Anthony Shadid, at work in Cairo. Photo by Ed Ou. Used with permission.

Rare is the day when the death of a journalist merits a national period of mourning.  But that’s how the passing of New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid feels from here.

Shadid, who won two Pulitzer Prizes while with the Washington Post, was well known for his courage, having survived a shooting in the West Bank (most likely by an Israeli sniper), a kidnapping in Libya, harassment and intimidation by Mubarak cronies in Egypt, and, as an unembedded Post correspondent, the American invasion of Iraq. “After anthony shadid’s unauthorized trip into Syria, the Gov put him on television and called him a spy,” tweeted Shadid’s Times colleague, David Kirkpatrick. “He went back again.”

But courage alone doesn’t explain the unique contribution Anthony Shadid made to American journalism and culture.  As a bilingual, bicultural, Christian Arab American of Lebanese descent, he was predisposed to bring an unprecedented level of understanding to events roiling the Arab world.  The key to his profound contribution, however, goes beyond religion and national origin.  He found his inspiration in the alleys, roadsides and warrens of everyday Arab life.  The insight Shadid transmitted to his readers was gleaned not by simply talking to the powerful in their respective capitals, but from his conversations with barbers, tailors, fruit vendors and the unemployed.

At the brink of the U.S. war with Iraq in 2003, Shadid wrote that Arab disenchantment “flows not from a clash of civilizations or resentment over Western values and lifestyles, but from frustration over U.S., Israeli and official Arab policies.” This conclusion came in large part from listening to the words of Palestinian refugees in the camps in Jordan. “We want just a little justice from America, that’s it,” said Lutfi Khalil, a customer in a “sparse grocery store” with “rows of honey jars alternating with empty shelves.”

From a war-ravaged Baghdad in 2006, Shadid wrote of “the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion” of Iraq.  This perception came not from chats with commanders and diplomats in the Green Zone, but from life-risking conversations with people like Karima Salman, the “stout Shiite Muslim matriarch” living beside a “dented, rusted steel gate perched along a sagging brick sidewalk,” whose daughter Fatima told Shadid: “One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing and one-third of us will be widows.”

And Shadid’s assessment of a band of Libyan rebels in the spring of 2011 was reported alongside the formerly faceless protagonists he came to name. “Fear is half of courage,” a 39-year-old rebel named Khalifa al-Awkali told Shadid, as he stood “atop a hill, waving an opposition flag and carrying binoculars.”  The rebel added,  “But we’re not scared, and we’re not going to surrender in the face of this tyrant.”

Four days later, Shadid and three of his Times colleagues were kidnapped by pro-Qaddafi militias.

Shadid’s brilliance lay in relying on his own eyes, ears, and voice – not on status quo conclusions about WMD or the realpolitik of Washington-Arab World relations.  He risked his life not out of bravado, but because he was determined to get on the ground, talk to everyone, and tell a true story.  That’s how he earned his readers’ trust.  And so it will continue, after his death:  In his lovely forthcoming memoir, House of Stone, Shadid turns his keen gaze inward, as he describes literally rebuilding his past in the land of his Lebanese ancestors.

Anthony Shadid was a journalistic giant in the tradition of George Orwell; a chronicler of the voices of ordinary people, in the spirit of Studs Terkel.  As a fellow journalist who’s spent 17 years covering Israel and Palestine, I always sought out Shadid’s writings to help put the broader region’s turmoil into context.  And as someone hoping to transmit journalistic values to the next generation of reporters – first at Berkeley, now at USC – I have treasured his journalism of the heart; his legacy of staying on the ground; his insistence in being an honest witness.

Among the many things ultimately at stake in the first democratic elections in Egypt in decades is the price of food. High prices — for bread, in particular — helped fuel the protests in Tahrir Square back in January. Experts say that if Egypt’s going to have any chance at feeding its 85 million people, it needs a food policy do-over. Food for 9 Billion, a collaboration between Marketplace Radio (US), the PBS Newshour (US), the Center for Investigative Reporting and Homelands Productions, is about the global challenge of feeding a growing world.    Click here for Sandy Tolan’s report from Marketplace, on the market realities of food independence, produced with Charlotte Buchen.  Click here for PBS Newshour piece by Tolan and Buchen.  And click on “view full post” below for their analysis of the issue of food sovereignty in Egypt.

Egypt: Food for a revolution

By Sandy Tolan and Charlotte Buchen

In 2008, three years before Egyptians rose up against President Hosni Mubarak, the global food crisis provided a hint of what was to come. As world oil prices rose and Western countries planted ever more acres for biofuels instead of people, food prices skyrocketed. Suddenly, cooking oil, tomatoes, lentils, rice and even bread soared out of reach for many families. Riots and protests broke out around the world. In Egypt, fights erupted in the subsidized bread lines and five Egyptians died in the clashes. Three years later, memories of 2008 were still fresh: groundwork for the revolution.

“The revolution started because of the price increase, but in the old days, nothing like this happened before,” recalls Sabah Orany Saber, standing outside a discount produce market that caters to the servant class in the wealthy 6^th of October neighborhood, near Cairo. “Now, everything is expensive. We used to eat off of our land and crops.”

Sabah; her husband, Qotb; and their children were once a farm family. They lived with Qotb’s parents and siblings near the family farm in Al-Fayoum, two hours southwest of Cairo. Several years ago, Qotb and Sabah brought three of their four children to the capital. They share a single room in a villa, where Qotb works as a chauffeur and night watchman. Now, instead of seeking higher prices for their produce, the urban migrants want affordable food: Like many of the estimated 40 percent of Egyptians who earn less than $2 a day, the family spends more than half its income on food.

“In Egypt, this price crisis has not come down for the common family; the prices of food are a daily crisis,” says Philip Rizk, an Egyptian filmmaker and activist who spent nearly every day at Tahrir Square during the January 25 revolution. “Most people can’t even afford protesting anymore because they’re not formally employed, which means you have to scrounge for work day in and day out.”

“Life was getting harder there for me and my father, and income was getting more limited, so I came to Cairo,” Qotb recalls. “I left so much behind. I left my heritage and land of origin, the village I was raised in, but, in the end, this is life. This is the reality. Until God makes it easier and we can stand on our feet, we are taking it step by step.”

The family’s journey to Cairo is part of a massive urban migration that is transforming Egyptian politics. More than 1 million peasant farmers – some estimates say closer to 4 million – have quit the land in the last 20 years. Among the factors driving this migration are escalating land prices; a farm policy that favors wealthy entrepreneurs; dwindling access to irrigation water, blamed on corruption under Mubarak; and population growth, leaving too many mouths to feed on small pieces of land.

For millennia, it wasn’t like that. Egypt was a nation of farmers. Blessed by the fertile silt of the Nile, they produced daily bread for the whole nation. Egypt had a secure food supply created at home. Now, in a global economy and with 85 million people, Egypt is the world’s biggest importer of wheat. Much of it comes from the U.S. and Russia. Under the Mubarak regime, this shift accelerated, as more and more Egyptian agriculture focused on high-value cash crops for export.

“I went to look at the land where the factory would be built, and it was just pure desert,” recalls Tarek Tawfik, an American-educated Egyptian entrepreneur.

In the late 1980s, encouraged by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Mubarak invited Egyptian entrepreneurs to come to the desert lands. Tawfik was among the first to answer the call.
“I said, ‘For heaven’s sake, this is where I’m going to be working?’ ” Tawfik remembers. “It was depressing. And then in no time, there was this factory built up, farms set up. Three or four other factories mushroomed out of this factory. We were the first company to go and farm potatoes in the middle of the desert, out of nowhere. People thought that we were lunatics.”

Today, factory farms line the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria, part of the 1,000 percent rise in the nation’s agricultural exports over the past two decades – to more than $1 billion in 2005. Under Mubarak, Egyptian businessmen like Tawfik flocked to the desert, growing, freezing, packaging and exporting grapes, strawberries, mixed vegetables and other luxury produce for the European table.

Meanwhile, some Egyptian and other agriculture and rural development experts question this policy. They ask why, when we’re already importing most of our basic staple like wheat, are we sending fancy fruit to the French? Under the free market concept of comparative advantage, promulgated in Egypt beginning in the early 1980s by USAID, the idea is to grow what you can for domestic consumption, and for the rest, raise cash by exporting high-value crops.

But this was not a classic free market. Incentives included cheap power, water, land and credit. Much of the work on factory farms is mechanized, critics say, so comparatively few jobs were created. Profits went straight back to investors and to pay off Egypt’s debt, rather than trickling down to ordinary Egyptians.

“This major plank of USAID’s programme,” wrote Ray Bush, professor of African studies and development politics at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, “has encouraged the production and export of strawberries for European out of season dinner tables, but this fruit and the export of vegetables does not seem to offer Egypt an escape route from its persistent agricultural underachievement. … Export revenue to compensate for low staple food production does not seem a useful way forward for Egyptian agriculture.”

Some Egyptian critics use sharper language. “Crony capitalism,” declares Magda Kandil, executive director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies.

“Basically, you have an entrepreneur who is well connected to people with high authority,” she says. “They’ve been capitalizing on connections that the average farmer cannot have in terms of marketing, economy of scale, access to water, access to technology, access to subsidized fuel, access to subsidized fertilizers. You end up milking a lot of the benefits for yourself. So I’m against this model because it doesn’t help the social agenda.”

Another thing that didn’t help: Egyptian laws that helped force more than a million farmers off their land. Under Law 96 of 1992, many lands given to small farmers under President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s land reform program in the early 1950s suddenly were returned to the original landlords. This was part of a broader strategy of “market-based reforms” encouraged by USAID, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Rents for tenant farmers shot up by as much as 1,000 percent, according to Bush, the University of Leeds professor; others faced brutal evictions by Egyptian security forces.

Farmers who fought to stay sometimes paid the ultimate price: Between 1998 and 2000, according to the Egypt-based Land Center for Human Rights, 119 people died and 846 were injured in violence related to Law 96. The law ­– combined with other factors, like large families, tight credit, expensive fertilizer and water scarcity – prompted the exodus to the Gulf states, Suez, Alexandria and Cairo.

“Life was harder there on me and my father,” recalls Qotb, the chauffeur and night watchman. “So I came to Cairo.”

When he can, Qotb climbs into a packed microbus and rides southwest to Al-Fayoum to bring some cash to his father, who still works the parched land. At dusk on a warm evening, the two men walked side by side on the dry, cracked 2 acres the family received from Nasser.

“There’s no water,” Qotb’s father repeatedly exclaims. The family grows some corn and prickly pear cactus fruit, but not much else.

Under Mubarak, families here say, water was steadily diverted toward crony projects. Now, Qotb’s father gets only a slow trickle once a week.

“Look right here,” commands Hussein Abdel Wahab Heyba, Qotb’s neighbor, standing in front of a water diversion gate in Al-Fayoum. “This is our main source of water, what used to cultivate all our old land from before.”

He and other farmers here say the government stole the water, redirecting it to help a rich man’s desert bloom. “It was given to the cronies, to the families, to the well-connected people,” he says.

Here, farmers fought with local police over which direction the water would flow. At one point, Hussein says, gun battles broke out. “This is why there was a revolution.”

When Mubarak fell, Hussein was on his way to Tahrir Square, part of a rotation of Al-Fayoum farmers fighting the corruption they say was helping force them off their land. Eighty percent of his generation has already left, he says, helping create a massive urban class that increasingly depends on imported food. Egypt, once self-sufficient in food production, now imports more than half of its staples, including the source of Egyptian baladi: its daily bread. Some say Egypt is now vulnerable to international price spikes or the political agendas of wheat-growing countries.

“You cannot guarantee the price of the international market, you cannot guarantee … that one day every (nation) will (not) keep his wheat to himself,” says Mamdou Hamza, a well-connected civil engineer who became a harsh critic of the Mubarak regime.

During the revolution, Hamza “adopted” scores of young people, providing counsel and encouragement and becoming a kind of godfather of the revolution. “Last year, Russia said, ‘I’m not going to export wheat.’ So (did) India. People could use it strategically against us to push us to do things we would not otherwise like to do. It could happen.”

For a stable Egypt, Hamza believes new leaders need to focus on growing more food at home. “We must have at least 80 percent strategically produced in this country,” he says.

This may prove difficult at a time when elaborate policy shifts are a lower priority for a new parliament struggling simply to assert its independence amidst military control.

But Hamza says the work must begin now. This would mean making more efficient use of irrigation, creating farmer cooperatives on larger plots, and preventing developers from gobbling up the mere 5 percent of Egypt’s farmland that is suitable for agriculture.

“If you don’t eat with your hand in the farm to produce your food,” says Hamza, reciting an old Egyptian proverb, “you will not be able to think with your own brain. Somebody will think for you.” And who will that be? The person “who will feed you.”

Qotb and Sabah no longer eat by their own hand. A laborer of the landless class, Qotb still dreams of going back to Al-Fayoum. “We could have worked together as one big family instead of being divided,” he says. “I dream about it all the time, but I don’t have the money to support that dream or to go back home.”

Now the family is part of an urban force, demanding lower food prices and access to education as the price for peace under a new regime. On Dec. 12, in the second round of parliamentary elections, Qotb and Sabah, with their children in mind, will vote in a free election for the first time.

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Morning meal, Cairo, July 2011. Photo by Charlotte Buchen

Anger over food prices helped contribute to the toppling of Hosni Mubarak. Through the story of one migrant family, we explore how displaced farmers, angry at agricultural policies that favor “crony capitalists,” now struggle to put food on the table.  Egypt:  Food for a Revolution will run tonight (Wednesday November 30) on PBS Newshour. Stay tuned for a link to the piece.   The story was reported by Sandy Tolan and produced and shot by Charlotte Buchen.  It is part of a new series, Food for Nine Billion, a collaboration between public radio’s Marketplace, the Newshour, the Center for Investigative Reporting and Homelands Productions.

Tonight’s broadcast of “Egypt: Food for a Revolution” launches our new series, “Food for Nine Billion,” an ambitious multi-platform media project that examines the challenge of feeding the world at a time of growing demand, changing diets, rising food and energy prices, shrinking land and water resources, and accelerating climate change. In the coming weeks, look for more stories from around the world highlighting various facets of the common struggle to provide a sustainable supply of food – whether it’s for an entire nation or a single family.

Whatever symbolic satisfaction the Palestinian Authority may get at the U.N., there’s always the Occupation and there — take it from someone who just got back from three months in the West Bank — Israel is winning the battle,  the one for control over every square foot of ground.  Inch by inch, meter by meter, Israel’s expansion project in the West Bank and Jerusalem is, in fact, gaining momentum, ensuring that the “nation” that the U.N. might grant membership will be each day a little smaller, a little less viable, a little less there.

The State to Which the U.N. May Grant Membership Is Disappearing (Originally posted on TomDispatch.com, and picked up by outlets around the world, including Le Monde Diplomatique, Salon, The American Conservative,  Al Arab Online and TheNation.com, )
By Sandy Tolan

It’s the show that time and the world forgot. It’s called the Occupation and it’s now in its 45th year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day.  Diplomats shuttle back and forth from Washington and Brussels to Middle Eastern capitals; the Israeli-Turkish alliance ruptures amid bold declarations from the Turkish prime minister; crowds storm the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, while Israeli ambassadors flee the Egyptian capital and Amman, the Jordanian one; and of course, there’s the headliner, the show-stopper of the moment, the Palestinian Authority’s campaign for statehood in the United Nations, which will prompt an Obama administration veto in the Security Council.

But whatever the Turks, Egyptians, or Americans do, whatever symbolic satisfaction the Palestinian Authority may get at the U.N., there’s always the Occupation and there — take it from someone just back from a summer living in the West Bank — Israel isn’t losing.  It’s winning the battle, at least the one that means the most to Palestinians and Israelis, the one for control over every square foot of ground.  Inch by inch, meter by meter, Israel’s expansion project in the West Bank and Jerusalem is, in fact, gaining momentum, ensuring that the “nation” that the U.N. might grant membership will be each day a little smaller, a little less viable, a little less there.

How to Disappear a Land

On my many drives from West Bank city to West Bank city, from Ramallah to Jenin, Abu Dis to Jericho, Bethlehem to Hebron, I’d play a little game: Could I travel for an entire minute without seeing physical evidence of the occupation?  Occasionally — say, when riding through a narrow passage between hills — it was possible.  But not often.  Nearly every panoramic vista, every turn in the highway revealed a Jewish settlement, an Israeli army checkpoint, a military watchtower, a looming concrete wall, a barbed-wire fence with signs announcing another restricted area, or a cluster of army jeeps stopping cars and inspecting young men for their documents.

The ill-fated Oslo “peace process” that emerged from the Oslo Accords of 1993 not only failed to prevent such expansion, it effectively sanctioned it.  Since then, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank has nearly tripled to more than 300,000 — and that figure doesn’t include the more than 200,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.

The Oslo Accords, ratified by both the Palestinians and the Israelis, divided the West Bank into three zones — A, B, and C.  At the time, they were imagined by the Palestinian Authority as a temporary way station on the road to an independent state.  They are, however, still in effect today.  The de facto Israeli strategy has been and remains to give Palestinians relative freedom in Area A, around the West Bank’s cities, while locking down “Area C” — 60% of the West Bank — for the use of the Jewish settlements and for what are called “restricted military areas.”  (Area B is essentially a kind of grey zone between the other two.)  From this strategy come the thousands of demolitions of “illegal” housing and the regular arrests of villagers who simply try to build improvements to their homes.  Restrictions are strictly enforced and violations dealt with harshly.

When I visited the South Hebron Hills in late 2009, for example, villagers were not even allowed to smooth out a virtually impassable dirt road so that their children wouldn’t have to walk two to three miles to school every day. Na’im al-Adarah, from the village of At-Tuwani, paid the price for transporting those kids to the school “illegally.” A few weeks after my visit, he was arrested and his red Toyota pickup seized and destroyed by Israeli soldiers.  He didn’t bother complaining to the Palestinian Authority — the same people now going to the U.N. to declare a Palestinian state — because they have no control over what happens in Area C.

The only time he’d seen a Palestinian official, al-Adarah told me, was when he and other villagers drove to Ramallah to bring one to the area.  (The man from the Palestinian Authority refused to come on his own.) “He said this is the first time he knew that this land [in Area C] is ours.  A minister like him is surprised that we have these areas?  I told him, ‘How can a minister like you not know this?  You’re the minister of local government!’

“It was like he didn’t know what was happening in his own country,” added al-Adarah.  “We’re forgotten, unfortunately.”

The Israeli strategy of control also explains, strategically speaking, the “need” for the network of checkpoints; the looming separation barrier (known to Israelis as the “security fence” and to Palestinians as the “apartheid wall”) that divides Israel from the West Bank (and sometimes West Bankers from each other); the repeated evictions of Palestinians from residential areas like Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem; the systematic revoking of Jerusalem IDs once held by thousands of Palestinians who were born in the Holy City; and the labyrinthine travel restrictions which keep so many Palestinians locked in their West Bank enclaves.

While Israel justifies most of these measures in terms of national security, it’s clear enough that the larger goal behind them is to incrementally take and hold ever more of the land.  The separation barrier, for example, has put 10% of the West Bank’s land on the Israeli side — a case of “annexation in the guise of security,” according to the respected Israeli human rights group, B’tselem.

Taken together, these measures amount to the solution that the Israeli government seeks, one revealed in a series of maps drawn up by Israeli politicians, cartographers, and military men over recent years that show Palestine broken into isolated islands (often compared to South African apartheid-era “bantustans”) on only about 40% of the West Bank.  At the outset of Oslo, Palestinians believed they had made a historic compromise, agreeing to a state on 22% of historic Palestine — that is, the West Bank and Gaza.  The reality now is a kind of “ten percent solution,” a rump statelet without sovereignty, freedom of movement, or control of its own land, air, or water. Palestinians cannot even drill a well to tap into the vast aquifer beneath their feet.

Living Amid Checkpoints, Roadblocks, and Night Raids

Almost always overlooked in assessments of this ruinous “no-state solution” is the human toll it takes on the occupied. More than on any of my dozen previous journeys there, I came away from this trip to Palestine with a sense of the psychic damage the military occupation has inflicted on every Palestinian.  None, no matter how warm-hearted or resilient, escape its effects.

“The soldier pointed to my violin case.  He said, ‘What’s that?’” 13-year-old Alá Shelaldeh, who lives in old Ramallah, told me.  She is a student at Al Kamandjati (Arabic for “the violinist”), a music school in her neighborhood (which will be a focus of my next book). She was recalling a time three years earlier when a van she was in, full of young musicians, was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint near Nablus. They were coming back from a concert.  “I told him, ‘It’s a violin.’  He told me to get out of the van and show him.”  Alá stepped onto the roadside, unzipped her case, and displayed the instrument for the soldier.  “Play something,” he insisted.  Alá played “Hilwadeen” (Beautiful Girl), the song made famous by the Lebanese star Fayrouz.  It was a typical moment in Palestine, and one she has yet to, and may never, forget.

It is impossible, of course, to calculate the long-term emotional damage of such encounters on children and adults alike, including on the Israeli soldiers, who are not immune to their own actions.

Humiliation at checkpoints is a basic fact of West Bank Palestinian life.  Everyone, even children, has his or her story to tell of helplessness, fear, and rage while waiting for a teenaged soldier to decide whether or not they can pass.  It has become so normal that some kids have no idea the rest of the world doesn’t live like this. “I thought the whole world was like us — they are occupied, they have soldiers,” remembered Alá’s older brother, Shehade, now 20.

At 15, he was invited to Italy.  “It was a shock for me to see this life.  You can go very, very far, and no checkpoint.  You see the land very, very far, and no wall.  I was so happy, and at the same time sad, you know?  Because we don’t have this freedom in my country.”

At age 12, Shehade had seen his cousin shot dead by soldiers during the second intifada, which erupted in late 2001 after Israel’s then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon paid a provocative visit to holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem.  Clashes erupted as youths hurled stones at soldiers. Israeli troops responded with live fire, killing some 250 Palestinians (compared to 29 Israeli deaths) in the first two months of the intifada. The next year, Palestinian factions launched waves of suicide bombings in Israel.

One day in 2002, Shehade recalled, with Ramallah again fully occupied by the Israeli army, the young cousins broke a military curfew in order to buy bread.  A shot rang out near a corner market; Shehade watched his cousin fall.  This summer Shehada showed me the gruesome pictures — blood flowing from a 12-year-old’s mouth and ears — taken moments after the shooting in 2002.

Nine years later, Ramallah, a supposedly sovereign enclave, is often considered an oasis in a desert of occupation.  Its streets and markets are choked with shoppers, and its many trendy restaurants rival fine European eateries.  The vibrancy and upscale feel of many parts of the city give you a sense that — much as Palestinians are loathe to admit it – this, and not East Jerusalem, is the emerging Palestinian capital.

Many Ramallah streets are indeed lined with government ministries and foreign consulates.  (Just don’t call them embassies!)  But much of this apparent freedom and quasi-sovereignty is illusory.  In the West Bank, travel without hard-to-get permits is often limited to narrow corridors of land, like the one between Ramallah and Nablus, where the Israeli military has, for now, abandoned its checkpoints and roadblocks.  Even in Ramallah — part of the theoretically sovereign Area A — night incursions by Israeli soldiers are common.

“It was December 2009, the 16th I think, at 2:15, 2:30 in the morning,” recalled Celine Dagher, a French citizen of Lebanese descent. Her Palestinian husband, Ramzi Aburedwan, founder of Al Kamandjati, where both of them work, was then abroad.  “I was awakened by a sound,” she told me.  She emerged to find the front door of their flat jammed partway open and kept that way by a small security bar of the sort you find in hotel rooms.

Celine thought burglars were trying to break in and so yelled at them in Arabic to go away.  Then she peered through the six-inch opening and spotted 10 Israeli soldiers in the hallway.  They told her to stand back, and within seconds had blown the door off its hinges.  Entering the apartment, they pointed their automatic rifles at her.  A Palestinian informant stood near them silently, a black woolen mask pulled over his face to ensure his anonymity.

The commander began to interrogate her. “My name, with whom I live, starting to ask me about the neighbors.” Celine flashed her French passport and pleaded with them not to wake up her six-month-old, Hussein, sleeping in the next room. “I was praying that he would just stay asleep.” She told the commander, “I just go from my house to my work, from work to my house.”  She didn’t really know her neighbors, she said.

As it happened, the soldiers had blown off the door of the wrong flat.  They would remove four more doors in the building that night, Celine recalled, before finding their suspect: her 17-year-old next door neighbor.  “They stood questioning him for maybe 20 minutes, and then they took him.  And I think he’s still in jail.  His father is already in jail.”

According to Israeli Prison Services statistics cited by B’tselem, more than 5,300 Palestinians were in Israeli prisons in July 2011.  Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, an estimated 650,000 to 700,000 Palestinians have reportedly been jailed by Israel.  By one calculation, that represents 40% of the adult-male Palestinian population.  Almost no family has been untouched by the Israeli prison system.

Celine stared through the blinds at the street below, where some 15 jeeps and other military vehicles were parked.  Finally, they left with their lights out and so quietly that she couldn’t even hear their engines.  When the flat was silent again, she couldn’t sleep.  “I was very afraid.”  A neighbor came upstairs to sit with her until the morning.

Stories like these — and they are legion — accumulate, creating the outlines of what could be called a culture of occupation.  They give context to a remark by Saleh Abdel-Jawad, dean of the law school at Birzeit University near Ramallah: “I don’t remember a happy day since 1967,” he told me.  Stunned, I asked him why specifically that was so.  “Because,” he replied, “you can’t go to Jerusalem to pray.  And it’s only 15 kilometers away.  And you have your memories there.”

He added, “Since 17 years I was unable to go to the sea. We are not allowed to go. And my daughter married five years ago and we were unable to do a marriage ceremony for her.” Israel would not grant a visa to Saleh’s Egyptian son-in-law so that he could enter the West Bank.  “How to do a marriage without the groom?”

A Musical Intifada

An old schoolmate of mine and now a Middle East scholar living in Paris points out that Palestinians are not just victims, but actors in their own narrative.  In other words, he insists, they, too, bear responsibility for their circumstances — not all of this rests on the shoulders of the occupiers.  True enough.

As an apt example, consider the morally and strategically bankrupt tactic of suicide bombings, carried out from 2001 to 2004 by several Palestinian factions as a response to Israeli attacks during the second intifada. That disastrous strategy gave cover to all manner of Israeli retaliation, including the building of the separation barrier.  (The near disappearance of the suicide attacks has been due far less to the wall — after all, it isn’t even finished yet — than to a decision on the part of all the Palestinian factions to reject the tactic itself.)

So, yes, Palestinians are also “actors” in creating their own circumstances, but Israel remains the sole regional nuclear power, the state with one of the strongest armies in the world, and the occupying force — and that is the determining fact in the West Bank.  Today, for some Palestinians living under the 44-year occupation simply remaining on the land is a kind of moral victory.  This summer, I started hearing a new slogan: “Existence is resistance.” If you remain on the land, then the game isn’t over.  And if you can bring attention to the occupation, while you remain in place, so much the better.

In June, Alá Shelaldeh, the 13-year-old violinist, brought her instrument to the wall at Qalandia, once a mere checkpoint separating Ramallah and Jerusalem, and now essentially an international border crossing with its mass of concrete, steel bars, and gun turrets.  The transformation of Qalandia — and its long, cage-like corridors and multiple seven-foot-high turnstiles through which only the lucky few with permits may cross to Jerusalem — is perhaps the most powerful symbol of Israel’s determination not to share the Holy City.

Alá and her fellow musicians in the Al Kamandjati Youth Orchestra came to play Mozart and Bizet in front of the Israeli soldiers, on the other side of Qalandia’s steel bars.  Their purpose was to confront the occupation through music, essentially to assert: we’re here. The children and their teachers emerged from their bus, quickly set up their music stands, and began to play.  Within moments, the sound of Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major filled the terminal.

Palestinians stopped and stared.  Smiles broke out.  People came closer, pulling out cell phones and snapping photos, or just stood there, surrounding the youth orchestra, transfixed by this musical intifada.  The musicians and soldiers were separated by a long row of blue horizontal bars.  As the music played on, a grim barrier of confinement was momentarily transformed into a space of assertive joy. “It was,” Alá would say later, “the greatest concert of my life.”

As the Mozart symphony built — Allegro, Andante, Minuet, and the Allegro last movement — some of the soldiers started to take notice.  By the time the orchestra launched into Georges Bizet’s Dance Boheme from Carmen #2, several soldiers appeared, looking out through the bars. For the briefest of moments, it was hard to tell who was on the inside, looking out, and who was on the outside, looking in.

If existence is resistance, if children can confront their occupiers with a musical intifada, then there’s still space, in the year of the Arab Spring, for something unexpected and transformative to happen.  After all, South African apartheid collapsed, and without a bloody revolution. The Berlin Wall fell quickly, completely, unexpectedly.  And with China, India, Turkey and Brazil on the rise, the United States, its power waning, will not be able to remain Israel’s protector forever. Eventually, perhaps, the world will assert the obvious: the status quo is unacceptable.

For the moment, whatever happens in the coming weeks at the U.N., and in the West Bank in the aftermath, isn’t it time for the world’s focus to shift to what is actually happening on the ground?  After all, it’s the occupation, stupid.

Signs of strains between secular and Islamist forces have been showing for months.  But both sides were to be represented in Friday’s mass demonstration.  Between 800,000 and a million people were expected.

Friday prayer, Tahrir Square, July 29 2011. Photo by Sandy Tolan

After midnight the Cairo heat finally broke.  Mamdouh Hamza, Egyptian civil engineer, businessman and longtime government critic, was sitting in a plastic chair in an outdoor café at Tahrir Square, puffing on a water pipe.  The white-haired Hamza was holding court with his cadre of young revolutionaries, to whom he’d become a kind of beneficent godfather.  (My colleague Charlotte and I had met him an hour earlier, having interviewed him for a story on Egyptian agriculture and food issues we’re producing for U.S. public radio (Marketplace) and television.)  Hamza – builder of big Egyptian development projects and nevertheless a longtime critic of the regime – had been trying to keep a dialogue going between the military council and his “kids.”  But recently things had broken down, and that morning at 5, he said, something disturbing and perhaps unrelated happened:  Someone called Hamza to say he’d been hired to kill him.  But the would-be hit man had changed his mind – “I like you,” he told Hamza – and so he gave the blood money back. Or so the story went.  Hamza seemed to think this was all a hoax, designed to rattle him, and he had no plans to heed the reluctant killer’s warning:  that Hamza shouldn’t show up at the square the next day, lest he take a bullet.

Now came Wael Ghonim, he of the social media revolution, with his own followers, to say hello to Hamza.  He engaged the older man about finding common ground with the Islamists.  Charlotte caught the moment on camera – a young man in a purple pinstripe shirt and designer wire-rim glasses, talking to the shaggy haired professor nearly old enough to be his grandfather –  but when Ghonim spotted Charlotte, he insisted she stop shooting.  “If you use this,” he said, “I will sue you.”  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be seen speaking of reconciliation with the Islamists; rather, a friend reported, he said he didn’t want to be caught on camera being friendly with Hamza, a fellow secularist.  “If you use this, I will sue you,” the Google MBA repeated to Charlotte, a smile frozen onto his face, before moving off with his entourage.

Signs of strains between secular and Islamic forces have been showing for months.  But both sides were expected to be represented in Friday’s mass demonstration.  Hamza predicted between 800,000 and a million people would show up.

At two in the morning we headed back downtown to catch a few hours sleep.  As we climbed into the taxi, the bearded Salafis, bussed in from all over the nation, were pouring single file into the square: a stream of white robes and skullcaps, part of a planned show of force by Islamists.  They would be spending the night in the square, ready with their banners and chants as the sun rose on Cairo three hours later.

By 9 am we were moving down another human river: a crush of people squeezing through a pedestrian corridor near the Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Finally the way opened up, spilling us onto a clearing on the square.  Red and white, and black and white banners, and modified Egyptian flags all carried the scrawled message:  There is one God but God.  Other signs called for the implementation of Sharia law.

“Obviously they are breaking some rules,” said our friend Magdy Kassem, a leftist who recalled the agreement by each member of the fragile revolutionary coalition not to bring potentially divisive rhetoric into Tahrir.  “They had huge discussions during the revolution that such a slogan should not be raised at the square,” in order “to have a common denominator for all political powers.” Now, Magdy said, they had abandoned that promise.  Indeed, Al Ahram Online reported that a coalition of secular movements pulled out of the demonstrations today, citing the Islamists’ refusal to present a united front and to “avoid all controversial points.”  Clearly the “Day of Unity and Popular Will” was not to be.

Volunteers were handing out red and black paper visors with inscriptions of the Muslim alliance.  “This is the biggest show of force for the Muslim coalitions,” Magdy said.  “It’s amazing.  I’ve never seen them that big in the square.”  Here and there, posters of Bin Laden were raised.

Nevertheless, secular voices were heard in large numbers:  Alongside the chants for an Islamic state came calls for democracy, freedom, social justice and accountability. ”Islameya, Islameya” rang out, but so did “Muslim-Christian unity,” and denunciations of Mubarak, U.S. aid, and the Israeli occupation.  Still, the clear force in the square was Islamic.  ”They hijacked the square,” our friend Madiha Kassem, Magdy’s sister, told us.  To this sentiment, ChangeRegimes tweeted:  ”Not sure why they’re so surprised.  Cairo is hardly Paris.”  No, it’s not. But for many here, calling for the “cleansing of the square” is not very Egyptian, either.  And some people here would later say the Islamists’ force in Tahrir may have backfired, sending a chilling image that voters could choose to reject in the coming elections.

We wanted to find Hamza and his entourage – they’d promised to connect us with protestors worried about putting enough food on their table -  but no one was picking up their calls and visual sightings would be hopeless in this crush.  (Later, very much alive and well, he would tell me he receives nearly 60 calls an hour – such is the state of a revolutionary leader – and as he didn’t recognize my number, he didn’t pick up.)

Here and there, young men had shinnied up a poll, perching above the crowds.  We wanted perspective too.  In a building at the edge of the square, we rode an elevator to the 7^th floor, and – thanks to Magdi’s graceful negotiations – emerged onto a balcony above the sun-soaked masses.

By now it was time for Friday prayer.  A sea of humanity stretched out below us:  Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, folding in unison, then rising together, then folding forward again, placing foreheads to the earth.   It was powerful to watch; beautiful.

“God is great,” came a surge of voices.

They retreated like a wave, giving way to another chorus: “Change, freedom, social justice…”

“God is great,” came the new crashing wave.

Change, freedom, social justice…

God is great….

Change, freedom, social justice….

God is great….

Change….

A masterpiece on display at a tiny art academy in Ramallah

The two-year odyssey of Picasso’s “Buste de Femme” goes far beyond the art itself:  it’s about protocols, “peace” agreements, ports and checkpoints.  And it demonstrates how art can play a role in the nationalist vision of an occupied people struggling for some normalcy while forging the nascent institutions of a state. Read more, from Al Jazeera English…

During “Operation Mozart” at Qalandia, say young Palestinian musicians, soldiers laughed, snapped pictures, and danced.  Does it matter?

Rashed Zarour, 12, says he saw Israeli soldiers dancing during the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra performance at the Qalandia military checkpoint on June 23rd. But he says, "Whether they danced, or were angry, I don't care. I'm just there to play music for my country."

The other day two dozen Palestinian children, armed with violins, cellos, woodwinds and brass, confronted Israel’s occupation at the Qalandia military checkpoint. [Listen to Mozart's Symphony No. 6 from Qalandia.]  A grim barrier of confinement was transformed, if only for a short time, into a space of assertive joy, as the young musicians played Mozart’s Sixth Symphony in F Major, and three selections from Bizet, just a few feet from machine-gun glad conscripts of the Israel Defense Forces.  Now comes word of dancing soldiers.

The extraordinary checkpoint concert, by the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra under the energetic direction of Jason Crompton, was a musical high point in the lives of the players, from 13-year-old Alá Shehaldeh, who declared the Qalandia performance to be “the best concert of my life,” to veteran UK jazz and classical violinist Helen Sherrah-Davies, who said Qalandia was “the best gig I’ve done.”

Part of the reason for this exuberance:  This confrontation of a military force amounted to a “musical intifada,” in the words of Al Kamandjati founder Ramzi Aburedwan.  “The soldiers were no match for our instruments,” said 16-year-old trombonist Majd Qadi.

The musicians and soldiers were separated by a long row of blue horizontal bars; as the music played on, and soldiers began to come out to see what was happening.  Who was on the inside, looking out through the bars, and who was on the outside, looking in?

Most witnesses seemed to see what I saw:  That at first the soldiers seemed to ignore the music; and then, out of curiosity, began to emerge from their small inspection stations to listen and watch.  At first, “they were angry,” speculated Alá, recalling the moment.  She sat with a fellow musician at a picnic table at Al Kamandjati’s annual summer music camp in Talitha Kumi, near Bethlehlem.  But Alá and others started noticing other things:  At least two soldiers, they said, seemingly taken aback by the spectacle, started taking pictures with their cell phones.  Others were laughing, enjoying the moment.  A couple of soldiers, said the 15-year-old violinist, Lone Khilleh, “were clapping for us, too.”

And, according to four of the young Palestinian musicians, several of the soldiers were dancing.

“There were two soldiers inside the box where you stand and you show them the permit, and they were just dancing,” said Rashed Zarour, a 12-year-old violinist.  “We were playing the Dance Boheme in the Bizet, and they were dancing together.  Two soldiers dancing together.  They were actually two girls.”

“Well you know what they say,” said Majd.  ”If you can’t beat them, join them.”

Majd Qadi, 16, played Mozart and Bizet at Qalandia. Afterward, he said, "It might be somehow similar to what happened to India at the time of Gandhi – the nonviolent resistance."

Though Ramzi was skeptical of such claims — “This is not dancing music” – three other Palestinian members of the youth orchestra insist on what they saw.  “I saw two soldiers dancing,” said the teenage oboist Areej Khaliliyeh.

So it appears there were dancing soldiers at Qalandia.

And, you may ask:  so what?  What does that matter?  Does it shift the power dynamics between Israeli army and the Palestinians?  Does it restore any land taken by settlers?  Does it make the occupation any less damaging?  Do dancing soldiers bring a just and peaceful resolution even one inch closer?

“I don’t care about them,” said Rashed, who will soon turn 13.  “Whether they danced, or were angry, I don’t care.  I’m just there to play music for my country.  That’s all.  To make my people happy.  To make Palestinians happy.”

I expected a similar answer from Majd, the 16-year-old whose family was expelled from the village of Beit Nuba during the Six Day War 44 summers ago.  More than 200,000 Palestinians lost their homes then, including the residents of Beit Nuba and two neighboring villages, which were razed to the ground after the war.  On the site of one of them, Imuas, sits Israel’s “Canada Park.”  There is almost no trace of the village.

“Before that war my grandfather was a very rich man who owned one-ninth of the total lands of the village.  After that my family became poor.  My father was talking to me a lot in the last years about how hard did he suffer to live.”

So it was striking to hear Majd’s reflections on the meaning of the dancing soldiers.

“I’m thinking about, if we could make them dance, that means that we probably were able to bring out some of their humanity that was lost under the guns,” he said, as light filtered down through tall spindly pine trees at the summer camp at Talitha Kumi.  ”It might be somehow similar to what happened to India at the time of Gandhi – the nonviolent resistance.”

Children and their “musical intifada” prevail at Qalandia

Jason Crompton, conductor of the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra, silhouetted in front of the bars at Qalandia military checkpoint. (To listen, click on "Symphony No. 6," or near "Bizet's Farandole," below.)

The operation was planned well in advance, and down to the last detail.  Target: Passenger terminal at Israel’s Qalandia military checkpoint, near the entry cage where every day, hundreds of Palestinians cross to Jerusalem.  Time of day: High noon, June 23^rd, 2011. Operatives: More than two dozen Palestinian children. Weapons: molded wood, metal string, curved brass.  Known co-conspirators: Georges Bizet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  ”This is a musical intifada,” declared Ramzi Aburedwan, founder of the Ramallah-based Al Kamandjati (The Violinist, in Arabic).

In truth the operation was not without risk. Jason Crompton, an American pianist who conducts Al Kamandjati’s youth orchestra, and a couple of his colleagues had come to Ramzi with the idea.  They’d heard about a similar Al Kamandjati event at the separation wall a few years ago.  But they all knew that Qalandia, defined as “Area C” under the ill-fated Oslo accords, is under full Israeli military control.  Setting up a Palestinian orchestra in an Israeli military zone – just steps from the steel corridors, revolving metal gates, and X-ray machines where Palestinians submit themselves for inspection – was an uncertain prospect.  How would the soldiers react?  If they forced the children to stop playing, and Palestinians watching this objected, what would happen next?  Would the situation get out of control?

A few Al Kamandjati staffers were nervous, and a couple of parents had called with their concerns.  Nevertheless, everyone seemed on board with the plan:  It was a way to confront the 44-year-old occupation by reclaiming space through music.

The operation began swiftly and according to plan.  At about 11 a.m. in Ramallah, the 30-some members of the youth orchestra began piling onto the bus, carrying their violins, cellos, trombones and clarinets.  Into the belly of the bus went snare drums, cymbals, timpanis, backpacks and sheet music.

We rolled south out of Ramallah.  Ramzi stood at the front of the bus and faced the musicians.

He designated a half dozen of the older students and staffers for early logistics:  As soon as we arrived at Qalandia, these six would quickly assemble the music stands and mount the large percussion.  For the rest, “you stay on the bus.  Please don’t go out.  We don’t want to attract any attention.  Once the stands and the big instruments are ready, everybody come with his music, his instrument, and we’ll start immediately.  If you can tune on the bus, that would be amazing.”

What if the soldiers come and order the children to stop playing?  “We don’t listen,” Ramzi said.  “Exactly as if they are not there.  If they say something on the loudspeaker, we don’t listen.  We produce sound.  That’s it.”  He added, hopefully:  “Normally at this time there will be more people there.  Which is gonna make it more safe, yani.”

“Enshallah,” I said.  God willing.

Just past Lovely Toys, the wall and checkpoint towers came into view.  The bus swung left through a roundabout, and then right, into the parking lot.  Ramzi ran off to find Jason, who had come in a car with two dozen music stands.

The early logistics team assembled the percussion and music stands, according to plan.  There they stood, black metal sentries in the hot sunlight outside the “passenger terminal,” out of the range of military surveillance cameras.

Nearby, through the open windows of the bus, came the sounds of children tuning their instruments.

Tuning on the bus: Mahmoud Karzoun, 18, and members of the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra, moments before they played at the Qalandia military checkpoint.

And then it started.  In two lines, from the front and back bus doors, the young musicians filed out, their instruments out of their cases and ready.  Ramzi directed them to the side of the building, where they were to grab a music stand and enter the terminal.

They strode determinedly past the red metal benches and toward the far corner of the terminal, in front of a long row of blue horizontal bars.  On the other side, in a small building behind bulletproof glass, soldiers seemed unaware of the unfolding musical drama.

Now Jason stood, arms raised, before the musicians – about 25 kids, and perhaps 8 teachers.  The orchestra was poised, bows and brass in position.

The sound of Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major filled the terminal.

Alá Shehaldeh, 13, a violinist in the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra, playing Mozart at Qalandia on June 23. "This was the best concert of my life," she said afterward.

Immediately people stopped, stared, and smiled in amazement.  They came closer, pulling out cell phones and snapping photos.  Soon perhaps a hundred people were gathered around the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra, transfixed.  “People were listening fully,” Ramzi would say later.  He was playing viola.  “The crossing stopped.”

As Mozart played at Qalandia on June 23, the crossing slowed to a trickle.

Helen Sherrah-Davies, a visiting violinist from the UK, remembers having to fight back tears as she played.  “I wonder how many times joy has entered that space,” she would muse afterward.

At first the soldiers seemed to pay no attention.  But as the Mozart symphony built –  Allegro, Andante, Minuet, and the Allegro last movement – they started to take notice.  By the time the orchestra launched into Georges Bizet’s Dance Boheme from Carmen #2, a soldier appeared, looking out through the bars.

Majd Qadi, 16, plays Bizet. A soldier looks on.

He was joined by a second, then a third. One of them got on his radio. They didn’t seem to know what to do.  Now Bizet’s Habanera (also from Carmen) was echoing through the terminal.

This was all rather out of the ordinary.  But the soldiers seemed to be aware that trying to stop the music would have created a mess –  and an opportunity for a global Youtube event.

Wasim Harbi, 9, is the youngest member of the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra

In the end, the orchestra played on, reprising Bizet’s Farandole [listen here: bizet2] from L’Arlesienne Suite No. 2, to triumphant applause. [hear more Bizet, with applause: bizet2ptwithapplause]

For a long moment, the cheering surged.  A feeling of euphoria hung over the reclaimed space.  The players looked at each other in amazement.

Sweat beaded up on Jason’s forehead, the result of his energetic conducting.  Now he was facing the cameras.  “Do you think the music can make a solution for peace between the nations?” a Palestinian reporter wanted to know.  “I wish it were that simple, really,” Jason said with a laugh.  “I don’t know if it can bring a solution but I think it can bring a lot of good things to people.  It brings really great things to these kids here.  And to be a part of that, I can’t ask for anything more, really.  It’s amazing.  To play here today – I feel so good.”

Back at the bus:  a sense of jubilation.  In the parking lot, Jason went window to window, jumping up to yell gleefully to the kids, who responded each time with whoops and screams.

Jason Crompton celebrates at the bus in the Qalandia parking lot, moments after the youth orchestra finished their concert at the checkpoint.

We headed back to Ramallah, to the sound of much singing, tabla and oud. “This was the best concert of my life,” said Alá Shehaldeh, a 13-year-old violinist.  Not so long ago, at a checkpoint, Alá was forced to open her violin case and play a song before the soldier would let her pass.

Now, Alá looked out of the bus window at the landscape of Palestine, a peaceful and uncomplicated smile resting on her face.

Lovely Toys, just north of the Qalandia checkpoint. Owner Wisam Afaneh stands at the entrance.

Lovely Toys is the key to your checkpoint destiny.  It’s the kids’ store, brightly festooned with stuffed tigers, scooters, beach balls and racing cars, that sits about 200 meters from Qalandia, where the 25-foot-high wall, watchtowers and military checkpoint divide Jerusalem from Ramallah.  The toy store serves commuters, and the occasional mom and her shebab at the Qalandia refugee camp across the chaotic street, reports owner Wisam Afaneh.

If your taxi or service (sir-VEECE, a collective van) gets snarled in traffic by or before Lovely Toys, you can count on a long wait in your car going south, or walking through the steel and concrete chambers on your way to Jerusalem.  If on the other hand you breeze past Lovely Toys – and the boys peddling bottled water and verses from the Quran, and the squeegee men wiping the windshields of reluctant drivers, and the huge chunks of broken concrete and scattered plastic debris, and the murals of a young Yasser Arafat and the handcuffed Marwan Barghouti along the wall, and the overflowing dumpster where a dead cat has been lying belly-up, paws reaching for the sky, for the last couple of weeks – then you might just get through quickly and make your appointment in the Holy City on time.

That is, if you have a permit, or, like me, an American passport with the diamond-shaped Israeli visa stamp.  (U.S. citizens with Palestinian heritage often get the square-shaped visa, along with the unambiguous “No Entry Into Israel.”)

The other day I walked through the checkpoint with a couple of American musicians, violist Peter Sulski and pianist Eric Culver, part of the annual Fete de la musique sponsored by the Ramallah-based Al Kamandjati music school.  We were on our way to a performance in the Old City.

It was late afternoon.  The road was like a parking lot.  We bailed from our taxi in front of Lovely Toys, trekked past that rigor mortis cat, and cut through a “pedestrian terminal” filled with empty red benches, scattered trash, and a guy sitting in front of a long row of metal bars, selling water from a picnic cooler.  From there we found our small corridor – a two-foot-wide, seven-foot-high steel cage that led to a floor-to-ceiling turnstile.  On the other side, about 50 people crowded in front of another “iron maiden.” Besides us, it seemed everyone was Palestinian – either with a Jerusalem ID or a special permit to pass for the day.

Though it was “rush hour” – about 4pm – only one of the five entrances was open.  So we stood, all clumped in one group, waiting, each in our own thoughts.

A melody in a minor key played in Eric’s head – the soprano aria from Bach’s St. John Passion.  It seemed appropriate for the setting.  This was his first time crossing like this, and it reminded him of his experience decades ago at the Berlin Wall.

Peter, a veteran crosser, had his thumbs on his mobile phone, making arrangements for a taxi to pick up an arriving colleague at the Tel Aviv airport. Still, he thought, imagine doing this every day. “It stops me from coming into Jerusalem for any other reason than to do what is necessary,” he would say later.  “Which I think is the point, isn’t it?”

Of course, we were the lucky ones with permission to pass – most Palestinians only dream of Jerusalem, as it becomes to them an imaginary city.  But Peter’s right: As Palestinian lands are confiscated in East Jerusalem, and Jerusalem IDs are routinely stripped, the energy of Arab East Jerusalem is dwindling, replaced by a vibrant life in Ramallah.  Even those with the right to live in Jerusalem are now choosing to make their home on the other side of the wall, in the emerging de facto Palestinian capital.

Not so long ago, this land was much more open.  ”Back in 96 it took me, Bethlehem [south of Jerusalem] to Ramallah in 25 minutes,” Peter said, breaking our reverie.   That trip that now takes two or three times as long.  “BMW 318.  Clanky carburetor.  Oh man.”

Eric smiled.  “I loved the 3 series.”

“Yeah the 3 series was brilliant.”

Eric pointed to a stray cat parading along the wall behind us.  Beside us, Palestinian workers in yellow vests swept up cigarette butts.  “Keep the terminal clean,” instructed a sign above them.

Every few minutes we’d hear a loud click, and three or four people filed through the high turnstile and through an airport-style security check.  On the other side, through thick, green-tinted glass, bored-looking soldiers sat in a spartan room in front of computer terminals.  One at a time, we’d press our visas or IDs up to the window, pick up our bags on the conveyer, and click through two more turnstiles, and into the light on the other side of the wall.

It was nearly dusk by the time we reached the Old City.  At the Center for Jerusalem Studies, in a building and courtyard that dates back to Crusader times, plastic chairs were set up along the stones.  A half moon rose behind a rooftop barbwire fence; next door, perhaps 200 feet away, the call to prayer drifted up from Al Aqua Mosque.

A few minutes later, the muezzin’s call fell quiet.  In the courtyard, the chamber music began: flute, violin, viola, cello, and soprano, performing Bach and Bartok.

Kids squirmed and whispered frantically in their seats; a child called for her mom across a stone wall; someone slammed closed the metal doors of his shop.  But the players carried on, their lovely music floating into the night sky above the Old City.

After the concert, the group headed back to Ramallah. I lingered a bit, sitting over a glass of wine with a friend under the grape-leaf lattice of the Jerusalem Hotel.  Then I hopped a taxi back to Ramallah.

The road was early empty.  We passed through Qalandia without stopping.  Just north of the wall, Lovely Toys stood quiet and dark.

A Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus, from the falcon family), in the sky over Jenin. Photo copyright by Walid Basha. Used with permission.

Say “Jenin” to a friend and ask what word comes to mind.  I’m guessing that word would not be “birdwatcher.”  Unless, perhaps, you’d had the good fortune to meet Walid Salim Basha, microbiologist, university professor, environmentalist, and scientific and photographic observer of the great bird migration over the West Bank, especially in the Jenin governorate. “In the Holy Land, all birds migrating from Europe to Africa avoid passing over the Mediterranean, so they will pass over Palestine – more than 600 million birds will fly over Palestine during the year,” Walid told me as he navigated the crowded streets of Jenin in his old Opel.  We were driving toward his house so he could show me photographs he took of 120 species of  migratory birds in the Jenin mountains.  “This year, over Jenin, I recorded more than 500 kites [a hawk-like bird of prey].  You have the white stork – we have thousands in Jenin, in the valley between Jenin and Nablus.”

I’d met Walid only a few minutes earlier, at the Al Kamandjati music center in Jenin, where his 11-year-old son Fadi is taking singing lessons with the British soprano, Julia Katarina.  (My new book is about Al Kamandjati and the transformational power of music in the lives of children.)  Fadi, who at this stage in life is also a soprano, has a strikingly powerful, clear voice, and was preparing for a performance of Italian arias for the Italian consulate in Bethlehem in a few days’ time.  (Right; of course he was.)  While Julia went upstairs to work with Fadi, Walid happened to mention his passion for birds, and soon he was inviting me back to the house to see the photos.

“Tell Julia I’ve kidnapped him,” Walid told Al Kamandjati staffer Reema Shriem, as we headed out the door.  I raised my eyebrows.  “In Jenin,” I said.

“I’m not a political guy,” said the professor of immunology and microbiology at An-Najah University in nearby Nablus, as we drove toward his house.  “I love my science.  I love my work.”  Walid began his bird documentation not to seek or fulfill a grant project for an NGO – but just because he wanted to.  “I believe in the NGIs,” he said.  “Non-governmental individuals.  We can do projects.”

We were stuck in traffic, and horns began blasting near the vegetable market in Old Jenin.  “This is an Arabic tradition,” Walid said, laughing.  “I was in Japan for six years” – working on his PhD and raising a family with his wife, Jameleh.  “Fadikon” was born there and holds a Japanese passport.  “In Japan we don’t use the horn.  Not once in six years.  Everything is going smoothly.  No noise.  Nobody steps in the street.  When I came back here, in one day, I used it thousands of times!”

We rounded a corner as the muezzin was giving his call to prayer.  Walid’s family is among only 400 Christians in Jenin, a town (and refugee camp) of more than 50,000.   But he said the distinctions between Muslims and Christians are “meaningless, here in Jenin.”  As a Christian schoolboy, Walid was not required to take Islamic studies as other students were.  “But my dad emphasized that we should take these courses because we should know about our neighbors. It gives you more to understand the others.  In general we don’t have any problems as Christians.  We respect each other.”

Now we arrived at the house, and Walid ran in to retrieve his camera, where he’s stored hundreds of close-ups of migratory and local birds:  Jays, robins, blackbirds, buzzards, owls; Turtle Dove, Palm Dove, Syrian Woodpecker, Yellow-vented Bulbul, Black Redstart, Stonechat, Chucker, Short-toed Eagle.  “This is the white-chested kingfisher,” he said upon returning to the car, showing me the little screen on his Fuji.  The bird sat on an electrical wire, a large lizard dangling from its beak.  “And I was watching him enter the nest and give it to the babies.”

Bird on a wire: The White-breasted Kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis), and dinner for the family, on an electrical wire in Jenin. Photo copyright by Walid Basha. Used with permission.

“This is the Palestine Sunbird [Nectarina osea].  It’s black, but after the sunrise, it will become more blue, sometimes green, depending on the reflection of the light.  It’s in an olive tree next to my house.”

A Palestine Sunbird (Nectarina osea), iridescent blue in this photograph, perched in an fig tree in Jenin. Photo copyright by Walid Basha. Used with permission.

He clicks forward.  “And this is the white dove, migratory – it comes to Palestine in springtime.”  The picture shows two doves together. “You know that if one of the couple dies, it will not marry again?  It will spend all the life with one – they are not changing couples every year, like other birds.”

A pair of turtle doves (Streptopelia turtur) near Jenin. Photo copyright by Walid Basha. Used with permission.

A Black-winged Stilt (Himantopus himantopus) outside of Jenin. This is one of 120 species of migratory birds documented by Prof. Walid Salim Basha. Photo copyright by Walid Basha. Used with permission.

A couple of weeks later, my friend Nidal and I paid Walid and his family another visit.  We sat on their comfortable third floor veranda, sipping tea. Fadi’s performance in front of the Italians in Bethlehem had been a big hit – so impressive that, after the performance, the diplomats began gushing to him in Italian, leaving it to Fadi’s uncle to break the news:  Fadi may be able to beautifully sing Italian arias in a barely detectable accent, but he doesn’t speak the language.

As we spoke, Walid pulled out a royal blue sheet of origami paper and began making folds.  He described the recent visit of the Japanese ambassador, who he showed all around Jenin.  He was fond of escorting one recent Japanese diplomat, a fellow Catholic, to holy sites in the area, including the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where they attended midnight and Easter masses.

Walid’s fingers worked the folds of his origami.  He was making a crane.  “There is a tradition in Japan – if you do 1000 cranes, all of your dreams will come true.”  Suddenly he said:  “In Japan, we used to go fishing.  I miss fishing a lot.  I hope they open Gaza so I can go there.”  Lately, moving around has become increasingly problematic.  In 1993, at the start of the Oslo “peace process,” he would travel from the West Bank to Haifa without problem.  “Now I need a permit and a magnetic card. If you want to cross the border, you will take hours just to make your decision.”  Jameleh suggested Walid’s love for birds, especially those in flight, has a deeper meaning.

Walid returned his attention to his crane.  Today the bird man of Jenin gives workshops on origami to kindergarten teachers here.  He tells them of the promise of 1000 cranes. After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he said, a young girl with leukemia tried to make 1000 cranes, in a dream to save her own life.  She got as far as 680; after her death, her friends and family finished the job.  Today, Walid is organizing a 1000 cranes project at Fadi’s school.  “We will collect the 1000 cranes, and send them to Japan,” he said.

Now he is finished with the blue crane.  It’s simple and beautiful.  Walid smiles, and reaches out, crane between his fingers, to offer it to Nidal.

A secret meeting 44 years ago could have changed the course of Middle Eastern history. But it never happened.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)

In this part of the world, carrying tragic dates around in your head is kind of like breathing: you do it automatically, without thinking. This time of year, for Palestinians, June 5 marks the 44th anniversary of their occupation by Israel. June 6, in the evening, evokes the darkness when Ramallah fell, and finally people realised that the tanks rolling into town were not Iraqis sent to the aid of the local people: they belonged to the army of Israel.

But buried beneath such memories of defeat for the Arabs in the Six Day War is the story of a momentous June 7 meeting that never happened. If it had, it just might have carved a different path for the Middle East.

Read more, from Al-Jazeera English…

On the 44^th anniversary of the first day of the Six Day War and the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Maddalena Pastorelli made plans to teach her regular music appreciation class to Palestinian children at the Qalandia refugee camp.  Under the circumstances – Palestinian youth groups were calling for a mass nonviolent march to the Israeli’s Qalandia checkpoint, alongside its 25-foot-high wall, and Israeli troops were mobilizing – it was an ambitious goal.

Maddalena Pastorelli, a teacher at Al Kamandjati (The Violinist) in Ramallah, with her box of homemade musical instruments to share with the children of Qalandia refugee camp.

Nevertheless, we set out in a white van in the late morning, Maddalena accompanied by two of her colleagues in the Al Kamandjati music school. At her feet was a cardboard box full of simple instruments: a tambourine, a triangle, small plastic sheets to make rattling sounds, a piece of plastic garden hose to evoke the sound of the wind, and plastic jugs filled with chickpeas, orange lentils, and rice. “The rice is the best for the rain,” Maddalena declared.

Maddalena, a flautist who studied in Sienna, Italy, was planning to hand out the instruments to the children for a small drama at the U.N. school in Qalandia camp. “It’s the story about a goat that lives in the forest, and she has a little baby, and she has to go to find some grass every morning, so she leaves the baby alone at home,” explained Maddalena as we rattled down the Ramallah-Jerusalem road, flashing past the Arabic sweet shops, half-built apartment buildings, auto repair garages and 10-year-old street peddlers hawking gum and boxes of tissue. “And the baby is always scared because there is the wind. And she says, No, this is just the sound of the wind, don’t be scared.”

Ten minutes out of Ramallah, as we approached Qalandia, a thick plume of black smoke rose in the sky, maybe half a mile to the south, near the wall and the Qalandia checkpoint. We could hear muffled explosions in the distance. The sound of ambulances grew near. Maddalena let out a moan, and for a moment, put her face in her hands. Iyad Jaradat, a Kamandjati teacher, took a call as he maneuvered the van 90 degrees to the left, toward the school at Qalandia Camp. “It’s finished,” he announced. Children at the U.N. school were being sent home; there would be no music class today.

Nevertheless, we parked, got out of the van, and began walking toward the school, as dozens of kids in their blue and white pinstripe uniforms streamed in the other direction, toward their homes in the camp. Iyad still needed to distribute posters and calendars announcing Kamandjati’s coming Fête de la musique (Music Days Festival), which will include performances at Qalandia and across the West Bank by students and teachers from Palestine, the U.S. and Europe. In a few days, 15 musicians will arrive from France, the U.K. and elsewhere to play the concerts, and to teach in the Kamandjati summer music camp near Bethlehem.

We walked through a nearly empty cement playground, hot and baked white from the sun. Maddalena clutched a roll of “Come to Palestine” posters, announcing the festival. The explosions just south of us, on the frontlines at the checkpoint, had died down, at least temporarily, though the whine of the sirens was more or less continuous. Iyad went to hand out programs to teachers in another part of the U.N. school, and came back to announce that the school’s theater had been converted to a triage center for youths injured in today’s clashes.

Later, we would learn, dozens of Palestinians were injured – 90, by one account – in the clashes at Qalandia, which according to reports began as protestors tried to form a human chain at the checkpoint, and, were met with tear gas and sound bombs from Israeli soldiers. Youths later began throwing rocks, amid reports in the evening that Israeli forces were attempting to storm Qalandia camp.

That afternoon, back in the van and the relative safety alongside the U.N. school at Qalandia,, Maddalena looked down at her feet and the unused box of homemade instruments. Next week, she said, there will be one last chance, before the summer break, for the children to perform their musical drama. She wouldn’t tell me the end of the story. “It’s a surprise,” said Maddalena.

We turned around and headed back toward Ramallah.

Abdallah Qazwah, 11, looks over sheet music to Beethoven's "Romance" in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. His brother, Khalil, a tabla player, stands at the ready with Abdallah's violin

“Romance!” exclaims 11-year-old Abdallah, standing astride his violin case in a narrow alley of Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. His eyes are alive, his smile wide. The exclamation comes in response to a question: What is your favorite music? The interviewer (that would be me) is not exactly a classical music aficionado, and so I had to wait for Abdallah’s violin teacher, the classically-trained Cambridge (UK) grad, Alice Howick, to tell me that the boy was not talking about a type of music, but rather an actual piece called Romance, by Beethoven.

Abdallah Qazwah is a student at Al Kamandjati, the Ramallah-based Palestinian classical and Arabic music school founded by Ramzi Aburedwan, who grew up in the Al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah.

During the first intifada (1987-93), Ramzi was one of the “children of the stones” who fought to end the Israeli occupation. At age eight, he was hurling stones at Israeli soldiers. Later, he picked up a viola, got a scholarship, trained at a French conservatory, and built a vision to share the power of music to transform the lives of Palestinian children, especially in the refugee camps. Today dozens of musicians from across Europe, the U.S. and Palestine work with hundreds of Palestinian children in the West Bank and Lebanon.

Over the weekend I went with Ramzi from Ramallah to Beirut to check out Al Kamandjati’s work here. Like Ramzi, Abdallah was born decades after the first refugees arrived in 1948, having fled or been driven out of their homes during the creation of Israel. At Shatila, a few hundred refugees took what they thought would be temporary shelter in tent camps in Lebanon. Sixty-three years after their Nakba (Catastrophe), some 12 thousand refugees crowd into haphazard and ever-expanding concrete and rebar dwellings on a single kilometer of land in Beirut. They’re still waiting to go home.

Of course neither Abdallah nor his parents have any memory of the Nakba; neither does the child recall the unspeakable things that happened at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, or during the War of the Camps a few years later. And he has never laid eyes on Acca, once a Palestinian Mediterranean town and now part of Israel (known there as Akko, or Acre), halfway between Haifa and Shatila. But like so many children from the camps, he yearns to know the place he calls his home.

A few weeks ago, during a violin lesson, Alice, who directs the Al Kamandjati program in Lebanon, mentioned to Abdallah that she’d been to Acca. The boy calmly put his violin in its case, pulled up a couple of chairs, and, Alice recalled, “sat me down and said, ‘tell me everything about this place. I want to know it, I want to imagine it.’ So I tried to describe for him a little about this beautiful city. And he stopped me and said, ‘Fi hamam?’ And hammam is the word for a bathroom so I thought he was talking about a Turkish bath. And I told him, ‘Yes there are, I’ve never been but I’m sure it’s great.’ I thought it was a weird question. And he said, ‘No, not hammam, hamam.’ Which means doves. He wants to know if there’s doves in the city. I told him, ‘It’s two hours that way. Everything you have here…’ I mean, they feel so far away from this country somehow.”

The story of the Palestinian refugee camp is the story of the past – treasured memories of a village long gone, mixed with the trauma of expulsion – and the future: dreams of a moment when, somehow, the U.N. resolution promising the right of return will finally be implemented, and the refugees will be allowed to go home. Of course those old homes, in many cases, no longer exist. But the memory of them does. And for the refugees in Lebanon, living in the past and the future seems to make the present a little more tolerable.

Abdallah’s present now includes Romance. And so it is for all the children of Al Kamandjati, in Lebanon and the occupied West Bank. Music is the present; it lives in the moment at hand. In front of a music stand, before a wall of brightly painted sea creatures, Alice crouches beside her pupil, pointing to a measure and giving him some final tips. Abdallah nods. His bright eyes dance over a page of notes first written down by Ludwig van Beethoven two centuries ago. And he begins to play.

In 1988, a photographer in the West Bank snapped a photo of a scrawny 8-year-old with tears in his eyes, hurling a rock at an Israeli soldier. The photograph symbolized the rage and frustration of the intifada. More than 20 years later, that boy, Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, has grown up to become a visionary musician.

Listen to more, from NPR…

Read about the upcoming book…

It’s always bizarre to watch the cheering throng of US congressmen, their pockets lined with AIPAC contributions, fawn over a visiting Israeli leader as if he were a conquering war hero of their own.  But seen on YouTube from the West Bank, Binyamin Netanyahu’s fanciful walk through Middle East diplomacy, and his disingenuous endorsement of peace and democracy – accompanied by an estimated 55 standing ovations – was truly surreal. Read more, from Al-Jazeera English…

I arrived in Ramallah a week or so ago, from America via Europe. This time, perhaps my 15th visit, it feels different – and not just politically, with stirrings around a possible Palestine statehood declaration in September. Personally, too.

Upon landing here in the West Bank, and taking up residency for the next few months in a flat in Ramallah, I found the familiar comfort of Arab hospitality – but now as someone who lives here, and is not just dropping in. This stay is fundamentally different from the many past trips when I parachuted into Jerusalem for two or three weeks, and lived out of a suitcase. There is something grounding about completely unpacking, finding the iron in the cupboard, counting the plates, thinking about putting things on the wall, and – most of all – shopping for provisions.

On my first night, my neighbor Sa’ad offered to walk me around the commercial center of Ramallah, in the 200-meter radius of the Manara, the Ramallah traffic circle guarded by a quartet of dignified, if sooty, stone lions. We set out in the cool evening, Sa’ad pushing his 20-month-old daughter in her stroller. He navigated from street to sidewalk, and around mounds of dirt and rubble: Ramallah’s streets are being torn up, one by one, to install new sewer and electrical lines. “Salma,” said Sa’ad, pointing at me as he paused in front of a pharmacy. “Say hello to Uncle.”

Sa’ad showed me where to catch the bus to Jerusalem, and the terminal where the vans go to Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm and other West Bank destinations. He pointed out the best places to get fresh-squeezed juice, buy hummus, or linger over a glass of Arabic coffee. We walked around the hessbeh, the crowded, cacophonous Palestinian vegetable market where mounds of apples, tomatoes, eggplants, oranges, garlic and spices are trucked in every day from across Palestine and Israel. (Despite international calls for boycotting Israeli goods, Hebrew lettering on boxes of fruits is ubiquitous in nearly every cramped produce stall.) Sa’ad said he preferred to buy from the “ladies from the villages,” when possible. These old women sit on the sidewalk selling olives, grape leafs, cucumber, cheese and za’atar, the staple spice that is blended with olive oil and served at every Palestinian table. “It’s better because it’s organic,” Sa’ad said.

By now my black plastic bags were bulging with provisions, but Sa’ad wanted to take me on one last stop – to his favorite chicken butcher. He introduced me, said I had moved here for a while, and that the guys at the butcher shop should take good care of me when I come in for my chicken. Ala rasi, said the butcher with a big smile, touching the top of his head with the palm of his hand. The burden is on me. In other words, he’s happy to help make a new guy in town feel welcome.

A just and durable peace need not be based on love or appreciation. But it must be based on dignity, equality, and mutual respect.

With a revolutionary spirit in the Middle Eastern air, with momentum building for unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations this September, and a virtual certainty of a coming Palestinian majority on the lands “between the river and the sea,” plans discarded long ago are reemerging.  Read more, from the Christian Science Monitor…

Most Americans, Jew and Gentile, grew up with the Leon Uris history of the struggle for the Holy Land. Exodus chronicles the heroic birth of Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. There the story ends; there is no other narrative.  This politically convenient and magnificently incomplete version of history remains the dominant American narrative of the tragedy known as Israel and Palestine. Despite the cracks in that narrative in recent years, the über story of Exodus – Uris’ 1958 mega-bestseller, and the subsequent Hollywood film starring Paul Newman – still holds a tremendous grip on the American imagination.  Read more, from Al-Jazeera English…