Muzzlewatch is a subsidiary of Jewish Voice for Peace, which tracks efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy. This article describes an example of how Palestinian voices are being stifled for fear that they would displease….guess who?
The article on Muzzlewatch is entitled, Update on Marcel Khalife, Lebanese oud player and was posted yesterday by Cecilie Surasky.
We reported earlier that the San Diego Salvation Army refused to rent their auditorium to UN artist for peace Marcel Khalife because doing so would be unbalanced if he didn’t also share the stage with an Israeli.
Pitchfork media is reporting that United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization “Artist for Peace” oud player Marcel Khalife can play at the Kennedy Center , the Skirball Center and Boston’s Berklee College, but he won’t be playing at San Diego’s Joan B. Kroc Theatre at the Salvation Army’s Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center.
The center said that they’d need an Israeli to play on the same stage. Is it because Khalife is known for putting the poetry of Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish to music?
Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam called the Salvation Army to get the story straight from them.
Turns out that depending on one’s perspective. Either it was an understandable move, or a classic case of muzzling.
Richard writes:
I spoke with Capt. John VanCleef who told me that when first approached, an individual was to rent their hall for the Khalife concert. But in the course of time this changed and a group named Al Awda took the place of the individual as sponsor. The Salvation Army would have had no problem with an individual renting the hall for this concert. Nor would it have had a problem with most Arab organizations renting the hall. But as part of the vetting process, the Theater asked Al Awda to present information about its mission. After reading this information, the Army decided it could not allow this group to rent their facility:
Al-Awda unequivocally supports the fundamental, inalienable, individual and collective rights of all Palestinian refugees to return to their original towns, villages and lands anywhere in Palestine from which they were expelled…All Palestinians are entitled to the rights to self-determination, to political, economic and civil equality, and to live in a single democratic state for all its citizens in all of Palestine.
I want to pause here to say that while I do not agree with Al Awda’s one state solution and its demand to full implementation of the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees, I would not have refused them the right to rent the hall. However, given that I am not the Salvation Army and they have larger community issues to consider, I can understand why they chose not to go forward with the concert.
The Arabist has a different take:
It’s good that Richard got this independently checked, although I strongly disagree with him that the Salvation Army’s decision is understandable. I very much doubt it would have made the same decision if the organization trying to book the venue was the Zionist Organization of America, Hillel, or one of the countless groups that supports Israel. I would guess that the Salvation Army’s decision very much has to do with the well-known intimidation campaigns against pro-Palestinian organizations and individuals by Zionist groups, and that it chose to avoid the controversy and problems that would probably come with hosting an al-Awda event.
So essentially the problem is that Al-Awda, whose advocacy of right of return for the five million Palestinian refugees of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine-Israel, living around the Middle East in refugee camps, should not have a voice without a corresponding counter-voice that makes the case for nullifying their aspirations. Even peace activists can disagree on this matter.
However, the issue of right of return was supported only six months after the creation of the state of Israel by UN Resolution 194, and should be exposed to fair thinking Americans without an Israeli (read Zionist) perspective. To what degree should Americans be asked to nullify or make exceptions to their human rights agenda before our hypocrisy becomes evident?
For reference sake, Marcel Khalife (b. 1950, Amchit, Mount Lebanon) is a Lebanese, Maronite, composer, singer and oud (an Arabic lute) player, considered a Palestinian among the Palestinians, a Southerner among the South Lebanese and most commonly an Arab musician. From 1970 to 1975, he taught at the conservatory in Beirut. In 1976, he created Al Mayadeen Ensemble and became famous all over the world for songs like Ummi (My Mother), Rita w’al-Bundaqiya (Rita and the Rifle) and Jawaz al-Safr (Passport), based on Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry.
In 1999 he was granted the Palestine Award for Music. In turn, he contributed the financial portion of the award to the National Conservatory of Music at Birzeit University in Palestine. In 2005, Khalife was named UNESCO Artist for Peace.
what is a stiffle?
There you go again. Knocking my spelling. What we need here is an autospell checker. None of this optional crap. And how about a little grammar too.
I don’t think it’s quite accurate to refer to the Jordanians and Lebanese of Palestinian origin as “refugees.” Their great-grandparents and grandparents may have been “refugees” but that was generations ago, and certainly doesn’t have any bearing on the current situation. None of these people are “refugees” and none of them have ever lived in either Palestine or Israel. I think the real reason they continue to falsely refer to themselves as refugees is because they’ve been living off of the UN and other folks for 60 years and they want their gravy train to continue, apparently forever and forever. Enough. History has moved on. They need to move on too. Get some frigging jobs and save their money and buy some land in Jordan or Lebanon or some other country. There’s lots of land for sale in the world.
This is such an absurd claim. I mean, my great-grandparents and grandparents were thrown off land they owned in Russia and Poland during the pogroms around the time of WWI. They received no compensation of any sort whatsoever, and no help from anyone at that time or since then. Does this mean I have the right to go to Russia or Poland and take possession of land just because my great-grandparents or grandparents owned it? Of course not. Anyone would laugh if I suggested such a thing. How ridiculous can you get? It’s been 60 years. The land in Israel is Jewish land now. Get over it. Encouraging them in this fantasy isn’t going to help them. On the contrary, it delays the day they accept that time has passed.
While I agree with parts of this, you seem to be ignoring the way Palestinians have been treated in Jordan and Lebanon. They have been treated as refugees by their host governments.
They are refugees officially and they have been supported by the UN for 60 years. Palestinians are not Jordanians, nor Jordanians, Palestinians. That is part of a propaganda meme which contends that all Arabs are alike. Ignorance, ignorance.
The Palestinians living in Jordan and other surrounding Arab countries are living mainly in “refugee camps,” instituted and supported by the United Nations. They are in those camps as a consequence of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and then Israel in 1948, so that what you call “Jewish land” is nothing less than stolen Palestinian land. UN Resolution 194 supported the return of those refugees only six months after their ethnic cleansing. That act on the part of Ben Gurion and others was a human rights injustice, which caused the deaths of many Palestinians. In 1948, the Palestinians owned 90% of Palestine; Jews owned only 7% of that land. We are talking here about people with deads to their property who had been living in over 470 villages and towns, where their ancestors had lived for over a thousand years, when Jerusalem was known as Al Quds. Although Israel attempted to bulldoze most of those villages into the ground, while building on others, those grounds still hold the Palestinian memory, the memory of an entire people. You cannot erase a people so easily, as the Holocaust attests. It may sound strange but there are Palestinian refugees actually living in Israel as citizens, who are not permitted by the government to take back their property or the villages of their ancestors.
Finally, the suggestion that land is Jewish or Arabic is pretty silly, unless you believe in God given rights, in which case the argument becomes absurd. This God is obviously not the one worshipped by Palestinians.
The rights of the Palestinians and the injustices perpetrated against them will not go away so easily. The very idea that a Palestinian, whose parents or grandparents owned land in a village now in Israel has no rights, but that someone who is only a quarter Jewish can emigrate to Israel and purchase land, does, is the worst expression of ethnocentrism and prejudice.