Making Music Under Occupation

By Andrew Kirkman

WEDNESDAY NIGHT at Kalandiya checkpoint. It's about 9 p.m.; even on a regular day they close the barrier at 10, so we're wondering if we'll get through. The bus driver already gave up: he'll be spending the night on his bus. A car bomb went off here today, and the soldiers are not letting anyone pass. Tempers start to get frayed; a youth is hauled off; a soldier swaggers around with a gun yelling at people to stand where he has decided he wants them to stand. Cell phones ring: the same banal jingles you hear everywhere in the States, the familiarity strangely jarring in such a-for me-unfamiliar scene.

I'm here-my first visit-playing with the largely German orchestra that's been brought in to accompany the "al Fawanees" musical at the Ramallah Cultural Palace. In fact the German element may be the reason we're still here: someone later tells me he overheard one of the soldiers remarking that he heard German being spoken; that was apparently enough to stop us passing straight through. We had to wait in the scrum with everyone else-yet another of those occasions, which quickly become routine, when you realize you're on the receiving end of the random whim of some kid who happens to be wearing a uniform. In fact the Germans nearly didn't get further than the airport: without the intervention of their diplomatic top brass (and a five-hour wait) they'd have been on the next plane home, and two years of preparation and planning would have been for nothing.

I'm jammed up against a smart, well-dressed, very Western-looking young woman, and start a casual conversation:

"How long have you been waiting?"

"Since about 3."

"Where are you from?"

"Oh, I'm from Ramallah."

I still find myself being brought up short by the thoughtless assumption that someone who looks like us, dresses like us and talks like us must be from the same world as we are. Yet another reminder of how difficult it is to "other" the people here, and the main reason, surely, why the Israelis are at such pains to keep people from meeting them. I get to talking with a young cellist from Chile about life under Pinochet: she remembers, as a child, a communist friend of her father's appearing and disappearing in the night as he moved from place to place to avoid capture; he still hasn't got back the job he lost under the junta.

It's pure chance that we're in the midst of this: it was our day off, and we've been taken on a day trip to Jericho and the Dead Sea, the latter another curious wake-up experience. I notice that all the beaches have signs in Hebrew and inquire about it with our Palestinian guide: "We are in the West Bank, right, yet all the beaches here are Israeli?"

"Oh yes, in fact we [Palestinians] aren't allowed to swim anywhere here."

I remark that even in apartheid South Africa there were beaches for blacks. He replies that he knows kids of 12 and 13 who have never seen the sea, even though, of course, it's pretty close in both directions.

It's nice to have a free day. Most days we've been in the theater, practicing, recording, working with those lovely kids who are so grateful, so happy to have this chance to do something creative and happy together. We spend a lot of time waiting around, lots of time to get to know the kids. They're happy, smiling, running around, yet-to an outsider-strangely mature: I'm struck by how like adults they express themselves, even in English. I talk about it with Hanan Ashrawi, with whom I'm lucky to have a private meeting. It's a big problem, she says: these kids grow up so fast, and all of a sudden they're adults with no real childhood behind them; it's clear to them early on that they aren't growing up in the safe, secure world we'd like all our kids to have: their parents can't protect them from tanks and helicopter gunships. She tells me how she and her husband strove to give their daughters a childhood as normal as possible. "It's so important," she stresses, "for these kids to have a chance to be kids: to be irresponsible, to be reckless."

And we both agree on something that's been striking me with increasing force since I arrived here, something I hear again and again from people inside the conservatory and out: music can give something even the Israelis can't encroach on; a chance for the kids to open their minds into a space that isn't filled with fear, uncertainty and a relentlessly building resentment, a space to be inventive, fanciful and free-a space to be kids.

I get to see this from another side in the Deheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem: a friend has arranged a visit there and we're shown around by a wonderful young guy called Yassir. Yassir is serious, purposeful and very clear in his mind about what he's doing. He's been (as I learn later) imprisoned (like so many young Palestinian men) and tortured. He had a wake-up call one day when he saw a young kid at the side of the road, fallen asleep with two wires in his hands: waiting for a tank to come by so he could detonate a pathetic little mine that would barely scratch the huge leviathan's paint. Yassir knew what he wanted to do: he set up an organization called Karama ("dignity") to give kids another outlet besides the hugely over-populated classes in the U.N. school (which, in any case, was destroyed, like so many others, after being targeted when the Israelis came in in 2002; it's only recently been rebuilt.) Check out Karama's Web site, ; Yassir put it together himself.

We go to Karama's building: it's a little, dark, one-floor house, but there's a room with some computers, there are kids' artwork everywhere, and-less expected-there's a room where, Yassir says, the kids can go and take out their aggression: they can throw things, hit things, scream and yell. He expresses a view that, by now, is becoming familiar to me: "If, when they grow up, they decide to turn themselves into bombs, OK, that's up to them; but for now I want to give them a chance to see another possibility, to discover that there are other, more productive things they can turn their minds to."

He has the same pragmatic approach to the people he works with: "I tell them when you leave here, OK, you can be Hamas, you can be Islamic Jihad, whatever; but while you're here you keep that stuff to yourself."

Yassir really lives and breathes something that strikes me more powerfully than anything else here, more powerfully even than people's outward cheerfulness, their hospitality, their kindness: and that's their incredible resilience. We're looking at a beautiful new home going up. "The Israelis came and bulldozed that house; see what we're doing: we're building a better house. That's what we do: whenever they destroy a house we build a better one."

I ask Yassir why they picked that house for destruction. "The guy who lived in that house had nothing to do with the struggle," he tells me. "Then one day his brother was walking past a military installation and they shot him in the leg; then they hauled him in, worked him over and finally shot him in the head. The guy in that house went crazy: he set up a suicide-bombing network and killed about 40 Israelis. And I can understand him: I really love my brother, and if they killed him, I'd feel like killing them, too."

It reminds me again of the profoundly racist undercurrent that occasionally surfaces in the American media: life is cheap for them there; they put their children in the firing line on purpose, etc. Take that hogwash away and put yourself in their shoes: how would you react if it were your brother being shot, your child, your mother? Your house being bulldozed? Take off the blinkers and it's not that hard to see.

On the way out of Bethlehem we get to see more: the route to the checkpoint leads us back past yet more of that hideous wall, and to a series of bus-bays being constructed right by it; you don't need to be a genius to figure out what's going on: the Israelis are gearing up to start cashing in on the tourist trade there, to take yet more money away from an economy they have virtually paralyzed. At the moment few tourists are coming to Bethlehem: this will fix all that.

One can almost feel the screws tightening: on land, as the wall, the endless checkpoints, the road networks, the settlements (all the same, all on the tops of hills) go up in a progress frightening in its speed and inexorability; and, with a still more iron grip, in the hearts and minds of the people.

Yet somehow they cope. It's the last day, and I'm in the bus taking the kids back to their homes in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, as it has done every day during the performances. Trying to get through Kalandiya for a flight the next morning is too much of a risk, so I'm staying in Jerusalem. We have to take the bumpy, chaotic road that links Ramallah with Jerusalem, and there's the inevitable wait while the soldiers come on and check all the passes, all the kids on the bus singing "We will miss you, Fawanees" at the tops of their lungs to a tune from "The Sound of Music." Thankfully they don't haul everyone off and search the bus; a mercy they haven't granted every day. Pretty soon even this will be impossible: the wall is being built right down the middle of this, the main artery into Jerusalem-its huge chunks are already lying in the road, waiting to go up-and any movement between the two (forbidden in any case to anyone with a non-Israeli ID) will be possible only via a huge detour.

I'm sitting with Hania Suodah-Sabbara, the radiant and truly wonderful director of the children's choir. I ask her how they'll manage. "Oh, we'll manage somehow," she says. "The Palestinians always find a way."

As we're pondering on the wall, she turns to me and says, "You know, they paint the other side with nice-looking scenes to try to make it look less like a wall. But there's no way round it: yes they're closing us in, but they're also making a prison for themselves."

---------------------------------------------

Andrew Kirkman is an associate professor of music at Rutgers University.

This article was published in the November 2004 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is used here with permission.