, relationality remains ingrained: “I also can’t abandon my sensitivity and just hate. I can’t blame the musician and put on his back everything the State of Israel has done over the past 63 years…” Amal’s inclusivity materializes aesthetically in the idiomatic fluidity that characterizes the band’s musical exchanges. This is perhaps best exemplified by a rendition of a song I first heard at a concert celebrating the release of Baghānnī, held at the auditorium of Kibbutz Kabri, near Kufr Yassif (April 16, 2011). The presentation included the album’s lineup, but without the

Strangers in their homeland  209 string quartet and woodwinds ensemble the album features, leaving room for band members’ improvisations and extended solos. The only cover on the album combines the Chilean singer-songwriter Violeta Parra’s “Graçias a la Vida” with an adaptation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “On This Earth:”7 On this earth what makes life worth living; The scent of bread at dawn; the burst of love; Mess on a pebble of stone; Mothers queuing like notes of a flute; And tyrants frightened of songs; On this earth. What makes life worth living; A woman on this earth; The lady of this earth; Mother of all beginnings; Mother of all endings; Once called Palestine; Because you are my lady; Makes me worth living. Violetta Parra was a songwriter, folklorist and visual artist who pioneered the Nueva Canción movement in Chile, which aligned with the socialist party ideologically and a folk revival aesthetically. Parra committed suicide in 1967 and the song, which celebrates life, is often regarded as a kind of a suicide note. Parra’s suicide foreshadowed the violence about to embroil Chile; after the 1973 military coup many of the movement’s artists were detained, exiled or assassinated. Amal had combined the two sources earlier, in honor of an event marking 90 years to the establishment of the communist party in Palestine (now Israel). In this performance, however, she dedicated the song to the Palestinian-Jewish activist and director of the Freedom Theatre Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was assassinated in Jenin earlier that month. On the album, the song starts off with the guitar, referencing the Latin American original, soon joined by a violin that introduces a short, plaintive melody, before Amal enters with the first verse, the actual song melody, and an ensemble of Arabic and Western instruments. Here in the live rendition, Naseem expanded the violin solo into a haunting lament saturated with klezmer-like idioms. The song became a sonic homage to an icon who was both Jewish and Palestinian, and who, like the seamless adaptation of local and international musical and textual sources that made up this performance, lived as though social boundaries and geographical borders did not exist. By the end of the song, the audience members were at the edge of their seats. Performances in the oPt, however, require a different approach. To begin with, due to local sentiments and the ban on Jewish-Israeli travel into Areas A, Amal cannot bring her Jewish band members. Logistical obstacles posed by the Occupation form another facet of the complex negotiations involved

210  Strangers in their homeland when an artist traverses State and Occupied Territory. Finally, there are emotional and aesthetic resonances that align to adapt performance practices to local audiences. These include the need to foreground symbols of national identity in solidarity with Palestinians living under military occupation, and the difficulty of introducing original musical content into a context where familiarity—folk songs etched in the collective memory of all Palestinians—forms the basis for expressions of unity and “collective effervescence.” Between State and Occupied Territory: Amal at the Zababdeh Culture and Arts Festival I met Amal at her Kufr Yassif home early in the afternoon.8 Entering a garden that seemed to buzz with the presence of dogs, cats and birds reminded me of how important proximity to nature was in Amal’s childhood. Amal’s mother, known for her love for animals, is often brought wounded animals needing care. Sitting among them, she was separating a mountain of mulūkhiyya (Jews’ mallow) leaves from their stems to prepare them for cooking or freezing; mulūkhiyya is used as either herb or vegetable in Palestinian cuisine. Amal however, was in a troubled mood. Her drummer had called to tell her he didn’t want to bring his trap set to the oPt, because the last time he did, soldiers searching the car at the checkpoint had damaged them. The festival promoter didn’t have the necessary backline, and Amal had to search for solutions. In addition, the promoter told Amal he intended to pay by check, even though he knew oPt checks couldn’t be cashed in Israel, and hence their previous agreement was on cash payment. Finally, Amal’s percussionist was stuck in Europe with a cancelled flight. These issues, a combination of production logistics common all over the world and those particular to moving between State and Occupied Territory had taken up her morning. Soon some of the musicians arrived in the van that was to take us to the West Bank (which necessitates a Palestinian-Israeli driver with West Bank insurance). We detoured to pick up two more musicians, arriving at the Jenin checkpoint an hour after leaving Amal’s home. The line of cars ahead of us indicated that at this checkpoint, passengers are meticulously scrutinized going into the Occupied Territories, not just coming out, as I had experienced elsewhere. I saw the red sign, common at checkpoints, advising that the road leads to Area A, and hence is both dangerous and illegal for Israeli citizens. Another sign specified a list of goods forbidden in the crossing. Possibly, the potential for smuggling goods at this checkpoint rather than security reasons was the purpose for scrutinizing the queues going into the oPt so intensively: our IDs were taken and the van was searched. “What is the purpose of your visit?” asked the soldier. “We’re playing at a music festival,” Amal responded. The soldier replied: “You know the checkpoint closes at 8 PM?” Amal, who had been told the checkpoint would be open

Strangers in their homeland  211 all night, called the promoter, who said we would probably have to return through a different crossing point. After the search and ID checks we were waved through, only to see that so many cars had lined up for entry into Israel, that they had taken up all lanes, including the one going towards Jenin. It was a standstill parking lot that from our vantage point seemed to go on for miles. Saturday is market day in Jenin, and the cars in line were probably Palestinian-Israeli families returning from Jenin’s market, which is considerably cheaper than Israel’s. After quite some time had passed, our driver followed another creative driver, who, with someone carefully directing him, managed to get onto the narrow gravel shoulder and circumvent the cars turned in Israel’s direction. When we got past the long mass of immobile cars, Amal tried to call the festival producer for directions, but her phone had no reception this side of the border. I gave her my jawwāl (Palestinian cell), and the promoter remained on the phone with her a good part of the way on this USAID built road to make up for the lack of road signage. For me, this little exchange highlighted the small, incendiary but symbolic ways by which fragmentation and disconnect are imposed on Palestinians well beyond the physical barriers and checkpoints that produced the traffic jam we had just circumvented. We had now entered a geographical space that for Jewish settlers was completely continuous with Israel in all means of infrastructure, communication and civic life. For Palestinians, the very same geographical space was one of parallel, obstructed universes; the Israeli phones ’48s could use anywhere else in the world would not work in the never-never land of Palestinian life in Occupied Territory.9 Zababdeh is a predominantly Christian little village located near Jenin’s Arab American University, a private institution established by wealthy USbased Palestinians in 2000, with current enrollment of 3,000 students. We arrived at an outdoor theater in a park overlooking a stunning view of feral hills. Built by the university’s founders, the site included a stage and sound system, several hundred plastic chairs for the audience, a kiosk and an arched building housing children’s educational books and Palestinian crafts for sale: locally made pottery, embroidered wallets, blown glass and colored sand bottles from Hebron. The audience trailing in was mixed: Muslims in the majority but also Christians, families with babies and kids of all ages, university students. By the time Amal came on stage, 600 or 700 people were in the audience. Amal’s band was in reduced format. Besides the Jewish musicians (guitar and bass), two percussionists were also missing. It was up to Amin the drummer to make up for their absence, armed with a borrowed drum kit from Al-Kamandjâti’s Jenin branch. The musicians doubled up wherever possible: Naseem exchanged between the oud and violin, and Jamil between the bouzuq and the oud. Another Jamil kept to the nay and Mahran remained on the qanun. Amal wore a traditional embroidered Palestinian dress, a prominent index of national identity, which she does not usually

212  Strangers in their homeland

Figure 5.1 Amal Murkus at the Zababdeh Culture and Arts Festival.

wear in her performances in Israel. In this context, the dress projected not only the obvious statement of native indigeneity but also a marker of unity between Palestinian populations separated by the matrix of Israeli controls. Music-wise, the set list was not predominantly focused on the recently released Baghānnī, but included a good number of folk songs as well as classics familiar to all. This was a means of connecting with the audience on common Palestinian ground, but also the product of adapting to local cultural standards. In Israel Amal’s music is commonly featured in auditoriums and concert halls, and even when the audience is participatory, it is highly focused on the musical event. This type of concert etiquette is new to the West Bank, and the outdoor setting of the Zababdeh festival gave it even more of a casual family outing feel.10 Folks were conversing, smoking arjīlas, taking care of their babies or talking on the cell. While they clapped after every song, especially when “Palestine” loomed prominent in the lyrics, their attention was directed as much to sociality as it was to the music. It was the familiar ground of folksongs like “Naʽnaʽ yā Naʽna’” and “al-Rozānā” that got all the kids dancing and the adults to sing along, rather than Amal’s original material or appreciation of the sophisticated arrangements and the ensemble members’ musicianship. Later Amal would comment to me: “It makes me sad my people don’t really know my music….”

Strangers in their homeland  213 After the show, our hosts would not let the band leave. We were taken to dinner in an outdoor patio adjacent to another courtyard, where an engagement party danced to a DJ blasting tunes ranging from Shakira’s Arabic adaptations to songs by the Lebanese singer Majda El-Roumi. It was pretty late, and Amal’s crew was tired, but as the table was being set up with a generous buffet of appetizers, ‘araq (anis-based alcoholic drink) and beer, it became obvious that this was not about to be a quick interlude. Rice and meats came an hour later. In the meantime, our hosts sat among us, introducing us to an oud player and a couple of aspiring singers. The oud player sat next to Naseem, obviously hoping for input from a master musician. Due to lack of training opportunities as well as the over-determinacy of the politicized folk-based repertoire that accompanied the rise of the PLO in the oPt, the study and practice of classical Arabic music had, since 1948, been maintained among ’48 Palestinians much more so than in the Occupied Territories (Boulous 2013). The oud player started with a solo, then accompanied a girl who sang a couple of Umm Kulthum classics quite well, followed by another girl who was nowhere nearly as accomplished. The locals’ performances felt as though they were auditioning to Amal and her musicians, at the same time that they were trying to create spaces of intimacy amongst Palestinians occupying different geographies of separation. When these lengthy performances ended—songs of this repertoire can be extended to last an hour, depending on the artist’s skill and audience response—Amal’s crew tried to get up and graciously leave, but our hosts were not ready to part. One of the locals, who was a little inebriated, asked Amal to sing, and when she politely declined, he began to sing an Abdel Halim Hafez classic. A couple of the older guys among our hosts, who were clearly a little inebriated themselves, got up to dance, the others clapping for them. This was the climax of an unspoken tug of wills. The locals wanted us to stay for the night, and perhaps, to extend the reunion with a world that exists beyond the confined realms of locally scripted horizons, in a place where conservative traditions and the Occupation have greatly dampened access to cultural life. Amal’s crew wanted to get back to their homes and lives. When the song was over, Amal got up and said: “We really have to leave, some of the guys have to be at work in the morning….” Since the Jenin checkpoint was long closed, our hosts sent a couple of young guys in a car ahead of us to lead us to the Tulkarm checkpoint. Tulkarm is located much further south and west of Jenin. Without their help, as no one had a phone with both GPS and reception, we would not have been able to navigate the roads at this time of night. We meandered through numerous unmarked villages, many of them silhouetted against the night in what seemed like a captured post-warzone frame suggestive of recently endured violence: darkened houses, no street lighting, overturned car carcasses on the sides of the road, a few of them burnt, listless shabāb hanging out in darkened streets, some smoking, some burning bonfires in the middle of the road, young kids among them. Someone commented: “What

214  Strangers in their homeland are they doing out this time of the night?” One village after another, the view was the same. After about an hour of meandering, the guys ahead of us turned right, only to reverse back shortly: “The checkpoint here is closed,” they said, “but no problem, we’ll take you to the next one.” As they led us to the Taybeh checkpoint, located yet further south, (bouzuq player) Jamil’s cell phone became active, and we followed the route on his GPS. We were making a huge detour, meandering through more darkened villages. Taybeh is located a short half hour’s drive northeast of Tel Aviv. We had been driving for hours all the way from the northern part of the country to the middle of the country in search of an open checkpoint. This checkpoint was open. We thanked the guys who led us there; this was as far as they could go, and they turned back. At the checkpoint two female soldiers armed with machine guns took everybody’s IDs and asked Amal what we had been doing in “The Territories.” After scrutinizing my American passport, the soldiers said they couldn’t let me into the country without a proper visa stamp. They called in the checkpoint commander, who reiterated that I couldn’t enter the country without either a stamped passport or an Israeli ID, which I hadn’t brought with me. Luckily, Taybeh is located in Area C, and hence not off-limits for (Jewish-) Israelis. After ten minutes of questioning, with Amal protesting all along that they could not leave me in the middle of nowhere, the commander let me go. This incident further highlighted for me the incongruities produced by continuously shifting, amorphous borders, where State and non-State occupy the same geographical area, introducing a complex web of parallel realities suspended between exclusion and inclusion. Taybeh checkpoint connects almost immediately with route 6—the fastest highway spanning from the south to the north of Israel. Although it was now around 2:30 AM and we still had a long drive ahead of us, the sense of released tension was palpable in the van. “Route 6, what a relief,” said someone. “Yes!!” someone else answered. We detoured to a stop near the Jenin checkpoint where Amin had parked his car, and then to Shefa-‘Amar to drop off Jamil, the nay player. By the time we got to Amal’s home it was around 4:30 AM. This episode outlines several aspects involving the work and artistic production of ’48 artists in their efforts to connect with their own people, across an arbitrarily produced, unpredictable and idiosyncratically managed border, which only they can (legally) cross. First are the sheer logistical difficulties involved, which may easily turn mundane travel and production problems into the Kafkaesque borderline existence described above. Beyond logistics, the border functions not only as material barrier. It is intimately implicated in the social relations and boundaries it constructs (Fassin 2011) not only between Jews and Palestinians but between Palestinians citizens and non-citizens. Our parting from the two guys that led us to the Taybeh checkpoint, which they could not cross, is the most obvious feature of the border’s role in the construction of difference, but its prominence obscures

Strangers in their homeland  215 numerous layers of the border’s politics of exclusion. Our hosts’ insistence on our staying the night portrayed, beyond their generous hospitality, their need to connect with a wider world that the ’48s represented to them. Among many other factors that circumscribe their lives, the Occupation most prominent among them, is the limited access to formal music education in the oPt, both temporally and institutionally, which is why the musicking around the dinner table felt like an audition. And for the ’48 Galileans, the cognitive and sensorial disorientation produced by the impossibility of communicating and navigating in Palestinian terrain, where they should expect (and want) to feel at home, produced its own marker of difference and dislocation. If they feel like strangers in their own land within the Green Line, the border is constructed to produce further difference across it. Amal’s performance served to bridge these markers of social difference through aesthetic representation and embodied presence. The traditional Palestinian dress, along with the folk and classics repertoire included in her set, channeled a musical and affective common ground of Palestinian unity that resonated with the local audience and created a shared space of continuity across geographic and civic-status divides. It also served to bridge the divergent artistic expectations of ’48s and Palestinians of the oPt. Although Amal was saddened by the fact that many did not know her original music, approximately 700 people in the audience were introduced to it that evening. For the musically inclined among them, this presented an opportunity to expand their palette past the familiar ground of ubiquitous folk and classics. This opportunity was doubly resonant in an area where the second intifada incurred some of the most devastating costs in human lives and civic infrastructure; the only local music institution, Al-Kamandjâti’s Jenin branch, had been recently founded (2007), and conservative traditions have also curtailed cultural production. The isolation imposed on oPt Palestinians by the Occupation had only served to bolster this conservatism. As mentioned in Chapter 1, in 2009 Al-Kamandjâti’s Jenin branch was torched, likely the work of conservatives’ animosity towards a secular cultural organization that incorporated Western traditions and dispositions. The Freedom Theatre established by Juliano Mer-Khamis in Jenin had undergone attacks as well, and many believe that his assassination in April 2011 was also due to resentment towards the cultural work and secularist freedoms espoused by the theater and its founder. For the locals who hosted Amal and her band, this visit was an opportunity to socialize in a context where looser social codes—drinking, a mixed-gender environment and musicking—provided a glimpse to horizons undetermined by strict social mores, lack of cultural access and the confinements of the Occupation. The story of Amal’s band at the Zababdeh Culture and Arts Festival illustrates both the cultural dissonances that borders, checkpoints and the Occupation impose on Palestinian communities, as well as the potential, both unifying and disruptive, that musical performances by ’48 artists bring to

216  Strangers in their homeland an area subject to the isolation imposed by the Occupation on the one hand, and homegrown, conservative cultural insularity, on the other. While performances in the West Bank present a particular set of challenges, for a prominent, politicized artist like Amal, performances within Israel necessitate other kinds of negotiations. Privately produced events or those sponsored by the communist party are a continuation of Amal’s lifelong activities and provide no cause for hesitation, nor do they draw criticism. But in the shadow of the polarized sociopolitical climate and raging cultural debates on BDS/PACBI and Israeli hasbara, Amal’s inclusivist approach is a fine line to tread. Artistic engagements pose dilemmas involving the choice of where, under whose sponsorship and in what contexts to perform. Art as shared space, art as battleground: Amal at the Jerusalem International Oud Festival and the JICC’s Speaking Arts Conference This section features Amal’s November, 2011 participation in two events: the prestigious Jerusalem International Oud Festival, and as the headline act for the Jerusalem’s Inter-Cultural Center’s (JICC) annual Speaking Arts Conference—which brings together Jews and Palestinians for performing arts workshops intended to encourage “Jewish-Arab dialogue through the arts.” The story of these performances illustrates the complexities faced by ’48 artists, who are torn between solidarity with the Palestinian cause, and their need to expand visibility and civic inclusion within Israel—and also, to make a living. I analyze these performances as “sites of disruption” that elicited diverse responses and debates in both Palestinian and Jewish public spheres, whilst foregrounding Amal’s point of view and agency. By demonstrating how Amal’s performances were lived and experienced—affectively, symbolically, discursively and performatively—amongst local actors, I also aim to inject subjectivity-oriented nuances into academic conversations on BDS/PACBI. These debates, whether supportive or critical of the movement, often theorize BDS through a macro-level analytic lens and/or an internationalist gaze that flattens out the complexities involved, which ethnographic groundwork in Palestine-Israel brings into focus.11 Founded in 2000, the Jerusalem Oud Festival began as a modest venture produced by the Confederation House, a cultural center intended to serve as “a meeting place for a variety of communities in Jerusalem in particular, and in Israel in general—Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, veteran Israelis and new immigrants….”12 The festival has since grown such that today its highly publicized concerts take place in Jerusalem’s most prestigious halls, showcasing local talent and international artists and drawing thousands. It is also promoted as an international tourist destination, magnetizing a host of international music critics and promoters of world music. According to Festival Director Effie Benaya, since the founding of PACBI

Strangers in their homeland  217 in 2004 international BDS campaigns have succeeded in reducing the pool of international artists willing to perform in Jerusalem (and in Israel in general).13 In 2011, however, ’48 artists were asked to boycott the festival as well. Amal had been invited to showcase her new release Baghānnī at the festival. She had participated in the festival in previous years, but this time she debated whether to attend or not: In the beginning I felt the Oud Festival did a lot of good for the exposure of Arabic music. They’ve never censored me, nor tried to intervene in what I sing or what I say onstage. And in my [publicity] interviews they’ve never stuttered: what I said was what was written. [But] it’s also East Jerusalem, and with [the home demolitions in] Sheikh Jarah going on, there are [now] a lot more settlements there…I [therefore] might feel differently about the next festival. On the one hand, I think it’s good the songs will… get to the people that I want them heard by, but I wonder if my boycott will help in some way… I won’t participate in a boycott only to be better liked. I will boycott where it is right and I can understand what I’m conducting it for. If I want the voice of Sheikh Jarah to be heard; if I want Jerusalem to be the capital of the Palestinian people [then the festival provides me with a stage to speak from]; if I could ease someone’s suffering by boycotting…. (AM May 9, 2011) By October 2011, the month before the festival, debates about participation of ’48s were taking place in Palestinian websites and beyond, in response to PACBI’s emphatic call to boycott the festival, issued in Arabic (October 14) and in English (October 31).14 For PACBI and the boycott supporters, participation in the festival amounted to supporting Israel’s colonization project: Let’s boycott Israel’s “Oud Festival,” an embodiment of Zionist cultural imperialism Despite the peoples’ revolutions that are shaking the thrones of tyranny and striving for democracy, freedom, dignity, and social justice in the Arab World, and in the midst of the hunger strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli occupation prisons and detention centers, we are surprised to hear that a number of Palestinian artists are participating in Israel’s “Oud Festival,” a Zionist propaganda festival that embodies what the late Edward Said termed “cultural imperialism” and that aims to appropriate our cultural heritage, just as it has done to our land and history. The participation of Palestinian artists in this festival would provide a Palestinian fig leaf to an event that explicitly aims to merge “Middle Eastern genres with original Israeli works,” and to celebrate Israel’s musical diversity and its “multifaceted musical idioms that draw on the pluralistic roots of the Jewish people,” according to the Israeli

218  Strangers in their homeland Minister of Culture’s welcoming message in the opening of the festival’s program… The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel calls upon all Palestinians, especially in the areas of ‘48 and Occupied Jerusalem, to boycott this festival… This is the least they can do, as their participation would undermine the growing movement for the cultural boycott of Israel, one of the most effective forms of our popular and non-violent struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.15 (Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel [PACBI] 2011a) The article also pointed out that the festival was organized by the Zionist Confederation House and sponsored by Israel’s Ministry of Culture, the Jerusalem municipality—considered another arm of the Occupation—along with other institutions that are complicit with Israel’s violations of international law and human rights. It ended with the questions: “Is it acceptable for any Palestinian artist to participate in a Zionist festival with such official support?… isn’t it time to refuse being ‘embellished’ and led to exhibitions to dance to the tunes of our oppressors?” (PACBI 2011a). In an effort to convince Palestinian citizens of the urgency of this call, the article also quoted Khaled Jubran, a ’48 artist who since his collaborative projects of the 1990s has rebuked his cultural ties to Israel, in the following statement: Let the most enlightened people, the prophets who preach tolerance, and the believers in coexistence, come and give me one good reason why I should contribute, as an Arab musician, to the fabrication of a musical culture for a people that lack one and that insists on denying my language! Besides the anti-colonialist sentiments expressed here, PACBI’s call demonstrates how music is used to essentialize ethnonational categories on both sides of the conflict. While Israel’s Minister of Culture promoted the Eastern Jewish origins of the musics showcased in the festival, thus absenting the Palestinians it also represented, for the Palestinian boycotters and Khaled Jubran, the festival was an appropriation of their heritage. Their move disregarded that much of the same heritage is shared by Mizrahim, who make up approximately 50 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizens. Mirroring the Minister of Culture’s exclusionary discourse, the boycotters’ appropriation of Middle Eastern culture as the sole propriety of Palestinians in Palestine-Israel negates a long history of Jewish participation in, and contributions to, Middle Eastern musics (Seroussi 2010). It also positions Israel as solely the product of colonial Western interventions in the Middle East, as represented by its Ashkenazi (i.e. occidental) elite. This process of essentialization is the outcome of a national movement wanting to establish its own cohesive grand narrative as the counter canon to that of the Eurocenter (Lavie and Swedenburg 1996). But, like all grand narratives, it is fraught with tensions and contradictions.

Strangers in their homeland  219 Public debates that followed further elaborated this essentialist viewpoint. For example, a Palestinian writer attacked the Jerusalem municipality for its treatment of East Jerusalem Palestinians—demolishing their homes as it was building Jewish settlements—at the same time that it appropriated their music for the Oud Festival. His final words were directed to Amal: “Surely you know what normalization is… so I suggest that if you participate… don’t sing “al-Rozānā,” my grandmother’s song, and don’t wear her dress” (Hilwe 2011). Ultimately, the campaign resulted in two artists cancelling their scheduled performances: the Greek singer Martha Frintzilla and the Palestinian citizen Hosam Hayek, who intended to present his aptly titled new album Gharīb fī Waṭanī (Stranger in My Homeland). Amal did not cancel. Her decision was based on the following reasoning: I live here. My parents fought to stay in the homeland. We fought for our rights; for the Arabic language [to be recognized as official language]… for the Palestinian minority to be recognized and treated equally… The moment that there is a framework in which I can express my art without stuttering… I sing the same texts to Palestinians in Ramallah or Birzeit as I do at the Oud Festival; I don’t change my skin because there are Jews or because the framework is what it is… I have never been supported by the Foreign Ministry, I refuse that, and I’m not supported by the Ministry of Education…So what is the artist supposed to do?… To be silent? Or, to pack and move abroad? Then I’ll be legitimated, as other Palestinian artists have been, when they have lost hope here? I choose to believe in hope. (AM, February 21, 2012) Amal’s deliberations point to the inherent dissonances that boycott logics imposed on ’48s artists, as well as to how the internationalized Palestinian campaign inflects back home. Civic rights and equality are at the core of BDS’ campaign, whose goals include ending the Occupation and colonization of the territories Israel conquered in 1967, equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their pre-1948 homes and properties.16 Omar Barghouti (2011), the founder and animator of BDS/PACBI, cites a near-consensus support for BDS’ goals among Palestinian citizens. At the same time, anti-normalization ethics require ’48 Palestinians to absent themselves from cultural participation in civic life offered by Israeli institutions that do welcome them, or at minimum, allow them to stage their presence and opinions. In the complex human geography of Palestine-Israel the balance between boycotting academic and cultural institutions and promoting/protecting the rights of individual subjectivities to civic and cultural inclusivity, is a fine but messy line to draw. The inherent contradiction between the exclusive politics of nationhood and those of inclusive citizenship raised by this debate surfaces a cultural predicament that parallels the political predicament of ’48s. Israeli

220  Strangers in their homeland citizenship bars ’48s from being electorally “counted” in the oPt. At the same time, ’48s also fall outside the purview of Israel’s leadership in any negotiations with the PA (and the PLO beforehand) and other deliberations taking place in the Knesset. In other words, Palestinian citizens have been politically absented from crucial debates on issues that pertain to all who live in the region, by both successive Israeli governments and Palestinian leaderships.17 This predicament leaves ’48s with little space for their own claims and stakes in history to be voiced within the country and region in which they live. The academic and cultural boycott adds further layers to how this predicament is lived and experienced. While according to PACBI’s updated (2018) guidelines Palestinian citizens are not formally asked to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, the ethic of anti-normalization remains an emotionally, ideologically and morally charged topic that continues to animate debates affecting ’48 artists, due to the representational associations of public performances.18 Hebrew press reviews of Amal’s performance at the Oud Festival (November 13) were incredibly favorable, if not glowing. Yediot Aharonot’s caption (Feder 2011) read: “Amal Murkus: dazzling Arabic Music.” The caption in Haaretz stated: “Justice Needs to be Heard!” (Shalev 2011b). Both writers highlighted the silencing of Arab culture in the Israeli mainstream and spoke apologetically about the injustice that necessitated their introduction of an Israeli artist of such high caliber. They also commented on the range and beauty of her voice, the quality of ensemble’s musicianship and the superb arrangements. The Haaretz reporter felt Baghānnī was one of the most important albums produced in Israel over the past few years, one that should have been celebrated as a major event in the country’s musical life. Yediot’s reporter highlighted Amal’s politicized bent and the need for such voices to be heard. Amal’s reading of the song texts in both Hebrew and Arabic prior to their performance, inspired in the Haaretz reporter a passing fantasy of a shared life inclusive of Arabic and Hebrew speakers. While Amal’s performance at the Oud Festival was not sold out, and both reporters noted that there were fewer Arabs than Jews in the audience, the performance produced by the JICC just a few days later at the Jerusalem YMCA’s beautifully frescoed auditorium (November 17) was packed to the gills, with many Palestinians in attendance. This was probably because the JICC performance was a much lower profile event, and hence had not drawn much attention from BDS. The Oud Festival is a relatively exclusive, pricey, high profile and internationalized event. As such, the discourses around it associatively pair the high culture it represents with national value (as highlighted by the Minister of Culture), rendering it an obvious target for BDS. By contrast, while the Speaking Arts Conference would likely be considered a site of normalization, it is a local, low-profile, community-oriented event. The choice of the YMCA rather than the Jerusalem Theater where the Oud Festival performance had taken place also rendered it more accessible to

Strangers in their homeland  221 East Jerusalemites due to geographical proximity and because the YMCA enjoys a long history of interfaith and intercultural activities, and hence is an ethnically unmarked space. Finally, the conference’s promoters invested an incredible amount of legwork and provided subsidized ticketing, in order to get Palestinians from the Eastern city and elsewhere to participate in the conference and attend the show. I follow here with a short description of the performance, in order to contrast it with one provided in a review published by Israel Hayom, a rightwing tabloid established and funded by archconservative American-Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his exclusionary, hyper-nationalistic views. This comparison demonstrates how the meanings generated by a performance can be distorted and manipulated to political ends. As Amal did at the Oud Festival, she read the song texts in both Hebrew and Arabic prior to their musical performance, so that everyone in the audience would apprehend their meaning. The crowd soon warmed up, clapping enthusiastically at the end of each song. In songs underscored by a folkloric feel, they clapped along with the driving rhythms. In the middle of her set, Amal invited Sameer Makhoul onstage. An oud player whose playing manifests virtuosity and sensitivity combined, Sameer had completely endeared himself to the conference participants who attended the music workshops he had conducted. Sameer had also contributed a song to Baghānnī (“Abbāy”). Amal began the song with Sameer and the band accompanying her, but the song soon turned into a duet, the chemistry between them palpable in their exchanges and transmitted to the audience. Sameer began the following piece with an oud solo that built up very slowly, which distracted the audience at first, but he soon got them listening for its subtleties. He then built it up to a running pace of a free-styled, filigreed étude, by which time everybody was clapping for him. Once the audience was primed, the percussion came in, and by now all were clapping and cheering. This was one of the warmest crowds, both attentive and participatory, I have seen in concert-hall performances. Another duet ensued, completely enrapturing the crowd as Amal and Sameer followed each other’s twists and turns, their synergy radiating into the auditorium. By the time Sameer was finishing this number with a layālī vocal improvisation, the audience was cheering emphatically, and some, especially his workshop students, were dancing on the sides of the hall. The two artists hugged and Sameer left the stage, but the ḥafla atmosphere remained. By now many people were dancing on the sides of the auditorium, and they kept dancing through Naseem’s brilliant violin solo, which served as the entry into the next piece: “Doqq,” one of the songs from Baghānnī. Amal closed with her Palestinianized version of “Gracias a la Vida,” her prior reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem highlighting the minimalist things in life which make it worth living. On this final note of hope, everyone in the hall was clapping or dancing, some singing along.

222  Strangers in their homeland Israel Hayom’s coverage of the show (Yalon 2011) could not have been more incongruent with my own perceptions. It seemed as though the writer attended a different show, or perhaps, reviewed it only for the purpose of countering the glowing reviews and imaginaries of a better world that Amal’s Oud Festival performance had generated in the other dailies. The article essentially accused Amal of incitement to violence. The sub-caption read: The Speaking Arts Conference is supposed to create an Arab-Jewish dialogue; but the singer Amal Murkus decided to propagate extremist messages through it and generated the rage of those present. The proposition: It’s all right to spill blood when you are building a Palestinian state. The writer had allegedly interviewed numerous people who had left in the middle of the show, and who had supposedly experienced shock in response to the “propagandist,” “anti-Israeli” and “antisemitic” content of the repertoire. His quote from a follow-up interview with Amal stated that she did not recall such arguments in the audience, and that she felt that “any struggle for freedom and against the Occupation is legitimate.” These highly divergent readings of Amal’s performances in the Hebrew press are, at least partially, the product of the political leanings of these publications and the predispositions of those who write for them. Israel Hayom’s description of the performance and its vilification of Amal’s is fully in line with the daily’s overall function as a platform for right-wing views and constant advocation for the extremist, hyper-nationalist Jewish narratives and symbols this platform promotes (Jamal and Bsool 2014). Projecting the voices of Palestinian citizens into the public sphere, and indeed, any kind of Jewish-Palestinian integrative dialogue is anathematic to such views. Israel Hayom’s reporter had come to the performance to hear a story that had already been written, and that would appeal to, as well as manipulate, the emotional and common-sensical pulls of its public. By contrast, for the writer of the-left leaning Haaretz, which prides itself for its pluralism and quality reportage, the same performance provided an affective space that enabled him to feel and imagine the conflict’s transcendence and regional integration, and that fleetingly potentialized a post-national shared life. And for the writer of Yediot, considered “centrist” within the Jewish-Israeli public sphere, the performance was an exemplar of the value of modern Palestinian-Israeli culture Jewish-Israelis should become acquainted with. The discursive spheres that materialized around these performances project the ambiguity inherent in aesthetic representations that allow them to be appropriated for pre-disposed political frames. These can be easily be reframed, strategically and emotionally, for divergent purposes in a charged political situation, regardless of the artist’s intentions. Amal’s performances provided opportunity for a variety of agents to foreground the essentialist bent that shapes the struggle for legitimizing exclusivist ethnonationalist narratives, within both Palestinian and Jewish public spheres. For PACBI supporters, it represented participation in a neocolonial project. For Israel

Strangers in their homeland  223 Hayom, it projected a Palestinian voice that needed to be silenced. And for the supportive Jewish-Israeli writers, these performances enabled the imaginary of a pluralistic society or post-national life—without delving deeply into the reasons they should feel apologetic for the contemporary lack of Palestinian voices within the Israeli media and cultural spheres—nor sensing the need to critique the Minister of Culture’s promotional framing of the festival as a celebration of the culture of Oriental (Mizrahi) Jews. The most profound response, however, was the dancing audience at Amal’s JICC show. Here Amal’s performance created what geographer Paul Routledge (2010) dubs a “sensuous solidarity,” one generated via performance, bodily movements and techniques that mobilize emotions and symbolism, allowing for dominant social norms to be played with, subverted and transformed. Amal’s JICC performance provided a fleeting emergence of an embodied language of solidarity unhampered by ethnonational divides and an actual enactment of a politics of hope. Her performances also projected the voice, agency and subject position of an artist who is a Palestinian citizen into the public arena, along with the complex negotiations and hardships involved in the disruption of essentialist narratives of belonging. As Amal summarized the experience: I’ll get on stage, and Jews will get pissed off at me, and so will Palestinians. It’s OK as far as I’m concerned. That’s what art needs to do. To bring out thoughts, to bring out arguments…. I do get hurt, because I’m an artist and a sensitive person… And I do everything from the heart, with a lot of effort, without economic support. My one source of support is the audience, and I have talent, and I have amazing partners who play with me and arrange and compose. They’re my brothers and they support me and they’re with me in everything. That’s my strength: my audience, my players, my family. (AM February 21, 2012) **** I here turn to elaborate on the life and music of Jowan Safadi, an artist whose indie-oriented musical output lives primarily online and in alternative live spaces. Jowan’s work remains mostly underneath the radar of the Israeli cultural establishment and in tension with paradigmatic representations of Palestinian collectivity. The scene Jowan’s music resounds in prominently projects Palestinian resistance and autonomy, along with a youth counterculture associated with individualism, pleasure and subversion of patriarchal, religious or essentialized narratives of Palestinianness.

Jowan Safadi The Turks came here The Turks left The English arrived

224  Strangers in their homeland [and then] The English left The Jews arrived Tomorrow we’ll see What will happen When they run [too]— Who [next] will want to ride us When our cousins leave? —Lines from the song “Min Biddo Yirkabnā” (“Who Will Want to Ride Us?”) In the performance featured here, Jowan’s presentation of this longstanding number in his repertoire was backed by a newly assembled band, which included a rhythm guitarist also providing back-up vocals, bass and drums— all adding a hard driving beat to Jowan’s singing and lead guitar lines. The rock rhythm, distortion guitar and clipped, gritty delivery of the lyrics provided a danceable garage-band styled musical envelope matched by Jowan’s adrenalized prancing about the stage. The song exemplifies the compact lyric irony that characterizes Jowan’s work, encapsulated in the punch line that makes up the chorus: “who next will want to ride us, when our cousins leave?” The term “cousins” (awlād ‘ammnā in Arabic, bney-dodim in Hebrew) is used by both Palestinians and Jews in everyday speak in ironic reference to the Other, as a marker of both distance and familiarity or a kind of familial estrangement that cannot be untangled from its unwanted proximity. The existential dissonances that form core experiences for ’48s unravel in the song’s final verse: “We didn’t come and we didn’t go; We are the ones who stayed in place; Every day a new guest comes; And freedom is a faraway dream.” The danceable rhythms and punkstyled performativity added yet another layer of irony to the sardonic humor embedded in lyrics. This dissonance between lyric content and aesthetic rendering is a prominent feature running through much of Jowan’s artistic output. Many in the crowd knew the lyrics by heart and were singing along, and all in the front rows were dancing and jumping to the backbeat, some toasting the beer or ‘araq-filled plastic glasses in their hands as they danced.19 The combination of protest-politics and hedonism, along with the choice of location for the performance, is representative of the youthful Palestinian scene that convened for the event. Jowan’s performance (April 9, 2012) was held in the garden of a now-closed sideroad restaurant located on a route connecting Haifa to the Druze village of Usafiyeh. The only marker of human activity observed from the unlit road were the cars parked in the restaurant’s parking lot. In the garden behind the restaurant, now equipped with a stage, a sound system and basic lighting, approximately 100 people had gathered to celebrate Jowan’s new release Namrūd (Troublemaker). This alternative Palestinian scene inhabits temporary, shifting locales in order to remain under the radar of both (Jewish)-Israeli exclusionary

Strangers in their homeland  225 discourses and practices, and the watchful gaze of conservative Palestinians eyes. Such spaces provide respite from the ever-vigilant scrutinization of Israeli authorities and exclusionary cultural institutions, as well as from intra-communal patriarchal and class-based norms that also refract into regional, sectarian, sexual and gendered proprieties (Karkabi 2013). DJ outfit Jazar Crew’s mix of dub, electronica and trance—a little disco thrown in as well—prepped the audience for the upcoming performance. Dance, drink, scarves and the occasional kūfiyya provided little shelter from the cold, high altitude air; the loyal crowd stuck out the event nonetheless. This performance staged and celebrated Palestinianness, albeit one encased in the aesthetics and practices of urban cosmopolitanism and youthful defiance rather than in traditional markers of “authenticity,” and this crowd was hungry for it. Head-shaved Mohawk style for the occasion, Jowan presented a number of songs from his new album and other YouTube-released singles produced since his move to Haifa in 2007 (see Figure 5.2). Jowan began to cultivate the burgeoning Palestinian cultural scene that materialized here after his move. In tandem, he developed a growing engagement with the Palestinian NGO Baladna, an association for Palestinian youth focused on raising awareness and fostering leadership on issues of national identity, social justice and human rights among Palestinian citizens. While Jowan’s recorded songs vary greatly in terms of style and instrumentation, in this performance they were all adapted to the punk-rock format of the ensemble. Yet their delivery remained lined up both lyrically

Figure 5.2 Jowan taking the Namrūd CD launch, with the same band, to Beit Aneesah, Ramallah. Photograph by Fares S. Mansour.

226  Strangers in their homeland and musically with Jowan’s stylistic hallmarks: metaphorical lyric compactness and affective dissonance created by the incongruity of lyric content with the musical arrangements. Highly personal songs about love turned into heartbreak and bitterness (“Touch Me;” “I Gave You My Heart”) were rendered in danceable ḥafla grooves.20 The electronic beats featured in the original recording of “al-Ghūl” (“The Monster”)—a song about approaching a nervous breakdown—render it a soundtrack fit for a rave, but it was no less danceable in this format.21 Along with “Min Biddo Yirkabnā,” a number of politicized songs included in the set bore their own ironies, their critiques sometimes turned inwards as much as they are towards Jewish-Israeli society. “Kāsak yā Waṭan” (“Cheers, Homeland”), for example, began with a march rhythm and a gesture of a military-styled salute.22 Using familial relations as a central metaphor, with “cousins” referencing Jewish-Israelis and “mother and father” referencing Arab nations, its biting lyrics stated: Cheers homeland, cheers; I salute you and your people… …Forget how your cousins; Beat and raped you, While your family was watching; And in front of your mother and father, Who instead of standing by you; Gave you up and sold you… Cheers homeland, cheers. (The crowd did…) The bluesy cadence of “Ṭayr Abābīl” (“Birds of Fire”),23 a song written during Israel’s 2008–2009 attack on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead), anchors multiple linguistic registers of Arabic. The song recontextualizes, within present day politics, a chapter (sūra) from the Qur’ān that speaks metaphorically of the heretical people of the elephant, who had conspired to destroy the holy al-kaʽba and were punished by birds of fire throwing scorching clay rocks from the sky. Alternating contemporary styled poetics with verses modeled on the Qur’ān, the song asks: “see what the children of Israel have done to us, explain to us the difference between them and the people of the elephant?….” Inspired by Jowan’s identification with the suffering and helplessness of Gaza during the onslaught, the song can also be interpreted as a critique of empty promises of religious salvation. While Jowan had been criticized by conservatives for his subversive take on the Qur’ān, in this performance—the song extended with the aid of much distortion and psychedelic hype—the crowd loved it. This was followed by “Yā Ḥarām al-Kuffār” (“Poor Infidels”), a tongue and cheek take on overly simplistic interpretations of Muslim teleological paths to heaven. Musically, the song was dressed up in a campy country two-step beat and twangy guitar riffs:24 Oh Poor infidels, swimming in the sea of fire, Here comes judgment day, as stated in the book, Look how cute the believers are, just like good boys,

Strangers in their homeland  227 Holding the hand of God and walking into heaven, And heaven is very sweet. It has wine and juice, It has trees and plants. It also has the prettiest girls, Plenty of women … very very sexy, Every believer takes 70, lucky them—the believers, And, oh poor infidels, swimming in the sea of fire…. The song had earned Jowan several death-wishes posted on his Facebook page. But here, like the rest of the material presented, it was received with hoots and much applause. Further into the set the audience began to demand what they wanted to hear. “Kahrabā’” (“Electricity”),25 from Namrūd, is a song that deals with sex and masturbation (“the pipes need to be plumbed…”). In this performance it ended with cheers and someone from the crowd bringing up a vodka bottle onstage as a token of appreciation. Such taboo topics are novel introductions; according to Jowan, another song of his was one of the first released “Palestinian sex songs.” The show closed with a long, improvised jam that included spoken word and lines that veered between song and recitation, yells and agonized screams, over a psychedelic instrumental buildup that alternated spacey drum and bass sections with distortion filled sonic clusters, to describe the slaughter of a lamb. This was Jowan’s ode to vegetarianism, another novel topic, here also functioning as a critique of the animal carnage associated with ‘īd al-aḍḥā (Feast of the Sacrifice). The need to develop alternative Palestinian spaces such as the evening described above must be contextualized within broader social dynamics of repression and confinement. These are framed by Israeli repression of demonstrative Palestinianness on the one hand, and conservative Palestinian and/or regional conventions of social codes or “authentic” representations, on the other. Jowan has paid dearly for his “troublemaker” role, both in situations in which he staged Palestinianness vis-à-vis Israeli society, and in situations in which he performed narratives of alterity vis-à-vis Palestinian and regional norms of social acceptability and religious propriety. I turn here to these events in order to contextualize their disruptive effects in particular performance settings, as well as to highlight the social and spiritual costs incurred by a ’48 artist who refuses to submit his personhood to the political and social institutions that combine to circumscribe it. Jowan at Haifa’s Bringing the Hearts Closer Festival: “I’ll suicide bomb you with freestyle movement dance” In the summer of 2010 Jowan performed with his friend Walaa Sbeit at the Festival for Bringing Hearts Closer and for Coexistence. The festival was sponsored by the Haifa municipality and the New Israel Fund (NIF),

228  Strangers in their homeland an NGO concerned with civic pluralism and democracy in Israel. Jowan and Walaa created a program that included skits and songs from both artists’ repertoires they combined for the event. The idea was to stage discourses on sensitive topics that usually remain within Palestinian circles— including refugees, political prisoners, discrimination, racism and the militancy of Israeli society—to a mixed audience of Jews and Palestinians. These topics are usually muted in shared environments for fear of censorship and repercussions. In bringing these topics into a shared domain, Jowan and Walaa were also staging a critique that poked at normative, hegemonic performance models of coexistence posed by the festival and similar projects intended to celebrate multiculturalism and civic pluralism in Israel. Their first skit satirized the commonplace and humiliating Palestinian experience of being ethnically profiled and searched at the airport and elsewhere: …I started with the sketches… a kind of stand-up opener, simply to laugh at things. I said I was looking for an Arab, a good Arab, to come up and help us. Then [Walaa] got onstage. And then I said I needed the Arab [in order] to search him… I stripped Walaa onstage… and discovered a kūfiyya in his bag. “He’s a fucking terrorist. They’re all the same!” [is what I said]. And then it became a song.26 (JS, February 3, 2012) The song developing from the skit began with Walaa rapping in English: … I’m a walking bomb, straight up from the land of martyrdom… Search me I’m an Arab, I’m a walking bomb… …I’ll shoot you with a bullet of poetry, I’ll assassinate you with a monologue, I’ll suicide bomb you with freestyle movement dance, And I’ll torture you with the rhythm of my peace drums…. Walaa’s rap served as an introduction to Jowan’s song Marbūṭ (“Tied Up”):27 “they tied up my body, they tied up my tongue, they spit in my face, they cursed my mother… But art cannot be tied….” a song that speaks about art remaining free, no matter what happens. The videoed performance shows an incredibly receptive crowd, hooting, applauding and whistling in appreciation. However, neither this song nor what followed went over well with everyone in the audience. As Jowan described it: People started to gather … it filled up… Arabs, Jews. [In the middle of the song] one of the organizers came and said “listen, we’re going back to DJ music because the audience isn’t happy with the content.”

Strangers in their homeland  229 Not happy with the content? People are jumping, suddenly there is a dabke line, people in the plaza, dozens, are actually holding hands and having a dabke circle…. Maybe some of the people are not happy with some of the content?… In short, I’m in the middle of the performance high… [I said] I’ll finish my performance and I’ll go. “No, you have to go. Sorry. They don’t like this.” … they complained again. So I said, “listen, let’s not get off in this sort of way. We’ll finish the song and we’ll go.” I got exasperated, because they were constantly interrupting us… and in the middle of the song…[they] turned down the volume. The promoters’ closing off the mics in the middle of the performance revealed the unspoken boundaries of Israeli coexistence models: “…Hundreds of people jumping in front of you, they know the songs, and it’s such powerful energy. I think that this is what scared them…” Jowan said. The dancing audience’s response to the performance projected the power of outspokenness to galvanize community for Palestinians who are unaccustomed to the outright projection of such challenges unto a public space whose boundaries are framed by the depoliticized banner of “coexistence.” This was just the beginning of publicized exposure that turned into a Kafkaesque entanglement with state security. Shortly after the festival, the national daily Maariv’s local Haifa publication featured an article with the headline: “Haifa: a festival for bringing the hearts closer turned into an incitement demonstration” (Izrael 2010). The subheading read: “A duo of rappers that lauds suicide terrorists, stickers titled ‘the butchers to flight’ and other surprises awaited those who came to Bringing the Hearts Closer Festival.” The referenced sticker is a play on the slogan “the best to flight” used to recruit aspiring pilots to the IDF’s air force, a statement that clearly rubbed against the writer’s patriotic sentiments. The author also interviewed an unnamed audience member who testified that “the guy onstage sang in English ‘I’m a proud Arab, a suicide bomber, I will murder your mother and your sister too’,” a highly “elaborated” translation of Walaa’s lyrics. Apparently, other (Jewish) neighborhood folks complained that the neighborhood was becoming a nest of leftist (i.e. Arabs and their sympathizers) extremists. The article drew the attention of right-wing MK Arieh Eldad, who used the story to gain political capital by convincing the State Prosecutor to open an investigation against the two artists on suspicion of incitement to violence. Jowan was called in for questioning. Following lengthy legal deliberations, the investigation was closed “for lack of evidence.” The argument in support of this ruling explained that the inciting song line that had provided cause for opening the investigation actually stated: “I’ll suicide bomb you with freestyle movement dance,” its meaning too ambiguous to make a solid legal basis for pursuing the investigation further. However, the last clause of

230  Strangers in their homeland the State Prosecutor’s legal summary letter contained a veiled threat concerning future cases: Despite [the right to freedom of speech] we do not think that we should worry if within the State of Israel, speech in admiration of suicide bombers specifically, or condoning of terrorism in general, will be made to chill off, if not completely frozen. In all other areas the warmth of an open and democratic society, whose expression is free and even tempestuous, will be maintained. (Eldad 2011) Predictably, follow-up coverage in the right-wing tabloid Israel Hayom (Adato 2011) promoted the idea that the case was closed for lack of evidence rather than unreasonable cause for pursuing charges, insinuating the two artists’ culpability. In April 2012, Jowan and Walaa filed a demand for the case to be closed with a clear “not-guilty” verdict. It took another two years and another filing on their behalf that advised the prosecution they were prepared to take the case to the Supreme Court, for the pair to be fully exonerated (Khoury 2014). While with the closure of the case this incident may be written off as a tempest in a teapot, what cannot be written off is the sense of being “tied up” Jowan speaks of in his song Marbūṭ. Such sentiments were expressed to me by numerous Palestinian citizens who were afraid of losing their jobs or sustaining other repercussions should their opinions or political activism (of the kind that would be better tolerated if associated with Jewish citizens) become public information. The trope of the “good Arab” Jowan recruited Walaa onstage with, indexes subservience, compliance and muting of critiques and frustrations as conditions for inclusion. The stereotypical “good Arab” is one who accepts Jewish rules of the game; the “bad Arab” does not, and the very production of such stereotypes provides a means of divide and rule policies set to “manage” the Arab-Jewish conflict in Israel (Bar-Tal and Teichman 2005). Walaa and Jowan’s performative use of images of martyrs and suicide bombers reappropriated images taken from the geography of violence that characterizes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to underline the empowering role of art, rather than violent action, in becoming “untied” and resisting oppression. And it was this very defiance of self-censorship that earned Walaa and Jowan the audience’s appreciation. For those who celebrated the performance, it represented a kind of “coming out” into the joint public sphere with discourses and affects that are typically expressed and enacted with such openness only in segregated (safe) spaces. But as the performance turned the “good Arab” image inside out, it also pushed at the limits of “coexistence” that framed the Bringing the Hearts Closer Festival, and threatened the conviviality of equilibrium prescribed by authority. The hyper-paranoid reaction that followed, beginning with shutting off the

Strangers in their homeland  231 microphones to the time and energy devoted to the case by the office of the State Prosecutor, cannot be discounted, nor can the violence embedded in the recommendation that such speech should be “frozen off.” This response represents the narrowing boundaries and limits of civic inclusion in Israel, and speaks to the habitual Israeli reflex of enforcing the grid of sociopolitical power hierarchies at the expense of its cherished democratic self-image. “Between the devil and the deep blue sea:” from “Poor Infidels” performed in Amman to “Safe in the Arms of the Occupation” produced back home While Jowan’s performance at Bringing the Hearts Closer Festival created a “site of disruption” vis-à-vis the (Jewish-) Israeli consensus, his performance in Amman, Jordan (November 27, 2012) created another, actually landing him in jail. As mentioned above, Amman provides a hub for regional encounters for an alternative Arab music scene that is uniquely also accessible to Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank. Jowan was to perform two shows: the first with FishSamak, the band that accompanied him at Namrūd’s release party, the second unplugged. He did not make the second show. Following his performance of “Poor Infidels” in the first show, Jowan was detained by police and charged with the criminal offense of insulting religion. A “Free Jowan” Internet campaign signed by many prominent artists and musicians, combined with legal pressure, brought to his release after a couple of days. But the experience left him shaken, bringing home the ways in which political and social boundaries are forcefully inscribed onto one’s body and personhood. The experience also added to the sense of exile and dislocation of a citizen who, as a reporter for the UAE-based The National (Lepage 2013) titled him, is nonetheless a “man without a country.” The song Jowan wrote following his release—“Safe in the Arms of the Occupation” (“Fī Ḥaḍan al-Iḥtilāl”)—reflects this experience, while contextualizing it in a broader disappointment from the failed promises of the Arab Spring:28 It’s not only the Jordan incident that made me feel this way… it’s about the revolutions [which] instead of leading people to liberation, freedom and rights it [became] the opposite…. [it’s about] that feeling of being confused, or being torn between the devil and the deep blue sea. Between [Israel’s] Apartheid system… [or] Occupation, and a fascist religious system. Not necessarily religious, but pretending to be… It’s about how lost we are… that we find the Occupation to be the least of evils. (JS July 23, 2018)

232  Strangers in their homeland FishSamak provided the hard-core musical accompaniment to these lyrics: Oh look how the spring; Turned out to be an autumn; How they fooled us. Look how Salafi our countries are; Swallowed by blackness; How they fooled us. No summer nor fun; We saw nothing but death; The “Spring” turned out a fraud. The video (2014) shows Jowan, hands shackled, while a variety of objects are passed into them, only to be contemplated and then discarded: a newspaper he scours for information, a bouquet of flowers representing spring, a hijab-clad green balloon with a woman’s face painted on it and others. One of these objects is an empty picture-frame Jowan tries to sing through before throwing it away; it is the very ontological framing of ascribed representations that he cannot live with nor create within. In between these images is footage of hyenas—representing the dark forces of history that have hijacked the contemporary Arab revolutions—chasing or devouring their kill. Towards the end of the video a lion appears, symbolizing Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad (which means “The Lion” in Arabic). The lion is first seen deflecting the hyenas away from their game, and later, chasing and consuming their prey, showing how as Syria’s revolution devolved into a civil war the “Great Protector” became a devouring beast himself. The song’s chorus features a woman whose dancing arms flutter around Jowan, inviting, caressing, enveloping: Maybe I am sad; Because for a moment I felt safe; In the arms of Occupation. The video ends with Jowan seen fighting invisible perpetrators as he sings: “Nobody dare touch me; nobody dare jail me, but my love.” These two episodes—the incitement charges that followed Bringing the Hearts Closer Festival and the jailing in Amman—created “sites of disruption” that came at a high personal cost to Jowan. Such incidents demonstrate how within the complex sociopolitical dynamics in the region, a Palestinian citizen does not get to openly stage a moral argument about why selfhood matters if s/he does not tow to either hegemonic Israeli models of inclusion or regional social and/or religious codes of appropriate representations of Arabness or Palestinianness. Per Jowan,

Strangers in their homeland  233 It’s becoming dangerous to hold on to revolutionary ideas that would somehow change the reality into a better one… It’s not safe here, it’s not safe there, it just depends on which taboo you break, you know? Some places its more acceptable to break religious taboos, other places to break political ones is more dangerous. (JS July 23, 2018) The alternative Palestinian scene that came together at Namrūd’s release party provided a safe, if transitory, performance space that is transcendent of the naturalized boundaries of nation, religion, gender or sexuality. Staged in other public spheres, such expressive freedoms can literally land one in jail. Earlier Career: Jowan in Be’er Sheva (Bi’r al-Sabʽ) Jowan’s alliance with the burgeoning Palestinian alternative scene is the outcome of a shifting sense of personal and political alignments that correspond to the increasingly polarized post-Oslo sociopolitical climate. This shift galvanized following his 2007 move to the mixed city context of Haifa. Beforehand, Jowan lived in the Southern Negev (Naqab) city of Be’er Sheva for 13 years. Be’er Sheva is a predominantly Jewish city. The Palestinian community living there is miniscule. The Arabic-speaking Bedouin community in the surrounding area has negligible social, political or cultural representation in the urban landscape that provided artistic fodder for Jowan’s earlier musical experimentations. Jowan’s early partners in his artistic journey were Jews. In chronicling Jowan’s artistic trajectory during his Be’er Sheva years I aim to highlight how the life and art of a Palestinian citizen of universalist identifications became increasingly challenged by a changing sociopolitical landscape, and the process of personal and artistic transformations that occurred in tandem. Jowan moved to Be’er Sheva after spending several years abroad. When he returned, he was not ready to rejoin the social and familial confinements of Nazareth, his native city. He applied to Be’er Sheva’s Ben-Gurion University, about as far from Nazareth as he could go in Israel. In Be’er Sheva he picked up the guitar, soon becoming enmeshed in a network of local musicians. Music took over his life: Jowan quit the university, rented a house in the Old City, filled it with instruments and turned it into an open house for musicians. After filtering in musicians he wanted to work with, Lenses was born. The project centered on Jowan’s songwriting and musical experimentations but remained open-ended and collaborative in its nature. Songs ranged from lyrical ballads to hard driving punk-influenced numbers, all combining musical instruments with electronica. Shortcuts, the first of three Lenses albums, was released in 2001 by Fact Records, a small Israeli indie label focused on electronica and experimental styles, and it created quite a bit of traction within the small alternative scene in Israel.29 The album was in English, the language of the music Jowan and his music cohort were listening to. English also felt natural to him because he had

234  Strangers in their homeland been speaking it at home and in his travels over the past few years, and because he had studied English literature. Other reasons for the choice of language were because: It’s a little weird to figure out how to do it in Arabic, when I’m here without one Arab player or an Arab audience… I [also] came to things from a very universalist standpoint; that I’m not necessarily [representing an] “Arab”… that most importantly [I am] human… I wanted people to relate to my music as music. To relate to its content without thinking who is standing behind it, Arab or Jew. And I didn’t want the quality of the music to BE about it being in Arabic. (JS February 3, 2012) Jowan’s universalist, cosmopolitan approach began to crack with the onslaught of the second intifada (2000–2005). The IDF’s violent suppression of the intifada during Operation Defensive Shield, when the military invaded Palestinian urban centers in the West Bank (2001–2002), left an indomitable mark: …Operation Defensive Shield was a bizarre period that drove people to fight [each other]. You could feel the divide and rule [game in operation]. You see the Jews becoming Israelis, the Arabs becoming Palestinian. The Jews go to reserve duty, the Arabs talk politics all the time; one guy you know turns to religion, another becomes more patriotic… I had been in this universalist phase, and suddenly, you feel alone…I also felt rage about the IDF and what was happening, [which] awakened the national identification in me more… So I sat with myself. What am I? What do I want to say? What is my position, actually? And this is when I wrote ID [Lenses’ second album, released in 2003]. The Arabic word for ID—Hawwiyye—references the term for ID card and the complex set of associations of subjugation for Palestinians carrying it, be they citizens or residents of the oPt.30 Importantly, it also references one’s identity of personhood. For Jowan, deliberating his own identity led to the album being his first experiment with songwriting in Arabic: I said I would do it in Arabic… if you understand the nuances of Arabic, then you hear my accent [on the album] is a little strange… almost like a Westerner singing Arabic… because I [wasn’t] used to singing in Arabic and [I had] these gentle, lyrical melodies that just don’t suit the language. So instead of adjusting the music, I adjusted the language… [my] confusion expressed itself in the singing, the lyrics, the melodies [and] the arrangements. Everything sounded like someone searching for something… [The lyrics] were [presented via] picturesque thought processes built on figurative images: animals, proverbs, old stories and such. But I did it in such a way that it was still catchy and understandable. Like the song “The Raven,” which spoke about my becoming like the raven that had forgotten how to walk… Do you know the story?

Strangers in their homeland  235 It’s a story about [the raven] seeing the walk of the alectoris and being very impressed by her walk. He wanted to learn to walk like that, so he started to imitate her. He didn’t succeed. So he wanted to return to his original stride, and he couldn’t do that either; he started to skip around in a weird way. And I’m really talking about myself there, becoming like that raven, who actually tried to imitate the Jews. To walk like them. To do this as rock [music]… and when I tried to return to Arabic I wasn’t quite successful there either. And then I found myself sort of in the middle, skipping between the two, not just in the music but in all kinds of ways—the mentality of my life, my [very] lifestyle. I’m no Israeli. I’m also not… I’ve taken from here and from there. And that’s ID. Jowan’s transformative process is indicative of how the ethos of universalism, viewed through the lens of humanism and individual freedoms, constantly rubs against ethnonational collectivism in Palestine-Israel. In skipping between languages, he is skipping between life worlds that crash and collide under the pressure of political violence. The kinds of freedoms Jowan addresses in his music and artistic choices—religious, gendered, sexual, linguistic, cultural and political—are out of step with the essentialized, ethnonational framing imposed on all local subjectivities. ID is representative of Jowan’s state of confusion and growing identification with the Palestinian national struggle. It is also representative of the ways expressive art negotiates the multiplicities of identity that are part and parcel of the lives of Israel’s Palestinian minority, within a sociopolitical reality that increasingly imposes an unforgiving grid on the very validity of the “multiple” involved in identity formation. The multiplicities that Jowan embodies in both his life and his art are what resonated so well with the Haifa crowd celebrating Namrūd’s release. Jowan began grappling with issues of belonging while still in Be’er Sheva, but the move to Haifa, which provided both a context and an audience for the shift in his artistic and political alignments, was precipitated by a personal crisis. Lenses’s third (and last) album Ahlan-Byebye was recorded in 2005 but released in 2007, the year of Jowan’s move. The album is saturated with images associated both with Jowan’s political awakenings and with the disintegration of his family life. While some of the songs were written in Arabic, others were in English. By the time the album came out, however, Jowan was onto the next phase in his life. He was developing a new musical scene amongst Haifa-based Palestinians whilst dealing with the crashand-burn trajectory of a disintegrating marriage. Adapting to the emergent Haifa Palestinian scene entailed another learning curve: Until then my music was more of a show. You’re watching something, like seeing a movie, there’s no interaction between you and me. With Arabs its more confrontable; sometimes more theatrical, sometimes more like a wedding [party], because that’s what’s understood, that’s the mentality. Slowly I tried to bring in [my] other side, but I had to write

236  Strangers in their homeland the songs in a way that was a little more like a ḥafla here and there. I like it, but it’s different… After I built the audience I went back to doing the things I love and it [all] got mixed; I would do this [old] stuff, but the ḥafla also became part of me. Jowan feels that ultimately, reintegrating with Arabic language and Palestinian culture was a process that invigorated his music as well as its reception. I think I’ve done a lot in the years I’ve been here… Because suddenly you’re dealing with your audience, face to face, not [in a roundabout] way [of] singing to Jews in Arabic and maybe Arabs will hear about me then… A few songs, [for example] “al-Ghūl” (“Monster”), as soon as it came out it became a hit. In Haifa’s social context of young, politicized Palestinians, Jowan’s growing politicization found resonance. The universalist became an activist, and Baladna, a natural hub of cultural and political activity. When an old Be’er Sheva friend asked Jowan to perform with him, Jowan declined. Performing in front of a (Jewish-) Israeli crowd of army or reserves-duty age at the same time he was active in a boycott campaign aimed at ending the siege on Gaza, felt too incongruent with his present lifeworld and political stance. Jowan missed the synergy he shared with the most important partners he had in Lenses, David Peretz and Elad Shufan, of whom he testified that “until now I’m looking for him in the ensembles I’m trying to put together—I’m looking for my Elad.” But when Peretz commented that Jowan had musically “disappeared,” Jowan’s answer was that he was “…simply doing it in another world, a parallel one, which is located in the same place, at the same time.” While in Jowan’s story the necessity of artistic and social location entailed traversing to a “parallel world,” Jowan fashions his artistic output from a perspective that is simultaneously located both within and outside of these two worlds. In the final analysis, for Jowan, the whole cultural/national division is a trick. We’re being taken for a ride and we flow with it, saying OK, we’re Palestinian. I’m not about that, but… I use it to stand up for myself, because when they try to take something away from you forcefully then you hold on to it. But between me and myself, and [also] publicly—I’ve never done my art out of a sense of nationalism or patriotism. I’m not a nationalist. Jowan’s provocative questioning of local regimes of knowledge and the essentialist bent that frames regional debates on political, social and moral hierarchies is shaped by his position as insider-outsider in so many overlapping yet contradictory sites of glocality. This position of dislocation is also

Strangers in their homeland  237 the source of his musical and poetic innovations. It provides for emergent modes and channels of creativity, and it catalyzes a means of re-imagining local terrain in uncompromising, locally formed but universally conceived terms of selfhood. Jowan’s music is an ongoing project of narrating Palestinian experience anchored in individual subjectivity and a deterritorialized sense of aesthetic and ideational place making. This project occurs both in articulation with, and in spite of, the charged sociopolitical arena where the grid of borderlines and social boundaries is so violently imposed.

In between the universal and the particular, “every person has his own Palestine.” “Exile… is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home,” writes Edward Said (2000, 173). I bring up this quote in order to recall the tropes of exile and Occupation that frame the introduction to this chapter. For the “ones who stayed in place” (to quote Jowan’s “Min Biddo Yirkabnā”), exiled on their own land, this unhealable rift bears its own particular set of dissonances, experiences of dislocation and structures of feeling. When your homeland is your exile, your belonging always conditioned, and your status that of a tolerated guest, the rift is not between the human being and native place, but between the Self and the very notion of emplacement, the very idea of a “true home.” For geographically displaced exiles “home” and “homeland” often come to exist as temporally frozen frames of reference, providing for a host of symbols of “authentic” representations that form the basis for a “literal return to the moment of erasure” (Alajaji 2013, 101). This “return to the moment” is exemplified by the prominent folk revival in the oPt and the Palestinian diaspora of musically channeled “authentic” representations. Such representations provide a means of remembrance of that which had been erased, of place branding pre-1948 Palestine (McDonald 2013b; Swedenburg 1990). For Palestinian citizens there can be no such nostalgic return to the moment, as their ancestral home has changed around them, to become the home that isn’t. This experience is perhaps most profound for internal refugees living near their pre-1948 homes which were either erased or repopulated by Jews (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007). But for all Palestinian citizens contemporary reality is a pixilated, fragmented limbo existence in which exile and nativity, cosmopolitanism and locality, memory and erasure, the universal and the particular are temporally and geographically bound together in a confounding and dissonant lived reality(ies). Palestinian citizens formulate and shape their art from these experiences and their personal responses to it. The artistic production of Amal and Jowan represents highly individuated negotiations of the cultural and sociopolitical terrain. They diverge in terms of aesthetic sensibilities, performance contexts, core audiences, ideologies and projections of Palestinianness.

238  Strangers in their homeland Amal’s ethical and musical dispositions matured in the context of her lifelong affiliation with the Communist Party, where the prominent emphasis on Palestinian roots and indigeneity overlaps with an identification with the struggles of oppressed peoples all over the world. Jowan’s sense of self and cosmopolitan approach to music-making developed away from his birthplace, native language, and the demands of collective representations, only to reintegrate with them later, on his own terms. Yet both artists exemplify an acute sensibility of multiple and overlapping, yet contested, registers of universal relationality and native particularity, which inform their approach to music making and their ethical dispositions. Different registers are foregrounded depending on performance circumstances and the individual ways in which artists negotiate the changing sociopolitical environment. The radicalizing public spheres that materialized during and after the second intifada have propelled both artists to emphasize the particular over the universal. But living with difference, without discounting the power differentials involved, is ingrained, and both registers, the universal and the particular, remain in operation, providing the impetus for creative ethical and affective constructions of glocality. This is the source of the heterogeneities, both ethical and aesthetic, that ’48 artists introduce to local terrain. In his analysis of the Jewish and Palestinian hip hop scene in Israel, David McDonald (2013a, 70) describes this dynamic as a “performative interplay of two discursive paradigms: exile and emergence” (emphasis in the original), with exile reifying notions of boundaries, and emergence providing for a decentering of the “nation” via postnational, post-colonial discourses of universalized relationality. As they move between these frames, ’48 artists create multiple sites of disruption. They stage a Palestinianness that refuses to be absented from the Israeli public sphere, complicate essentialized narratives of belonging, provide for channels of affective unity binding citizens and non-citizen Palestinians across a border that segregates them, and open up spaces for intracommunal social critiques. While negotiating the multiplex layers that make up the interstitial spaces between these seemingly oppositional frames, Amal and Jowan are creating what George Lipsitz (1990) terms counter-memory. Lipsitz conceptualizes counter-memory as a process of rememberance and forgetting that begins with personal, specific experiences, from which larger narratives are constructed. Such narratives rub against the grain of histopriographic telelologies, which focus selectively on actions and events that justify their teleology. While both narrative approaches combine elements of myth and elements of history, counter-memory surfaces hidden histories excluded from dominant narratives. It highlights localized experiences of opression that reframe and refocus hegemonic narratives projected to represent universal experience, and it forces the revision of existing histories by providing new perspectives on the past.

Strangers in their homeland  239 Artists who are Palestinian citizens inject the experiential specificities of minoritized individuals unto public spheres, projecting counter-memories unto a past that, in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is typically narrated as a primordial and territorialized authentication of collective representations. Their cosmopolitan sensibilities are anchored in the “strangerhood” inflicted on them as exiles in their own home (Abu-Rabia 2008). The counter-memories they produce form both a processual affirmation of place and a means of countering the very idea of place and emplacement. Within both constructs of exile and emergence, ’48 artists seek to be recognized first and foremost as contemporary artists, rather than as naturalized representations of primordial collectivities. History and myth become resources for the ethical and aesthetic reconstruction, as well as the deconstruction, of Palestinianness.

Notes 1 Quotes by Wisam are from an April 16, 2011 interview. The personalities he references are: PA president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen); Juliano Mer-Khamis, founder of the Freedom Theatre, who was assassinated shortly before this interview; Avigdor Lieberman, then Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs known for his hawkish, ultra-nationalist views; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 2 Interview, May 6, 2011. 3 Interview, July 13, 2011. 4 Personal communication, April 27, 2011. Professor Seroussi was Head of the Musicology Department at this time. 5 Personal communication, March 27, 2011. 6 Amal’s quotes and biographical information are from interviews conducted on May 6, 2011, and February 21, 2012. 7 The song combines Arabic translations of Parra’s verses with lines loosely based on Darwish’s poem, adapted and translated by Roger Tavor. The English translation by Tavor is taken from the liner notes of Baghānnī. 8 July 23, 2011. 9 See Tawil-Souri, Cellular Borders (2016), for how telecommunication infrastructures in the West Bank are implicated in Israel’s settlement project, the economic benefits it gains from the Occupation, the matrix of controls over Palestinian lives and Israel’s symbolic hegemony over territory. 10 See Chapter 1 for listening practices and etiquette in the West Bank. 11 For academic perspectives on BDS see Azoulay 2015; Bakan and Abu-Laban 2009; Butler 2006; Carter Hallward 2013; Culcasi 2006; McMahon 2015; Peteet 2016; Svirsky 2015. 12 The Kalman Sultanik Confederation House—Center for Ethnic Music & Poetry. See http://www.confederationhouse.org/en/About (accessed June 29, 2018). 13 Interview, December 21, 2011. 14 See for example Arabs48.com (2011); Doc Jazz (2011); Qadita.net (2011a and 2011b). 15 For PACBI’s full statement see http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1750 (accessed April 20, 2014). 16 See “what is BDS,” https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds (accessed April 13, 2018).

240  Strangers in their homeland









Epilogue

How far is far? How many ways are there? We walk And walk to the essence And we don’t arrive …….. But our prudence needs a song Of light foot So that hope Be not tired.

—From Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “How far is far?,” English translation by Roger Tavor, taken from the liner notes of Amal’s Baghānnī.

Jaffa, October 2019 When I began my research in 2011, I had no idea that this also marked the beginning of a journey of return to the country I left in 1983. I moved away because staying meant living a kind of exile from myself, my core identifications, my humanity. I eventually made New York, where almost everyone is an expat and exile-hood a form of citizenship, my home. Life, however, produces its own trajectories. Through my extended residencies in Israel-Palestine over the past decade, Jaffa also became home. There are few similarities between the Big Apple and little Jaffa—once a prominent Palestinian harbor city that today serves as Tel Aviv’s Orientalized backyard—but both of these urban habitats defy the logic and gravitational pull of nation-centric conventions, and in both I feel at home and comfortable in my own skin. One of Jaffa’s Arabic nicknames, “Mother of the Stranger” (ʾum el-gharīb), encapsulates for me the numerous experiences of exile, stranger-hood and dispossession that have converged in this city, where living with difference produces its own identifications, intimacies and perspectives on humanity.

242 Epilogue I bring up my own journey here because writing an ethnography is a work of inherent dissonances involving time, space and personal geographies. It is a process of trying to “walk towards the essence” of human experience, whilst the world has moved on from the fleeting moments one has captured in audio recordings, field diaries and video, or by engaging in prominent public discourses of the day. The people featured in this book have, just like me, moved on in their lives. Most of the VOP members are now adults in their twenties. The Shirana choir has parted from the AJCC and is working independently under the title Rana. Amal recorded another album. Jowan embarked on new and different projects. Ramadan and Tim have left Palestine. Ramzi now splits his time between France and Palestine, developing his international career in tandem with managing Al-Kamandjâti. Malik and Muhammed are studying music in Europe. System Ali has professionalized, recorded a second album and opened a music center for youth in Holon, a town adjacent to Jaffa; several of the members featured in this book have moved on, others have joined the collective. Geopolitics have also “moved on.” My project highlights events and discourses whose politics and ideologies were characteristic of a specific historical moment that followed the failed Oslo process, and was accompanied by widespread regional instability and highly polarized local public spheres. Some of the trends and events I chronicled, which then seemed indicative of momentous political and cultural developments underway, now appear as blips on the wings of history or as harbingers of hope gone horribly off course. The Israeli social protest movement was buried under the barrage of divisive discourses and manipulations instigated by Israel’s government and the weight of structural and political violence that has always posed obstacles to social equity agendas in Israel. The “Arab Spring” devolved into a military winter in Egypt, total chaos in Libya and a civil war in Syria that has claimed an estimated 500,000 lives and displaced half the country’s population, internally or as refugees abroad. Palestine’s 2011 bid for independence at the UN now seems an inconsequential anecdote in a world hijacked by the isolationist, belligerent politics of the United States under president Trump and his administration’s overwhelming support for Israel. The European Union, facing the rise of a variety of neo-fascist, ultranationalist movements and Brexit, is too weak and divided to exert its support for the two-state solution. If during my fieldwork the internationalization of the conflict provided new horizons and frames of struggle for Palestinian liberation, it seems that Palestinians are now, once again, on their own. While ethnography is by its very nature an anachronistic project in a rapidly shifting world of geopolitics, my hope is that the larger questions pertaining to music and conflict posed in this book resonate well beyond its temporal frames. This monograph has aimed to show that musical culture is integral to questions of politics, power, nation making, citizenship and conflict in Palestine-Israel. While it cannot offer conclusions nor solutions to the conflict, this work does place expressive culture at the forefront of the

Epilogue  243 long “walk towards the essence,” and it foregrounds process rather than arrival as central to the making (and remaking) of culture(s) and subjectivities in this context. The centrality of expressive culture for understanding the formation of subjectivities under a protracted ethnonational conflict echoes in various conceptualizations of universality that hover over every chapter in this book. This is because, I believe, deliberating what it means to be human in a context of violent conflict and/or Occupation is rife with painful dissonances. The host of tropes linking music-making to politics in this context— including “resistance,” “coexistence,” “shared language,” “normalization,” “revolution,” “cultural intifada,” “folklife,” “co-resistance” and “home”— are all players in how universality is constructed and mobilized via music in a variety of settings. Universality may be flaunted as a fundamental given in human life—as, for example, in the “music is a shared language” trope—or challenged in the very name of the humanity it stands for, as in “culture against normalization.” Yet all of these tropes stand for arguments about what it means to be human in a charged setting of political conflict. Musical performances, however, are not arguments, although arguments are often presented within and about them. They are also not linear progressions advancing to a singular, analytic conclusion, but rather an experience of sonic trajectories that on the one hand, reverberate through one’s body and on the other, create auditory spaces that one enters and inhabits in a variety of ways (Kun 2005). It is precisely through the interplay of embodied, affective and cognitive dimensions mediated within this loop that musical performances become processes that conjure, express and transform realities. In all the scenarios presented in these pages, music-making mediates the tensions between the universal and the particular, the global and the local, the collective and the individual, the future and the past. Through these mediations the essence of humanity is questioned and challenged, and in the process, the political is rendered human, and humans become politicized. The highly diverse sites of cultural production, spatial geographies, institutions, social actors, ideologies and musical genres featured in this ethnography also extend past this work’s temporal confinements. This diversity is ideational as much as it is methodological, because it aims to add a lot of grain to a context of ethnonational conflict oftentimes depicted in binary terms of dominant-subaltern, hegemony-resistance, Israel-Palestine or Jewish/Israeli-Arab/Palestinian. My approach highlights local heterogeneities across both State and Occupied Territories, without underplaying how exposure to violence and power differentials structure this plurality. The book hence includes institutions and scenes on both sides of the Green Line and spotlights different sites and ideologies within these areas. It showcases hegemonic Israeli and Palestinian narratives, as well as the “borderzones” that complicate them. It demonstrates how Mozart’s sixth symphony becomes a revolutionary art form and genres indexed with national formations are turned into sites of post-national imaginaries. Taking this scope of

244 Epilogue cultural production as the subject of analysis in the context of the conflict is a means of de-essentializing and deconstructing models of “authenticity” associated with nationhood, binaries of dominant and subaltern, and fixed cultural meanings attached to concepts such as “resistance,” “coexistence” or “home.” What emerges instead is a dynamic process through which borders and social boundaries are created, shifted or dismantled in everyday life. This opens up spaces for the social meanings that lived experiences produce and project. There is much work yet to be done along these lines of inquiry. Complicating the teleology of national narratives involves not only the recognition that nations are constructed in relation to other nations but also the multiplex construction of individual subject positions and identities. Gender is an important aspect of how music mediates between individual experience and the construction of collectivities in a political context, and it remains tangential in this study. Literature that addresses gender-contextualized negotiations of the conflict is relatively abundant, but scholarship on the ways in which gendered constructions of state, nation, citizenship and ways of belonging intersect in Israel-Palestine via music remains thin (Caspi and Blessing 1991; Maira 2013; McDonald 2010a; Swedenburg 2000). Generational differences also account for diverse inflections in cultural production along with individual perspectives on the conflict. For example, the gravitational pull that the Communist party’s ideologies and frameworks for cultural production provided for Amal and many other Palestinian citizens is not likely to extend to the “Oslo generation” that has matured in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Block. Children and youth appear throughout this work as part of the social matrix, but are not treated as a distinct category of study. Sunaina Maira’s Jil Oslo (2013) on Palestinian hip hop provides a first step in this direction, but this can be extended to a host of other genres, contexts and life experiences. Spatial distributions of power and hegemony are also important for understanding the constitutive power of music in conflict situations. Due to the categorical and experiential divisions between State and Occupied Territories, and the highly limited institutional, legal, ideological and experiential access that scholars from either side of the Green Line have to “the other side,” cultural analysis often brackets off “Israel” from “Palestine” as generalized and discrete units of analysis. This can serve to obfuscate a myriad of differences and heterogeneities that characterize different sites within Israel or the oPt, as well as movement across them. Each specific site, from mixed cities in Israel to urban centers in Palestine, is a product of particular histories, demographic processes and sectarian, class-based, political and cultural dynamics, all deserving their own musical mapping in the context of the conflict. There are many directions in which this research can be further advanced. And there are many more questions about the future we are all spiraling towards. Is the post-Oslo era now shifting into an even more ominous era

Epilogue  245 yet to be named? While the future is unbeholden and such questions remain open, what this ethnography spells out are the different ways in which music-making encapsulates and projects the “song of light foot” Darwish evokes, or in other words, the music(s) that will propose and accompany any projection of a better future in Palestine-Israel. Here I would like to recall Amal’s words from Chapter 5, which represent for me the ultimate power of music making: “I choose to believe in hope.” This may be dovetailed by another statement and repeated almost verbatim by two musicians, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who share the same family name but no kin relations— Yair Dalal and Emad Dalal—on two separate occasions: “There is no such thing as co-existence. There is existence.”

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Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abbas, Mahmoud 46, 74, 190, 239n1 “Abbāy ” (song) 221 ‘Abd al-Nasser, Gamal 15 Abed al-Wahhab, Muhammed 71, 205 Aberjel, Reuven 170 Aboutbul, Amon 95 Abu ‘Arab 67 Abu Dis 66–71 Aburedwan, Ramzi 17, 48–50, 49, 72, 74–75, 78, 129 Addameer (Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association) 156n22 Adelson, Sheldon 221 adhân 67 aesthetics 154; folk 194; and ideologies 23, 29; intertwined with ethics 39, 46, 61; and modes of discourse 194, 201; and multicultural ethics 83; of Palestinian musical intifada 128–135; politics and 154–155; polyglot 187; and practices of urban cosmopolitanism 225; and remaking of space 134, 152; as site of conflict negotiation and transcendence 7; of SLI 179; and sociality 111 Ahlan-Bye bye (album) 235 Ahmad (Al Khatib) (oud and cello player) 139–143 Ahmed, Sara 87, 118 “‘Ā’isha” (song) 131 ‘Ajami 90, 95, 110, 167–169, 171, 177, 184–186, 195–196; Arab community of 91; Arab-Jewish Community Center in 90, 91; demographic balance 94–95; demolitions in 171, 184; gentrification of 167; historical

and economic trajectories affecting: 195n8; history of: 91–92; Israel Land Authority 91; local residents of 92; mentions in song 177, 184, 196; Palestinian ghetto in 185, 186; Palestinian refugees from 167; residents of, mid-1950s and 1980s 92; settler yeshiva in 92, 110 Al-Aida refugee camp 18, 46 al-Am‘ari refugee camp 66–71 Al-Assad, Bashar 232 al-‘Awda (The Return) dance troupe 18 al-Kasaba theater 73 Alberstein, Chava 112–114, 123n28 “al-Bint al-Shalabiyye” (song) 61, 68 Algerian War of Independence 61 Al-Ghazali, Nazeem 68 al-Ghūl (The Monster) (song) 226, 236 Al-Hakawati National Theater 54, 55–59, 60–62, 78, 79, 136, 137 Al-Ittihad 4 Al-Kamandjâti 17, 35, 38; The Al-Kamandjâti Camps Orchestra 60; The Al-Kamandjâti Jazz Orchestra 55, 63, 65; The Al-Kamandjâti Youth Orchestra 54, 56–58, 69, 79, 128–135; founding of 44; infrastructure 50; The Jenin Oriental Ensemble 68–69; Jenin branch: 68, 79, 211; multifaceted project of resistance and nationmaking 78–80; music curricula 44–45; Music Days Festival 47, 52–54; overview 48–52; permits and liabilities 54–56; The PNEAM 45, 47, 71–78, 80; The Ramallah Orchestra 55, 59–61, 63, 79, 131; The Ramallah Oriental

270 Index Ensemble 66, 67, 69; and Ramzi Aburedwan poster 48–49, 49 Al-Kamandjâti Jazz Band 55, 62–65 “Al-Kamandjâti Show” 80n9 Al-Kamandjâti Youth Orchestra 54, 56–58, 69, 79, 128–135 Al-Khammash, Rawhi 77 Al-Khatib, Oday 67, 69, 70, 77, 153–154, 156n23 Al-Kurd, Mustapha 136–137 Aloni, Udi 170 Al-Qasim, Samih 203 “al-Rozānā” (song) 112, 117, 212, 219 Amal (album) 206–207 Amneh (Jeroushi) [of System Ali] 172–179, 181–185, 187, 188 Anarchists Against the Wall 35 anti-normalization 41n9, 83–84, 199, 200, 219–220; see also normalization Anzaldúa, Gloria 188 “Apartheid roads” 135 Apocalypse Now (film) 42 Arab culture: 182; in Israel 2, 205, 220; marginalized 83 Arabic music 56, 67, 81n28, 95, 115, 153, 201, 203; and Al-Kamandjâti 45, 56; and Amal Murkus 203, 217, 220; classical 2, 7, 25, 32, 45, 71; in demonstration 25; and education 45, 200; and ‘48s 213; Galilee-centered educational project 36; and Israeli media 83; and Khalife 61; and Palestinian national formation 24, 43–46, 62, 71–75; and West Bank music conservatories 19, 148; see also Palestine National Ensemble of Arabic Music (PNEAM) Arabic Music Ensemble 71; see also The Palestine National Ensemble of Arabic Music (PNEAM) Arabic takht 134–135 Arab-Israeli wars 9, 15, 162, 180 Arab-Jew 8, 11, 84 Arab-Jewish: civic partnership/ shared citizenship 14, 82, 100, 164; coexistence (projects) 29, 82, 86, 105, 108, 118–119, 120, 167; collaborative work 85–86, 88, 95; cultural dialogues 84, 86; divide 106; environments 161; framework 107; institutions/ organizations 84, 86–88; integration 39, 89; musical representations 88; political parties 157; relationality 11; umbrella/label 88, 106

Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC) 35, 97–98; demographics 91–92; founding of 86; interventions in Jaffa 92–119; musical 85–92; overview 82–85; pluralistic atmosphere 104; Shirana choir 91, 105–118, 119, 122n9, 123n29, 242; social life of 89; Voices of Peace (VOP) choir 82, 89–90, 91, 94–98, 99–104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 118, 119, 242 Arab-Jewish (multicultural) organizations/institutions 7, 39, 82, 84, 86–89, 118–120 Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra (AJYO) 14, 25, 33, 86, 122n5, 198 Arab League 54 Arabs 10–11, 25, 39, 42, 82, 86, 88, 90, 99, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 114, 116, 120, 158, 164, 168, 175, 177, 179, 188, 199, 208, 216, 220, 228–229, 234, 235–236 Arab Spring 6, 16, 29–30, 76, 158, 174, 181–182, 191, 231, 242 Arafat, Yassir 13, 95 armed resistance (maqāwma musallaḥa) 49–50 artists: Palestinian citizens of Israel 8, 11, 22–23, 39–40; rap artists 19 “Asham” (song) 112 Ashkenazi-Mizrahi: Ashkenazim/ Mizrahim 11, 21, 22, 86, 106, 158, 161, 162, 163, 169, 170, 172, 179, 218; political system 163; secular/religious dispositions of 21 Askadinya 62–65 “aural border” 5, 120 Baez, Joan 205–207 Baghānnī (album) 203, 207, 208, 212, 217, 220–221, 239n7, 241 Baghdad Radio Orchestra 96 Bakhtin, Mikhail 193–194 Bakri, Mohammed 203 Baladna (Palestinian NGO) 225, 236 Banai, Ehud 111 Banai, Yossi 115 Barak, Ehud 190 Barenboim, Daniel 13, 44 Barenboim-Said Foundation 44, 131 Barghouti, Omar 41n9, 219 Baumann, Gerd 89, 103 BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement 15, 20, 38, 41n9, 44, 199, 216–218, 219–220, 239n11 and n16,

Index  271 240 n18; see also Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement; Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) BDS/PACBI 15, 41n9, 199–200, 216–220, 239n15 Be’erSheva (Bi’r al-Sabʽ) 233, 235, 236 Belkind, Nili 28, 31, 39 Belkünd, Yoseph 36 Benaya, Effie 216 Bennett, Tony 19 Berda, Yael 141–142, 145 Bethlehem 18, 37, 44, 46, 144, 155n3 The Betweenness of Place (Entrikin) 155n1 biopower 151; biopolitics/biopolitical 151; spatial expression of 151 Birmingham School of Cultural Studies 21 Bizet 58, 133; Carmen Suite 58, 132–133; L’Arlesienne58–59, 132–133 “Blowing in the Wind” (song) 94–95 “Blue Bossa” (jazz standard) 63 Bokhary, Lina 64 Borders and social boundaries 2; between citizens and non-citizens 119; and checkpoints 125; construction of 5; Israel-Palestine borders 137; and music 4–5; “music knows no borders” 142, 149; musico-aesthetic production 4; and Occupation 145, 151; and Palestinian mobility 4–5; and personal geographies 7; and power 4–5; at Qalandiya checkpoint 136; and relationality 7; and Self and Other, concepts of 7–8; social construction of 5; as social process, and metaphor 21–22; and spatio-temporal relations 151; and West Bank 126, 138 border zones/borderlands 37, 40, 188–190 Bouazizi, Mohamed 76 Bourdieu, Pierre 147–148 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement 15, 20, 38, 41n9, 44, 199, 216–218, 219–220, 239n11 and n16, 240n18 Brahms 154, 156n19 British colonial rule 141; see also British Mandate 71; Mandate Britain 141 British Mandate 71 “Building the House Anew!” (song) 174–176, 188–189 “Bulldozer Night” 25

bureaucracy: COGAT 138; colonialstyled 138; and the making of space and time and musicking in Palestine 138–143; Occupation 17, 33, 39, 128, 138, 140–146; Shabak and 142 bureaucratic violence 137–146 Butler, Judith 5, 47 Camp David 83 Camp David summit 3 Cantoni, Michele 28 Carmen Suite (Bizet) 58, 132–133 Carpenters 95 Casey, Edward 126 Checkpoint(s) 5, 17, 18, 27, 29, 33–34, 39, 52, 55–56, 57, 71, 119, 121, 124– 125; bureaucracy and 139; mobility and 128–137; music and 128–137; in Ramadan’s story 149–151; between State and Occupied Territory, or Palestinian citizens and non-citizens 210–216 checkpoint spacio-temporality: Doppler effects of 135–137 Chetrit, Sami 170 Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land 80n9, 155n5 Civil Administration District Coordination Offices (DCOs) 138 classical Western music 7, 24, 44–45, 51; as art of resistance 56–59, 61–62, 134–135, 143; and national ensembles 71; presenting Palestine to foreign powers and 60–62 Clifford, James 204 COGAT (Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories) bureaucracy 138, 144 colonial-styled bureaucracy 138 Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) 138, 144; see also COGAT cosmopolitanization of cultural life in Palestine 66, 143–146 creativity: embodiment and 146–153; spatio-temporal violence and 146–153 Crompton, Jason 57, 132–134 “culti-parading” 89, 103 culturalization of the conflict 105, 199, 200 cultural citizenship 6, 19, 39, 47, 53, 62, 66, 69, 70, 79, 88, 100, 118

272 Index cultural policy 6–7, 19; described 6; in Israel 85–89; and Palestine 38 “cultural intifada” 128, 243 cultural resistance 43, 46–47, 59, 79, 128–129, 155n4 cultural territorialization 20, 125 Culture of Peace Festival 13 cyber-representation, Israeli maps 126, 155n3 dabke 18, 41n12, 43, 46, 90, 91, 148, 229 Dakwar, Naseem 207 Dalal, Yair 11, 13, 95, 164, 245 DAM (Palestinian hip hop band) 25, 190 Damascus Gate 54–55, 56–59, 62, 79, 132, 149 Danse Bohême 58 Darwish, Mahmoud 61, 153, 197, 203, 207, 209, 221, 239n7, 241, 245 Darwish, Sayed 67 Davis, Angela 205 Davis, Miles 63 “A Day Will Come” (“Yom Yavo”) (song) 96 Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE) party (Ḥadash in Hebrew, Jabha in Arabic) 4, 171, 202–203, 205–206, 209, 216, 238, 244 “development towns” 161 Die Walküre (opera) 42 “Don’t Laugh at Me” (song) 95 Doppler effects: of checkpoint spaciotemporality 135–137; defined 136 “Doqq” (song) 221 Doumani, Beshara 72–73 “dual society” model, Zionism and Palestinian national movement 8, 166 Duchin, Arkadi 96 Dylan, Bob 94 East Jerusalem 5–6, 9, 20, 34, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 78, 121, 136–137, 196n18; classical Western music performances in 58–59; cultural life in 54; demolition of Palestinian homes in 20–21, 189; devolution of 54; musical interventions in 65; Music Days Festival and 52–53; Old City of 5; Palestinians of 40n7; permits and liabilities in 54–56; see also Jerusalem East-West/“East” and “West” 13, 19, 44, 47, 62, 79, 82, 84, 111, 143 East-Western Divan Orchestra 44

Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM) 14, 28, 35, 38, 44–45, 125, 138–143; classical Western music at 45; foreign musicians at 143–146; Jerusalem Children’s Orchestra 138; music curricula 44–45; Oriental Music Department 139; Palestine National Orchestra (PNO) 45, 146; Palestine Youth Orchestra (PYO) 125, 139, 142 “Eggplants” (song) 112–113 Eldad, Arieh 229 El-Funoun 148–149 Elias, Taiseer 25 El-Roumi, Majda 213 embodiment: and borderlands 188; creativity and 146–153; cultural imperialism and 217; and spatiotemporal violence 146–148 EMI International 207 Enchik (Enver Seitibragimov) [of System Ali] 172, 177, 185, 196n21 Entrikin, J. Nicholas 155n1 Eretz Nehederet (A Wonderful Country) (TV program) 163 Eshel Studios 99 ethnic cleansing 145 “ethnocratic system” 166 ethnographic positioning 29–38; origins and departure 30–32; Palestinian family 36–38; return and methodology 32–36 Evron, Nimrod D. 165 extremist nationalism 156n19 Fact Records 233 Fadl, Muhammed 140 Fairouz (Lebanese singer) 67, 68, 205, 206 Fakhri, Sabah (Syrian Singer) 76–77 Farandole (from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne) 58, 133 Fattaḥ al-Ward (album) 203 “Fawq al-Nakhl”(song) 68, 95 Fī Dhikrā al-Ḥarām (In Memory of the Holy Sanctuary) (composition) 143 Festival for Bringing Hearts Closer and for Coexistence 227–228 “Fighting for our Home!” slogan 159, 175 “Fī Ḥaḍan al-Iḥtilāl” (“Safe in the Arms of Occupation”) (song) 231 FishSamak 231–232 foreign musicians in Palestine 143–146

Index  273 ’48s 10, 11, 197–200, 204, 211, 215, 217, 219, 220, 224; see also “inside Palestinians;” Palestinian citizens of Israel Foucault, Michel 130, 151; biopower and 151; and his conceptualization of governmentality 151; Foucauldian modernistic sense 151; Foucauldian political economy 130 Freedom Theatre 128, 215, 239n1 “Free Jowan” Internet campaign 231 Frintzilla, Martha 219 Frith, Simon 23 Furani, Khaled 28 Gandhi, Mahatma 49 Gaza-Jericho Accords 13, 95 Gaza Strip 3, 4, 6, 9–10, 24, 51, 152, 155n2, 168, 191, 200, 236; demographics and 40n7; as “open air prison” 155n2; Operation Cast Lead and 226; wars on and 83 Gefen, Aviv 96 genre: importance of 23; politics of 23–26 gestalt: of domination 126–128; of resistance 126–128 Gharīb fī Waṭanī (album) 219 Gibran, Wisam 197–199, 202, 239n1 “The Girl from Gadot” (song) 178–180 Golan Heights 25 “The Good Ones Will Win” (ha-Tovim Yenatsḥu) (song) Google 155n3 governmentality 151; centralized and privatized 145; Foucault’s conceptualization of 151 “Graçias a la Vida” (song) 209, 221 “Greater Israel” 9 “Great Tents” (OhalimAdirim)(album) 161; see also Protest Tents Green Line 9, 12, 14, 20, 29, 36, 38, 83, 109–110, 121, 122n23, 145, 162–164, 201, 215, 243–244 Guevara, Che 179–182 “Guevara Māt!”(song) 179–182 Haaretz 220, 222 Habanera (from Bizet’s Carmen Suite) 58 Habibi, Emile 203 “Ḥad Gadya”(song) 113–115, 117 Hadag-Nahash (band) 163 Hafez, Abdel Halim 213

Haggadah 113 Haifa 32, 36, 73–74, 121n2, 161, 203, 224, 225, 233, 235, 236; alternative music scene in 204; Bringing the Hearts Closer Festival in 227–229 Hall, Edward T. 155 Hall, Stuart 12, 21, 22 Halutz, Dan 174–175, 195n15 Hamas 3, 9, 25, 40n5, 167, 192, 195n15, 197 Hammami, Rema 129 Hanafi, Sari 151 Haredim (the ultra-Orthodox community) 40n2, 90, 163, 195n5 hasbara 94, 122n11, 216 Hass, Amira 146–147 “Hava Nagila” (song) 90 Hayek, Hosam 219 “ha-Yom”(“Today”) (song) 111, 117 Hebron 3–5, 40, 67, 74, 150, 153, 177, 211 “Hilltop Youth” 108, 114; and history of 122n23 Histadrut (trade union) 192 homogenization 62–64 housing 91–92; home and 159–170 Huldai, Ron 93, 167, 168 Hunter, Mary Ann 117 Idelman, Mariano 163 ID (“Hawwiyye”) (album) 234–235 “Idialam” (song) 185–187 “If We’ll Know How to Love” (“Im Neda Le’ehov”)(song) 115 Im Tirtzu (organization) 119–120 “Inta ‘Omrī” (song) 90 “inside Palestinians” 10; see also ‘48s; Palestinian citizens of Israel internationalization of the conflict 199, 242 Intifada: first intifada 16, 18, 50, 113, 127, 147, 148, 206; second intifada 3, 17, 43–44, 64, 79, 84, 127–128, 139, 146–147, 155n4, 190, 199, 215, 234, 238 Israel: Arab culture and music in 2, 73, 83; Arabic speaking minorities of 84; and Arab-Israeli wars 162–163, 180; Arab-Jewish coexistence in 29, 82, 86, 119, 167; Arab-Jewish collaborative work and 85; Arab-Jewish label in 88; Arab-Jewish musical representations, in 88; Arab-Jewish (multicultural)

274 Index organizations in 86; Arab-Jewish (multiculturalist) projects in 86, 89, 105; Arab Spring influence on 158, 174, 180–181, 182; arts community in 160; bi-national partnerships in 171; citizenship and 10, 97, 100, 105, 159, 170, 200; citizenship and cultural policy in 85–89; Egyptian border of 191; holocaust refugees/survivors in 42, 91, 185, 186; Israeli-American solidarity in 94; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2, 3, 19, 21, 127, 162, 230; Israeli social protest movement in 30, 39, 190, 242; Land Authority 91; Jewish-Arab relations in 82; Jewish hegemony in 1, 14, 83, 85, 97, 190, 201; J14 social protest movement in 157; Kokhav Nolad, Israeli version of “American Idol” in 100; media and Arabic music in 83; media and domestic music industry in 83; multiculturalist music projects in 119; musical map of 171; national culture of 174; Palestinian citizens of 8, 10–11, 19, 22–23, 25, 33, 34, 39–40, 40n1, 41n15, 83, 85–88, 104, 110–111, 114, 118, 120, 161; and Palestinian national movements 121; Palestinian suicide bombings in 83; political system of 163; post-WWII Jewish immigrants in 91; “price tag” attacks in 108; public life in 82–83; securitization project of 162, 163; social justice in 162; social mapping of 170; social protest in 22, 29–30, 39, 93, 104, 122n10, 157–162, 171, 182, 190– 195; sociopolitical system 164; Songs of the Land of Israel 2, 24–26, 84, 113, 178–179; and violence, zero-sum game of 119; and Zionism 2, 8, 41n14, 76, 85, 97, 121, 165, 166, 170 Israel Hayom 221–223, 230 Israel-Palestine xi, 3–5, 9, 13, 21, 24, 36, 119, 137, 142, 241, 243, 244; reading/ listening to in counterpoint 26–27; see also Palestine-Israel Israeli Jews 12, 42 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 1–3, 19, 21, 127, 162, 230; see also PalestinianIsraeli Conflict Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra 24 Israeli social protest movement 29–30, 39, 93, 104–105, 157–165, 190–194, 242; from discourse to music 170–187; home as contact zone 187–190; from

housing to home, to different kinds of home 159–170; see also J14 social protest movement; “Protest Tents” Israel Land Authority (ILA) 91–92 Israel-Palestine 3–4, 26–29; American cultural polices in 6–7; binarisms of 243; borders of 137; cultural construction of place, nation,ethnicity and citizenship in 21–22, 24–26; gestalt of domination and gestalt of resistance in 126–128; Jewish population in 40n7; musical interventions in 13; overview 9–12; and performance 5; and porous borders 138; see also Palestine-Israel J14 social protest movement 157, 194n1; Israeli social protest movement 39, 190, 242; see also Israeli social protest movement; “Protest Tents” Jackson, Michael 188 Jaffa: banner at 168; art of being“Yāfāwwiyeh” 187–190; from discourse to music 170–187; fieldwork in 32; history of demographics and power relations 91–92; home as contact zone in 187–190; from housing to home, to different kinds of home 159–170; Jewish-Palestinian relations in 167–68; as identity 182–188; local identities in 92, 95; nativist attachment to 174; Palestinian population in 195n8; as “periphery” 165–67; as “periphery” vis-à-vis the Rothschild “center” 190–193; price tag in 108–110, 115; protest site 104, 163, 164; “Russian” immigration to 196n21; social protest and 190–193; “spatial heteronomy” in 166; System Ali 171–173; Tasso Muslim cemetery in 196n19; see also ‘Ajami; Jaffa ArabJewish Community Center (AJCC) Jaffa Arab-Jewish Community Center (AJCC) 35, 82, 86, 89; case studies 118; diffusing social tensions in Jaffa 92; educational projects of 86–2; International Tolerance Day 91; interventions in Jaffa 92–3; Jaffa’s Palestinian community and 93; Jewish-Arab relations and 82; low-income youth and 105; mission, ethics of 93; musical projects of 89–1; and “Shirana Against Racism” 109; Shirana Choir and 105–18, 242; vocal

Index  275 coach 101; Voices of Peace choir (VOP) and 89, 94–98, 99–104, 242 Jaffa tent city 104–105, 165; banner at 168; social protest and 190–193; System Ali and 170–187 Jara, Victor 205 Jasper, James M. 155n1 Jenin 57, 67, 68–69, 74, 79, 128, 155n4, 209, 213; Al-Kamandjati branch in 48, 68, 79, 211, 215; checkpoint 210–211, 213, 214 Jerusalem: checkpoints and concerts 5, 135–137; Jerusalem International Oud Festival 216–217; Judaized 127; Speaking Arts Conference 216–217, 220, 222; “Unified” 127; see also East Jerusalem Jerusalem Children’s Orchestra 138 Jerusalem Intercultural Center (JICC) 36, 86, 122n5, 216, 220, 223 Jerusalem International Oud Festival 121n2, 216–221 Jewish Israelis 1, 2, 11, 21, 28, 33, 40n1, 41n15, 90, 178, 214, 222, 226 Jewish Nation State Bill 85 Jezreel Valley Multicultural Music Center (JVMMC) 86 Jubran, Khaled 218 Kahane, Meir, Rabbi 109, 122n24 “Kahrabā”(“Electricity”) (song)227 Kant, Immanuel 49 “Kāsak yā Waṭan” (“Cheers, Homeland”)(song) 226 Kasem, Fathi 95 Katsav, Moshe 195n6 Khalidi, Rashid 125 Khalife, Marcel 61–62, 67, 95, 206 “Khamrat al-Ḥobb”(song) 77 khamriyyāt (wine poetry) 77 khamsa 177, 196n17 Khoury, Moussa 4, 8 Khoury, Suhail 14 King, Martin Luther 49, 205 Klein, Iris Jean 16 Kokhav Nolad (TV program) 100, 101 Kufr Yassif 197, 205, 208, 210 Kulanana recording 99–100, 101–102, 105, 113 Kun, Josh 5, 120 Lâji’ (refugee) Community Center 18 “Lammā Bada Yatathannā” (song) 61, 111

L’Arlesienne 58, 132–133 Lavie, Smadar 22 “Law for Prevention of Damage to State of Israel through Boycott” 199 Leef, Daphni 157, 190 Legacy Band 1, 3, 5–6 The Lemon Tree: an Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Tolan) 155n5 Lenses (band) 235–236 Levinson, Haim 138 Liba (Neeman) [of System Ali] 171, 173, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185 Lieberman, Avigdor 239n1 “Life is Beautiful” (“ha-ḤayimYafim;” “La Vita è Bella”) (song) 95 Lindholm Schultz, Helena 62, 121 Lipsitz, George 238 Lockman, Zachary 7–8 London (album) 113 Lumsden, Malvern 117 Luna (Abu-Nassar) [of System Ali] 95, 172, 173, 185 Maariv 229 Makhoul, Sameer 221 “Marbūṭ” (“TiedUp”) (song) 228, 230 Mandate Britain 141; see also British Mandate “Ma Nishtana” (song) 113 Manor, Ehud 96 Maqâm 81n28 maqām ḥijāz 77 Marbūṭ (song) 228, 230 Marx, Karl 160 Masson, Diego 60–61 mawwâl 74, 77, 90, 131 Mbembe, Achille 151 McDonald, David 18–19, 80n12, 238 Mehta, Zubin 13, 24, 95 Meir, Golda 194n3 Merchavim Institute 99–102 Mer-Khamis, Juliano 128, 155n4, 197, 209, 215, 239n1 Middle East 1, 16, 135, 155n5, 169, 174, 186, 196n17, 205, 218; Arab Spring in 76; and borders 45; and Israel 83, 158, 169; Khamsa in the 196n17; Studies 26–27, 29 Mikelis, Dimitri 61, 63 Military Order 1651 (for stone throwing) 156n21 Miller and Yúdice 19

276 Index “Min Biddo Yirkabnā” (“Who Will Want to Ride Us?”) (song) 224, 226, 237 Mixed city/ies 109, 158, 166, 233 Mizrahi: artists 84; category 11; culture 11, 169, 223; identification 169; immigrants 161, 169; marginalization of 169; Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relations 21, 162–163; neighborhoods 161, 169; vote 169 Mizrahim 8, 11, 22, 84, 86, 158, 161–162, 169–172, 194, 201, 218, 223; “New Mizrahim” and 170 Monterescu, Daniel 22, 28, 92, 166, 171, 187, 188, 195n8 Mor’heb, Mahran 208, 211 Moti (Ben Baruh) [of System Ali] 172, 173, 182, 184, 196n23 Mozart at Qalandiya checkpoint 128–135; see also checkpoints Mozart Symphony No. 6 57, 59, 132 Muhammed A. (Aguani) [of System Ali] 172–173, 176–177, 180–187, 196n23 Muhammed M. (Mughrabi) [of System Ali] 172–173, 176, 183, 184–185 multiculturalism 86–89; described 87; in Israel 86, 100, 118; and musical representations in Israel 13, 39, 82, 84, 88–89, 94–105; and pluralism 87; in Tel Aviv 90; in Western liberal democracies 87 multiculturalist organizations in Israel 85–89, 111, 118–119 “multi-relating” 89, 103 Murkus, Amal 39, 197, 198, 202–223; art as battleground, art as shared space 216–223; Jerusalem International Oud Festival and JICC’s Speaking Arts Conference 216–223; PACBI’s boycott of Israel’s Oud Festival 217–223; between State and Occupied Territory 210–216; at Zababdeh Culture and Arts Festival 210–216 music: as resistance 12, 15–20; and aesthetics of coexistence 82–84, 96; as agent in Palestinian (re)making of time and space 153–155; and Arab culture in Israel 12; Arabic music 83, 95; and Arab-Jewish coexistence 86; and Arab Spring 16; checkpoints and 5, 128–137; as coexistence 2, 7, 12–15, 19–20, 29, 34, 39, 44, 82–84; as co-resistance 20–21; education 6, 7, 21, 200; education at Beit System Ali

195n12; education at the AJCC 90–91; education in Palestine 7, 17, 19, 43–46, 48, 53, 66, 75, 80n19, 146, 215; forms of 17; global-local permutations of 84; and Israeli media and domestic music industry 83; and Israeli national culture 83; and Jaffa AJCC 86, 89; and Jewish-Arab relations 82; and Kulanana concept 100; McDonald on 18–19; and modernity 19, 24, 45, 56, 62, 65, 79, 155; multiculturalist music projects 119; Muzika etnit (ethnic music) 84, 172; Muziḳa mizraḥit 84; professionalization and nationalization of 45–46; public performances of 93; role in Palestinian life 16–19, 28–29 music education in Palestine 43–46 Music Days Festival 47, 52–54, 60, 64, 65–66, 129 “Musiciens Pour Palestine” benefit concerts 48 muwashshaḥāt 74–77, 81n25 Muziḳa etnit 84, 172, 207 Muziḳa mizraḥit 84 “My YiddisheMomme” (song) 90 Nablus 37, 138, 142–143, 153 Najm, Fuad 180 Namrūd (album) 224, 225, 227, 231, 233, 235 “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” (song and slogan) 120 Na‘na ya Na‘na (Peppermint) (album) 207 “Naʽnaʽyā Naʽna’” (“Peppermint”) (song) 212 “Nardis” (by Miles Davis) 63 The National 231 nationalism: extremist Jewish 156n19; Jewish hyper- 169; Palestinian 44, 77, 167, 182; see also nation-building National Liberation Front (FLN) 61 nation-building 17, 38; Al-Kamandjâti project of 78–80; and cultural policy 39; and homogenization 62; in Palestine 43–46, 47, 53, 56, 120, 128, 146; politics of 7, 15; Zionist 178 Nazareth 25, 37, 73, 161, 172, 203, 233 “necropolitical” 151 Neeman, Rachel 85 neoliberalization 159, 161; neoliberal capitalism 87; neoliberal discourses

Index  277 98; neoliberal era 175; neoliberal policies 92–93, 159; neoliberal societies 193; neoliberalism 187 Neta (Weiner) [of System Ali] 171–180, 182, 185, 189, 195n10, 195n15, 196n23 Netanyahu, Benjamin 84, 135, 157, 159, 163, 192, 194, 196n26, 197, 199, 221, 239n1 New Israel Fund (NIF) 227–228 “New Mizrahim” 170; see also Mizrahim normalization 189, 219–220, 243; anti-normalization 41n9, 83–84, 199, 200, 219–220; and BarenboimSaid Foundation 44; defined 15; see also Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS); Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) Notre Dame Church 1, 5–6 Nueva Canción movement 209 occupation bureaucracy 17, 128, 137–146; see also Occupied Territories; Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) Occupied Palestine 11, 39, 44, 74, 126, 154, 197; see also Occupied Territories; Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) 3–4, 13–14, 15, 19, 26, 35, 40n2, 71, 85, 110, 118, 121, 136, 145, 147, 162, 169, 177, 197, 198, 200–201, 203, 207, 234, 237, 244; and “barrier” frame 124; and cartography 126–127; and demographics 40n7; geographical demarcation of 9–10, 33–34; and incarceration 156n22, 207; institutionalized music education in 7; performances of Palestinian citizens in 209–220; and Right of Return 18; and US policy 40n5; see also Occupied Territories; Occupied Palestine Occupied Territories 38, 42, 53, 74, 84, 87, 110, 121, 162, 182, 199, 210, 213, 243–244; Arab-Jewish cultural dialogues involving 84; described 9; IDF and military police’s violence in 113, 192; Jewish hegemony across 1; see also Occupied Palestine; Occupied Palestinian Territories Occupy Madrid Movement 158 O’Connell, John Morgan 14 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) 159

Olearchik, Alon 207 “On This Earth” (poem) 209 Operation Defensive Shield 234 Oslo 3, 13, 14, 17, 28, 32, 38, 44, 60, 64, 83–84, 85, 95, 198, 202, 204, 208, 242; and “Oslo Generation” 244; peace process 82, 86; see also Oslo Accords; post-Oslo Oslo Accords 6, 9, 33, 43, 79, 83, 95, 86, 126, 127, 172, 240n17; see also Oslo; post-Oslo era Ottoman Empire 10; Al-Kamandjati’s Ramallah branch 48; cultural center 66; era/period 48, 66; and Palestine 30, 41n13; rule 30–31 PACBI (Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) 15, 41n9, 199–200, 216–220, 221–222, 239n15 Palestine 29, 30, 37, 38, 43n6, 46, 47, 48, 50–52, 54–55, 60–61, 62, 66, 67, 70, 72, 78, 79, 80, 96, 112, 126, 154–155, 156n22, 180; access to music in parts of 66; art and freedom in 64–65; bureaucratic control in 138–143; checkpoints, mobility, music in 128–137; cultural organizations in 43–46, 48; cultural life, cosmopolitanization of in 3, 4, 124, 128, 138, 141–146; Doppler effects of checkpoint spacio-temporality in 135–137; as entity deserving of statehood 3; foreign interventions in 43–44; foreign musicians in 143–146; gestalt of domination in 126–128; gestalt of resistance and 126–128; historic 9–11, 15, 18, 181–182, 198; international presence in 30–31, 51–52, 60, 80n11; making of space and time and musicking in 138–143; mobility and cosmopolitanization of cultural life in 143–146; Mozart at Qalandiya checkpoint 128–135; music as an agent in (re)making of time and space in 153–155; musical production in 15–17, 24, 25, 55, 146; nation-building and music education in 43–46; occupation bureaucracy extended and 143–146; Studies 26–27; perceptions/imaginaries/ representations of 27–28, 46–47, 70–80, 155n3, 174–176, 181–182, 184, 197, 209, 212, 237; and performance

278 Index of space-time in 126–128; playing through bureaucratic violence in 137–146; politics and aesthetics of Palestinian musical intifada 128–135; popular resistance in 56; public life in 48; Ramallah and Jerusalem, checkpoints and concerts 135–137; and sovereignty appeal to UN 18, 190, 199; spatio-temporal violence, embodiment and creativity in 146–153, 156n18; see also Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt); Occupied Territories Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Swedenburg and Stein) 27 Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) 45, 71, 77, 81n21 The Palestine National Ensemble of Arabic Music (PNEAM) 45, 47, 71–80, 81n22; at Al-Kasaba theater 73–78; and construction of national symbols 71–73 Palestine National Orchestra (PNO) 45, 146, 151, 154 Palestine Youth Orchestra (PYO) 45, 125, 139, 142, 151, 154 Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) 15, 41n9, 199–200, 216–222; see also BDS Palestinian Authority (PA) 6, 9, 18, 33, 40n5, 43, 54, 71, 74, 119, 125, 144, 190, 220, 239n1; negotiating independence at UN 46; see also Palestinian National Authority Palestinian National Authority 40n4 Palestinian citizens of Israel 8, 10–11, 19, 22–23, 25, 30, 33, 34, 39–40, 40n1, 41n2, 83, 85–88, 104, 110–111, 114, 118, 120, 161–162, 165–166, 171, 194, 197–239; Amal Murkus 204–223; and Arab culture and music 2, 73, 83; Arabic speaking minorities 84; and Arab-Jewish coexistence 29, 82, 86, 119, 167; and Arab-Jewish collaborative work 85; and the Arab-Jewish label 88; and Arab-Jewish musical representations 88; and Arab-Jewish (multicultural) organizations 86; and Arab Jewish (multiculturalist) projects 86, 89, 105; and the Arab Spring 181, 182; and bi-national partnerships 171; and citizenship 10, 22, 85–88, 89,

99–100, 105, 110–111, 118–119, 159; and citizenship and cultural policy in Israel 85–89; and the communist party 202–203; and the Israeli social protest movement 22, 39, 161–162; and JewishArab relations 82; and Jewish hegemony 1, 14, 83, 85, 97, 190, 201; Jowan Safadi 223–237; and media and domestic music industry 83; and multiculturalist music projects 119; and the role of artists in public life in 82–83; and social justice 162; and reconstruction of Israel’s social mapping 170; and social protest 193–194; and the sociopolitical system 164; and violence, zero-sum game of 119; and Zionism 97–98 Palestinian cultural organizations 7, 15, 43, 140 Palestinian hip hop 1, 6, 16, 19–21, 24, 25, 56, 172, 190, 201, 238, 244 Palestinian identity 5, 11, 19, 23, 43, 56, 58, 64, 65, 72, 75, 76, 88, 127, 155n4, 182, 183, 198, 200–201, 205, 208, 225, 235 Palestinian-Israeli Bereaved Families Forum 36 Palestinian-Israeli conflict 1, 4, 162, 239; see also Israeli-Palestinian conflict Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 2, 9, 10, 13, 15–16, 18, 71–72, 95, 119, 213, 220 Palestinian mobility 3, 4, 138, 141; and cultural life, cosmopolitanization of 3, 4, 124, 128, 138, 141–146 Palestinian modernity 18–19, 24, 45, 47, 56, 62, 65, 79, 151, 155, 166 Palestinian musical intifada 128–135; aesthetics of 128–135; politics of 128–135; see also cultural intifada; cultural resistance Palestinian music conservatories 71, 143, 146 Palestinian nationalism 18, 40, 44, 77, 167, 182, 187 Palestinianness 17, 24, 43, 50, 59, 64, 65, 70, 73, 128, 146, 154, 202, 223, 225, 227, 232, 237–239 Palestinian space 127–128, 152, 227 Parra, Violeta 209, 239n7 “The People Demand Social Justice!” slogan 159 Peres, Shimon 13 Peretz, David 236 “Permission to Narrate” (Said) 16

Index  279 personal autonomy 125, 147 Peteet, Julie 151 Pile, Steve 126, 134 Piyuṭim 89–99 politics of 154; aesthetic production 154–155; coexistence, 7, 13, 20, 34, 39; collaboration 2, 7, 14, 15, 83, 88, 164, 170, 172; cultural production 26; culture 29; erasure 155; exclusion and inclusion 4, 215; genre 23–26; hope 223; ID cards and classifications 240n30; identity/ personhood 108, 204; inclusivity 174, 198, 219; integration 13; music making 3, 38, 155; musical production 8; nation-building/nationhood 7, 15, 17, 219; Palestinian musical intifada 128–135; participation 99; recognition/ representation 87, 99, 102, 108, 119, 158; reconciliation 28; relationality 3, 5, 22, 37; resistance 7, 15, 16, 17, 20, 53, 130; spatiality and temporality 124; sound 3, 17 Pope Benedict XVI 96 Popular Arts Center 149 Popular Committee for the Defense of Tasso Cemetery 196n19 popular resistance (maqāwma shaʽ biyya) 49, 50, 56 post-Oslo 50, 51, 66, 189, 197, 202, 233; cultural production 26; era/period 3, 7, 37, 62, 71, 84, 85, 118, 146, 189, 198, 202, 244; trend 10; see also Oslo; Oslo Accords price tag: and “death to the Arabs” graffiti 109; events in Jaffa 110; initiatives 115; and “Kahane was right” 109; terrorism 109, 110, 115; violence and terror acts 108–109 “Prize for a Creation on the Subject of Zionism” 85 “Protest Tents” 157; see also J14 social protest movement public housing 92–93, 104, 167, 168, 191, 193 Qalandiya 56, 121, 137; Al-Kamandjâti Youth Orchestra performance at 128–135, 154; checkpoint 34, 56, 119, 121, 128–131, 135, 136, 137; concert participants 134; entrepreneurial kids from refugee camp at 132; foot traffic at 131; Mozart at 128–135; Music

Days Festival at 129; Palestinian musical intifada and 128–135; refugee camp 48, 136 Qudûd ḥalabiyya 74, 76–77 “Qul li’l-Malīḥa” (song) 77 Qur’ān 226 Rabin, Yitzhak 14, 83, 97 Rabinowitz, Dan 28 Racy, Ali Jihad 73 Ramadan (Khattab) (bass player) 148–153 Ramallah 33, 34, 35, 37, 44, 46, 54, 57, 63, 119, 121, 129, 134, 139, 149–150, 170, 191, 219; al-Am‘ari refugee camp in 69; Al-Kamandjâti branch in 33, 35, 42, 44, 48–49, 51, 68; al-Kasaba theater in 73; Beit Aneesah in 225; between Ramallah and Jerusalem 135–137; and concerts 135–137; cultural life in 66; Cultural Palace in 52, 60, 133; LaWein club in 64; lookout in 152; military invasion of 64; middle class in 79; Popular Arts Center 149; Ramallah Café (blog) 155n5; The Ramallah Orchestra 55, 59, 59, 60–62, 63, 79, 131; Ramallah Oriental Ensemble 66–71 Rancière, Jacques 154 Regev, Miri 85 relationality 3, 5, 7–8, 11, 37; modes of 22, 37; cultural politics of 13; dialectical 120; and Jaffa 166–167, 171, 187; for Palestinian citizens 194, 201, 208, 238 resistance: defined 134; Pile on 134 “The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad” program 6 Rice, Timothy 126 “Ride of the Valkyries” (theme from Wagner’s opera Die Walküre) 42 Rishon le-Zion 36–37 Rothschild “center”; social protest and 190–193 Routledge, Paul 223 Russian Compound 156n17 Saddouk, Khaled 77 Safadi, Jowan 11, 39, 197, 198, 202, 203–204, 223–237, 238; “Between the devil and the deep blue sea:” 231–233; Earlier Career in Be’er Sheva

280 Index (Bi’r al-Sab‘) 233–237; at Haifa’s Bringing the Hearts Closer Festival 227–231; “Safe in the Arms of the Occupation” 231–233 Said, Edward 13, 16, 28, 44, 127, 217, 237 Sarid, Yossi 191 Sbeit, Walaa 227–229, 230 Scarry, Elaine 150 second Lebanon war 83, 195n15 Seeds of Peace 190 Seeger, Pete 205 Seroussi, Edwin 200 Seskin, Steve 95 shabâb 57, 58, 67, 213 Shabak (Israeli Security Agency) 138, 142; and bureaucracy 142 “Shabb Daʽabak” (song) 115 sha‘bi 15, 24 Shakira 213 Shalit, Gilad 25, 192 Shannon, Jonathan 74 shared Arab-Jewish citizenship 39, 82, 84–86, 88, 109, 110; see also Voices of Peace Sharon, Ariel 31 Shauq (Longing) (album) 207, 208 Shehada, Saleh 195n15 Sheikh Imam 180–182 Shenhav, Yehouda 193–194 “Shiboletba-śade” (“Wheat Stalk in the Field”) (song) 25 Shirana Choir 91, 105–106, 111–119, 114, 122n9, 123n29, 242; aesthetic context 111–118; “Against Racism” 109; overview 105–106; politics within 107–108; sociopolitical context 108–111 Shofan, Elad 236 Shofani, Yusuf 36 Shohat, Ella 169 Shortcuts (album) 233 Shufan, Elad 236 “Sībūnī yā Nās”(song) 77 Sluka, Jeffery A. 34 social justice 30, 87.157, 159, 162, 163–164, 165, 170, 173–174, 177, 190–191, 217, 225 social protest 160, 190–194; see also Arab Spring; Israeli social protest movement; J14 movement “Song Drives the Darkness Away” (“Shir Megaresh et ha-Ḥ oshekh”) (song) 112

“Song of Hope” (“Shir Tikva”)(song) 96 Songs of the Land of Israel (SLI) 2, 24, 25, 26, 84, 112, 113, 178–179 Sosa, Mercedes 207 “A Sparrow Stood at My Window” (“Aṣfūr Tall Min al-Shubbāk”) (song) 95 “spatial heteronomy” 166 spatio-temporal violence 156n18; creativity and 146–153; embodiment and 146–153 Speaking Arts Conference 216–217, 220, 222 Stein, Rebecca 27 Stokes, Martin 72 “Straight No Chaser” (jazz standard, Monk) 63 Street, John 12 Suite Andalouse for Oud and Orchestra (piece by Marcel Khalife) 61 Swedenburg, Ted 22, 27, 158 System Ali 20, 25–26, 159, 167; Amneh (Jeroushi) 172–179, 181–185, 187, 188; art of being “Yāfāwwiyeh”187–190; “builds the house anew” at Jaffa tent city 170–187; from discourse to music 170–187; Enchik (Enver Seitibragimov) 172, 177, 185, 196n21; home, imaginary(ies) of, 171; and Jaffa tent city 170–187; texts 195n14; and Jewish-Palestinian hip hop 20, 25; Liba (Neeman) 171, 173, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185; linguistic idioms and musical style 172, 179; Luna (AbuNassar) 95, 172, 173, 185; Moti (Ben Baruh) 172, 173, 182, 184, 196n23; multi-voiced presentation 187; performance 167, 173, 187; textualmusical cartography 186; Yonatan (Dayan) (bass player) 172; Yonatan (Kunda) (rapper, guitarist) 172, 173, 178, 180, 183, 185 “System Ali ‘Ala Bālī! ”(System Ali On My Mind) (song) 176–177 Ta‘ayush 35 Tahrir Square revolution 30; see also Arab spring ṭarab 45, 61, 73, 75–76, 78, 203 Tasso (Jaffa’s Muslim cemetery) 184, 196n19 “Ṭayr Abābīl”(Birds of Fire) (song) 226 Tawil-Souri, Helga 125–126, 151

Index  281 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 205 Tel Aviv 6, 25, 30, 99, 102, 103, 121n2, 152–153, 189, 194, 208, 214, 241; demonstrations/rallies in 31, 157, 160, 169, 191; international airport near 42, 144; Southern neighborhoods of 169–170, 188; University 149; US embassy in 40n5; see also Tel Aviv-Jaffa Tel Aviv-Jaffa 33, 36, 95, 102, 103, 167; municipality 91–93, 98, 168, 171, 182, 187, 189, 190 Tel Aviv Art Museum 94, 97 Theodorakis, Mikis 205 “There will never be another you” (jazz standard) 63 This week in Palestine 64 Tim (Poitier) (PYO and PNO Orchestra manager) 139–142, 143–145 Tolan, Sandy 129, 155n5 Toot Ard 25 “Top of the World” (song) 95 Touma, Emile 203 Umm Kulthum 71, 90, 205, 213 UNESCO 9, 30, 54, 199 United Nations (UN): PA negotiating independence at 46; recognition of Palestine as non-member observer state 155n3 United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) 40n5, 40–41n6, 48, 80n5, 120; UNRWA schools 52–53, 69, 70 violence 22, 32, 34, 51, 64–65, 83–84, 103, 104, 107, 116–117, 125, 137, 174–175, 209, 213, 231; acts of 108; of authority 87; and borders 34; bureaucratic 137–146; circles of 136; as condition of knowledge production 14; conceptualizing 154; conflict-related 108; cycles of 2, 83, 110, 198, 208; domination and 5;(embodied) experiences of 39, 128, 149–150, 154; episodic 127; ethnonational 88, 114, 116, 117; exposure to 16, 28, 64, 121, 243; fanbased 120; geography/landscape of 2, 51, 127, 128, 230; incitement to 200, 222, 229; interface with power and 17; intra-communal 176; markers of 71; masking of 7; monopoly of 151; of Occupation 118; ongoing 3, 26;

of patriarchy 116; political 3, 235, 242; power and 27; price tag 108–110; proximity to 105; resistance through 16; singing against 108; site of 116, 154; source/threat of 114, 120; spatio-temporal 146–153, 156n18; structural 89, 104; transforming experiences of 49–50, 78; zero sum game of 119 Voices of Peace (VOP) choir 82, 89–90; aesthetic trajectory of 96; diplomat’s reception 96; Jewish Agency’s role in the 97; members 104, 105; multicultural setting 103–104; Muslim, Christian and Jewish youth in the 91; performing multicultural Israel 94–99; recording pluralistic citizenship 99–104; and the Shirana choir 119, 242; at the Tel Aviv Art Museum 94 Wagner 42, 156n19 “we are all periphery” slogan 161 “We shall overcome” (song) 206 Weisel, Meir 14 West Bank 3, 6, 9, 10, 15, 17–18, 20, 29, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 48, 52, 53, 54, 56, 61, 65, 67, 83, 85, 92, 108–110, 115, 126, 127, 129, 131, 135, 137, 138, 141, 144, 147, 149, 150, 155n2, 200–202, 204, 210, 212, 216, 231, 234; music conservatories in 19; NGO-ization of 19–20 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra 13, 80n3 Western orchestral traditions 143 “Why Be Happy?” (Bokhary) 64 Winegar, Jessica 41n14, 49, 50, 70–71 Ya‘acov, Neve 121 “Yāfāwwiyeh” (song) 182–185 “Yā Ḥarām al-Kuffār”(“Oh Poor infidels”) (song) 226–227, 231 “Yāllāh Ḥabībī” (song) 134 “Yamā Mweil al-Hawā” (song) 131 Yediot Aharonot 220, 222 Yiftachel, Oren 122n19, 166 YMCA 220–221 Yonatan (Kunda) (rapper, guitarist) [of System Ali] 172, 173, 178, 180, 183, 185

282 Index Yonatan (Dayan) (bass player) [of System Ali] 172 Yuval-Davis, Nira 119 Zababdeh Culture and Arts Festival 210–216 “Zamân al-Salâm” (“Time for Peace”) (song) 13, 95

Ziad, Tawfik 203, 207 Zionism 2, 8, 76, 97, 121, 165, 166, 170; American alignment with 41n14; “Prize for a Creation on the Subject of ” 85 Zionist Confederation House 218 “the Zionist Festival” 85 “Zion U” contest 85