Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture

By Rachel S. Harris

The year 1978 marked Israel's entry into Lebanon, which led to the long-term military occupation of non-sovereign territory and the long, costly war in Lebanon. In the years that followed, many Israelis found themselves alienated from the idea that their country used force only when there was no alternative, and Israeli society eventually underwent a dramatic change in attitude toward militarization and the infallibility of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). In Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture editors Rachel S. Harris and Ranen Omer-Sherman collect nineteen essays that examine the impact of this cultural shift on Israeli visual art, music, literature, poetry, film, theatre, public broadcasting, and commemoration practices after 1978.

Divided into three thematic sections-Private and Public Spaces of Commemoration and Mourning, Poetry and Prose, and Cinema and Stage-this collection presents an exciting diversity of experiences, cultural interests, and disciplinary perspectives. From the earliest wartime writings of S. Yizhar to the global phenomenon of films such as Beaufort, Waltz with Bashir, and Lebanon, the Israeli artist's imaginative and critical engagement with war and occupation has been informed by the catalysts of mourning, pain, and loss, often accompanied by a biting sense of irony. This book highlights many of the aesthetic narratives that have wielded the most profound impact on Israeli culture in the present day.

These works address both incremental and radical changes in individual and collective consciousness that have spread through Israeli culture in response to the persistent affliction of war. No other such volume exists in Hebrew or English. Students and teachers of Israeli studies will appreciate Narratives of Dissent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9780814338049

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I

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SPACES OF COMMEMORATION AND MOURNING

Chapter 1

MUSIC OF PEACE AT A TIME OF WAR

Middle Eastern Music Amid the Second Intifada

Galeet Dardashti

I boarded an airplane for Israel to conduct the bulk of my dissertation fieldwork in late winter 2003—the height of the Second Intifada—as nearly every day brought new Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel and Israeli targeted killings in the Palestinian-ruled territories. The escalation of seemingly interminable violence and political instability led to the electoral victories of the staunchly right-wing Ariel Sharon as prime minister in both 2001 and 2003, based in large part on the Israeli public’s confidence in his ability to fight terrorism. Israeli policy toward Palestinian life under Sharon focused on techniques such as military incursions, curfews, roadblocks, and destruction of public institutions and infrastructure with the full support of US President George W. Bush.¹ Because many Palestinian Israeli citizens of Israel had expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, their loyalty to Israel became highly suspect.²

It was during such a political climate that in 2004 Avigdor Lieberman—then minister of transport—proposed a plan known as the Populated-Area Exchange Plan, under which Palestinian Israeli towns adjacent to areas under Palestinian Authority would be transferred to Palestinian Authority, and only those Palestinian Israelis who agreed to live within Israel’s new borders and pledged loyalty to Israel would be allowed to remain Israeli citizens. Although the plan did not ultimately pass, its proposal underscores the ultranationalist fervor that emerged at this time of war. The Israeli political left—in favor of a political nonmilitary solution to the conflict and willing to make territorial and other concessions in exchange for a peace agreement with the Palestinians—was shattered.

The gloominess of the 2000s in Israel stands in sharp contrast to the unfettered hopefulness of the previous decade. I began my research on Middle Eastern music in Israel for my master’s thesis, during the euphoric period of the 1990s—amid a very different political climate. At that time, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Israelis were forming a range of Middle Eastern-and Arab-influenced bands. No academic had yet written on the subject of this emergent music scene, and I was excited about it on a number of levels. As a self-professed liberal American Jew, the new political developments of the 1990s occurring in Israel inspired me. I spent my junior year of college studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My Israeli friend, Danit, and I watched the signing of the Oslo Accords on TV in her dorm room in 1993; we felt that we were witnessing a crucial moment in history.

When I started hearing some of the new Middle Eastern and Arab music coming out of Israel a few years later, I was optimistic. I knew from my own grandfather’s experience as a renowned Iranian singer who immigrated to Israel in the 1960s that Israel had not always been a hospitable place for Middle Eastern music.³ In spite of the country’s large Mizrahi (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African background) and Arab population, Middle Eastern musical traditions were marginalized and almost entirely excluded from dominant musical media for several decades. This began to change in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s as hegemonic notions of Israeliness were called into question.

Post-Zionism became a pivotal term in the scholarly and public discussions about Israel’s possible transition from a colonizing military society into a globalized capitalist society.⁴ The post-Zionist model also rejected the nationalist ambition to form a cohesive universal identity, adopting a postcolonial discourse that gave voice to subaltern sectors of the population such as Palestinian Israelis and Mizrahim.⁵ The 1990s marked a period when Israelis were highly optimistic about prospects for peace with Palestinians. This, in part, contributed to a flowering of groups performing Middle Eastern and Arab music, many of which emphasized coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. I was quite excited about studying these political and cultural changes occurring in Israel. By the time I submitted my master’s thesis in 2001, however, the Second Intifada was well under way.

In this essay, I examine some of the grassroots Middle Eastern- and Arab-influenced art music that began proliferating in the Israeli public sphere in the 1990s and how these musical practices shifted as the political climate changed drastically with the Second Intifada. I highlight the ways in which Middle Eastern musical practices became co-opted by a multitude of local and transnational players amid the increasing deployment of music in Israel during a period of war. As I demonstrate, the Middle Eastern music scene set in motion in the 1990s continued to flourish during the turbulent and violent period of the 2000s.⁶ In fact, though the government and local municipalities withdrew much of their support for arts programming due to budget cuts, new financial sponsors entered the Middle Eastern music scene. It became even more important to these sponsors, government representatives, and music producers that these performances—often framed as concerts of collaboration between Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis—continued amid the constant warfare; they represented glimmers of hope for peace to audiences in Israel and abroad.

It became increasingly clear to me, however, that such performances often did not represent what was happening in the music scene. Although there were many Israelis involved in the performance of Middle Eastern and Arab music—both Jewish and Palestinian—few musical collaborations actually happened between Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis. In many cases, this framing of the Middle Eastern and Arab music scene as representative of coexistence was not pernicious, but rather gave those in attendance a hopeful respite from the unrelenting violence. Yet in some instances, it seemed that because the funding for the concert or festival was based on the premise of coexistence, some collaborative projects were specifically created for that purpose.

During Israel’s prestate years and the first two decades of the nation’s existence, government entities were heavily involved in inventing and promulgating Israeli national culture, as they believed it to be a powerful method for instilling national unity among its diverse Jewish population—comprised primarily of new immigrants from all over the world. Although the Israeli state continues to sponsor some cultural activities, both government indifference to the arts and the need to increase government spending on security have gradually led to a dwindling of state-sponsored cultural arts programs within Israel.⁷ The state no longer concerns itself with the policing of its national musical culture.

In The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, George Yúdice argues that one of the striking effects of globalization is the broad invocation of culture as a resource for social change. Unlike in several decades past when culture was administered and wielded on a national scale, in today’s global era, culture is often coordinated on many levels, both locally and supranationally, by corporations, private foundations, and the international nongovernmental sector.⁸ Such theoretical musings have relevance to the Israeli case. As violence between Israelis and Palestinians increases, local Israelis and many international parties have deployed Middle Eastern music—seen by many as the ideal bridge-building tool between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis—quite significantly. Culture has become the slippery terrain on which change is sought.⁹ As I demonstrate, Middle Eastern music in Israel has become a resource for the improvement of Israel. I examine some of the implications of this new deployment of music as musicians and their music are used to wage larger political battles to which the artists may not subscribe.

THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL CULTURE

While the official establishment of Israel as a nation-state occurred in 1948, its national character began to be forged in the 1880s as Jews began arriving from Europe in growing numbers; by 1920 the Jewish population in Palestine had reached approximately 80,000.¹⁰ David Ben Gurion’s notion of antisectorialism (mamlachtiut) sought to use the biblical legacy of Jewish history in Palestine to establish the universally binding character of the new state. Jewish law (Halakhah) became a fundamental component of the Israeli legal system, Jewish holidays became national holidays, and archaeological sites deemed to be those mentioned in the Bible became national sites.¹¹ This invented national identity became part of government policy once Israel became a state in 1948.

Similarly, the antecedent of an Israeli national musical style was deliberately created beginning in the 1920s. By the time Israel declared independence in 1948, the cultural character of the state had already been invented, defined, and set by the Israeli establishment, according to a primarily Western aesthetic. With the establishment of the state, government-controlled radio, and later television (established in 1968) played a powerful role in determining what became accepted as Israeli popular music, for up until 1990, Israeli broadcast media was exclusively controlled by the state’s Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA). As a prerequisite for full social integration, all subsequent immigrants were encouraged to abandon their previous cultural traditions in order to embrace the official national Israeli culture.

The exclusion of Middle Eastern and Arab music during Israel’s early years was pervasive because of this state-controlled media. Under IBA control, Voice of Israel (Kol Israel) the station responsible for the domestic and international radio service, had only one Arab-language channel that aired Arab music. Its Arabic-language programming was primarily intended as public diplomacy toward Israel’s Arab neighbors across the borders. Its secondary target was the Palestinian population of Israel. The Arabic-speaking Mizrahim within Israel was its last priority. The station established its Arabic Orchestra in 1948. Composed of the recent Jewish Iraqi immigrant musicians and—after 1957—some Jewish Egyptian immigrant musicians, the IBA’s Arabic Orchestra served a valuable political function for the state by attracting its listeners to the propaganda programming that followed its high-quality Arabic musical interludes.¹² Aside from the Arabic-language radio station, Middle Eastern music was only minimally featured on mainstream Israeli radio when the state-run folklore ensembles were aired; this always occurred during specific unpopular time slots. In the 1970s, however, the second generation of Jewish Middle Eastern Israelis finally grew weary of such second-class treatment.

EMBRACING ARAB CULTURE

By the late 1980s and early ’90s, musika mizrahit, a Mediterranean-styled pop music that grew out of the Mizrahi working-class cassette culture in the 1970s, had just begun to pervade the Israeli public sphere after years of exclusion from a Eurocentric Israeli establishment.¹³ Israeli ethnic music (musika etnit yisraelit) emerged in Israel in the late 1980s—less than fifteen years after musika mizrahit entered the scene—but by that time, cultural and national discourse had already shifted to valorize notions of cultural integration;¹⁴ hybridity was becoming the new recipe for authentic Israeliness and national belonging. In the early years (the late 1980s to themid-1990s), ethnic bands primarily fused traditional Eastern styles with Western classical music and jazz.

Beginning in the early 1990s Israelis witnessed many crucial changes in their daily lives. In addition to the one Israeli national TV channel operating since 1968, in 1993 the commercial Channel 2 finally began broadcasting in Israel. By 1994, with the cable television infrastructure in place, Israelis had the option of choosing between forty television channels in more than a dozen languages. Non-government-regulated commercial radio stations were also introduced only in the early 1990s. As a result of the shift to commercial media, musika mizrahit became an instant hit on new television shows and began to pervade the new radio stations ruled by ratings, not the tastes of government officials.¹⁵ The mainstream success of musika mizrahit not only made the sounds of Arab music begin to sound less foreign to Israelis but also emboldened Mizrahi and Palestinian Israeli musicians interested in bringing more traditional Arab music to the fore.

With the conclusion of the Second Intifada, the signing of the Oslo Accords became the watershed event for Israelis’ openness to Arab culture. Israelis had already earned a reputation as notorious international travelers decades earlier; it became trendy for young Israelis to backpack in the Far East, South America, the Indian Peninsula, or Oceania for several months or up to a year, after their mandatory army service. With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, however, Israeli tourists were ready to traverse a previously forbidden frontier right in their backyard—the Middle East; following new diplomatic agreements with its neighbors, Israelis traveled to Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt in unprecedented numbers.

Historically, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have experienced years of state-sanctioned discrimination, underdevelopment, and political disenfranchisement. In the context of this increased exposure to Arab cultures and optimism for peace, however, government policies toward Palestinian Israelis became more inclusive and tolerant. Official Israeli discourse shifted, encouraging Israelis to pursue coexistence (du-kiyum) with their Palestinian conationals.¹⁶

Indeed, this period marked the height of musical collaborations of Arab music between Palestinians/Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis such as those of the bands Bustan Abraham, Alei Hazayit, and Yair Dalal’s many Palestinian collaborations.¹⁷ These ensembles performed primarily for Jewish Israeli audiences in Israel and diverse audiences abroad. Because of their coexistence messages and mix of Palestinian, Palestinian Israeli, and Jewish Israeli band members, these groups benefited tremendously from this new era.¹⁸ Neither Alei Hazayit nor Bustan Abraham performed songs of a political nature, yet the highly charged and exciting political changes occurring in Israel made their music seem of great political importance.

By the mid-1990s, not only did demand for their performances increase in Israel and Europe, but it even extended to the West Bank and the Arab world. These performances were always of high political import: in 1993 the Israeli government invited Alei Hazayit to perform at a ceremony marking the first implementation of the Oslo Accords; in 1995 the group performed a concert for UNESCO in Ramallah; that same year they became the first Israeli group to perform in Jordan.¹⁹

Yair Dalal emerged onto the ethnic music scene in Israel in the mid-1990s as the first Mizrahi musician to clearly articulate how his own Iraqi-Jewish identity was part of a cultural heritage Israel’s Palestinians shared. In 1994 Dalal, who was barely known in Israel at the time, was invited to perform in Oslo to mark the one-year anniversary of the Oslo Accords and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Israeli and Palestinian leaders. He took a choir of Palestinian and Israeli children with him, and they performed a song he composed called Zaman es-Salaam (Time of peace) together with another Norwegian children’s choir. This launched his career, and today he is Israel’s most well known international emissary of Arab music.

Dalal’s framing of his own dual Arab Jewish identity was key to his success in the mid-1990s. His biography in his 1996 release, Samar, stated:

Yair Dalal was born in Israel in 1955. His family is originally from Iraq. . . . He is one of the last musicians to represent the Arab Jewish music from Iraq. His background gives him the seeds to develop this rare mix of traditional and modern, Jewish and Arab, Oriental and Western. Yair Dalal is also a strong advocate for peace in Israel and devotes his talent to abolish the ideological barriers between people and in particular between Jews and Arabs. To him, when based on esteem and mutual respect, cultural fusion becomes an essential element to communication between peoples.

While Dalal certainly did his share of East-West musical fusions in the 1990s, it was the East-meets-East concept of shared culture between Jew and Palestinian that made his image so appealing, particularly to audiences abroad.

Music was not the only medium through which Jewish Israelis began forging connections and identifying with Palestinians. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Mizrahi filmmakers, poets, and academics began creating works that reflected new conceptions of an Arab identity they shared with Palestinian and Palestinian Israelis. Haim Bouzaglo’s film Fictitious Marriage (1988), for example, calls fixed notions of Israeli identity into question; when Eldi, an Arab Jew, is mistaken for a Palestinian worker in Tel Aviv he opts to adopt that identity, which takes him as far as Gaza. Similarly, in the poem Purim Sequence by the Mizrahit poet Tikva Levi, the narratorial voice describes listening to the Palestinian musical group Sabrin and expresses anxiety that she might be mistaken for a Palestinian:

I turn down the volume

so only I can hear

my paranoia is transmitted to the door or the window

someone might think that whoever listens

to Arabic is an Arab

And come to kill me²⁰

It was also in the late 1980s and early 1990s that radical Mizrahi academics such as Ella Shohat and Yehuda Shenhav began underscoring the similar experiences of discrimination and oppression dealt to both Mizrahim and Palestinians at the hands of a Eurocentric Israeli establishment. Such Mizrahi expressions of identification with Palestinians reflected a New Levantine discourse, which Israel had not witnessed until this peaceful period.²¹

MUSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

While the post-Oslo enthusiasm for Middle Eastern music in Israel was certainly significant, there were still very few Israeli infrastructural institutions for young Israelis interested in studying and performing these musical traditions. This changed quite rapidly, however, with a successive sprouting up of several new music programs and venues, particularly in the Tel Aviv area and Jerusalem. Bar Ilan University became the first school offering formal Middle Eastern musical instruction in 1993. In particular, 1995 was a crucial year with the opening of two schools in Jerusalem. The Department of Oriental Music at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance—a true music conservatory—opened its doors for the first time, and the Center for Classical Oriental Music and Dance, offering courses on a range of Middle Eastern musical traditions (Arab, Persian, Turkish) and certain forms of Middle Eastern dance opened in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood as well.²² The Arab-Jewish Community Center in Jaffa—opened in the early 1990s—began offering private and group lessons on Arab musical instruments, and soon the prestigious Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music began offering a course on Arab music taught by Yair Dalal.²³

Within a few short years, an ethnic music scene took shape. Many young Israelis of all types—the largest percentage Mizrahim and Palestinian Israelis—became students of Middle Eastern music and formed bands.²⁴ Reflecting the above developments, in 1996 the Zionist Confederation House in Jerusalem shifted its focus to concerts of ethnic music and became The Center for Ethnic Music, and the Inbal Dance Theater in Tel Aviv expanded into the Inbal Ethnic Arts Center in order to showcase the rich heritage and exquisite arts of each ethnic community.²⁵ Many of the Palestinian Israeli students and graduates of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance became members of the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth, founded in 1990.²⁶ A few Arab cultural performance locations opened for the first time in the early ’90s to specifically serve the Palestinian Israeli community, including Al Midan in Nazareth and both Al Midan and Al Soraya in Haifa; the Israeli government heavily subsidized all of these spaces.²⁷

Middle Eastern Music in Israel Amid the Intifada

I conducted most of my dissertation fieldwork between 2003 and 2004—the height of the Second Intifada—during a very different political climate than that of the Oslo euphoria of the 1990s. Not only had all of the collaborative groups mentioned above disbanded, but also physical contact (let alone musical collaboration) between Israelis and Palestinian noncitizens of Israel had become virtually impossible with military closures in effect in response to suicide bombings.

But even many of those collaborations that were not rendered impossible by border closures became difficult as a result of political tensions. Although Yair Dalal had forged an ongoing collaboration of several years with the Bedouin Ensemble, Tarab, their relationship ended in 2003. That year, one of the organizers of WOMAD (the World of Music, Arts, and Dance Festival)—one of the largest world music festivals, where Dalal has performed several times—informed Dalal that members of Tarab had accused him of exploiting them only for his own personal gain. Dalal was heartbroken.²⁸

Moreover, Dalal, whose career was built on the success of Oslo, also felt wounded in the aftermath of his 2004 efforts to collaborate with Palestinian Israelis in Israel. The Oud Festival, which he cofounded in 2001, and other Middle Eastern and Arab music projects he and other Jewish Israelis helped to initiate, always made an effort to include Palestinian Israelis, yet he complained that Jewish Israelis were never invited to the Arab music festivals that the Palestinian Israeli community staged, such as the Jabus Festival and the Tarshiha Festival. Dalal found this exclusion both hurtful and uncourageous.²⁹

It was a difficult time for Israeli ethnic musicians like Dalal who relied heavily on earnings from performances in Europe to make a living. During the Second Intifada, however, Israeli musicians were boycotted from almost all European festivals. The economic ramifications of the boycott coupled with increasing tensions between the musicians ultimately led to the disintegration of Bustan Abraham in 2003.³⁰ According to Dalal, the number of students wanting to study with him and other teachers of Arab music had also decreased slightly.

THE FRAGILITY OF PEACE

The 1990s marked a period when many Israelis opened up to Middle Eastern and Arab music, in part because of their optimism toward peace, but when I spoke to Israelis in 2003–4, things had changed for some. Dan Golan, the cultural attaché of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spoke openly to me about this issue. Golan, who had always self-identified as left wing, confessed that the enthusiasm he had felt for Arab music in the 1990s had waned with the shattering of his hopes for peace. He described to me the viscerally negative sensations he experienced when hearing Arab music in recent years. Golan was not proud that he had unwittingly developed such an outlook but attributed the change to feeling betrayed by Palestinians whom, in his view, had rejected peace.³¹

Amal Murkus, a Palestinian Israeli singer/songwriter who sings in Arabic, expressed frustration with the fragility of the Israeli public’s openness to Arab music:

When we are in war Arabs are hated, when we are in peace . . . Let’s bring an Arab singer, let’s make peace . . . And lately the political situation has been so difficult with so many bombings, and when I’ve been invited to participate in a big festival, a good festival and a bombing happens, suddenly my performance has a different mood or people don’t come to my performance, you understand? . . . There is a lot of tension all the time and as an Arab singer—people take it out on me, get angry at me if I perform in Tel Aviv.³²

Many of the Palestinian Israeli musicians who had begun enjoying the fruits of Oslo saw some of the public’s enthusiasm for their performances melt away.³³ Although most Israelis I spoke with did not clearly articulate the link between changes in their music preferences and the political situation, as Golan did, the number of former peacenik Israelis that I knew personally who had moved significantly to the right in just a few years was staggering.

Mizrahi Pride

The beginning of the Second Intifada occurred at a time when Mizrahim were experiencing the biggest surge of pride in their own Mizrahi identities ever witnessed historically in Israel. Shas, the increasingly powerful Mizrahi religious political party, won ten Knesset seats in 1996, and by 1999 it had won an unprecedented seventeen seats. An additional 200,000 people voted for the party that year. These votes didn’t come only from ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi Jews but from Mizrahim (mostly working-class Mizrahim) who were seeking a new social ideology and a new movement to lead them.³⁴ The all-Mizrahi movement Hakeshet Hademokratit Hamizrahit (the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition), a group that promotes equal rights for Israel’s Mizrahi population, was founded in 1997. Most of those active in Hakeshet were radical Mizrahi middle-and upper-class intellectuals. Mizrahim from all social classes were a part of this new surge of pride.

I had already observed Mizrahi pride as palpable in the late 1990s, and by 2003 Mizrahim had embraced their Mizrahiyut in even more overt ways. For third-generation Israelis, in particular, one’s specific Mizrahi ethnicity became of particular interest during this period as many began constructing their own identities heavily on the cultural legacies from which they had become disconnected. For example, Mizrahim, quickly identifying my physical traits as similar to their own, would often ask me Mah At? (What are you?), so as to know whether I was Iraqi, Yemenite, Iranian, or Syrian. Mizrahim were interested in both connecting to their roots and forging bonds with others who shared them. In musical terms, by the late 1990s, many had begun to move away from the panethnic and hybrid pop musical styles of the 1980s and ’90s, focusing instead on what they viewed as more pure musical traditions (i.e., Persian, Iraqi, Moroccan, Turkish), which many Israelis began to view as more authentic.

Performances of Middle Eastern music set into motion in the 1990s, therefore, did continue during the Second Intifada. During this turbulent and violent period, however, Jewish musicians such as Yair Dalal began focusing more strongly on their own heritages. Dalal’s 2002 album, Asmar, on the Magda label, was an album mostly focused on Iraqi music. Almost all of the musicians on the album were of Iraqi heritage, such as Avi Agababa and Asaf Zamir, Dalal’s regular percussionists. In addition, Dalal featured guest musicians Yossef Shem Tov (oud) and Albert Elias (ney), and recorded a song composed by Salim Al-Nur. Shem Tov and Elias were legendary Iraqi musicians and Al-Nur a famous Iraqi composer and Dalal’s private teacher of Arab music; all of them—over the age of seventy—immigrated to Israel from Iraq in the 1950s.³⁵ The album also contains a poem written by the Iraqi-born Israeli poet, Ronny Someck. Unlike many of his previous albums, there is no mention of Palestinians on this album or of Dalal’s activism to bring peace between Arabs and Jews.³⁶

The Festivals

One early morning during the summer of 2003 I caught a ride to Nazareth from Tel Aviv with Moti,³⁷ the producer of the Culture of Peace Festival. Moti was accompanying the Israeli pop singer Sigal,³⁸ a singer he managed at the time, for an audition with the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth, which he also managed. I had interviewed Moti on his work producing performances of Arab music in Israel, and he invited me to come along for the day trip to Nazareth on condition that I only observe and not ask any questions until after the audition. He didn’t want to make Sigal nervous—she was nervous enough. They know I’m not an Arab, right? she asked as we drove along the way. I’m sure that I might make some mistakes on the Arabic or something. Yes, they know, said Moti. I told them that you are my friend and that you are a well known singer among Israelis.

The Arab Orchestra of Nazareth is comprised almost exclusively of Palestinian Israeli male musicians from Nazareth.³⁹ They work with a number of Palestinian Israeli singers depending on the repertoire they are performing in Israel or abroad. Amid the recent popularity of Arab and Middle Eastern–infused music in Israel, Sigal, a Jew of Iraqi and Moroccan background, had become interested in performing classical Arab music with the orchestra, following the path of the more well known Moroccan-descended Jewish Israeli pop sensation Zehava Ben. Like Ben, Sigal had recently started studying Arabic language and singing, wanting to connect more with her Arab roots.

When we arrived at the orchestra’s rehearsal space in Nazareth, the musicians wanted Sigal to sing every Arab song in her repertoire. The atmosphere was casual and relaxed, and although Sigal didn’t know all of the Arabic lyrics, a few of the musicians would chime in and help her whenever she forgot the words. After the audition was over, Moti talked to the orchestra leader, Suheil, in private. According to Moti, Suheil liked Sigal’s voice but was concerned that she didn’t sing the songs in an authentically Arab way, as they were meant to be sung. Suheil wasn’t convinced that the audience would respond well to her. Moti, however, conveyed to me that he managed to convince Suheil that having Sigal, a Jewish Israeli, collaborate with the Palestinian Israeli musicians on a few songs at Tel Aviv’s Culture of Peace Festival would be a big hit with those in attendance.

All three of the primary Middle Eastern music festivals that still occur annually in Israel were founded during the intifada between 2001 and 2003 despite the difficulteconomic and political situation. Furthermore, the biggest festival, the Oud Festival, grew steadily each year as it continued gaining global sponsors. Although the Israeli government and Jerusalem Municipality did continue to sponsor the festival, its largest sponsorship came from the Beracha Foundation (a Jewish American–funded philanthropic organization that promotes coexistence in Israel), the Goethe-Institut (a German cultural institution primarily supported by the German government that encourages international cultural exchange), and the Jerusalem Foundation (an Israeli nonprofit that seeks to create a just society for all citizens of Jerusalem, emphasizing coexistence as a primary mission).

The importance of maintaining this musical scene—in spite of budget cuts—with music performed by both Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis in Israel, was underscored in the 2003 Oud Festival brochure with written statements from two government officials. The first, from Uri Lupolianski, Jerusalem’s mayor, contained these words:

The occurrence of the Festival is of great importance, especially in these days of tension. The festival brings together composers, instrumentalists, singers and song writers—Jews and Arabs—who unite to form a joint creation, when these days its meaning is more encouraging than ever. Maybe this way, through respect toward Arab culture, we shall find a new way to express our longing for a life of patience and tolerance. The festival draws music lovers from every spectrum of Israeli society every year, and therefore contributes a great deal to bringing peoples’ hearts closer together and bridging gaps and chasms like only music can. (Author’s translation)

Micha Yinon, head of administration of culture in the Israeli Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, expressed similar sentiments:

The Fourth Oud Festival takes place this year during a difficult period, both in terms of security and financially. In addition, the decreasing number of visitors to the city of Jerusalem makes the occurrence of festivals and cultural events more difficult. However this places even greater importance on the occurrence of this festival, which maintains optimism and faith in coexistence and hope for a culture of peace. The festival is a testament to the power music has for bringing souls together, and allowing creations and dialogues between those close and far, the admirers and the enemies, from every religion, ethnicity, age and gender. (Author’s translation)

Although the government officials focus their discourse on the festival’s importance as a symbol of hope and coexistence between Palestinians (referred to as Arabs) and Jewish Israelis, in actuality there were conspicuously few musical collaborations between Palestinian and Jewish Israelis that year. The Middle Eastern music schools that opened in the 1990s described above had self-segregated into two camps—those that primarily served Palestinian Israelis and those that served Jewish Israelis, primarily Mizrahim.⁴⁰

Like the Oud Festival, the 2003 Culture of Peace Festival—Tel Aviv’s biggest Middle Eastern musical festival—featured many Palestinian and Jewish Israelis performing Arab music, with very few of them performing on stage together. In fact, the only performances featuring both Palestinian Israelis and Israeli Jews collaborating together were those specifically conceived and constructed by the festival producer, Moti, such as the one described above. Moti, the manager of the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth, sees himself as a left-wing activist and began producing concerts of Arab music in the late 1980s as a political statement against racism in Israel. As someone who had already spent years forging connections in the Israeli pop and jazz music industry, he made it his mission to bring Arab music performed by Palestinian Israeli musicians to reputable concert halls for the Jewish public. In 2002, at the beginning of the Second Intifada, Moti founded the Culture of Peace Festival in Tel Aviv and has continued serving as the festival’s artistic director and producer.

The Culture of Peace Festival is supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that work toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although the ethnic music scene was not producing many collaborative projects featuring Jewish and Palestinian Israelis by 2003, it seemed that some were created in order to satisfy the conditions of the funders. In this case, the musicians were not just performing as part of the Culture of Peace Festival, but asked to stand in as actors performing a culture of peace. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, Exhibitions are fundamentally theatrical, for they are how museums perform the knowledge they create.⁴¹ Like exhibitions, curated performances often involve quite a bit of framing on the part of producers in order to convey the messages they convey; although audiences generally experience the performance as a direct musical expression from those on stage, there are sometimes other forces at play in the musical process.

It seemed that the coexistence ensembles—many of which had formed at the grassroots level in Israel in the 1990s—were being re-created amid this period of warfare to satisfy the agendas of global sponsors. Here, the notion of production fetishism,⁴² one of the effects of globalized capitalism, is useful:

Production has itself become a fetish, masking not social relations as such, but the relations of production, which are increasingly transnational. The locality (both in the sense of the local factory or site of production and in the extended sense of the nation-state) becomes a fetish which disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.⁴³

While it appeared to audiences that Palestinian and Jewish Israelis were collaborating just as they had a few years before, the actual impetus for many of these performances was concealed.

Sigal, the singer described above, eventually did perform with the Nazareth Orchestra at the 2003 Culture of Peace Festival in Tel Aviv. As Nezar and Suheil explained to me, Moti insisted that she collaborate with them in order to produce a coexistence moment. Unfortunately, as Suheil had predicted, Sigal wasn’t well received by either the Jews or the Palestinians in the audience. Many audience members felt that Sigal, a musician accustomed to performing in clubs, rather than concert halls, didn’t make the transition gracefully. Not only did her overly ornamented vocal rendition of Farid Al-Atrash’s Ya Gamil" fall flat, but also her flirtatious dancing during the instrumental sections seemed quite out of place to many in attendance. Even some of the instrumentalists on stage appeared to be having a difficult time holding back their laughter. Early on in her performance of the piece, members of the audience began talking among themselves fairly loudly—largely ignoring her.

Many of the other performances at Moti’s Culture of Peace Festival in 2003 were, however, received very well by audience members. In one such performance, the Palestinian Israeli singer Lubneh Salmah from Nazareth sang some of Oum Kalthoum’s songs accompanied by the Nazareth Orchestra. This concert, in particular, attracted Israelis of all types. Like most concerts featuring the music of Oum Kalthoum, audiences evaluated the singer’s performance based on her ability to mimic the ornaments that Oum Kalthoum sang and often improvised in her renowned performances of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Nearly all in attendance greeted Salmah’s performance with an enthusiastic standing ovation. At that point, the mayor of Nazareth came to the stage to thank the audience and the concert’s benefactors. He began speaking in English, a more neutral language in Israel, when some members of the crowd yelled "B’arabee (speak in Arabic"), and after contemplating this for a few seconds, he switched to Arabic and some—in particular Palestinian Israelis and some Mizrahim—cheered, proud to have Arabic spoken and sung at such a prestigious concert hall in Israel. The mayor delivered the entire speech in Arabic. Most Israelis do not speak Arabic, however, and my Israeli friend of Mizrahi background who beamed with glee during the entire concert (which was performed solely in Arabic) was offended when this political figure spoke in a language not spoken by many in attendance, including her. Suddenly, a perfectly enjoyable concert of entertainment and cultural pride seemed to pose a nationalist threat.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In his book The Festive State, David Guss explains that as the festival is transformed into an icon of ‘national tradition,’ a borrowed image of difference made to stand for the nation as a whole . . . the subtle ambiguities of local performance, the layerings of history and context, must all but be eliminated.⁴⁴ Although in the Arab world Oum Kalthoum was viewed as one of the greatest symbols of a highly anti-Israeli Arab nationalism, here in the Israeli context at the Culture of Peace Festival, the performance of Oum Kalthoum’s Inta Oumri (a piece performed constantly in Israel) is to serve as a means for bringing the Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, and Palestinian Israelis together, putting differences aside. But when those on stage began speaking Arabic (as opposed to singing it) the moment of cultural harmony melted away, reminding those present of the current political realities dividing them.

As investing in Arab culture in Israel is increasingly viewed as one of the gateways to peace, Palestinian Israeli musicians and their representatives have to navigate diverse interests in order to appeal for funding from the government, international NGOs, and private sponsors in Israel and abroad. My intention is not to implicate culture brokers, especially in a place as fraught with political turmoil and cultural complexity as Israel. For the most part, they have very well meaning intentions. As anthropologist Steven Feld reminds us, however, musical projects embarked upon with self-consciously progressive political and aesthetic agendas are neither innocent of nor discursively free from postcolonial critiques.⁴⁵ In their quest to mainstream Middle Eastern and Arab music in Israel and appeal for available funding, however, culture brokers do sometimes offend and co-opt some of the very Palestinians they are attempting to