Music and Culture as a Vehicle of Resistance

Ramzi Aburedwan speaking to Charles Zerner, a professor
from Sarah Lawrence College. 

 The dissonance between the diet of stereotypes and lies that Americans are fed  and the reality on the ground here in Palestine troubles me to the point that I have had so much trouble sleeping here. While I had a pretty good idea about what the Israeli Occupation was, I now realize just how ignorant we Americans really are and how much is hidden from us through media representations or the complete invisibility of Palestinian life in any news coverage. In the five days I have been here in Israel and Palestine, I have heard stories of what the misery of occupation has meant for Palestinians on a daily basis. And all this is designed and deliberately concealed from Americans and particularly  from the millions of tourists who come to Jerusalem each year the visit the holy sites in this city. Quite simply, under the guise of "Israeli security," Palestinians are denied of their basic human rights. When I interviewed Palestinian writer and lawyer and founder of the Al Haq human rights organization,  Raja Shehadeh, he described the phenomenon of how Israel manages its self-image of being a so-called democracy by not allowing people to see what it is doing in the occupied territories. The image of Palestine and Palestinians as being violent, unwelcoming,  or America-hating couldn't be further from the truth. The people we have met in Palestine have embodied not only the spirit of resilience I was looking for-- but they are the most dignified and humane people I have ever encountered. For a wonderful account of how Palestinian national territory is being eroded and the destruction to the environment, I highly recommend Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. This nonfiction book describes the ways that Israeli settlements are systematically changing the landscape and culture of Palestine ---and eroding Palestinian sovereign territory on a daily basis.

Al Kamandjati poster showing Ramzi as a nine year old boy, and then as a young man playing viola.

On our second day here we went to Ramallah where we spent the early part of the day at the Al Kamandjati Music School ://www.alkamandjati.org/ . The school is located in a small but beautiful old house which was donated by a local Ramallah family who heard about the work of the school's founder, Ramzi Aburedwan. While the school is small, it has great acoustics due to its domed ceilings; at the school they recently renovated the building to accommodate more useable space for classes which serve local students in the West Bank (mostly Ramallah) and kids who come for summer camps. The more remarkable thing about this school, however, is the story of it's founder. Ramzi was born into one of Palestine's approximately 30 refugee camps which were the result of Palestinian displacement when the state of Israel was created in 1948 and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled violence or were forced from their homes. Ramzi was born in the al Amari refugee camp which  is inside the city of Ramallah. And, like thousands of other Palestinian refugees, Ramzi grew up in poverty and in very crowded living conditions. Palestine's refugee camps are both a serious reminder of both the 1948 displacement of Palestinians and Israel's continued attempt to deny the rights of Palestinians both in  historical and contemporary terms; Israel does not teach or allow anyone to teach about the 1948 Nakba in schools, and thus, the very fact of these refugee camps is a kind of denial inside Israel. The refugee camps symbolize the Nakba (the catastrophe of 1948 when Israel declared itself a state and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes through violence and terror).

The plaque/schedule of classes at Al Kamandjati Music School. 

Ramzi told us the story of how he came to music and to start Al Kamandjati. Ramziwas born in Bethlehem, but his family lost their home after the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank. He grew up very poor in the al Amari refugee camp (a squalid, overcrowded slum that is home to approximately three thousand refugees who were displaced in both 1948 and 1967---pictures forthcoming) just outside the West Bank city of Ramalllah. To help his family, Ramzi used to clean the garden of a local Ramallah woman and also deliver newspapers from 4-7 am. Unbeknownst to him, his grandfather was putting aside the money Ramzi was making to help his family, for Ramzi's future education. At the age of nine, Ramzi was one among many thousands of school-age children who was politically awakened during the first Intifada (Paletstinian uprising)  in 1987. Like other Palestinian children, he confronted Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)  tanks that rolled into refugee camps and shot tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition at protestors. These military incursions went all over the West Bank towns and villages and the Gaza strip--the Intifada was a coordinated effort to confront Israeli occupation through shop closures and withholding of taxes to protest the continued Israeli occupation and to move the stalled negotiations. Ramzi was only nine at the time of the Intifada, but like many boys his age, particularly in the refugee camps, he threw stones at tanks to protest the military incursions into their homes and cities.

We visited the refugee camp where he grew up, and I can tell you it was the equivalent of the worst slums you can imagine. People in camps like Amari (we visited two others as well) live in really crowded  conditions, with very little ventilation, poor or no sanitation, and no heating. The refugee camps which started in 1948 as makeshift tent camps, are now cement brick structures, and there is no building codes. People build to accomdate their families, and because they've been protected under international refugee status, they hope to one day return to their original homes. These camps, however, have become more destitute since Israel no longer allows Palestinians work permits to work inside Israel (many of these men were formerly in the construction trades) and now, there is little work. Because they are poor, and have no place to go, the refugee camps are a kind of limbo. Some people leave and others stay both out of principle or because they can't afford to live anywhere else. There are some 22 refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza as well as camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan.

Back to Ramzi, though. Shortly after the the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising, a journalist snapped a picture of him standing in the refugee camp throwing a stone at an Israeli tank invading the refugee camp where he lived. the journalist, a rather responsible human being, chose to find someone in a neighboring house adjacent to the camp to help him identify the boy. The woman was the person Ramzi had done some yard work for. She told the journalist that he was an intelligent young boy named Ramzi. Some time later, that same woman's relative came from Jordan to do a musical  performance in Ramallah. She suggested that his group not only perform for the elites of the city, but that they should also go to the refugee camps and perform and offer some kind of workshop for kids. The woman's relative agreed and Ramzi came to hear the group perform at the Al Bira center, and he said, "after two days of listening, I was swimming in the sea of music."

An American Ph.D. graduate student whose research is in ethnomusicology
and the role of music in the occupation. She is working at Al Kamandjati. 

Ramzi told us how profoundly he was affected by the music and how much he realized that the life of refugee children was without beauty--without gardens, art, playgrounds, ways to express themselves in a harsh climate of poverty, and hopelessness. The experience of hearing music and watching musicians touch their instruments touched Ramzi deeply. He realized how much music reached into the traumatized souls of the children living under occupation and gave them food for their hungry souls. Some years later, he was given a scholarship to study music in France, and after he returned to Palestine in 2000,  he witnessed the devastation of the Second Intifada-- with hundreds of days of curfews, roadblocks, and the confinement of people to the camps for days on end. It was then that he dreamed of bringing music to refugee children and training them to play music. Since 2002, Ramzi had been working to start the Al Kamandjati Music School (he learned to play viola and thus named the school after the word violinist). The school now serves students from around the West Bank (it is an NGO) offering classes, performances, composition courses, and also touring around Palestine to have students play for communities and refugee camps. The music is both Western classical and Arabic influcenced. Ramzi's school  receives support from individual musicians, schools, and some grants from European countries. They also receive donations of instruments and have guest teachers and performers from Europe. They asked us to lobby people to send instruments to his school.

But Ramzi says, the struggles he has to bring and foster culture for Palestinian children is part of the larger struggle against occupation. "Under Israeli occupation," Ramzi says, "Palestinians are not allowed to practice their culture. We are not allowed to have Arab musicians and poets and performers from the Arab world come and visit and play for us. Israelis will not grant them permits to come to Palestine to perform. For sixty years, we have been isolated from culture, music, etc, in the Arab world and in a sense, we are making up for so much with so little. My goal is to bring the beauty of music to the camps, to remind Palestinians of their heritage and their musical traditions, and to help young people find relief from the suffering of occupation by expressing themselves with music. But we are limited with funds, and every performance we do, every city we travel to, every camp we perform in, has to receive a permit from the Isrseli government. We cannot go to Gaza to play music. We don't want to be isolated, but the occupation has made it difficult for us to practice our culture and share it with others." Ramzi describes, for example, how numerous performances have been cancelled due to lack of permits being issued, and for example, incidents such as halls being burned at the refugee camps where the musicians were to perform.

The balcony of Al Kamandjati music school where students often perform for the community.

Ramzi and his students, for example, cannot get a permit to play in Jerusalem, where music and culture by Palestinians also is severely restricted. So you know where they performed last year? At the Qalandia checkpoint outside Ramallah that is the daily lifeline of Palestinian workers who work in East Jerusalem. The Al Kamandjati orchestra played while the lines of cars idled, while the turnstiles where Palestinians walk through and show their West Bank identification and place their hands on a magnetic machine. They played orchestral music by the side of the road to give a little beauty to those people moving through the checkpoint to go to their jobs, to Jeruasalem for permits, for those heading back to their West Bank Palestianin villages. When one IDF soldier confronted one of the musicians playing his oboe, Ramzi answered, "it's not a gun!" This has since been one of the slogans of the Al Kamandjati Music School; google  the school and listen for yourself to the amazing work of this wonderful project to resist occupation with culture!
Another project that involves music in the Palestine-Israel conflict is the Barenboim-Said Foundation which was co-founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said: http://www.barenboimsaidusa.org/