Children of the Stone
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by the same author
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later
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CHILDREN OF THE STONE The Power of Music in a Hard Land
S a n d y To l a n
N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY
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Bloomsbury USA An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Sandy Tolan, 2015 Lines from poem “Children Bearing Rocks” from On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani, published by Interlink Publishing Group, Inc. Original Arabic copyright © Nizar Qabbani, 1980, 1986, 1995. English translation copyright © Salma Jayyusi, 1996, 2013. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. ISBN: HB: 978-1-60819-813-9 / PB: 978-1-63286-341-6 ePub: 978-1-60819-817-7 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Tolan, Sandy. Children of the stone : the power of music in a hard land / Sandy Tolan.— First U.S. edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60819-813-9 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-63286-341-6 (paperback) – ISBN 978-1-60819-817-7 (ebook) 1. Aburedwan, Ramzi. 2. Violists—West Bank—Biography. 3. Music—Social aspects—West Bank. 4. Music—Instruction and study—West Bank. 5. Refugees, Palestinian Arab—West Bank—Education. I. Title. ML418.A287T65 2014 780.95695′309051—dc23 2014032528 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in the U.S.A. by Thomson-Shore Inc., Dexter, Michigan To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters. Bloomsbury books may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at specialmarkets@macmillan.com.
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To Andrea
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With mere rocks in their hands, they stun the world and come to us like good tidings. Bursting with love and anger, they defy, and topple, while we remain a herd of polar bears bundled against weather —nizar qabbani, “children bearing rocks�
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contents
Note to Readers
xiii
Maps
xv
Introduction
xxi
Prelude: Over the Wall, to Play Beethoven
1
First Movement: Stone 1 Pushcart
7
2 Grandfather
9
3 Uprising
25
4 Father
40
5 Accord
49
6 Viola
55
7 Harmony
61
8 Mozart
73
9 Symbol
83
Interlude I
95
Second Movement: Instrument 10 Conservatoire
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99
11 Adaptation
111
12 Brother
126
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13 Troubadours
136
14 Edward
146
15 Jenin
152
16 Oday
164
17 Celine
172
Interlude II
187
Third Movement: Practice 18 Beethoven
191
19 Al Kamandjati
197
20 AndalucĂa
208
21 Palaces
216
22 Luthier
229
23 Fire
236
24 Birth
246
25 Sebastia
253
Interlude III
265
Fourth Movement: Resistance
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26 Fractures
269
27 Unity
276
28 Rise, Child
283
29 Ode to Joy
293
30 A Musical Intifada
298
Postlude: Over the Wall, to Play Beethoven
315
Acknowledgments
317
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contents
xi
Source Notes
321
Selected Bibliography
427
Index
439
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N ot e to R ea d e r s
T
his is a work of nonfiction. As such there are no imagined conver sations or composite characters. Everything in this book is the result of interviews, archival research, news accounts, and primary and secondary sources. All facts in the book have been subject to rigorous fact-checking, including verification with the dozens of people interviewed in the course of the reporting. That said, much of the book relies on the reflections of people who were in places where neither I nor any other journalist was present as witness. Thus, of course, not every detail can be independently verified, in particu lar old and sometimes selective memories that describe small details, or unrecorded conversations. However, I have made significant efforts to corroborate the stories captured for this book through multiple accounts. This is the case in particular for incidents that may be especially difficult for readers, such as the circumstances surrounding the death of a child in a refugee camp during the first Palestinian intifada. In such cases I relied on a combination of the available record—books, newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly papers, human rights reports, United Nations records, and eyewitness accounts—to build a multiple-sourced narrative. This book tells the story of Palestinian children learning and playing music in a war zone. It is therefore inherently about one people’s tragedies, dreams, artistic triumphs, struggle against a military occupation, and aspirat ions for freedom, and for an ordinary life. Readers should not expect the traditional journalistic approach—that is, the parallel narratives of Palestinians and Israelis. Rather, the story is told largely through the eyes and experiences of a remarkable group of children and of the visionary
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Note to Readers
Palestinian musician at the heart of this book. Still, in all of the stories the book conveys, and especially in the sections providing historical context, I have tried my best to apply my own personal and professional journalistic standards of rigor, accuracy, and fair-mindedness. For the most part the story is told chronologically. In rare cases, for ease of reading, I have juxtaposed events that may not have happened one right after the other. In those instances I have noted this in the source notes. The bulk of the research and reporting took place from 2009 to 2014 and grew out of a feature story I produced for National Public Radio in 1998. For more details, see the acknowledgments and source notes.
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I n t ro d u c t i o n
December 2009 Pronto Italian Restaurant, Ramallah, West Bank
I
t was a chance encounter, in December 2009, at an Italian restau rant in the West Bank. I was in Ramallah, working on a story on the dim chances for genuine Middle East peace. I was standing with two fellow journalists, looking for an open table, when I heard my name called out from across the restaurant. “Sandy! Sandy!” I looked at the bearded young man sitting at a corner table. He was beaming at me. I didn’t recognize him. He pointed to himself: “Ramzi!” I hadn’t seen him in nearly a decade. Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan had been a child of war, one of thousands of Palestinian children who threw stones at Israeli forces during the six years of the intifada (1987–93; later known as the First Intifada), the uprising against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. At age eight, Ramzi had been immortalized in one of the most iconic images of the era: a shaggy-haired David with fear and resolve in his eyes, unleashing a stone at an unseen Goliath. By the time I met Ramzi in 1998, the intifada was over. He was a skinny, clean-shaven eighteen-year-old who lived with his grandparents in the Al Amari refugee camp on the outskirts of Ramallah. No longer was he sneaking through the camp, hurling rocks at soldiers and dashing from rooftop to rooftop to escape. Now, still relatively early in the Oslo peace process, Palestinians long in exile were returning to the West Bank to help build a state of their own. New cultural institutions were springing up, and
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Ramzi suddenly had a chance to study a long-held passion: music. He had laid down his stones and, with the help of two middle-class Palestinian mentors, picked up a viola. Within a year, posters around Ramallah showed little Ramzi, throwing the stone, alongside an image of Ramzi as a young man, pulling a bow across his viola strings. The poster announced the arrival of the new National Conservatory of Music. It looked like an advertisement for a newly independent Palestine. In that winter of early 1998, I sought out Ramzi in the refugee camp where he lived with his family in their modest plaster-and-cinder-block home. I recorded his music and his memories of the intifada. He remained proud of his stone-throwing days, echoing the sentiments of many Palestinians who believed, then, that the stone would lead to their libera tion. “I wish I could collect all of the stones I threw and frame them or put them on the wall or put them in my own museum,” he told me then. “Because I was only a child. And all I had was a stone.” Ramzi’s playing was crude and halting; at eighteen, he’d barely had a year of practice. More vivid were his memories of racing through the warrens of the camp during the intifada as one of the “children of the stones,” as Abu Jihad, the assassinated Palestinian revolutionary, called Ramzi’s generation. Most striking of all was the teenager’s vision to trans form the lives of children and show the world what his people could accomplish. “I want to see many conservatories opening up in all of Palestine, so that people can learn to play,” Ramzi told me one cold gray afternoon, looking out his window at the narrow alley in the refugee camp. “And I want for children to understand that there’s something called a viola and a violin. I want people to see that we Palestinians are capable. We are like everybody else in the world. We can do a lot. I hope one day I’ll be a teacher and a professional viola player. I hope we’ll have a big orchestra and we’ll tour the world in the name of Palestine. I want to show the world that we are here, on the map.” Later that spring of 1998, around the time my story about Ramzi aired on National Public Radio, he landed a coveted scholarship to study the viola at a music conservatory in Angers, France. We kept in contact for a couple of years. I followed his progress at Angers. I’d heard he’d started a traveling band, playing mostly Arabic music, while he continued to learn classical viola at the French conservatory.
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Eventually, we lost touch—until that night at the restaurant in Ramallah. He joined us at the table. “What are you doing back here, Ramzi? I thought you were still in France.” “No, I’m back.” “So what are you up to?” “I’ve been opening up music schools all over Palestine.” I got chills. This was precisely what Ramzi had said he wanted to do, twelve years earlier, when he was a teenager. With the help of musicians and supporters from the United States, England, Germany, France, Italy, and the West Bank, Ramzi had created musical programs in ten locations, including three in refugee camps in Lebanon. He called his school, centered in Ramallah, Al Kamandjati— Arabic for “The Violinist.” In five years, his vision of freedom through music had reached thousands of Palestinian kids. “That was my dream,” he told me at dinner. “I wanted to have many schools, everywhere, in all of Palestine. And now,” he laughed, “I say, ‘Wow, I’m crazy, what have I done?’” The building of Al Kamandjati is the story of a child from a refugee camp who confronts an occupying army, gets an education, masters an instrument, dreams of something almost surely beyond his reach, and inspires scores of others to work with him to pursue it. Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli musician and director of the Berlin State Opera, was among them. He has performed with Ramzi over the years—at chamber music concerts at Al Kamandjati, and in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that Barenboim founded with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. “Ramzi has transformed not only his life, his destiny, but that of many, many, many other people,” Barenboim told me. “This is an extraordinary collection of children from all over Palestine that have all been inspired and opened to the beauty of life.” Not only children: An American violist quit the London Symphony Orchestra partly to help Ramzi build his dream. A French violinist took leave from his Spanish orchestra to help bring the music school to the refugee camps. A gifted soprano who trained at the English National Opera put off her career in the United Kingdom to live in Ramallah and give voice lessons to Palestinian children. A score of Palestinian teachers and professionals signed over deeds to properties, raised hundreds of
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thousands of foundation dollars, donated thousands of hours of labor, and cajoled local civic and religious leaders to make room for a new form of musical education in the villages and camps. Here, I realized, was a story in sharp contrast to the darkness I’d been encountering that December across the occupied West Bank. In the South Hebron Hills, children told me of settlers who stoned them, or unleashed German shepherds, as the children made their long trek to school. Near Qalqilya, a few miles inland from the Mediterranean coast, I met with local Palestinian leaders whose community was surrounded on three sides by the twenty-five-foot-high separation barrier that Israel had declared necessary to protect Israeli citizens from suicide attacks. Yet the wall sliced deep into the West Bank, seizing nearly 10 percent of the land supposedly set aside for an independent Palestinian state. It cut off access to farmers’ olive orchards, and in places, it blocked daylight. At the military check point at Qalandia, just south of Ramallah, I watched as Palestinians passed beneath soldiers in machine-gun nests and through long corridors of metal bars, carrying precious permits that would allow them a rare trip to the holy city of Jerusalem. On the Palestinian side of the wall, I met with teen agers in the Balata and Qalandia refugee camps who had given up hope of ever living in a free country. Their leaders, they believed, had sold them out, while enriching themselves and fellow elites with funds siphoned off from the international community. After my fifteen years of traveling to Terra Sancta, these stories under scored the bleak prospects for meaningful peace. But my reconnection with Ramzi sparked something else. Hundreds of young Palestinian musicians, inspired by Beethoven, Mozart, and indigenous Arabic music, were forging their own independent vision. As the military occupation intensified, shrink ing the free space around them; as their own leadership failed time and again to deliver on their promise of a “viable and contiguous” state of Palestine, these young musicians kept playing. Through the music, in small but mean ingful ways, Ramzi, his teachers, and his students were creating their own freedom. At times it was an interior freedom: In the midst of violence and chaos, music brought inner calm. At times it was external, an assertion of independence in direct resistance to the occupation itself: children standing before stunned soldiers, performing impromptu classical symphonies. I first learned these details of Al Kamandjati over dinner that night, and then the next night at a Christmastime concert of baroque music in a
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church north of Ramallah. In the coming summers, on the road in the West Bank; at a Bethlehem music camp with dozens of international musi cians; and in a sunny courtyard echoing with the sounds of violin, piano, bassoon, and timpani, I learned a new way to navigate through a landscape of checkpoints, refugee camps, olive groves, military night raids, and endless failed peace talks. The story of Al Kamandjati is about music, violence, and a dream of liberation. It’s about a growing movement of nonviolent resistance, new ways of thinking across the Israeli-Palestinian divide, the challenge of confronting religious extremism, the potential of music to protect and heal traumatized children, the struggle of one young musician to master an instrument, and, above all, the transformative power of music in a land of brutality, beauty, and confinement. In Children of the Stone I hope to show what it’s like for ordinary Palestinians to live under a military occupation. Despite the boatloads of ink and forests of newsprint devoted to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” precious little has examined day-to-day life under its most enduringly corrosive aspect: Israel’s forty-seven-year occupation of the West Bank. To explore this I have focused not on “both sides” of the conflict as I did with my 2006 book, The Lemon Tree, but rather on the West Bank, on the “other” side of Israel’s separation barrier, through the drama, grace, joy, and hardship of a group of children engaged in learning music. These children, along with Ramzi and the teachers who work with him, suggest an alternative way of understanding the conflict and its resolut ion. Edward Said, the late Palestinian intellectual and Columbia University professor, was himself drawn to music as a way of exploring alternative solutions to one of the world’s most impossible struggles. The story of his rare friendship with Barenboim, and the orchestra they founded, is told in this book, alongside Ramzi’s. “The role of the intellectual is to ask questions,” Said once said. “To disturb people, to stir up reflection, to provoke, you might say, controversy and thought. The role of the intellectual is to challenge power by providing alternative models. And, as important, resources of hope. It’s not our destiny to be refugees. It’s not our destiny to be prisoners of war. It’s not our destiny to be commandos. It’s not our destiny to be an army of occupation. “We have a choice.” *
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At the dinner at Pronto, the Italian restaurant, as Ramzi told me the details of what he and his friends had accomplished, I kept grabbing his arm, leaning toward him, and exclaiming, “You did it, Ramzi! You did it! You did exactly what you said you would do!” He smiled. “Come tomorrow. You must visit, and learn how we made this happen.”
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