Christmas Baroque music festival in Palestine
This December, Al Kamandjati Music Center presents its fifth annual festival of Baroque music.
Performances are scheduled for towns and cities throughout the West Bank, between December 12 and 22, 2009.
Kamilya Jubran: a female oud player & singer who lit Europe on fire
Kamilya Jubran is a Palestinian musician from Akka (Akko / Acre) who was for several years a member of the Sabreen Group before branching out on her own. She is now a fixture of the music scenes in major cities around Europe, where she receives rave reviews for her passionate voice and mastery of the oud and percussion instruments.
View Kamilya Jubran's biography and concert dates on her website.
Lebanese hills alive with music
They've come from the occupied Territories, the Middle East, and Latin America to share a stage for one night in Lebanon.
The Palestine Youth Orchestra played a packed audience at the Beiteddine Arts Festival, even though their band was incomplete.
The Gaza members were not permitted to leave the Strip, and those carrying Israeli passports were not allowed into Lebanon.
Al Jazeera's Zeina Awad caught up with some of the performers from the West Bank.
Palestine Youth Orchestra spreads peace and harmony
Ali Dahmash, a Palestinian-Jordanian blogger, made a video about his experience of watching the Palestine Youth Orchestra perform in Amman. He then posted the clip on iReport, a citizen journalism website - and then it was picked up by CNN.
Click here to read the CNN piece
Le Trio Joubran: Nazarene oud players win global accolades
Three incredibly talented brothers from Nazareth - Samir, Wassim and Adnan - have revitalized oud playing for an international audience. Their subtle interpretations of classic musical pieces have earned them rave reviews. Recently, they performed at the European parliament.
Read more about the Joubran Brothers on their website.
The best known hip hop group in Gaza is called DARG - an acronym for Da Arab Revolutionary Guys. The team is composed of Sami Srour, Bassam El Masry, Mohammed Antar, Mohamed M Massri - four young men who rap in Arabic about Gaza's problems, ranging from poverty and unemployment to violence of both the narrative and political varieties. "Some fight with guns; we fight with words," they say.
Recently, they featured in a news report by AFP. Watch it here.
"Art for the struggle": They Do Not Exist revisited
Photo: Vertigo Magazine
They Do Not Exist (Laysa lahum wujud), Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974, 25 min
Salvaged after the 1982 Lebanon War with Israel and only recently been made available, Mustafa Abu Ali's early film "They Do Not Exist" focuses on Lebanon's Palestinian refugees. Abu Ali worked with French New Wave-filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on "Ici et Ailleurs" (Here and Elsewhere) and founded the PLO's film division. A filmmaker of "militant cinema," Abu Ali took the title of his film from a remark by former Israeli PM Golda Meir: "There were no such thing as Palestinians... They did not exist" (Washington Post, 1969). Shot under extraordinary circumstances, Abu Ali's work examines conditions in Lebanon's refugee camps, the effects of Israeli bombardments, and the life in guerrilla training camps. "They Do Not Exist is a stylistically unique work, which demonstrates the intersection between the political and the aesthetic in Lebanon."
Animating the lost Palestinian Film Archive
Independent Palestinian Film Online
(Still from 'The Driver' by Jumana Emil Abboud)
Palestine in Israel’s Big Brother House
(Left - Futna Jabari, Right - Edna Kunti )
Welcome to Hebron: a Swedish documentary of a Palestinian girl's life
Seventeen year-old Leila lives in Hebron. She has a dream that everyone can live in peace, but she and her schoolmates are exposed daily to harassment, violence and intimidation from Israeli settlers. For the Palestinian school girls at the Cordoba School in Hebron, it is impossible to remain unaffected by the Israeli occupation. The school is surrounded by military posts, barbed wire and extremist Israeli settlers. The daily walk to school is a humiliating experience.
Leila and her classmates are exposed daily to the indifference of the Israeli soldiers and laughter and stones from settlers. But in spite of constant harassment, Leila believes in hope, peace and justice. She refuses to let bitterness and hatred control her life: - 'We can all live together. Muslim, Jew or Christian, there is no reason to hate each other,' she says in Terje Carlsson's documentary Welcome to Hebron.
Heb2: documentary TV from the heart of Hebron
Micha'el Zupraner, an Israeli filmmaker, has undertaken a fascinating video project in Hebron.
He has moved to Tel Rumeida, the area of Hebron where hard-core ideological settlers live side-by-side with Palestinian residents in a state of perpetual tension and frequent violence. But Zupraner is not an ideological settler. There, the quiet young Israeli got the know the settlers, the soldiers and the Palestinian residents - even though he is not an ideological settler. Zupraner follows them around with his video camera, filming daily events - soldiers searching Palestinian homes, settlers and Palestinians exchanging harsh words, interviews with Palestinians - and posts them on his website, Heb2.
I Am Yusuf and this is My Brother: a Palestinian play on a London stage
Amir Nizar Zuabi is a Palestinian playwright and director who is a citizen of Israel. Originally from the Galilee region, he lives in Tel Aviv with his Jewish wife, an actress, and their child. Better known abroad than in Israel, where he is practically unknown to the Jewish mainstream, Zuabi's most recent play is currently being staged at London's Old Vic Theater. In the play he imagines the events of 1948, which 'loomed large' in his childhood and continue to play a huge part in his identity today. While most art and news about Palestinians focuses on those who live as refugees or under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, it is rare to hear the voice of a Palestinian who was not expelled in 1948; who grew up in the country that became Israel.
Excerpt:
The play, I Am Yusuf and This is My Brother, which he has written and directed, imagines what it felt like to live through history. One of Zuabi's challenges, as a 33-year-old who has never known anything else, was to envisage life before 1948.
Frames of Reality: exhibition of images by Palestinian and Israeli photojournalists
Local Testimony, an annual exhibition that shows the best photojournalism taken in Israel and Palestine, this year includes a new co-existence project sponsored by the Peres Center for Peace.
Frames of Reality is a project that brings together 11 Palestinian and 12 Israeli photojournalists and documentary filmmakers. Their works are on display at the Local Testimony exhibition.
Below is a video clip of two of the participants showing and discussing their works and experiences - one is Israeli and one Palestinian.
Photo exhibition: Coal Mine/Gaza, by Eman Mohammed
Photographer Eman Mohammed focuses her lens on a little-known aspect of life in Gaza - the Al Habbash coal mine in Beit Hanoun, where the salary for a hard day's labor is between $3 and $5, plus a package of cigarettes.
The coal, which is used for nargilehs (traditional water pipes) and barbecuing, has been mined using traditional methods since early 2009, after the IDF destroyed the machinery.
Artsworld visits Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp. This pioneering project is the only professional venue for theatre and the arts in the north of the Palestinian occupied territories. Zakaria Zubeidi, the head of the al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade in Jenin in the West Bank, has now put down his weapons and believes that children's theatre is an important way to fight for Palestinian statehood.
Tel Aviv artists portray female suicide bombers as madonnas
The Israeli journalists' union on Thursday took down
a series of pictures that superimposed the faces of female Palestinian
suicide bombers on Madonna-and-child paintings after the images sparked
a public furor.
Yossi Bar-Mocha, the head of the National Federation of Israeli
Journalists, said his organization removed the pictures from its Tel
Aviv headquarters for fear they would offend people who lost relatives
in militant attacks.
"There is a majority in favor of removing the pictures... The main
problem is that the artists didn't tell us what the exhibition was
about beforehand and simply presented it as 'an exhibition of
pictures,'" said Bar-Mocha.
Click here to read the article on the Haaretz website.
Installation art on Tel Aviv beach mimics separation barrier
A styrofoam imitation of the separation on a Tel Aviv beach. Shelly Federman.
People arriving at Tel Aviv's beach Monday met an unexpected art display mimicking the West Bank security barrier.
Barriers: an examination of life with the wall
New York Times correspondent Isabel Kershner has covered Israel-Palestine for years. She knows her beat, and this shows in both her news reporting and her in-depth features.
'Barrier' is her riveting, humane examination of how Israel's controversial barrier has affected people on the ground.
Footnotes in Gaza: a graphic novel by Joe Sacco (updated)
Scroll down for update.
Footnotes in Gaza is the latest work by Joe Sacco, the graphic novelist who authored the critically acclaimed Palestine.
Inside Hamas: the untold story of militants, martyrs and spies
Palestinian journalist Zaki Chehab's Inside Hamas is reviewed in a New York Review of Books piece that covers three books about Hamas (the other two are Kill Khalid, by Paul McGeough, and Hamas in Politics, by Jeroen Gunning).
Excerpt:
Although Hamas itself is not yet a quarter-century old, it is important to recall that the earliest armed resistance to Zionist colonization was not nationalist, but rather pan-Islamist in inspiration. In his gossip- and fact-packed book Inside Hamas, Zaki Chehab, a pro-Fatah Palestinian journalist, reminds us that the namesake of Hamas's Qassam Brigades was, in fact, a Syrian who was educated at Cairo's al-Azhar University. When France occupied Syria in 1920, Ezzedine Qassam briefly led an armed cell, but soon fled to the safety of British-occupied Palestine. As a mosque preacher in Haifa he witnessed the surge in Jewish immigration that followed Hitler's rise, and began a clandestine campaign to arm Muslim fighters.
A Young Palestinian's Diary, 1941-1945: the life of Sami Amr
A professor of history at an American university has collated the translated diary of a young Palestinian man from Hebron who was in his early 20's during the last years of the British mandate.
While many new books on Israel/Palestine pore over the conflict and its lack of resolution, the details of identity formation, the political trials and triumphs on each side, few books give the reader a heart-felt tug that can come from the voice of youth. Among works by and about Palestinians, many books that share individuals’ lives have thus far appeared in Arabic. Indeed, there has been an increase in the number of memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies, on both sides of the historical conflict, but few come from the pens of young people as they struggle to fulfill dreams of education, employment, and marriage to that right person.
Omar Yussef, the Palestinian Hercule Poirot, stars in a fourth mystery novel
Omar Yussef is a fictional Palestinian detective in the West Bank who stars in a series of mystery novels by Matt Beynon Rees. Youssef is a 56 year-old schoolteacher from Bethlehem, a modest, decent man who is a recovering alcoholic, a loving husband a devoted father who also cares deeply for the students he teaches at a local UNRWA school.According to Rees, a former correspondent for TIME Magazine who lives in Jerusalem, Yussef is based on a real person, someone the journalist came to know over the years he spent covering the West Bank.
Raja Shehadeh wins Orwell Prize for "Palestinian Walks"
Raja Shehadeh, the acclaimed Palestinian writer, recently won the Orwell Prize for his non-fiction work, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a vanishing landscape.
Ian Black, Middle East editor for The Guardian, reviewed the book here.
Caricaturing the separation wall
(Photo by Tanya N)
The Largest Mural in Palestine is For Women
Under the patronage of Prime Minister Dr. Salam Fayyad, Palestine's largest mural is unveiled. Created jointly by Women's Affairs Technical Committee (WATC) and the Open Workshop for Culture and Arts (OWCA) to honor Palestinian women, it is the culmination of year-long activities centered on celebrating the contributions of women in culture. This project was supported by the EU which has provided almost 70% of the project budget that reached €72000.
The first Palestinian on the moon
Larissa Sansour is currently exhibiting in group show in Bahrain and has her first solo show in New York. Born in Jerusalem in 1973 to a Russian mother and a Palestinian father, educated in New York and London and living in Copenhagen, Sansour has exhibited internationally. Visitors to her shows in New York and Bahrain will encounter her video "A Space Exodus".
Photo exhibitions from Gaza to commemorate one year since the war
Elsewhereness, an online magazine that publishes art dealing with social issues, has published a special series to mark one year since the Gaza war. Female photojournalists Eman Mohammed and Eman Jomaa bring a particularly intelligent, sensitive (but not sentimental) eye to life in Gaza - both during and after the war.
Click here to view the photographs and read the biographies of the photographers.
The Parents Circle Family Forum (PCFF), a group of 500 bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families, is participating in a showing of comics designed to bridge the conflict. The exhibition is currently taking place at a New York art gallery.
Excerpt from the gallery's description of the exhibition:
Morning in Jenin is a richly detailed, beautiful and resonant novel examining the Palestinian and Jewish conflicts from the mid-20th century to 2002, (originally published as The Scar of David in 2006, and now republished after a new edit), author Susan Abulhawa gives the terrible conflict a human face. The tale opens with Amal staring down the barrel of a soldier's gun—and moves backward to present the history that preceded that moment. In 1941 Palestine, Amal's grandparents are living on an olive farm in the village of Ein Hod. Their oldest son, Hasan, is best friends with a refugee Jewish boy, Ari Perlstein as WWII rages elsewhere. But in May 1948, the Jewish state of Israel is proclaimed, and Ein Hod, founded in 1189 C.E., “was cleared of its Palestinian children...” and the residents moved to Jenin refugee camp, where Amal is born. Through her eyes we experience the indignities and sufferings of the Palestinian refugees and also friendship and love. Abulhawa makes a great effort to empathize with all sides and tells an affecting and important story that succeeds as both literature and social commentary.
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