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CounterPunch
January
25, 2003
Music Lives
in Palestine
So Do the Kids.
So Do the Teachers.
by ELLEN CANTAROW
5:30 on a Wednesday in late November. Our Ramallah
master-class at The National Conservatory of Music (Palestine)
has just ended and ten-year-old Taher, a young flute-player,
is practically jumping up and down, his face glowing with hope:
"Oh! please let me play, too!" Will's and my jazz-improvisation
demonstrations--I on piano, he on alto-sax, flute, clarinet and
bass clarinet--drew inspired playing from Tariq, the little 14-year-old
frame-drum-player with the punk hair-cut, also from a stocky
12-year-old flautist. We invited both of them to play a piece
with us at our Friday concert. Now Taher is mad to join us. "But
Taher," I say, "you need to rehearse with us! Can you
do it now?" "I'll go ask my father!" He bolts
down the Conservatory's narrow stone stairs. Dad peers out of
the car, looking puzzled and irritated--it's Ramadan, nerves
fray at the end of the day. "He's been fasting all day,
he needs to go home to eat!" "I don't NEED to eat!"
Dad's resistance crumbles; he trudges up the stairs, and we proceed
to rehearse. Finally we light on something Taher plays well--a
simple piece he wrote himself. "OK," I say, "You'll
play with us," and the little boy throws his arms around
my neck.
For two weeks I taught master classes
with Will Connell, a New York-based reed-player, at Palestine's
National Conservatory of Music. Founded in 1993 as an affiliate
of Birzeit (pron. Beer-zate) University, the school is dedicated
to fostering excellence on a wide variety of instruments--piano,
violin, flute, ney, clarinet, saxophone, oud, guitar, qanoon
(a zither-like insrument with complex tuning), and many percussion
instruments including the tabla. The curriculum revolves around
European and Oriental classical music.
According to Suheil Khoury, the school's
General Director and one of its five founders, before the Conservatory
Palestinian music education was limited to short-term workshops.
Mere months of training could earn you a certificate of proficiency
on your instrument. The result: pervasive mediocrity. For decades
the human voice has been the centerpiece of Oriental music with
instruments playing a poor second-best accompaniment. So Khoury
is emphatic about a proper--a European, if you will--emphasis
on instruments (there are no voice teachers here.) My impression
is that he'd like the Conservatory to be a Palestinian Julliard.
Besides the regular faculty musicians
have been recruited from overseas to visit, perform and give
workshops. Daniel Barenboim played and taught in 1999. I arrived
in the middle of veteran flautist Wissam Boustany's master-classes
and concerts--he teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge; his East
Jerusalem concert drew a crowd of over 100. (The Palestinian
professional and business classes are culture-vultures: when
they can, they flock to events like Boustany's concert, or like
the East Jerusalem showing, the first night of my stay, of "Jenin,
Jenin"--a film banned in Israel.)
Since Israel's re-occupation of the West
Bank, the Conservatory has established regional campuses in Ramallah,
Bethlehem and East Jerusalem. There are days and weeks on end
when curfews prevent anyone's getting from one town to another.
Thus this improvised solution: splitting the school's resources
geographically. Overall, Palestinian education has been severely
impacted by Israel's savage crackdown on the second Intifada:
schools pervasively damaged; Ministry of Education records destroyed;
permanent roadblocks prevent regular travel between urban centers;
curfews interrupt any and every schedule. A small individual
example of the occupation's impact: US-educated Dalia Habash,
the Conservatory's public relations director, worked earlier
in the Birzeit University administration. Arriving at work one
day over a year ago she and a friend found the college blocked
by Israeli soldiers. They begged the soldiers to let them enter;
one of the men hurled a sound grenade at them, breaking Dalia's
leg. On her recovery she found herself nearly paralyzed with
fear every time she had to go to work: the trauma was so great
that she finally quit. Multiply this small incident thousands
of times, adding to it far greater enormities (in 2001-2002 alone,
216 students were killed by the Israeli army, 2,514 wounded)
and you have some idea of the tragic impact Israel's warlike
policies have had on Palestinian education.
The Conservatory and its faculty suffered
the ravages of last spring's incursion. The Ramallah seat of
the school was invaded, the main door forced open with explosives
causing major damage to the building; inner doors kicked open
and broken, drawers emptied and their contents; floppy discs
and music CDs were strewn on the floor. A cello was broken. In
one classroom the word "Death" was scrawled on a blackboard;
in another, all the books were thrown on the floor and trampled.wo
senior administrators were arrested and detained without charge.
The Conservatory's survival under such circumstances--400 students
attend its classes after their regular elementary and high-school
hours; its administration and faculty work with great efficiency
even in such extremities--represents a triumph of nonviolent
resistance to the occupation and the war of attrition Israel
has waged since the start of the second Intifada.
Like pianist Daniel Barenboim, flautist
Wissam Boustany who performed during our stay, and other musician-visitors,
we went to contribute to the life of this singular educational
institution. While the Conservatory is enthusiastic about promoting
such visits, Khoury's emphasis is the long-term employment of
highly qualified musicians. Its permanent faculty includes stellar
talents with impressive recording and touring histories for example
master tabla-player Yusuf Hubeisch, oud-player Habib Shihadeh
and qanoon-player Ibrahim Atari. The young people show the effects
of their training by such teachers. Ranging in age from 8 to
18, even the youngest knew basics of reading and technical execution;
all of them seemed to have a sense of musical purpose. Some,
including 14-year-old Tariq, 18-year-old Nadia Aruri, a pianist
who performed with Barenboim when he visited, and Abed Sabah,
a Hubeisch percussion student who accompanied us during our East
Jerusalem concert, were very gifted. In our workshops nearly
all the young people were as eager to participate as Taher. Our
home-base was East Jerusalem's YWCA where the Jerusalem division
of the school is located. Evenings in one of the buildings big
foyers there were always students jamming on oud and percussion,
often with their teachers.
***
Will and I gave our scheduled concert
in East Jerusalem. But the one in Ramallah, so eagerly awaited
by Taher, the Conservatory faculty, and the large audience everyone
expected, never happened. Israel levied a three-day curfew on
the city, preventing any travel to or from the city. ("Curfew"
is a somewhat deceptive term for American ears: in occupied Palestine,
curfews shut down whole towns, cities and regions. Within any
given place, no one is allowed on the streets--sometimes for
days on end--save for the few hours permitted by the military.)
There'd been no suicide bombing linked to a Ramallah resident,
no threats, no disorder. Earlier that week I awakened in my Ramallah
hotel and looked out my window to see school-children crossing
the street with their back-packs, adults walking to work, the
café-owner down the street opening up for the morning.
In the center of town sidewalk peddlers laid out their wares,
people flocked to stores to shop; patients waited in the opthamologist's
office where I went to get treated for a minor eye infection.
No disorder, just people trying to get through their days. "Curfew
is an extraordinary measure," said Raja Shehadeh, a Ramallah-based
novelist and lawyer who for years has written on occupation law.
"It is supposed to be used only when the situation is out
of control, and nothing is out of control in Ramallah. There
is no threat to the settlements, it is quiet. There used to be
legal protests against such measures; a legal protest might make
them think twice, but there is none. So curfews are imposed and
lifted arbitrarily."
Harassment at the airport; being on the
wrong bus at the wrong time inside Israel; being caught by a
stray Israeli army bullet at a checkpoint; getting attacked by
settlers--all of these worst-case scenarios intruded fitfully
on my fantasy life before I arrived. I hadn't thought about how
the more banal evils of occupation would affect me. The most
insidious got into my pores from the start of my stay--the wretched
condition of the streets around the Y: leaving and returning
to the hotel I passed heaps of rubble, navigating unpaved stretches
of sidewalk while cars skidded around me. The same bleak landscape
seemed to punctuate the rest of East Jerusalem. Israel is responsible
for trash collection here; it simply lets things run amok. Jews
in West Jerusalem would instantly complain, observed an Israeli
friend: the trash and rubble would be cleared away instantly.
Checkpoints and roadblocks separate every
city, town and village from every other. Kalandia, just beyond
Jerusalem, is one of the largest. Everyone entering the West
Bank must pass through it. Nothing could have prepared me for
its actual physical impact -- a huge, larger-than-football-field
stretch of rubble and trash interlaced with razor wire and cement
dividers. The dividers track cars and people relentlessly towards
the actual check-points: several desk-like concrete blocks where
Israeli flags wave and soldiers stand, all armed with machine
guns. If you're lucky you get an older, sympathetic soldier;
if you're unlucky you get a young, arrogant and insulting hot-head.
Ambulances are halted by soldiers, their drivers forced to dismount
at machine-gunpoint and to open the backs of the vehicles. Meanwhile
hundreds of people drive or trudge across the rubble towards
the checkpoints. No matter whether you're young or old, rich
or poor, sick or well, lame or a marathoner, you must run this
gauntlet. On the Ramallah side of the checkpoint there's a wretched
line of tacky little shops that sell soft drinks and other convenience
items. Anything that can be sold or peddled is up for grabs:
my eye was caught, on my return trip from Ramallah through Kalandia,
by the saddest-looking turkey I've ever seen, lame in one foot,
with yellowed, sodden feathers, caged for sale but ignored by
the trudging crowd intent only on getting past the soldiers.
Children run about peddling anything they can--knick-knacks,
chiclets and the like: from the modestly prosperous region I'd
known from 1979 through 1988, the West Bank has become the Third
World. Meantime the settlements, the reason for all this hardship,
flourish. Modern oases that sprawl across the West Bank's hills,
they sport swimming pools and shopping malls, use most of the
West Bank's water, and are insulated by the Army and Jewish-only
"bypass roads" from all the trouble their presence
causes.
When Will arrived at Kalandia several
nights after me, wind was blowing across the hills of rubble,
dust was everywhere, it was bone-cold. It's common to stand here
for hours in the chill or snow or rain watching soldiers smugly
chatting, smoking cigarettes, taking their time while you wait.
You can't protest: defiance courts harassment or worse. And you
do well not to drive through the checkpoint; instead, get someone
to drive you; dismount from your group taxi or car, then trudge
over the hundreds of yards of rubble and trash, pass the checkpoint,
and take a group taxi or have a friend pick you up on the other
side. The whole checkpoint process could take you a half-hour,
making your trip from Jerusalem maybe an hour-long (Jerusalem
to Ramallah used to take me 20 minutes in the 1980s, but "normal
life" doesn't exist anymore)--this is lots better than getting
stuck in the checkpoint traffic-jam for an hour or more. Americans
and foreign nationals can circumvent the crowds of Palestinians
but Will and I found ourselves in a Palestinian line and decided
to experience the wait. It was like being at New York's 42nd
Street at rush hour with added physical discomforts, fear of
the military, and the humiliation of having to submit to military
authority. Around us were old women, mothers with their infants,
teenagers, workers and professionals. A young woman who couldn't
have been more than 22 was waved contemptuously back to Ramallah
by a woman soldier no older than she: the Palestinian woman begged
to be allowed to go to Jenin, the young Israeli shouted "Yalla!"
("Let's go! Get out!") leaving the young Palestinian
to stand sobbing while the rest of us filed by her, filled with
pity. One tall, distinguished-looking gray-haired man in a suit
turned out to be a Palestinian Authority youth affairs administrator.
"Now you see," he said, his eyes flashing with anger,
"what we have to go through every day. And people wonder
why some of our young people blow themselves up!"
Zero-level in occupation life is the
constant disruption of your plans by checkpoint delays and curfews;
nothing can be scheduled with any certainty. I was supposed to
teach in Bethlehem early in my stay, but a curfew was levied:
classes cancelled. When I passed Suheil Khoury's office and expressed
my disappointment I got only an impassive shrug: "That's
the situation," he said, turning back to his computer.
"The Situation" is a classic
Palestinian understatement that describes everything from the
destruction of Jenin through checkpoints, curfews, delayed and
cancelled events and appointments. An impassive expression and
little shrug often go along with the phrase. I was never quite
sure whether the shrug expressed bitter resignation or just determination
to get through the ordeals of occupation with one's sanity intact.
An omnipresent adaptation to "The Situation" is cell
phones: everyone carries them, adult and child, in the occupied
territories as well as in Israel. At one point during our Ramallah
teaching a cell phone rang. "All you guys have cell phones,"
I said. "How come?" "Because when the bombs come,"
shrugged Tariq, the little frame-drummer, "our mothers want
to know where we are." I made an appointment with Tariq
and several of his friends to discuss "The Situation's"
impact on their young lives, but the curfew intervened: meeting
cancelled.
***
Over the course of my stay I grew friendly
with Ibrahim Atari, the Conservatory's master qanoon-player,
a large man with huge shoulders and a sweet, serene expression.
From Ramallah he commutes daily to the Conservatory's seat in
East Jerusalem. His wife, an Israeli-Arab, just gave birth to
their first child. Because of the uncertainty of life under the
war and occupation, she stays inside Israel. Because his pass
is stamped "Arab" and "Ramallah," he can't
travel inside Israel; he hasn't seen her or his newborn daughter
for weeks. During the Ramallah curfew, both our plans disrupted,
we spent two evenings playing together; he introduced me to Oriental
music's complicated 7/4. 9/8 and 10/8 rhythms. When, during a
break, I expressed my dismay about his forced separation from
his wife and infant daughter, I was rewarded with a shrug and
Ibrahim's serene smile: "It's the situation." The last
day of my stay I found him sitting in front of the Y's large
TV set watching American troops massed in Qatar. I began venting
my anger at Bush's war plans, and Ibrahim turned his gentle gaze
on me: "So: do you remember 7? 9? 10?"
In a diary fragment published in THE
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS Raja Shehadeh describes last spring's
"incursion"--the invasion of his brother's house by
soldiers; the IDF's killing of the son of a man who had worked
in Shehadeh's law office--and then, finally, the sight of a shopkeeper
during a curfew break, sunning himself, to all appearances impervious
to three tanks parked opposite: "Most of the Palestinians
in the territories resemble these men," he writes. "When
we can, we sun ourselves in direct view of the Israeli tanks,
acting as if they were not there. This is how we have been able
to survive these past 35 years. What these soldiers destroy we
repair, when they close roads we find detours, what they deny
us we find alternatives for."
***
CLOSING NOTE:
This essay's title is taken from an exuberant e-mail I sent to
friends early in my stay. I'd expected to be depressed by the
occupation and its effects on the lives of my hosts: instead,
I found myself uplifted by everyone's resilience, their musicianship,
their stoicism and good humor. In the end, they helped us at
least as much as we helped them.
Ellen Cantarow
plays jazz piano professionally in Boston and New England. She
can be reached at: ecantarow@attbi.com
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