Even After Exile, Palestinian Musician Vows to Play On

[oberliner]

Excerpt:

The bitterness of Jenin's grim history rebounded on Younis' bridge-building effort. Fatah commander Zubeidi told TIME that the focus of the hostility against Younis was the short presentation on the Holocaust that she delivered to her musicians during the bus ride to Tel Aviv. "She should have been telling them about the current holocaust that the Israelis have been inflicting on the Palestinians for the past 60 years," Zubeidi said. He ordered the conductor out of Jenin, he explained, because of "threats" by "angry Palestinians", including some of the musicians' parents.

Younis is having none of that. She claims that the parents of all the musicians on the trip had signed release forms, knowing that their kids would be playing at a Holocaust survivors' club near Tel Aviv. On Monday, she says, Zubeidi's men went through the narrow lanes of the refugee camp with megaphones ordering parents not to send their children to Younis's music classes. "They have built a high wall between me and the children," she laments.

In a spirit of defiance not unfamiliar in Jenin, however, the indominable orchestra conductor is fighting back. Younis is demanding that President Abbas lift the ban on her teaching music in Jenin. "This is the only music center in all the West Bank, and what have the Palestinian Authorities given me? Nothing. Not a single violin." Younis vows to keep her youth orchestra going, somehow. She concludes an interview with a question of her own: "You don't know where I could get a saxophone, do you?"

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1889443,00.html?iid=tsmodule

[EFerrari]

1. This woman is an idiot to drag kids already living in a ton of stress

into such a conflicted situation. She probably shouldn't be trusted with children.

[oberliner]

2. Why did it need to be a conflicted situation?

There was no reason for the PA to take the actions against her that they did.

From all accounts the concert was a positive experience for all concerned.

If the powers that be just left it at that there would have been no problem.

[EFerrari]

4. You must be joking. If a teacher of my children dragged them into

such a controversial situation, I'd have her job. Good teachers don't do that to children. Her students aren't a set of props for her self aggrandizement or to make some kind of political gesture. They were entrusted to her care to learn MUSIC.

Stupid on so many levels. I wonder how many of those kids will stop playing now altogether. What a creep.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

5. 100% spot on. Publicity hound has done a great job meeting her goal, hasn't she? nt

[EFerrari]

7. Not to parents who have trusted their kids to teachers or to teachers

who try to create an environment where learning is possible and even pleasurable.

Do you watch "Arab Labor", ProgressiveMuslim? I just started seeing it. This whole incident reminds me of when the central couple was trying to find a kindergarten for their little girl -- and it turns out she's much better off learning to count by playing computer BlackJack with her grandfather than dealing with the wacky schools. lol

[oberliner]

6. Performing for Holocaust survivors is not a controversial situation

They weren't props and this wasn't a political gesture. It was "Good Deeds Day" and performing for senior citizens who are Holocaust survivors is generally considered a good deed.

Most orchestra conductors who teach music also try to give their students the opportunity to perform. This group has performed for a variety of different audiences, including some in Israel, without incident.

There is no reason why there needed to be any kind of negative reaction to this from anyone.

[EFerrari]

8. You must be on crack. n/t

[oberliner]

9. There must be a lot of people on crack then

Because I think that most folks agree with me on this, with a few notable and vociferous exceptions.

[EFerrari]

10. How nice for you. They weren't your children. n/t

[oberliner]

11. Nor were they yours

Yet we both seem to think we know what is best for them!

[EFerrari]

12. I know better than to rationalize a child's negative experience

with intellectual dishonesty.

[oberliner]

18. Young people bringing joy to the eldery is not a negative experience

There is no intellectual dishonesty involved.

[EFerrari]

21. To describe this situation in that narrow reductive way is more of the same n/t

[Donald Ian Rankin]

13. You don't think that she intended it as a political gesture?

That isn't the impression I have received of the situation, certainly - I don't think she viewed this as a simple "good deed"; I suspect she was more concerned about a) the publicity and b) influencing the children than she was about entertaining or influencing the audience.

Which are arguably laudable goals, but not as non-controversial as you're making them out to be.

[oberliner]

16. That is not what she said

She said that she wanted to raise the spirits of these poor, old people.

I find it odd that when I initially posted the story about the performance the only responses from folks here were saying that this was a positive thing. No one made any mention of there being any particular political component to the performance at all.

I think she thought she was doing a good deed and the trio of posters who responded when the story was initially posted also seemed to think that it was a positive thing.

I would think the outrage from DUers would be against the PA leadership who have turned this from something positive to something negative. Much less publicity would have been generated if they had just left it alone.

Any parent who did not approve of their child performing for Holocaust survivors would have been free to pull their child from the orchestra and could explain to their child whatever it is they wanted to explain about why it was wrong for them to play that concert and have no further contact with this woman again if they so chose.

Other parents who were not bothered by the concert could have continued to allowed the children to be a part of this orchestra.

The fact that the PA authorities instead chose to bar this woman from entering Jenin and closed down the orchestra entirely seems not to have been the best approach.

[Violet_Crumble]

19. I commented on the story about the performance saying it was a positive thing,,,,

And after reading every comment in the ensuing threads, my opinion that it was a positive thing hasn't changed at all, and I find it sad that such a positive thing had such negative consequences which have by far outweighed publicity-wise the performance itself. I'm going to repost the link to the original story you posted just in case anyone missed it

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1073846.html

I've got a few comments to make just based on things I've read in different posts in different threads on this:

Despite any claims to the contrary, there is no way in the world that a group of Palestinian children performing for a bunch of oldies that included Holocaust survivors can be described as politicising the Holocaust. Neither is explaining the Holocaust to a busload of kids. And it's this claim that playing for them was politicising the Holocaust and talking about the Holocaust itself which appear to be the key reasons why Ms Younis has been vilified. It's nothing to do with dedicating a song to Gilat Shalit, which I would have thought would have been what would have been objected to, if anything, on political grounds.

Politicising the Holocaust usually involves the prism it's viewed through, and it cam produce starkly different focuses on which groups were singled out for destruction. An example of this was the Soviet Union, which viewed the Holocaust in a way where while they acknowledged that there were millions of Jewish victims, those victims were singled out, not because they were Jewish, but because the Nazis saw them as communists. While there were plenty of monuments to the communist victims of the Holocaust, it was only in the 1960's that the first small monument to Jewish victims of the Holocaust appeared. That's politicisation of the Holocaust - a musical performance for Holocaust victims, many of whom were probably the same age as the kids who performed for them when they suffered at the hands of the Nazis is in no way political....

I'm not seeing what the problem was with Ms Younis telling the kids about the Holocaust. The only objection I can make out, and it's one I strongly disagree with, is that she shouldn't have talked about the Holocaust, because in doing so she's somehow not being fair as she's not focusing on the ongoing abuse of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel. Y'know, coming from Jenin, I'm pretty damn sure all those kids have first-hand and very in-depth knowledge of how badly Palestinians are treated, so why anyone would insist someone needs to tell them about it is beyond me. It makes sense to me that when kids are going to meet Holocaust survivors that the Holocaust is explained to them. I don't see how putting something like that in context is exploiting kids.

In a nutshell, this really unfortunate and somewhat ugly response to the performance (and I had a real facepalm cringing moment when I first read of the response) is just another instance of something that's sadly too prevalent when it comes to the I/P conflict, and that's an unwillingness by people to acknowledge and respect the suffering of others, be they Israeli or Palestinian. Each 'side' clings to its view that only its suffering is worth knowing and being compassionate about, because to acknowledge the suffering of others is in some way to 'consort with the enemy'....

[EFerrari]

22. I don't think the problem here is politicizing the Holocaust.

And in fact, what bothers me doesn't depend on one set or another set of the adults involved being right or being wrong. If this had been a group of Israeli kids that were dragged into the middle as if into their parents' ugly divorce, I'd feel the same way, actually. It's just a rotten thing to do to kids in general.

[GoesTo11]

39. Very well put.

[Violet_Crumble]

40. Thank you...

I strongly believe that the more Israelis and Palestinians get to meet each other in normal surroundings, the more chance there is that preconceptions about Israelis and Palestinians that are held will be shattered...

[GoesTo11]

41. People are people - land is land

If they weren't fighting over turf, Israelis and Palestinians would get along very well together. Maybe someday.

[GoesTo11]

28. This woman should be found guilty of collaboration and executed by Hamas

Just an idea. With due process, of course.

[Violet_Crumble]

37. What a stupid comment to make! n/t

[LeftishBrit]

26. Would you feel exactly the same way...

about ANY children anywhere being involved in activities that could be seen as political? E.g. American children taking part in fundraising activities for groups with an antiwar message?

I can understand having concerns about including political messages in compulsory state-school-taught courses - which this was not. I could understand being concerned even in this case, if it is felt that the teacher was not honest with the children or parents. However, the meme, "I send my children to school/extracurricular classes/other activities to learn, not to get mixed up in politics!" is most usually one of conservatives who don't want their children exposed to potentially radical ideas, or to knowledge about differences (e.g. mention of homosexuality, or of non-Christian religions).

Is your concern that you feel the teacher was not honest with the children; that you feel that they could have been put at risk for verbal or physical abuse; or is that you don't approve of this sort of activity at all?

[EFerrari]

34. For me, it's about the outcome for the children, not the politics.

The children's group was dragged into a political debate and now, they've lost their teacher which is disruptive for them. As a teacher, it seems to me that the environment, the space where our young people learn should be protected -- so that it can function.

Adults use children in all kinds of petty ways that are dishonest -- as you mention, when people scream "think of the children" over their pet peeves.

This example is different. In this case, the children's education was disrupted because the adult in charge was not thinking of her first responsibility, to facilitate learning in a safe and consistent way and her students paid for it. In this example, no one really thought about the children enough.

[bemildred]

35. Yah. The kids ought to come first.

Any kids. Always the first consideration. Only in that way will the future be made better.

[cali]

3. I disagree.

this is exactly the sort of thing that bridge building is about. And it works.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

15. What evidence do you have that bridge building between the Israelis and the Palestinians works?

I would say that what the available evidence shows is that everything that has been tried hasn't worked, so either building bridges hasn't been tried enough or it doesn't work, or possibly both.

I think that - as repeated elections have shown - enough of the Israeli electorate are sufficiently indifferent to the grievances and suffering of the Palestinians that this kind of bottom-up approach to peace-making isn't going to achieve anything; the only possible scenario for peace in the middle east will be if the US forces Israel to make concessions against its will.

I think trying to justify this orchestra by saying "it was in the interests of the children concerned" may well make sense - that is, after all, the general purpose of a youth orchestra - but saying "it would have helped improve Israel's treatment of the Palestinians" does not (unless you want to argue that it was valuable as a propaganda exercise directed at the US, which I think it probably wasn't).

[ProgressiveMuslim]

23. I'm curious to see this evidence as well.

[cali]

25. I have some.

Of course there are quite a few programs, but I've actually been able to witness firsthand a program that brings together Israeli and Palestinian dancers. I have a couple of friends who are dancers who have an amazing studio (great sprung floor) in a fantastic setting (on a mountainside, great organic gardens, hundreds of acres of fields and brooks and woods). They've both taught and performed both in Israel and on the WB and for years they've brought together groups together, of dancers from both places to the studio for intensives.

EM Forster wrote an amazing essay about politics and personal relationships. He wrote that in a world gone mad, the only real thing, and the place to start, is with personal relationships.

I'm sure some people think that Palestinian dancers who would collaborate with Israeli dancers, are traitors. I think that's primitive and dangerous "thinking".

[Donald Ian Rankin]

14. Does she have any opposite numbers?

Are there Israeli youth orchestras or similar playing for Palestinians refugees or the children of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, and learning about the Naqba from the other side?

It wouldn't surprise me if there were, but I've never heard of any, although that may just be because they don't get publicity, of course.

[oberliner]

17. Have you heard of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra?

It is an orchestra founded by Israeli Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian Edward Said and includes both Israeli and Palestinian musicians ages 14-25.

Here is an excerpt from an article about a performance they gave at a Palestinian senior citizen facility outside Ramallah in July of 2008:

The children's orchestra then proceeds to a women's geriatric home in the al-Bireh township, and a room with bars on the windows. The ladies are disturbed and the children uneasy. But they play, the women start to clap, then dance, the children respond, then sing themselves in accompaniment to their instruments. The music of the young bringing smiles and dancing to the old touches the soul anywhere in the world, but here it cuts deeper, somehow.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jul/13/classicalmusicandopera.culture

[shira]

24. If Barenboim's orchestra played for holocaust survivors, would there be any similar outrage?

No, there wouldn't. Neither would there be any outrage if Barenboim's orchestra played in the W.Bank for senior citizens there.

So why the outrage at this incident?

[LeftishBrit]

27. Barenboim's work and statements have been controversial for some Israelis

From Wikipedia:

'In September 2005, Barenboim refused to be interviewed by uniformed Israel Army Radio reporter Dafna Arad, considering the wearing of the uniform insensitive to the Palestinians present. Then Israeli Minister of Education, Limor Livnat (Likud), was quoted as describing Barenboim as "a real Jew hater" and "a real anti-semite". <37>

In December 2007, Barenboim and a group of some 20 musicians from England, the United States, France and Germany, and one Palestinian were scheduled to play a baroque music concert in Gaza.<38> Although they had received authorization from Israeli authorities, the Palestinian was stopped at the Israel-Gaza border and told that he needed individual permission to enter.<38> The group waited seven hours at the border, and then canceled the concert in solidarity.<38>...'


The Shas party objected to Barenboim accepting Palestinian citizenship and recommended that he be stripped of Israeli citizenship.


Of course, there is a significant difference in *degree*: the Israeli objections to Barenboim's actions have mostly remained on a verbal level, and he has mostly been permitted to carry on with his activities - unlike Younis and her orchestra. But one cannot say that there has been *no* outrage about Barenboim.

[shira]

29. you think Barenboim is aware of the way Palestinian children are exploited by Hamas/Fatah as shields

And if he spoke out against it, you think he'd be forever banned from the W.Bank and Gaza? Maybe he doesn't speak out because he doesn't want to rock the boat?

[LeftishBrit]

30. I'm a little confused on what you're saying...

Are you saying that Barenboim SHOULD be bringing up this particular issue? I disagree strongly that it's his duty to discuss it; I think it is not relevant to his work building bridges as a musician.

Or are you simply giving it as an example of Israel allowing greater freedom of speech and the press within their country than Hamas or even the PA do? I would certainly agree on that.

[shira]

31. how can it not be Barenboim's duty to discuss it?

who is he trying to build bridges with? the Palestinian victims of human shield exploitation, or the military leadership that forces it on the population?

[LeftishBrit]

32. Would you think that someone who tried to build bridges with American citizens...

on a cultural level is required to attack the war in Iraq?

Do you think that Wafa Younis in her musical bridge-building work is required to criticize Avigdor Lieberman explicitly?

Such actions might be desirable and courageous - but at the same time they are not necessary in such contexts, and in some cases may even deflect from the work being done.

I think that contact between peoples does not necessarily either imply support for, or require direct criticism, of the leadership. I think it is a good in itself, and may sow the seeds of peace between the peoples.

[shira]

33. not really the same thing at all

on a cultural level is required to attack the war in Iraq?

Do you think that Wafa Younis in her musical bridge-building work is required to criticize Avigdor Lieberman explicitly?


There are no American victims of the Iraq war who cannot speak for themselves, nor are there victims of Avigdor Lieberman (yet) who cannot speak up for themselves against their oppressors. I don't see how anyone pro-Palestinian can go into the W.Bank or Gaza Strip and not be outraged at the way in which Hamas exploits and takes advange of the citizens (most are children) there. To remain silent and ignore or trivialize the situation is IMHO very anti-Palestinian. One would have to completely loathe the Palestinian people to not be outraged about the way in which Hamas victimizes them.

[EFerrari]

36. Then you understand very little about the American victims

of the Iraq war who are mostly children who have lost a parent and sometimes even their home. I guess not enough of those children post to this forum.

And no matter how many times you repeat the meme that Palestinian children are exploited by their own people, I notice you never balance it by acknowledging that the IDF's use of women and children as human shields is so out of hand, the Israeli Supreme Court had to intercede. And even so, they have not stopped.

[Violet_Crumble]

38. Insisting that any performer must make political statements is wrong...

When something is done in an attempt to bridge cultural divides, which is what the kids orchestra in Jenin, and also Daniel Barenboim's orchestra does, it's the music that's the message, not an opportunity for extremists from either camp to insist that they should be speaking out about this or that politically. The problem with what happened to the kids orchestra was that the PA guy in Jenin made the whole thing political, and now I see Shira going along a similar tangent....

Yr last sentence about the value of contact between peoples bears repeating for anyone of the above mindset: 'I think it is a good in itself, and may sow the seeds of peace between the peoples.'

Couldn't agree with you more on that....

[EFerrari]

43. But you don't throw kids into the vacuum. That's simply irresponsible.

[varelse]

20. Very sad. It's not an auspicious move for peace or justice in the region.

I can't see that anyone of good faith gains anything at all by this action. Quite the reverse.

[azurnoir]

42. Something that flew under the "outrage" radar

Israeli bombs silence Gaza music school

There was a music school in Gaza. It was just six months old. The 31 children aged 7 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 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.

http://imeu.net/news/article0015432.shtml