NYT
June 1, 2009
Minuets, Sonatas and Politics in the West Bank
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The shy Palestinian teenager raised her flute and dispatched the courtly melodies and cascading runs of an 18th-century concerto with surprising self-assurance.
Over just three years of study the flute had become a near obsession for Dalia Moukarker, 16. She was practicing so hard — sometimes retreating to a bathroom in her crowded apartment, sometimes skipping meals — that her wrist filled with pain, limiting her to two hours a day. But in a classroom here recently, the discomfort was nowhere to be seen. For she had earned an almost surreal reward: a master class with her hero, Emmanuel Pahud, a major international soloist.
Mr. Pahud circled, studying her intently. Then he took her instrument and sent out stunning roulades of notes to demonstrate. Dalia gaped in wonder and gave a soft laugh of amazement. The flute, she said later, “takes me to another world that is far away from here, a more beautiful world. Because it is not a beautiful place here. It is an ugly place.”
Dalia is one of a new generation of Palestinians who have been swept up in a rising tide of interest in Western classical music in the last several years here in the Palestinian territories, but especially the West Bank. The sounds of trills and arpeggios, Bach minuets and Beethoven sonatas, are rising up amid the economic malaise and restrictions of the Israeli occupation.
But as with many endeavors in this part of the world, the pursuit of classical music is fraught with tensions and obstacles, including a desire not to be seen as working with Israelis.
A small effort to teach violin at a refugee camp in Jenin, north of Ramallah, was banned in March when camp authorities heard that the students had played for Holocaust survivors in Israel, saying the concert “served enemy interests.” A lack of detailed knowledge about the Holocaust is widespread among Palestinians, who view that chapter of history as a catalyst to the creation of Israel and thus a source of their suffering. But the music teacher, Wafaa Younis, an Israeli Arab, scoffed at the complaint. “I don’t think it should be a problem,” she said.
In another incident a music school in Jenin was heavily damaged by arson.
Because of financial hardships, most students rely on donated instruments and a rotating cast of European teachers. Since traditional Palestinian culture frowns on the mingling of the sexes, parents are sometimes reluctant to send their children to music schools, administrators say.
And politics are never far away. Some Palestinian teachers couch the instruction in propaganda, calling it a means of “resisting the occupation.” Across the border in Israel, which has a mother lode of classical music talent, there is little awareness that Palestinians are pursuing the same artistic tradition. That is perhaps no surprise in a conflict where mutual ignorance is prodigious.
“We cannot perceive them as people who have their own cultural lives,” said Noam Ben-Zeev, a music critic for the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz.
Despite the opposition of some, many Palestinians see the study of Western classical music — part of a broader cultural revival in the West Bank — as a source of hope, a way to connect to the outer world from a hemmed-in and controlled existence, particularly at a time when hope for a Palestinian state seems ever more distant.
“Deep inside, it’s to demonstrate we are alive, that we deserve to be alive and have our culture,” said George Diek, a partly self-taught Palestinian oboe teacher in Bethlehem.
The presence of classical music is still tiny among a West Bank population of 2.5 million. But concerts pop up more and more. A Baroque festival took place across the West Bank in December. A piano competition for Palestinians attracted 50 entrants to East Jerusalem in January.
Sounding Jerusalem, a chamber music festival, will take place in the area for the fourth year this month. Music schools are booming and sending students off to study in Europe and the United States. An influx of money from foreign governments, local foundations and the Palestinian Authority has fueled the music revival.
Even in Gaza, pummeled by a 22-day war with Israel that ended in January, Palestinian authorities are trying to reopen a small music school that was heavily damaged.
One of the major players in the nurturing of classical music is the Barenboim-Said Foundation, established by Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-born Israeli conductor and pianist, who is a forceful advocate for Palestinian rights, and Edward W. Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual, who died in 2003. It opened a center in Ramallah in 2006 to provide lessons here and coaching in nearby towns and villages.
Dalia is one of the foundation’s students. She lives in Beit Jala, a village close to Bethlehem, where she shares a room with a sister, Roudy, 11, a budding clarinetist. She is the eldest of five children in a Christian family. Her father, Sulieman, is a security guard at Bethlehem University, and the family survives on money sent by two of her father’s expatiate brothers.
Posters of the French-Swiss Mr. Pahud are taped to Dalia’s bedroom window, which overlooks Bethlehem and a tumble of white houses. She can also see a wall that is part of the lengthy barrier built by Israel in response to attacks. Hundreds of Israelis were killed in suicide bombings emanating from the area. Dalia said that she felt “in prison” because of travel restrictions. “Every time we look at this wall, we feel suffocated,” she added.
Friends at first made fun of her flute playing, saying music was not a serious endeavor. Some teachers supported her. “But the most important thing was the feeling the music gives me,” she said. “You feel as if you are flying.” She now hopes to gain a foundation scholarship to study in France, she said, and dreams of being a conductor.
At the master class, Mr. Pahud told her to lighten her hold on the flute to release tension. “Gentle fingers, small fingers,” he said. Later, in an interview, he pronounced her a real talent.
Mr. Pahud, 39, was personally invited here by Mr. Barenboim. In addition to its own activities, the Barenboim-Said Foundation also assists a group called Al Kamandjati (the Violinist), founded in October 2002 by Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp and studied viola in France. Having started with 90 students, the program now has 400, Mr. Aburedwan said. Among its students is Sondos Samarn, 12. Her teacher, Benjamin Payen, 28, of France, said she was one of the most talented violin students in Ramallah.
Al Kamandjati’s Jenin branch was the school struck by arson. No one claimed responsibility, and suspicion fell on an array of forces: Islamists (although religious authorities are said to have given their blessing to the school), social conservatives, people jealous of the school’s success, collaborators with Israel.
Classes were immediately moved to the garden, and the small stone school reopened within two weeks. On a day in late April children came bearing ouds, flutes and violins. The smell of smoke lingered despite the whitewashed walls. Iyad Staiti, the director, asked visitors to stay inside, to avoid drawing attention from the school’s enemies. Across town Al Kamandjati is renovating a building that will be a much larger home.
Just how complicated things can become is made obvious by the third classical music presence, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. Affiliated with Birzeit University, it began in the mid-1990s and has more than 650 students and a curriculum of theory, ear training, music history and performance, as well as an Arabic music program. It has ambitions to sponsor a Palestine national orchestra. The conservatory is putting up a modern glass-and-concrete building in Bethlehem about twice the size of its quarters there.
Though they share Mr. Said’s name, the conservatory and the Barenboim-Said Foundation no longer work together. A joint youth orchestra fell apart.
Suhail Khoury, the conservatory’s general director, said Barenboim-Said was siphoning off the best musicians for the Arab-Israeli orchestra it sponsors, the West-Eastern Divan. He accused Mr. Barenboim of effectively supporting the Israeli occupation by not using the orchestra to oppose Israeli policies.
“The fact on the ground is that Israel occupies Palestine,” he said. “If one guy’s foot is on the neck of another, you can’t sing together.”
Mr. Barenboim said that the orchestra was “not a political project” and does not endorse the Israeli occupation. Music, Mr. Barenboim said, is the best weapon the Palestinians have “against violence and ugliness.”
“If you go to a violin lesson for an hour,” he added, “in that hour you are not in contact with violence or with the occupation.”
Near Ramallah, hours after teaching Dalia’s master class, Mr. Pahud played a solo concert at a boys’ school. The call to prayer from a nearby mosque mingled with the notes coming from his gleaming golden flute.
Dalia sat in the third row, beside her main teacher, Ilia Karadjov, 40, from Germany. The two bent their heads over the score of each piece. At the end Dalia presented Mr. Pahud with a bouquet.
She said her flute was like a friend she could not live without. But it is borrowed, from an amateur musician in her village. Dalia will give it back when she gets her own and goes off to a university.
“This way,” she said, “I can give an opportunity for someone else.”
Showing posts with label palestine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label palestine. Show all posts
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
A Music School Silenced in Gaza
From the political website Counterpunch
Israel's Cultural Warriors
A Music School Silenced in Gaza
By NADIA HIJAB
There was a music school in Gaza. It was just six months old. The 31 children aged seven to 11 could choose one of five instruments, including the guitar, oud (lute), and piano. Most of the 19 girls gravitated to the guitar and piano while many of the 12 boys showed a preference for the oud.
The school worked out of rented premises in the Palestinian Red Crescent Society building just across the street from the Preventive Security Forces compound in Gaza City. The compound was targeted in the first wave of Israeli bombardments on December 27, and twice more the next day. The five-story building was vaporized; a flat gravel surface is all that remains.
Like other buildings in the neighborhood, the Gaza Music School was shattered; window frames and doors were blown out, and holes were punched in the walls. The force of the blast imploded the four ouds, just like it had the compound.
By some miracle, the children had not yet arrived for their lessons and so were spared the fate of those in other schools in the path of Israeli bombs.
In the midst of all the death and destruction in Gaza, the school's short life rouses particular emotion. That there was such a school at all is astonishing, not just because of the 18 month siege that followed the decades of "de-development" of Gaza under Israeli occupation but also because one might expect it to be contrary to an Islamist social program.
There is almost no musical education in Gaza. The school project was developed in response to community demand, particularly from among the 11,600 children who are members of the Qattan Center for the Child. The Center provides extra-curricular activities and a library for the children. It is impressive: With its 103,000 books, it is one of the largest children's libraries in the Arab world.
The children who attended the Center's music workshops and concerts started asking for more. "They said, 'We want to play instruments too,'" explained Ziad Khalaf, the Ramallah-based director of the Qattan Foundation, which established the school with co-funding from the Swedish development organization SIDA.
The school provided a window on another world for the besieged Gazans. "Many parents sat in on the theory lessons so they could better support their kids' homework," said Khalaf.
The five music teachers include two Russian women married to Palestinian men. They refused to leave Gaza when the border was briefly opened to enable foreigners to flee. For them, Gaza with all its misery and deprivation is still home, just as it is for the 1.5 million other Palestinians living there.
And what about Hamas' supposed social rigidity? Some websites did take a strong line against musical education, complaining that Hamas was allowing music to be taught under its rule instead of the Sharia. But they were ignored. Khalaf emphasizes that the Foundation has experienced full support from all authorities and communities in its different places of operation.
The day after the music school was hit, its coordinator called each of the children and their parents to make sure they were safe, and also to assure them that the school would be repaired, restocked, and reopened as soon as possible.
In Ramallah, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music is planning a fundraiser soon to help rebuild the school. "Some friends from Amsterdam and London who saw the damage to Gaza music school on the Foundation's website said they will be fundraising to help," Khalaf said.
These plans, too, arouse emotion: Palestinians rebuild even as the rubble rises around them. They have had 60 years to learn how to do so, and show no signs of giving up their quest for their rights -- not even the right to learn how to play a musical instrument.
Nadia Hijab is a senior fellow at the Insitute for Palestine Studies.
Israel's Cultural Warriors
A Music School Silenced in Gaza
By NADIA HIJAB
There was a music school in Gaza. It was just six months old. The 31 children aged seven to 11 could choose one of five instruments, including the guitar, oud (lute), and piano. Most of the 19 girls gravitated to the guitar and piano while many of the 12 boys showed a preference for the oud.
The school worked out of rented premises in the Palestinian Red Crescent Society building just across the street from the Preventive Security Forces compound in Gaza City. The compound was targeted in the first wave of Israeli bombardments on December 27, and twice more the next day. The five-story building was vaporized; a flat gravel surface is all that remains.
Like other buildings in the neighborhood, the Gaza Music School was shattered; window frames and doors were blown out, and holes were punched in the walls. The force of the blast imploded the four ouds, just like it had the compound.
By some miracle, the children had not yet arrived for their lessons and so were spared the fate of those in other schools in the path of Israeli bombs.
In the midst of all the death and destruction in Gaza, the school's short life rouses particular emotion. That there was such a school at all is astonishing, not just because of the 18 month siege that followed the decades of "de-development" of Gaza under Israeli occupation but also because one might expect it to be contrary to an Islamist social program.
There is almost no musical education in Gaza. The school project was developed in response to community demand, particularly from among the 11,600 children who are members of the Qattan Center for the Child. The Center provides extra-curricular activities and a library for the children. It is impressive: With its 103,000 books, it is one of the largest children's libraries in the Arab world.
The children who attended the Center's music workshops and concerts started asking for more. "They said, 'We want to play instruments too,'" explained Ziad Khalaf, the Ramallah-based director of the Qattan Foundation, which established the school with co-funding from the Swedish development organization SIDA.
The school provided a window on another world for the besieged Gazans. "Many parents sat in on the theory lessons so they could better support their kids' homework," said Khalaf.
The five music teachers include two Russian women married to Palestinian men. They refused to leave Gaza when the border was briefly opened to enable foreigners to flee. For them, Gaza with all its misery and deprivation is still home, just as it is for the 1.5 million other Palestinians living there.
And what about Hamas' supposed social rigidity? Some websites did take a strong line against musical education, complaining that Hamas was allowing music to be taught under its rule instead of the Sharia. But they were ignored. Khalaf emphasizes that the Foundation has experienced full support from all authorities and communities in its different places of operation.
The day after the music school was hit, its coordinator called each of the children and their parents to make sure they were safe, and also to assure them that the school would be repaired, restocked, and reopened as soon as possible.
In Ramallah, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music is planning a fundraiser soon to help rebuild the school. "Some friends from Amsterdam and London who saw the damage to Gaza music school on the Foundation's website said they will be fundraising to help," Khalaf said.
These plans, too, arouse emotion: Palestinians rebuild even as the rubble rises around them. They have had 60 years to learn how to do so, and show no signs of giving up their quest for their rights -- not even the right to learn how to play a musical instrument.
Nadia Hijab is a senior fellow at the Insitute for Palestine Studies.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: A Culture Clash
NYT
September 7, 2008
Abroad
Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: A Culture Clash
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
GAZA — In a dingy storefront on a noisy block in the middle of Gaza City, metal shelves bulge with dusty audiotapes extolling Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad. Alongside them, a pouty Jennifer Lopez beckons from the cover of a CD. DVDs are also on offer, of not-yet-officially-released movies like “Wanted,” “Hancock” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” the Adam Sandler comedy about a Mossad agent turned hairdresser in a New York City salon run by a Palestinian woman.
Amer Kihail, 32, a slender man with an elastic, hangdog face, runs the store, called New Sound. Do Gazans living under Hamas buy much Western music or many Western movies? Mr. Kihail looked baffled, and maybe even a little annoyed, by the question.
“Of course,” he said.
Ruled by Hamas, penned in by Israel, grappling with daily shortages of food and supplies, Gazans need an escape. Culture turns out to be not just an afterthought but, many say, essential to surviving here. Especially for young Gazans, what’s on satellite television and the Internet, on tapes and compact discs, is a window to the world beyond the armored checkpoints, and a link to Arab society elsewhere and, crucially, to the West.
And in what is clearly an emerging struggle within Hamas between political pragmatists, trying to consolidate their new authority, and extremists who have begun pressing a more fundamentalist agenda, culture is a central battleground for control of Gaza. A release from confinement and hardship, even mundane television becomes freighted in this context.
As much as the Pakistan-Afghan frontier, this is a front line in the so-called global war on terror, in which anti-Western strains of Islam rub up against the social and cultural proclivities of many, perhaps most, Muslims.
How the West fares, improbable as it might seem, may depend as much on whether people in this forsaken strip of land and elsewhere in this part of the world are watching “Zohan” and Dr. Phil, as on skirmishes in the mountains south of Kabul. What’s happening in a humble Gazan music store, it turns out, has repercussions across the region and beyond.
Gaza isn’t what you might imagine, culturally speaking. Like the West Bank, it occupies a special place in the Middle East: Gazans may loathe Israel but have worked there or spent years in Israeli prisons, and while they haven’t taken up Jewish culture, they’ve experienced Western life as many other Arabs haven’t. This has encouraged a sensibility that, until lately anyway, had a moderating effect on religion and society.
Not far from New Sound, booksellers in this city’s ancient market hawk sex-instruction manuals alongside yellowing paperbacks from Egypt interpreting the Koran. Arabic translations of old Harlequin romances are laid out on folding tables cheek by jowl with joke books in which Muslim characters do borscht belt shtick. (Wife at a psychiatrist’s office: “My husband talks when he’s sleeping. What should I do?” Psychiatrist: “Can you give him a chance to talk when he’s awake?”)
A skinny boy with bad teeth, manning the book tables the other morning, grinned when a woman came by and thumbed through “What to Do if You Have Weaknesses in Sex.”
Pointing to the religious books, she asked, “Do many people buy those?”
“Sure,” the boy said.
“These, too?” she asked, gesturing toward a stack of flimsy softcovers with a picture of the young Cheryl Tiegs on the front.
“Oh yes!” he said.
That evening, in the garden of a family restaurant called Roots (“No Weapon Please,” a sign said on the front door), patrons munched salads and gazed at “Friends” on a big screen. Everybody was waiting for “Noor.”
As they do throughout much of the Arab world these days, the streets here clear each night when “Noor” comes on. A Turkish “Dallas,” centered around the title character and her rich Muslim family enduring the usual soap opera imbroglios, the show has become so wildly popular that imams in Saudi Arabia and Gaza have lately issued fatwas against anyone who watches it. Naturally, nobody pays attention.
Even Hamas tunes in. Imad Alifranji is helping to start up Alquds, a new Islamic television station, Gaza’s second after Al Aqsa, Hamas’s station, which recently devoted three full days of programming to stories about promising Gazan high school students. Mr. Alifranji is wrestling with what might attract just a few more viewers.
“There’s so much pressure here to find jobs, because of the Israeli siege, because of internal fighting, and with no places for young people to go out, that Gazans take comfort in a Turkish soap opera,” Mr. Alifranji said with a shrug. “It is true,” he said, “Hamas is upset with some scenes in ‘Noor,’ which it fears provide a bad example for Palestinian families, scenes of sex before marriage. My 15-year-old daughter is obsessed with ‘Noor.’ My son, Mosab, who’s 18, tries to stop her from watching. He disapproves.”
As if on cue, Mosab, who looked 12, walked into Mr. Alifranji’s office. The only time he visited a Gazan cafe, Mosab said, he left because “Noor” was on television. He used to listen to Arab pop stars like Elissa and Tamer Hosni, but now finds “they have no respect for religion.” He prefers Jackie Chan movies and rap. “ ‘Noor,’ ” he said, “doesn’t know the difference between what should be taboo and what is acceptable.” Suddenly, Mosab’s cellphone rang. He blushed.
The ringtone was the theme from “Noor.”
Hip-Hop and Soap Operas
Gaza has not had any movie house since the last one burned two decades ago during the first intifada. The Palestinian territories are bitterly split, with the more moderate Fatah ruling the West Bank, and Gaza under the control of Hamas, which won the Palestinian popular election two years ago and fought back an attempted coup by Fatah last year. Now Gaza has become isolated. The French Cultural Center is virtually the only institution that organizes a modest art exhibition or music recital once in a while.
But that doesn’t mean Gazans don’t consume and make culture themselves. One broiling afternoon, a dozen young married friends sat around a picnic table at a swim club, near the beach in Gaza City, talking about “Oprah,” “24” and “Prison Break.”
The club, a private retreat amid garbage and ruins, was a whitewashed oasis of bougainvillea and tattered canvas awnings on rusty blue poles, a kind of faded Polaroid of Coney Island around 1965, but with female swimmers in soggy pants and T-shirts, not bikinis, and shirtless teenage boys kicking around a soccer ball.
“We do as we like in private,” explained Rajah Abujasser, 20, wearing a green head scarf and long sleeves despite the heat.
Across town, Mothafar Alassar was taping a new track at Mashareq, a recording studio. He’s 20, a baby-faced rapper with a shaved head. A few years ago he formed the band S.B.R. with a friend.
“Through TV and the Internet I fell in love with rap, with Tupac and 50 Cent, Keny Arkana from Marseille,” he said. “People laughed at first. Rap was new in Gaza. The French Cultural Center, they gave me money to make an album. Now, when we had a concert recently, 700 people came.”
Hamas then arrested Mr. Alassar, saying he had no license to perform, but released him after he gave a live sample of his hip-hop to a bemused, bearded official. “Hamas is not against art,” Mr. Alassar said. “They just don’t understand it.”
Rima Morgan, a 28-year-old business student turned singer in a white head scarf and black leotard, was also at Mashareq, recording a jingle for a West Bank radio station. “My family, which is traditional, didn’t want me to sing, because it meant late nights, at parties, with men and women together,” she said. “But for me singing is the only way to keep going.” She said she listens to Indian music, to Céline Dion and Julio Iglesias, and to Arab pop stars like Elissa. On television, she watches “Friends.”
And “Noor,” of course.
“We can’t travel, so it’s our exposure to another Islamic society,” she said.
Ramy Okasha, a fellow singer, who was also there, shook his head. “The man is not a man,” he complained about Noor’s husband, Mohannad, the soap opera’s blue-eyed answer to Fabio; his face, like that of Noor’s, hangs on the bedroom walls of countless Gazan teenage girls. “She’s too stubborn,” Mr. Okasha grumbled.
What does he watch instead?
“ ‘The Bold and the Beautiful,’ ” he answered.
Cartoons Cutting Too Closely
Hamas produces its own version of culture. The cartoonist Omayya Joha’s caricatures appear in many Arab magazines and newspapers. She’s the widow of a Hamas fighter killed by Israelis. She married another fighter after he died.
“I have a quill in one hand and a gun in the other,” she likes to say. At a Hamas office not long ago, sitting reservedly in hijab and black gloves before a conference table and tray of candy and fruit juice, she said coolly: “Israel thinks of me as a radical anti-Semite, but I’m not. I simply do not think that we can ever have peace. No way. Never.”
She studies Western cartoons. “The exposure is very important,” she explained, brightening at the prospect of talking shop, not politics. Lately, the Fatah-linked newspaper in the West Bank rejected some of her work and that saddened her.
“You start to think about self-censorship,” she frowned, “anticipating what Fatah will not like.”
This is exactly what many Gazans say Hamas has lately caused them to do.
She stiffened at that remark. “There is a price to pay for your affiliations,” she said. Eyad Sarraj shook his head when this was repeated to him. “Hamas has not yet officially imposed its cultural program, but it’s in place,” he said. He is a Gazan psychiatrist. “After the election last year, we were assured Hamas would not infringe on our personal freedom, but now they are trying hard to prove us wrong. They are coming into our homes.”
He was alluding to an episode last month when hooded Hamas policemen broke into the rooftop apartment of a businessman and his wife, who were quietly drinking with guests. The police officers beat up the men and confiscated the liquor.
Ayman Taha, a Hamas leader, claimed that was a mistake. “Those were wrongdoings by some individuals in Hamas who don’t reflect the movement’s position,” he said.
Stone-faced, built like a weight lifter, he was sitting on a patio overlooking the sea, staring undazed into the sun. Below, teenage boys played paddle ball in the surf and women in head scarves, and also some without, sat under makeshift tents. Rifles across their laps, black-clad policemen, who are everywhere in Gaza, perched on a ruined embankment beside the patio, watching. “Hamas has not implemented any restrictions regarding cultural life,” Mr. Taha said.
Aside from slowing Internet access, ostensibly to deter Gazans from looking at pornography, that’s technically true, but there is also no law here against alcohol and you won’t find a bar in Gaza. Mr. Taha chalked up the attack on the businessman, along with a rising number of similar events, to rogue elements in Hamas, former soldiers who are now unseasoned policemen who, he stressed, do not disrupt basic party unity. “If some people are restricting their own freedoms as a reaction, out of fear, that is their decision,” he went on in a deadpan voice. “Do you hear that music?” A restaurant was piping Steely Dan across the patio.
“Do I use my power to stop this?” he said. “No. People are entitled to their behavior — so long as they do not harm this culture.” And there’s the rub. Gallery Mina, a Ministry of Culture art space that for years hosted poetry readings, films and Western-style art exhibitions, was among hundreds of organizations recently raided by Hamas, with the excuse of flushing out Fatah links; now Mina has been turned into a home for Hamas-approved events.
The Culture and Free Thought Association, a nonprofit organization in Khan Yunis, a town in southern Gaza, with a theater, a summer camp and a variety of arts programs, was looted not long ago by Hamas security forces who held the woman in charge at gunpoint and later went to her home. Leaders of Hamas in Khan Yunis apologized afterward, claiming, like Mr. Taha, that the raiders were renegades.
It’s noteworthy that the places raided by Hamas aren’t book stalls selling sex manuals or cafes showing sitcoms, but cultural centers promoting art that aspires to be more than an opiate for the people, implying an organized attack.
“Hamas wants to create an impression in Gaza that they are not controlling individual life or suppressing cultural freedom, and they want that message to reach outside,” said Jamal Al Rozzi, director of the Palestinian Theater Association in Gaza, whose office was also attacked. “But at the same time, everything is under its control. Hamas doesn’t officially tell us that we can’t do anything, but you can be taken away to prison and beaten for 30 days and no one will even know where the hell you are.”
Security at a Price
Khan Yunis is, even by Gazan standards, a bastion of religious tradition, a sun-baked puzzle of tumbledown buildings and dirt streets, the Wild West compared to the cosmopolitan Gaza City. It’s also a Hamas stronghold, although before Hamas took over, a local shop was bombed by Islamic extremists for selling pop music.
“After the explosion, we lost so much that we could only afford to rent half our former space,” said Mazin Abdeen, 35, the store’s owner. He was leaning against the front door of his new place one recent afternoon, chatting with an ice cream salesman next door over the roar of a generator. As usual, the electricity was out. The air was ripe with the stench of reused cooking oil, which, because Israel provides little gasoline, Gazans have turned to for fuel.
On a glass counter in Mr. Abdeen’s shop, stocked with watches and women’s underwear, were tapes by Elissa and Nancy, the pop singers. “Now that Hamas is the government, there is no problem,” he said. “They protect us.”
That is the paradox. Hamas has provided the formerly lawless Gaza with security, which won the party the election over Fatah. But Hamas now makes many Gazans feel insecure. Majeda Alsaqqa is the woman running the Culture and Free Thought Association, the one held at gunpoint. For the moment, she’s back in business. But Hamas not long ago took over the local library, and it stages plays about the lives of Palestinian soldiers killed by Israel, which are sometimes performed in the street just outside Ms. Alsaqqa’s garden.
“They use real explosives!” she said, laughing. “It used to be different here. I used to ride around on a bicycle wearing a dress. The raid on us was about imposing a different culture — about not liking our kind of theater, where men and woman mix. These were brainwashed kids who came with the Kalashnikovs, who are taught not to like foreigners or summer camps, where we teach children not to take anything for granted. For the first time, I’m scared.”
She’s not alone. Even so, Gazans can be stubborn. These days, playing songs extolling Fatah in public is a direct provocation against Hamas. The other night, a Fatah anthem sounded through the streets. It turned out to be a bachelor party. A rented bandstand with flashing lights had been erected in a square.
The men, heads skyward, danced with a mad intensity, escaping into the deafening music. The inky sea was up the street, silent and shimmering. There was no traffic, no movement on the sidewalks otherwise, but at the end of the block, several young, armed Hamas soldiers lingered in the shadows.
“You never know,” said Mr. Kihail, back at New Sound. “No direct threat has come, but you cannot joke with Hamas.” Next to the cash register — beside tapes bearing an image of the long-faced, white-bearded Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin — he nonetheless still stocks Fatah tapes with pictures of Samih Madhoun, the fighter whom Hamas last year elaborately executed. When asked to play a selection from the tape, Mr. Kihail kept an eye on the door.
“Arafat, you left,” the singer wailed, “but you left behind an earthquake that is Samih Madhoun.”
Just then, a middle-aged woman in a head scarf wandered in, and fondled a CD by Mustafa Amar, an Egyptian singer in a dashing white scarf, standing before the Pyramids. “It’s an escape,” she said, making clear she meant the music, not the album cover.
Mr. Kihail asked her if she was also a fan of Abdel Halim, the Egyptian crooner, who died in 1977 and who remains universally beloved here. He cued up a Halim song, one about a man abandoned by his lover, with a baleful melody. She nodded. Briefly, Mr. Kihail teared up.
“I blame him,” the woman said, about Halim, “for being so romantic. Life is not like that.”
“No,” Mr. Kihail said, “it isn’t.”
September 7, 2008
Abroad
Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: A Culture Clash
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
GAZA — In a dingy storefront on a noisy block in the middle of Gaza City, metal shelves bulge with dusty audiotapes extolling Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad. Alongside them, a pouty Jennifer Lopez beckons from the cover of a CD. DVDs are also on offer, of not-yet-officially-released movies like “Wanted,” “Hancock” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” the Adam Sandler comedy about a Mossad agent turned hairdresser in a New York City salon run by a Palestinian woman.
Amer Kihail, 32, a slender man with an elastic, hangdog face, runs the store, called New Sound. Do Gazans living under Hamas buy much Western music or many Western movies? Mr. Kihail looked baffled, and maybe even a little annoyed, by the question.
“Of course,” he said.
Ruled by Hamas, penned in by Israel, grappling with daily shortages of food and supplies, Gazans need an escape. Culture turns out to be not just an afterthought but, many say, essential to surviving here. Especially for young Gazans, what’s on satellite television and the Internet, on tapes and compact discs, is a window to the world beyond the armored checkpoints, and a link to Arab society elsewhere and, crucially, to the West.
And in what is clearly an emerging struggle within Hamas between political pragmatists, trying to consolidate their new authority, and extremists who have begun pressing a more fundamentalist agenda, culture is a central battleground for control of Gaza. A release from confinement and hardship, even mundane television becomes freighted in this context.
As much as the Pakistan-Afghan frontier, this is a front line in the so-called global war on terror, in which anti-Western strains of Islam rub up against the social and cultural proclivities of many, perhaps most, Muslims.
How the West fares, improbable as it might seem, may depend as much on whether people in this forsaken strip of land and elsewhere in this part of the world are watching “Zohan” and Dr. Phil, as on skirmishes in the mountains south of Kabul. What’s happening in a humble Gazan music store, it turns out, has repercussions across the region and beyond.
Gaza isn’t what you might imagine, culturally speaking. Like the West Bank, it occupies a special place in the Middle East: Gazans may loathe Israel but have worked there or spent years in Israeli prisons, and while they haven’t taken up Jewish culture, they’ve experienced Western life as many other Arabs haven’t. This has encouraged a sensibility that, until lately anyway, had a moderating effect on religion and society.
Not far from New Sound, booksellers in this city’s ancient market hawk sex-instruction manuals alongside yellowing paperbacks from Egypt interpreting the Koran. Arabic translations of old Harlequin romances are laid out on folding tables cheek by jowl with joke books in which Muslim characters do borscht belt shtick. (Wife at a psychiatrist’s office: “My husband talks when he’s sleeping. What should I do?” Psychiatrist: “Can you give him a chance to talk when he’s awake?”)
A skinny boy with bad teeth, manning the book tables the other morning, grinned when a woman came by and thumbed through “What to Do if You Have Weaknesses in Sex.”
Pointing to the religious books, she asked, “Do many people buy those?”
“Sure,” the boy said.
“These, too?” she asked, gesturing toward a stack of flimsy softcovers with a picture of the young Cheryl Tiegs on the front.
“Oh yes!” he said.
That evening, in the garden of a family restaurant called Roots (“No Weapon Please,” a sign said on the front door), patrons munched salads and gazed at “Friends” on a big screen. Everybody was waiting for “Noor.”
As they do throughout much of the Arab world these days, the streets here clear each night when “Noor” comes on. A Turkish “Dallas,” centered around the title character and her rich Muslim family enduring the usual soap opera imbroglios, the show has become so wildly popular that imams in Saudi Arabia and Gaza have lately issued fatwas against anyone who watches it. Naturally, nobody pays attention.
Even Hamas tunes in. Imad Alifranji is helping to start up Alquds, a new Islamic television station, Gaza’s second after Al Aqsa, Hamas’s station, which recently devoted three full days of programming to stories about promising Gazan high school students. Mr. Alifranji is wrestling with what might attract just a few more viewers.
“There’s so much pressure here to find jobs, because of the Israeli siege, because of internal fighting, and with no places for young people to go out, that Gazans take comfort in a Turkish soap opera,” Mr. Alifranji said with a shrug. “It is true,” he said, “Hamas is upset with some scenes in ‘Noor,’ which it fears provide a bad example for Palestinian families, scenes of sex before marriage. My 15-year-old daughter is obsessed with ‘Noor.’ My son, Mosab, who’s 18, tries to stop her from watching. He disapproves.”
As if on cue, Mosab, who looked 12, walked into Mr. Alifranji’s office. The only time he visited a Gazan cafe, Mosab said, he left because “Noor” was on television. He used to listen to Arab pop stars like Elissa and Tamer Hosni, but now finds “they have no respect for religion.” He prefers Jackie Chan movies and rap. “ ‘Noor,’ ” he said, “doesn’t know the difference between what should be taboo and what is acceptable.” Suddenly, Mosab’s cellphone rang. He blushed.
The ringtone was the theme from “Noor.”
Hip-Hop and Soap Operas
Gaza has not had any movie house since the last one burned two decades ago during the first intifada. The Palestinian territories are bitterly split, with the more moderate Fatah ruling the West Bank, and Gaza under the control of Hamas, which won the Palestinian popular election two years ago and fought back an attempted coup by Fatah last year. Now Gaza has become isolated. The French Cultural Center is virtually the only institution that organizes a modest art exhibition or music recital once in a while.
But that doesn’t mean Gazans don’t consume and make culture themselves. One broiling afternoon, a dozen young married friends sat around a picnic table at a swim club, near the beach in Gaza City, talking about “Oprah,” “24” and “Prison Break.”
The club, a private retreat amid garbage and ruins, was a whitewashed oasis of bougainvillea and tattered canvas awnings on rusty blue poles, a kind of faded Polaroid of Coney Island around 1965, but with female swimmers in soggy pants and T-shirts, not bikinis, and shirtless teenage boys kicking around a soccer ball.
“We do as we like in private,” explained Rajah Abujasser, 20, wearing a green head scarf and long sleeves despite the heat.
Across town, Mothafar Alassar was taping a new track at Mashareq, a recording studio. He’s 20, a baby-faced rapper with a shaved head. A few years ago he formed the band S.B.R. with a friend.
“Through TV and the Internet I fell in love with rap, with Tupac and 50 Cent, Keny Arkana from Marseille,” he said. “People laughed at first. Rap was new in Gaza. The French Cultural Center, they gave me money to make an album. Now, when we had a concert recently, 700 people came.”
Hamas then arrested Mr. Alassar, saying he had no license to perform, but released him after he gave a live sample of his hip-hop to a bemused, bearded official. “Hamas is not against art,” Mr. Alassar said. “They just don’t understand it.”
Rima Morgan, a 28-year-old business student turned singer in a white head scarf and black leotard, was also at Mashareq, recording a jingle for a West Bank radio station. “My family, which is traditional, didn’t want me to sing, because it meant late nights, at parties, with men and women together,” she said. “But for me singing is the only way to keep going.” She said she listens to Indian music, to Céline Dion and Julio Iglesias, and to Arab pop stars like Elissa. On television, she watches “Friends.”
And “Noor,” of course.
“We can’t travel, so it’s our exposure to another Islamic society,” she said.
Ramy Okasha, a fellow singer, who was also there, shook his head. “The man is not a man,” he complained about Noor’s husband, Mohannad, the soap opera’s blue-eyed answer to Fabio; his face, like that of Noor’s, hangs on the bedroom walls of countless Gazan teenage girls. “She’s too stubborn,” Mr. Okasha grumbled.
What does he watch instead?
“ ‘The Bold and the Beautiful,’ ” he answered.
Cartoons Cutting Too Closely
Hamas produces its own version of culture. The cartoonist Omayya Joha’s caricatures appear in many Arab magazines and newspapers. She’s the widow of a Hamas fighter killed by Israelis. She married another fighter after he died.
“I have a quill in one hand and a gun in the other,” she likes to say. At a Hamas office not long ago, sitting reservedly in hijab and black gloves before a conference table and tray of candy and fruit juice, she said coolly: “Israel thinks of me as a radical anti-Semite, but I’m not. I simply do not think that we can ever have peace. No way. Never.”
She studies Western cartoons. “The exposure is very important,” she explained, brightening at the prospect of talking shop, not politics. Lately, the Fatah-linked newspaper in the West Bank rejected some of her work and that saddened her.
“You start to think about self-censorship,” she frowned, “anticipating what Fatah will not like.”
This is exactly what many Gazans say Hamas has lately caused them to do.
She stiffened at that remark. “There is a price to pay for your affiliations,” she said. Eyad Sarraj shook his head when this was repeated to him. “Hamas has not yet officially imposed its cultural program, but it’s in place,” he said. He is a Gazan psychiatrist. “After the election last year, we were assured Hamas would not infringe on our personal freedom, but now they are trying hard to prove us wrong. They are coming into our homes.”
He was alluding to an episode last month when hooded Hamas policemen broke into the rooftop apartment of a businessman and his wife, who were quietly drinking with guests. The police officers beat up the men and confiscated the liquor.
Ayman Taha, a Hamas leader, claimed that was a mistake. “Those were wrongdoings by some individuals in Hamas who don’t reflect the movement’s position,” he said.
Stone-faced, built like a weight lifter, he was sitting on a patio overlooking the sea, staring undazed into the sun. Below, teenage boys played paddle ball in the surf and women in head scarves, and also some without, sat under makeshift tents. Rifles across their laps, black-clad policemen, who are everywhere in Gaza, perched on a ruined embankment beside the patio, watching. “Hamas has not implemented any restrictions regarding cultural life,” Mr. Taha said.
Aside from slowing Internet access, ostensibly to deter Gazans from looking at pornography, that’s technically true, but there is also no law here against alcohol and you won’t find a bar in Gaza. Mr. Taha chalked up the attack on the businessman, along with a rising number of similar events, to rogue elements in Hamas, former soldiers who are now unseasoned policemen who, he stressed, do not disrupt basic party unity. “If some people are restricting their own freedoms as a reaction, out of fear, that is their decision,” he went on in a deadpan voice. “Do you hear that music?” A restaurant was piping Steely Dan across the patio.
“Do I use my power to stop this?” he said. “No. People are entitled to their behavior — so long as they do not harm this culture.” And there’s the rub. Gallery Mina, a Ministry of Culture art space that for years hosted poetry readings, films and Western-style art exhibitions, was among hundreds of organizations recently raided by Hamas, with the excuse of flushing out Fatah links; now Mina has been turned into a home for Hamas-approved events.
The Culture and Free Thought Association, a nonprofit organization in Khan Yunis, a town in southern Gaza, with a theater, a summer camp and a variety of arts programs, was looted not long ago by Hamas security forces who held the woman in charge at gunpoint and later went to her home. Leaders of Hamas in Khan Yunis apologized afterward, claiming, like Mr. Taha, that the raiders were renegades.
It’s noteworthy that the places raided by Hamas aren’t book stalls selling sex manuals or cafes showing sitcoms, but cultural centers promoting art that aspires to be more than an opiate for the people, implying an organized attack.
“Hamas wants to create an impression in Gaza that they are not controlling individual life or suppressing cultural freedom, and they want that message to reach outside,” said Jamal Al Rozzi, director of the Palestinian Theater Association in Gaza, whose office was also attacked. “But at the same time, everything is under its control. Hamas doesn’t officially tell us that we can’t do anything, but you can be taken away to prison and beaten for 30 days and no one will even know where the hell you are.”
Security at a Price
Khan Yunis is, even by Gazan standards, a bastion of religious tradition, a sun-baked puzzle of tumbledown buildings and dirt streets, the Wild West compared to the cosmopolitan Gaza City. It’s also a Hamas stronghold, although before Hamas took over, a local shop was bombed by Islamic extremists for selling pop music.
“After the explosion, we lost so much that we could only afford to rent half our former space,” said Mazin Abdeen, 35, the store’s owner. He was leaning against the front door of his new place one recent afternoon, chatting with an ice cream salesman next door over the roar of a generator. As usual, the electricity was out. The air was ripe with the stench of reused cooking oil, which, because Israel provides little gasoline, Gazans have turned to for fuel.
On a glass counter in Mr. Abdeen’s shop, stocked with watches and women’s underwear, were tapes by Elissa and Nancy, the pop singers. “Now that Hamas is the government, there is no problem,” he said. “They protect us.”
That is the paradox. Hamas has provided the formerly lawless Gaza with security, which won the party the election over Fatah. But Hamas now makes many Gazans feel insecure. Majeda Alsaqqa is the woman running the Culture and Free Thought Association, the one held at gunpoint. For the moment, she’s back in business. But Hamas not long ago took over the local library, and it stages plays about the lives of Palestinian soldiers killed by Israel, which are sometimes performed in the street just outside Ms. Alsaqqa’s garden.
“They use real explosives!” she said, laughing. “It used to be different here. I used to ride around on a bicycle wearing a dress. The raid on us was about imposing a different culture — about not liking our kind of theater, where men and woman mix. These were brainwashed kids who came with the Kalashnikovs, who are taught not to like foreigners or summer camps, where we teach children not to take anything for granted. For the first time, I’m scared.”
She’s not alone. Even so, Gazans can be stubborn. These days, playing songs extolling Fatah in public is a direct provocation against Hamas. The other night, a Fatah anthem sounded through the streets. It turned out to be a bachelor party. A rented bandstand with flashing lights had been erected in a square.
The men, heads skyward, danced with a mad intensity, escaping into the deafening music. The inky sea was up the street, silent and shimmering. There was no traffic, no movement on the sidewalks otherwise, but at the end of the block, several young, armed Hamas soldiers lingered in the shadows.
“You never know,” said Mr. Kihail, back at New Sound. “No direct threat has come, but you cannot joke with Hamas.” Next to the cash register — beside tapes bearing an image of the long-faced, white-bearded Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin — he nonetheless still stocks Fatah tapes with pictures of Samih Madhoun, the fighter whom Hamas last year elaborately executed. When asked to play a selection from the tape, Mr. Kihail kept an eye on the door.
“Arafat, you left,” the singer wailed, “but you left behind an earthquake that is Samih Madhoun.”
Just then, a middle-aged woman in a head scarf wandered in, and fondled a CD by Mustafa Amar, an Egyptian singer in a dashing white scarf, standing before the Pyramids. “It’s an escape,” she said, making clear she meant the music, not the album cover.
Mr. Kihail asked her if she was also a fan of Abdel Halim, the Egyptian crooner, who died in 1977 and who remains universally beloved here. He cued up a Halim song, one about a man abandoned by his lover, with a baleful melody. She nodded. Briefly, Mr. Kihail teared up.
“I blame him,” the woman said, about Halim, “for being so romantic. Life is not like that.”
“No,” Mr. Kihail said, “it isn’t.”
Sunday, March 27, 2005
A Peace Song in the Middle East
MSNBC
Peace song serenades Palestinians, Israelis
Simultaneous broadcast is latest sign of easing tensions
By Preston Mendenhall
Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 8:55 p.m. ET March 27, 2005
JERUSALEM - A musical message of peace serenaded Palestinians and Israelis on Sunday, in a simultaneous broadcast to promote reconciliation - the latest sign of easing tensions in the Middle East.
Sung in Hebrew and Arabic, "In my heart" is the creation of Israeli musician David Broza and Palestinian instrumentalist Said Murad, whose brother, Wisam, accompanies Broza on vocals. The ballad is about love and land, an issue at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"If we succeed in making this music and create this kind of art, it will help put people together," 44-year-old Said Murad said.
Broza and Murad worked with the Voice of Palestine and Israel’s Army Radio to coordinate the broadcast on Sunday morning.
Despite improving relations, there was an undertone of conflict on the airwaves. Army Radio’s Razi Barkai asked a Palestinian radio official whether his station had "stopped incitement messages on your broadcasts." Shortly after taking office in January, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas ordered anti-Israeli incitement to stop.
Since a landmark Palestinian-Israeli summit, Israel has curtailed military operations and withdrawn forces from several Palestinian towns.
Risk for peace
The musicians took considerable risks by performing together and interspersing Hebrew and Arabic in the song. Broza, 49, traveled to the West Bank to perform the song in a Palestinian village. The two visited each other’s homes during the years it took to complete the project. The Murads live in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Broza lives in Tel Aviv.
"In my heart" is the first song with Hebrew lyrics ever played on Palestinian radio. Its broadcast is a rare appearance for Palestinian artists on Israeli radio.
"I really just think that if we put our minds together, and if we play it right, there will be peace in the Middle East," Broza said in an interview.
Broza is no stranger to the peace movement here. In 1978, a song he penned during Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel became an anthem for the peace generation.
"It was like watching the first man on the moon," Broza said. "The first Arab leader landing at Ben Gurion airport. It was something."
Rhythm of friendship
Broza and Murad's shared belief in peace grew into a deep friendship and a metaphor for the peace process: two sides getting to know each other at their own rhythm.
"When we met, David said he wanted to start working first. And I said, let’s wait. Let’s get to know each other better," said Murad from his East Jerusalem studio.
Murad and Broza say they admired each other’s work for more than a decade, but it took four years of "meeting and talking about music, politics and everything," Murad said, to write and produce "In my heart."
Bitterness over years of bloodshed won’t disappear overnight. Yet the musicians say they hope their song will succeed where politics have failed, and help to bring harmony to the Middle East.
"If we love the land, if we believe in history, we can create good future for us," Murad said.
Two sides in studio
Already, the recording of "In my heart" has helped to narrow the divide between Israelis and Palestinians.
For the chorus of "In my heart," Broza and Murad brought Palestinian and Israeli children to the studio to learn to sing in each other’s language.
Israeli TV stations featured the song prominently on Sunday night. And so far, radio listeners say they like the sound of hope.
"If children hear this music, they will understand that the land is for everyone, not just for the Jews or Arabs," said Ismail Khalifawi, a Palestinian student in Jerusalem who listened to the broadcast. "The land is for all."
NBC’s Preston Mendenhall is on assignment in the Middle East.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7309601/
Peace song serenades Palestinians, Israelis
Simultaneous broadcast is latest sign of easing tensions
By Preston Mendenhall
Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 8:55 p.m. ET March 27, 2005
JERUSALEM - A musical message of peace serenaded Palestinians and Israelis on Sunday, in a simultaneous broadcast to promote reconciliation - the latest sign of easing tensions in the Middle East.
Sung in Hebrew and Arabic, "In my heart" is the creation of Israeli musician David Broza and Palestinian instrumentalist Said Murad, whose brother, Wisam, accompanies Broza on vocals. The ballad is about love and land, an issue at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"If we succeed in making this music and create this kind of art, it will help put people together," 44-year-old Said Murad said.
Broza and Murad worked with the Voice of Palestine and Israel’s Army Radio to coordinate the broadcast on Sunday morning.
Despite improving relations, there was an undertone of conflict on the airwaves. Army Radio’s Razi Barkai asked a Palestinian radio official whether his station had "stopped incitement messages on your broadcasts." Shortly after taking office in January, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas ordered anti-Israeli incitement to stop.
Since a landmark Palestinian-Israeli summit, Israel has curtailed military operations and withdrawn forces from several Palestinian towns.
Risk for peace
The musicians took considerable risks by performing together and interspersing Hebrew and Arabic in the song. Broza, 49, traveled to the West Bank to perform the song in a Palestinian village. The two visited each other’s homes during the years it took to complete the project. The Murads live in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Broza lives in Tel Aviv.
"In my heart" is the first song with Hebrew lyrics ever played on Palestinian radio. Its broadcast is a rare appearance for Palestinian artists on Israeli radio.
"I really just think that if we put our minds together, and if we play it right, there will be peace in the Middle East," Broza said in an interview.
Broza is no stranger to the peace movement here. In 1978, a song he penned during Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel became an anthem for the peace generation.
"It was like watching the first man on the moon," Broza said. "The first Arab leader landing at Ben Gurion airport. It was something."
Rhythm of friendship
Broza and Murad's shared belief in peace grew into a deep friendship and a metaphor for the peace process: two sides getting to know each other at their own rhythm.
"When we met, David said he wanted to start working first. And I said, let’s wait. Let’s get to know each other better," said Murad from his East Jerusalem studio.
Murad and Broza say they admired each other’s work for more than a decade, but it took four years of "meeting and talking about music, politics and everything," Murad said, to write and produce "In my heart."
Bitterness over years of bloodshed won’t disappear overnight. Yet the musicians say they hope their song will succeed where politics have failed, and help to bring harmony to the Middle East.
"If we love the land, if we believe in history, we can create good future for us," Murad said.
Two sides in studio
Already, the recording of "In my heart" has helped to narrow the divide between Israelis and Palestinians.
For the chorus of "In my heart," Broza and Murad brought Palestinian and Israeli children to the studio to learn to sing in each other’s language.
Israeli TV stations featured the song prominently on Sunday night. And so far, radio listeners say they like the sound of hope.
"If children hear this music, they will understand that the land is for everyone, not just for the Jews or Arabs," said Ismail Khalifawi, a Palestinian student in Jerusalem who listened to the broadcast. "The land is for all."
NBC’s Preston Mendenhall is on assignment in the Middle East.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7309601/
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