Music in Conflict

Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production

Nili Belkind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000204001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

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.

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 Israeli-Jews 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, 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 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 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 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, inc...

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