Palestinian women make music: an interview with Ayeda Ayed

Background

In these unfortunate times, the word “Palestinian” often conjure up a spectrum of negative associations, from terrorists age and suicide bombers to dispossessed victims and supplicants living in rubble and political violence.

Of course some of these are accurate descriptions but they do not tell the whole story. Palestinians are also a creative, talented people, proud of their heritage, determined to preserve their culture and to join the international music community.

Ayeda Ayed tells us the other story as she paints the landscape of Palestinian music history against which we can appreciate three of its leading women musicians today.

Displaced in 1948 to refugee camps in Jordan and West Bank, Ayeda’s parents came to Canada in 1965. She was born in Winnipeg, becoming politically active after the first intifada, vowing to show the world that ‘we Palestinians do have a heritage’.

A performer herself, she now directs event programming for Beit Zatoun, a cultural organization in Toronto.

As in most cultures, music plays a significant role in Palestinian daily life. Before 1948 and the creation of Israel, Palestine was a rural, agricultural society with music marking births, marriages, funerals, olive picking and other harvests.Urbanization and modernization along with the loss of agricultural lands threatened these music traditions but women, who had always played an active cultural role, now took upon themselves the urgent task of rescuing and revitalizing ancient songs.The Palestinian liberation struggle imbued music with a nationalistic flavor to which has been added a more artistic emphasis, recreating and modernizing the idea of what a Palestinian song is.

Poetry is the common thread that runs through Palestinian songs, whether the style is hip hop, ballads, rock, folk songs, lullabies, laments or classical Arab music. Palestinian songs stretch from the universal themes of love and death to love of the land, remembering by name political prisoners and children killed by violence along with the longings inherent in exile, isolation and dispossession of land and home.

“It’s difficult to be a Palestinian artist and not be political,” Ayeda says. For women musicians, feminism and self expression, the making of art in a patriarchal society further strengthens the politicization of today’s Palestinian music.

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The musicians

Ayeda tells us why she chose these three Palestinian women musicians for our Tidings program:

Amal Murkhus sings “Diary of a Palestinian Wound” on her CD Shauq (Longing), with words by Mahmoud Darwish, including the famous and beloved line:

“My country is not a suitcase, I am not a traveler, I am the lover and the land is the beloved.”

Rim Banna sings “The Carmel of My Soul “ on her CD Mirrors of my Soul, a tender song about a prisoner in which she honors Mount Carmel in the Galillee as the soul of her soul. Palestinian poetry makes frequent references to places humanizing them or making them parts of one’s body, elevating both the person and the place.

Kamilya Jubran,whom Ayeda describes as ‘my favorite Palestinian artist’, for her modern, electronic edginess combined with rigorous, classical Arab sound. She was formerly a member of the group Sabreen. On her CD Wameedd, Kamilya sings “Ghareebah” (Stranger) the poetry of Khalil Gibran, expressing the melancholy of exile:

A stranger in this world..

A stranger/In estrangement there is cruel loneliness/And painful desolation/But it makes me forever think/Of a magical home I know not…

Ayeda concludes our interview: "This is a theme a lot of people talk about inside and outside of Palestine. Exile is not physical. Often my friends in Palestine who are inside Israel tell me they feel exile on the inside. They’re exiled inside.”

This interview on Tidings from Hazel Kahan was originally broadcast on WPKN radio on August 11, 2010. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

Being a Palestinian Israeli: Dr. Adel Manna

The world is watching Israel has been the focus of increasing international attention since the attack on Gaza in December 2008 but even more so recently for the attack on the flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza, for the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, for aggressive building of settlements on occupied territory, for housing demolitions in East Jerusalem, for its nuclear potential and for tension in the special relationship it has historically enjoyed with the United States.

Less attention has been paid to the 1.5 million people, 20% of its population, who are Palestinians—Arabs, Christians, Druze—and citizens of Israel.

Dr. Adel Manna, an insider as member of this Arab Israeli minority, talked with us from Israel to provide a current perspective on the situation. He is the director of Academic Institute for Arab Teacher training at Beit Berl, a government-funded institute in central Israel and Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. He is a well-published authority on the history of the Ottoman period and is now writing a book about the Palestinians during the first decade of Israel's existence. His views on the subject are available here and here.

Declaration In December, 2006, in response to the growing discrimination and denial of human rights by the Israeli Government, the National Committee of the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel released a declaration—The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel—highlighting the aspirations of the Arab minority in Israel.

The declaration reads, in part: We, the Palestinian Arabs living in Israel, the natives of the land and the citizens of the state, part of the Palestinian people and the Arab nation … the 1948 war brought about the creation of the State of Israel on 78 percent of the territory of historical Palestine. We, who counted 160,000 in our homeland, found ourselves within the borders of the Jewish state, cut-off from the rest of our Palestinian people and the Arab world, were forced to accept the Israeli nationality and we became a minority in our historical homeland.

From Dr. Manna's perspective, things have got much worse for the native population since this declaration was released, making him fearful for the future of his children and grandchildren.

Here are selected excerpts transcribed from the June, 2010 Tidings from Hazel Kahan interview which can be heard in full:

We are perceived as people who are living temporarily in this place, as second-class citizens and, more than that, as a fifth column, as part of the Arab world, part of the Palestinian people in conflict with Israel while all the Jews in the world are perceived potentially as citizen of Israel…all they have to do is come to Israel and the next day they can be citizens of Israel while myself, who was born on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, for the last 60 years or more I am experiencing this discrimination…which is getting worse...

We are perceived by the majority and their representatives as challenging the State of Israel as a Jewish state…Being Jewish means automatically Jews have more rights than others and we say we don’t agree to that. We will not acquiesce to the status since 1948 that all Palestinians particularly Arabs would be forever second-class citizens in this State...The definition of the State of Israel as of the Jewish people and a Zionist state means we are excluded from the common goods of this state.

Passports and citizenship Dr. Manna explains that traveling on an Israeli passport means that as Israelis, Palestinians are not allowed into many Arab countries. At the same time, certain notation identify him to the Israeli authorities as a Palestinian, and is given rigorous inspection at airports. This is an established, ongoing policy:

In my country, I’m an Israeli citizen, they behave to me as a stranger…they want to remind me whenever I leave this country, at the airport, that I am a foreigner in the country, I am not an Israeli citizen. Everywhere else in the world…my Israeli passport protects me as an Israeli citizen, the same way like any Jew. This passport gives me equality outside Israel. This same passport discriminates against me when I come to the airport in Israel.

An imposed divided loyalty Palestinian Israelis are faced with a profound dilemma and a conflicted identity:

I am loyal to all the laws of Israel. This is what a citizen in a democratic state should be asked for…but in Israel that is not enough. They are asking us as a Palestinian minority to be loyal to all the policies of this right-wing government…against the Palestinians or Lebanese. And we question those wars…there are other ways to solve problems. Whenever you say that, you are automatically fifth column, partners to Israel’s enemies…Loyalty to policies that exclude us? It’s like asking Blacks in South Africa to be loyal to apartheid. We can't do that... The policy is that Israel wants to bring more Jews into Israel and to get rid of us.

Unintended consequences The years of discrimination, of what Dr. Manna describes as an “ethnic democracy” are having unanticipated consequences:

Arabs in Israel are getting more and more bitter…they are getting more experience as citizens of Israel, more educated, more outspoken and less willing to accept the discrimination. They (the Government) are no longer frightening them.

As long as the Palestinian minority was a weak minority which did not challenge the identity of the State, they were able to live with that. In the last decade the Palestinians became more outspoken, they are telling the majority that…the problem is the ideology of the State—Zionism. Being Jewish and Zionist means the State has an ideology against all non-Jews and non-Zionists and since we can’t be Jews and Zionists they want to get rid of us, and if they can’t get rid of us they want us to be second-class citizens…

Dr. Manna describes it as “an unfortunate, delicate, difficult situation” where “we always have to balance our feelings and what we think with what the Israeli law is asking from us.”

We are citizens who are keeping the laws since 1948, we are good citizens. All that we demand is equality…

Unfortunately, instead of appreciating the relative silence and nonviolence struggle of the Palestinians, this government and other governments are pushing us into the corner to choose: either you are with Israel or you are with Israel’s enemies.

The future? Expulsion and transfer will not be possible, according to Dr. Manna, because “there is nowhere for us to go.” Instead:

This issue will be on the focus of the next year more and more.. rights and fair representation in all the institutions of Israel, a promise made in Israel’s declaration when statehood was declared…We are waiting this for 62 years.

Israel can’t behave to us the way they behaved in the past…Israel is paying a high price. I do hope, I really do hope, that the Jewish majority will understand that what they are doing lately is counterproductive…this heavy use of force, to try to frighten everyone is not working any more. They have to change their policy towards the Palestinians in occupied territories and towards the Palestinians in Israel.

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This interview on Tidings from Hazel Kahan was originally broadcast on WPKN radio on June 30, 2010. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

Israel through the eyes of a psychotherapist

Avigail Abarbanel is an Israeli-born psychotherapist who migrated to Australia in 1991. A few months ago, she and her husband moved to the Scottish Highlands where they plan to set up their counseling practice. I spoke with Avigail from her home near Inverness. (The full interview is available as a podcast.)

I found it refreshing and interesting to talk to a psychotherapist about a subject—Israel—that I find increasingly confusing. Along with more and more people it seems, I am asking: Why do the Israelis do what they do? Why do they keep on doing it? Can’t they see what damage they are doing to themselves, to the Palestinians, to us all? I asked Avigail if she would diagnose Israel as if the nation were a client of hers and then suggest an appropriate treatment regimen.

Here, summarized as succinctly as I can, are the main threads of Avigail’s response along with her emphatic assertion that underlying everything she says is a clear distinction between explanation and excuse. (I do urge you to listen to the podcast and listen to her compelling, fluid presentation. Sometimes an mp3 is worth thousands of words of text!)

Trauma and its ramifications lie at the heart of the Israeli nation:

it is the organizing principle of the Israeli people and the psychology that has shaped its national character. But not just because of the Holocaust of World War II; rather, the seeds are already there, in the culture, the biblical stories (see Joshua, see Deuteronomy, Numbers, Exodus) and through centuries of history, including the Zionist movement in the late 19^th century. The roots of victimhood and persecution go back to a long time ago. The roots of victimhood and persecution go back to a long time ago.

Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of trauma is that it is passed on, through the generations and proliferates within the generations.

Trauma, as we know from PTSD, is a clinically-established phenomenon that can manifest whenever the suffering individual perceives existential threat. The problem is that this threat may or may not be real today. Objectively Israel, with its military might and nuclear power is one of the most formidable forces in the world; however, the irrational aspects of insecurity persist, nourished rather than managed, treated and healed, amplified now to include Iran.

With an identity forged by its enemies and reinforced by the state’s religious, education, military and cultural institutions along with the trauma narrative, Israelis are not open to seeing themselves in new ways.

Those who suggest such alternatives—you, me, liberal Jews, Judge Goldstone--are dismissed as hostile to Israel and included among the expanding number of enemies. As George W. Bush put i: “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”

Protective isolation against what is perceived as a highly dangerous world and against anyone perceived as an enemy is a natural consequence of trauma.

The huge dimensions of the wall and fence complex built by Israel in the West Bank speak clearly to just how dangerous every Palestinian man, woman and child is seen to be.

On her blog in the extensive section about Palestine/Israel, Abarbanel writes: “the story of Israel and the Palestinian people is the story of trauma being transmitted from one generation to the next” and “my people…have allowed the quality of their life and their identity to be determined by those who hated them and committed crimes against them.” But, she continues: ”Healing is a risky business that requires a willingness to change one’s identity” and not, as she puts it, an endeavor for the faint-hearted.

Abarbanel draws on the work of the American psychiatrist Murray Bowen, and the “close relationship between trauma and persecution, and a tendency to emphasize the force of togetherness. When togetherness is emphasized, those those who do not feel, think, agree, act in the way that the group does, can be seen as traitors.” Citing Bowen’s theory of differentiation, she believes Israel is a “culture of consensus” and a “very poorly differentiated society …with the sense of self very, very meshed and entangled with the sense of the group.”

Based on this analysis, Avigail Abarbanel believes “Israel cannot be reasoned with”, that it “is a traumatised society and it is therefore very dangerous.” Applying family therapy models, she compares Israel to the abusive husband, the Palestinians to the abused wife and the United States to the enabling neighbor;.

She advocates for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict but warns that the coexistence of two traumatized people will require a great deal of imagination and intelligence.

She suggests that there are enough good and skilled and spiritual people in the world whose energies can be mobilized to do the work of healing and reconciliation when the time comes. “It can be great, you know!” she adds.

The interview ends with Avigail reflecting on the ‘secondary traumatization’ that can affect volunteers and human rights workers who are dealing with traumatized populations all over the world. “Look after yourself first,” she counsels, since “you have to be well to help other people…The only way I am able to work sustainably without burning out…is because I do put myself first.”

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To hear more about this provocative and thoughtful interview, please turn to the podcast.

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To become more familiar with the body of Avigail Abarbanel’s work, here are her writings and her professional website.

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My interview with Avigail Abarbanel will be broadcast on Tidings from Hazel Kahan, a monthly program on WPKN radio on May 12, 2010 and is also available as a podcast. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

The interview is also available in German.

The four questions for Seder 2010

As they sit down for the Passover seder, Jews traditionally ask four questions,
each a variation on: Why is this night different from all other nights? Traditionally, the second question asks: Why on all other nights do we eat all kinds of herbs, and on this night only bitter herbs (horseradish or maror)?

In this 2010 version of the Passover seder, olives replace horseradish as the second question is asked and answered. (Thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace for bringing this to my attention.)

Zayit – Olive
(Olives are distributed to seder participants and the following is recited):

Zayit: al shum mah? – This olive: why do we eat it?

The olive tree is one the first plants mentioned in the Torah and remains among the oldest species in Israel/Palestine. It has become a universal symbol of peace and hope, as it is written in Psalm 52:I am like a thriving olive tree in God’s house, I trust in God’s loyal kindness forever and ever.

We add this olive to our Seder plate as a reminder that we must all be God’s bearers of peace and hope in the world. At the same time, we eat this olive in sorrow, mindful that olive trees, the source of livelihood for Palestinian farmers, are regularly chopped down, burned and uprooted by Israeli settlers and the Israeli authorities.

As we look on, Israel pursues systematic policies that increasingly deny Palestinians access to olive orchards that have belonged to them for generations. As we eat now, we ask one another: How will we, as Jews, bear witness to the unjust actions committed in our name? Will these olives inspire us to be bearers of peace and hope for Palestinians–and for all who are oppressed?

There's no such place as home!

This is a personal story, based on conversations with my school friends from a very far away place and a very long ago time. Midge, Pat and I were children together at Woodstock, an international boarding school in Mussoorie in the state of Uttarakhand, 6,600 ft up in the Indian Himalayas, while our parents lived in India, Pakistan or other countries.


We didn’t know we were third culture kids until a few years ago in a presentation at a school reunion we were introduced to the work of two sociologists, David Pollock and Ruth van Reken, through their book “Third Culture Kids.” The audience erupted into a series of “ah-ha’s”, giggles and whispers. “So that’s who we are,” a woman said, smiling, nodding her head. Her spouse grumbled: “So that’s why you’re like that.” For us in the audience, everything fell into place: now we had a name, now we could recognize ourselves and each other.


Also referred to as global nomads, third culture kids are people who’ve spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their primary culture, the culture from which their parents came, also referred to as their home or passport culture. In the case of my school friends, this was the United States. My home culture was less clear since my parents were refugees and had neither passports nor a home culture to which they could return.

The second culture was where we actually grew up--in this case, India. The third culture was an interstitial culture, the culture that grew up between the first and second cultures and the one that we inhabited. Although my friends were mishkids, the children of missionaries, other parents worked in the diplomatic or military services or in the business sector.

This third culture is highly mobile: its people are always coming and going, their lives marked by arrivals and departures, creating a child and teenager who become skilled at developing relationships.


If you are a third culture kid, you might jump into a new relationship quickly and deeply, with an urgency born of knowing the next move is always on the horizon. Or, you might prefer a casual, superficial friendship, shying away from closeness because you already anticipate the loss as departure time looms.


If you are a third culture kid, you might feel “wrong” or out of place a lot of the time, not knowing the ropes, because you are always learning a new culture, including your home culture. Returning to America from India, my friends remember how they did not understand its popular culture, its slang and social rules, how things work, what was expected of them. Because they looked like everyone else in their home town, they were expected to behave the same too, even though they thought and felt quite differently. They felt “other” but didn’t look it.

At the same time, in India, they looked “other” but did not feel fit, leaving them confused when their second culture responded to them as though were foreigners or strangers. Feeling different wherever they are, third culture kids tell their childhood stories not realizing they may come off as arrogant or boastful to those who don’t come from a third culture.


Given this strong but sometimes murky identity, one can understand why my classmates and I have a strong attachment to our past and to each other, with connections that last for decades and that assert themselves with special strength at school reunions. You can hear us confess that other third culture kids are the only ones who “get it” and are therefore the only ones among whom we can feel truly at home. It takes one to know one; it’s a precious and enduring recognition.


The mobile third culture child can grow into a restless global nomad adult, unable to escape the need to be on the move, to always have another place in mind which can be very disconcerting to other members of our families. I call this place elsewhere.

Mobility, restlessness, a certain detachment--and it’s no surprise that some third culture kids harbor an eccentric view of home and an odd way of describing what home means to them. In his book, Paper Airplanes in the Himalayas: The Unfinished Path Home, Paul Seaman describes what home meant to him, growing up in Pakistan:

Like nomads, we moved with the seasons. Four times a year we packed up and moved to, or back to, another temporary home. We learned early that ‘home’ was an ambiguous concept, and, wherever we lived, some essential part of our lives was always someplace else.



You can hear Midge, Pat and me talk about what “home” means to us, along with fragments of wonderful Indian music.

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“There’s No Such Place As Home” was broadcast on WPKN on February 10, 2010.

Tidings from Hazel Kahan, can be heard on the second Wednesday of every month at 12:30 pm on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport, WPKM, 88.7 Montauk and streaming on wpkn.org. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.