06/10/15 – Sandy Tolan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Next up on the show is Sandy Toland.
Oh boy, I'm on the wrong tab too, aren't I?
Well, I'll tell you, I think it's fair to say, Sandy, as I troll through my tabs here looking for my You section, here it is.
People may well have read you before at tomdispatch.com.
Is that correct?
That's right.
Right.
A number of other places, Salon, Daily Beast, other places as well.
There you go.
And then you're the author of the books, The Lemon Tree and Children of the Stone, The Power of Music in a Hard Land.
That's the newest one, right?
That's correct.
Just came out in April.
Okay.
Now, the URL here is kind of a pain, so I'll tell you, just Google up Sandy and Musical Intifada for this article, A Musical Intifada in the West Bank.
So just Google Musical Intifada and Sandy and it'll come right up for you here.
And this is a very interesting story, well, of the West Bank and the occupation, larger politics, but also, of course, of this young girl.
What's her name?
I don't know how to say it right, so I'll let you, and please introduce her and her story.
Okay.
Alla Shalalda is the girl on the cover of the book.
She's now 17.
I think I met her when she was 12 or 13.
She is a Palestinian musician, a violinist, who was one of the first students at the music school that I document, founded by a young stone thrower of the first Palestinian intifada who was iconized.
His iconic image of the first intifada was captured in late 1987, throwing stones at his Israeli soldiers.
He then went on to become very good at music, founded a music school.
And Alla, the girl that you were asking me about, is on the cover of the book.
But the story I tell really throughout the book and in this article is of the times that she was, you know, at times she has been forced to stop at checkpoints, as every young and old Palestinian need to do.
There are hundreds of them throughout the West Bank.
And at one point, she was coming back from a concert and she was forced to play the violin for a soldier.
And it's those kinds of experiences that children throughout Palestine in this music school experience, just as other Palestinians do on a daily basis, hundreds of checkpoints in a land the size of Delaware.
So the book is a story about music, but it's also a story about resilience and strength and a kind of non-violent confrontation of the occupation on the part of Ramzi, the founder of the music school, and girls and kids like Alla and these wonderful young Palestinian musicians.
Now, tell the story of her being forced to play the violin for the IDF there.
Yeah, well, it was this particular incident was, I believe, in April of 2008.
And you have to bear in mind, Scott, I mean, it's interesting that we're speaking on June 10th.
This is the 48th, excuse me, the 48th anniversary of the end of the so-called Six-Day War, also known as the 1967 war, and also known as the beginning of the occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza.
And it's these children who really don't know, and really anyone under 50 who hasn't had the opportunity to travel outside of Palestine, they don't know anything but occupation.
So in a way, I mean, I describe this in the book and one of my chapters opens with Alla and her older sisters, who's a flutist, and some of the other kids coming back from a concert to Ramallah, and they're stopped at a checkpoint.
And it's called a flying checkpoint, one of 600 of these so-called closure obstacles.
And the soldier walks up and slides open the door and says, you know, he points at her blue violin case and said, what's that?
And she said, it's a violin.
And he said, do you know how to play?
And she says, yes.
He said, well, step out of the van.
And he says, I want you to play for me.
And his sister's yelling, don't play for him.
But she stood up and pulled out her violin and started playing this beautiful Arabic song called El Hawati, which means the beautiful girl.
And it was really quite a powerful moment.
And actually, I was just in the West Bank.
She's now 17.
And as I read about that incident from my book, she came on stage and actually played that same song live.
It was quite moving.
But during that time, in 2008, I believe it was, little did she or any of the other kids know that after she played, one of the other soldiers came up and was a bit more friendly and said, you know, I play the violin, too.
Could I just borrow your violin for a minute?
And another soldier came and they actually started playing for the kids with the kids' own instruments.
And these Palestinian children were sort of astonished at how could they be so mean to us on one hand and keep us under occupation and then in this moment seem like normal people.
And Arasha, I remember telling me that she was genuinely confused by this.
Well, now let me ask you.
I don't know if maybe, well, I'm sure it's the same story.
Maybe I misunderstood it the first time or just now the second time or I don't know what.
But can you clarify a little bit about I guess it seemed like I thought that the original incident there was, you know, a much more humiliating type of a thing.
Are you saying that they really humiliated her and made her play, but then the other soldier came over and he was kind of nice?
Or are you saying the original demand was not so bad in the first place?
No, no.
I'm saying the first thing.
I mean, it was the OK, that's what I thought it was.
This was like a real I mean, this is a 13 year old girl and this is an armed soldier with an American machine gun in his hand saying play for me in a, you know, humiliating her in a terrible kind of a way.
Right.
The last part of what happened was a very rare and kind of exceptionally unusual incident that the what happens doesn't take away from the first part at all.
Right.
That's just it almost makes it more of a humiliation that like, oh, here it's all harmless.
Let me play your own violin for you now.
Well, the fact is that the real meaning of, you know, there's sort of a double meaning in this incident because of this this one small act of kindness.
But the fact is that the message that all Palestinians get at all times when they're traveling under severe restrictions in the West Bank is one of humiliation and domination.
That is the central aspect of Israel's military occupation.
There was an incident that was just documented by B'Tselem, the premier and very well respected human rights group in Israel that documented the arrival of settlers at a swimming pool maintained by Palestinians in their own village, accompanied by soldiers who evicted the 70 or so Palestinians bathing in the pool to allow the settlers to bathe in the pool.
This is the kind of daily humiliation that unfortunately not only characterizes the occupation, but is more or less out of the of the view of most Americans.
I think if Americans really understood what was happening, we probably wouldn't put up with it as much as and allow tax dollars to go toward it.
The central reality of the of the occupation is humiliation, and it really can't stand up.
Eventually it has to fall under the weight of its own sort of moral decay.
Well, you think of the timing of this story of the pool here, where this is just a few days after the incident in McKinney, Texas, where the cops came and the one cop especially completely flipped out and went after and tackled the young black girl and all that.
And it's it's echoes of the old Jim Crow South that, you know, things certainly aren't perfect here, but they're better than that.
And I think we're proud that we don't have KKK segregated swimming pools in America now, this kind of thing.
And then here comes this exact kind of thing that we're proud to be over here being implemented right in front of our face there in Palestine on our dime, too.
And I'm sorry we got to go to this break.
We'll be right back with Sandy Tolan in just a minute.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Sandy Tolan about everyday life for occupied Palestinians and by way of telling the story of this young girl, Alaa, a musician, a violinist.
And we're talking about the story of her being humiliated and forced to play the violin for IDF soldiers at a checkpoint.
And then Sandy was mentioning this recent story from, I guess it's yesterday.
Oh, no, it was it was during April, but the story just came out.
It was documented by by B'Tselem, the human rights group.
And I think the report came out more recently.
Yeah, there's there's a write up at Mondoweiss about it today.
Soldiers expelled 200 Palestinians from pool to allow settlers to bathe instead.
You know, amazing stuff.
And, you know, I know you're not supposed to ever bring up Hitler, the Nazis, because there's a rule against that and whatever.
But, you know, the war didn't really start until thirty nine.
Right.
And the Nazis were in power in Germany and humiliating a lot of Jews and a lot of other people and mistreating them in a lot of ways, you know, long before the war and the Holocaust ever broke out.
And this sounds exactly like the violin story.
Sounds exactly like the kind of anecdote that I heard as a kid about how people were treated, especially Jews under the Nazis, where this kind of routine humiliation of a child just because they're the SS and what are you going to do about it?
And that's how they are.
And, you know, I've heard also many stories of people in the Soviet Union.
I'm not talking about the world's worst pogrom or the final solution, but just day to day anti-Semitism on the part of, you know, all the various different kinds of secret police and public ones under the USSR who treated Jews and others in this exact same kind of way.
And this is all sponsored by the American people that this kind of treatment of even kids.
I want to intervene here.
Look, I don't find those kind of historical analogies that useful to compare Israelis to Nazis.
I think you should look at it.
I mean, look, other people have pointed out that these these kinds of music, musical performances were also required of people in the concentration camps.
But beyond that, I think this calling Israelis Nazis is is using a label instead of describing this.
I'm not.
I'm actually I'm just talking about the event.
Right.
And I'm thinking more of like show me your papers at the train station type transgression rather than, again, the Holocaust.
I wasn't comparing it to the final solution.
I was comparing it to ritual humiliation on the part of unaccountable government officials.
Right.
So let's just call it what it is rather than saying it echoes this.
I mean, that's my that's my own opinion.
OK, but I'm just admitting that it does, because that's how I was raised to think about World War Two was this is how Nazis behave and this is why we fought them kind of thing.
I just that's my experience in going to government school in America.
Is this why we're the good guys?
Because we fight people who do things like this.
Right.
So so my my preference is to look at exactly what's happening.
Like I know a lot of people don't like the labels of apartheid or but but if you look at what's actually happening on the ground, you have to judge it on its own terms, which is separate and unequal treatment and the humiliation, whatever its historical echoes, the humiliation and the degradation and the complete lack of freedom that is forced upon the Palestinians speaks on its own terms.
And as Americans, we're supporting this through our tax dollars.
And as I said before, I don't think I don't think that this can abide.
This is a system of such deep injustice that I think the more it's exposed on its own terms for what it is, which is separate and unequal, which does carry echoes of apartheid, according to Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Prize winning archbishop of South Africa.
It does carry echoes of of Jim Crow.
When you look at this pool incident we've been discussing, Scott, and when you look at you know, you compare that to what just happened in Texas, where, you know, it's a state still tinged with the Confederacy.
There are it's hard to ignore ignore some of these some of these historical parallels.
I agree.
I think, you know, evoking Nazism in Israel is not a way to advance the conversation, though.
Well, right.
I mean, that's the thing.
It's whatever his name's law that you're never allowed to talk about how national socialism could apply in a historical analogy.
It's the one history we're not supposed to learn from because it's like the argument at absurdum.
Right.
Because it was a totalitarian government.
So they were for everything.
So you can compare anything to their policies, basically.
Right.
But that doesn't I but I don't think I'm being absurd in saying that this is the kind of thing that Nazi cops would have done to people at the train station for their own entertainment at the average civilian's expense and that kind of thing.
It's exactly that kind of anecdote.
You know, I personally don't think it's useful to compare Israelis to Nazis.
All right.
Well, how about, you know, my wife grew up in the Soviet Union.
She's Jewish and she was treated, again, not like it was in the middle of World War Two in the final solution or anything like that.
But her and her family were treated as third or fourth class citizens in the USSR and made to undergo just these kinds of humiliations.
Is it OK if I compare them to the.
Well, it's OK.
You can do whatever you want.
Africa is a good one, but not not never Germany.
I understand.
But it just seems kind of silly when you put it in context of you compare them to any other totalitarian government.
We don't have to agree on everything.
All right, I got you anyway.
So but now tell me the story of how she went back and went ahead and in a non humiliating way, kind of bested them by playing and going and doing a concert at the checkpoint for the people there and showing the IDF up.
So what one of the things that I write about in my book and Children of the Stone is, you know, what I really wanted to do, probably more than anything, is show what everyday life is for Palestinians, especially Palestinian children under a system of occupation that is getting close to its half century mark.
But I wanted to do it through the drama of this music school and by showing what children, how their lives really can be transformed.
I mean, you still have the the sort of concrete confinement of the occupation over their lives, and that's unavoidable.
But but within these chains, so to speak, you have children who are who are becoming not only more resilient and stronger, but but begin to see themselves in a different way.
Allah, you know, when she was playing that song for that soldier was doing it was such sort of pride and defiance.
And her big sister was so proud of her.
But it's not just this moment.
Her big sister is named Rasha and she plays the flute.
And she described to me in really eloquent terms about how much she was really transformed in her interior, not just not just in the sense of of the moment that she's playing the music, but how she began to see herself differently.
She began to see herself as as not so much an angry child who had been so devastated and traumatized by the second Palestinian Intifada, which was much more violent than the first, but by the fact that she saw herself as a resilient, self-respecting musician.
And this is how our teachers and her family began to see her.
And then I started doing some research into how music affects children in other war zones, in places like Bosnia, South Africa under apartheid, in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, you know, research that had been done by brain scientists and neurologists and musicologists and others that show that that, you know, your inner wiring can change, that this really ends up transforming children.
So that's a lot about the book is the strength, self-respect and not just a sort of kumbaya story where, oh, isn't it nice that these little children have put down their stones and are picking up musical instruments?
I mean, that on the surface is true, but also just as true or maybe more true is the fact that they're using this music as a form of resistance against the occupation and nonviolent confrontation to the soldiers.
One of the most amazing experiences I've ever had is seeing Allah and a bunch of other young Palestinian musicians march into one of the bleakest places on earth, the Kalandia checkpoint that separates Ramallah and Jerusalem.
And to the shock of the soldiers, set up their music stands and begin to perform Mozart's Symphony No.
6.
I have never seen anything like it.
It was one of the most amazing moments in my life as a journalist.
Yeah, well, and it is it's important just to see that, you know, they're surviving and declaring their humanity under that occupation.
And despite that, you can cage them like animals, but that doesn't turn them into animals.
They're not.
And that kind of behavior just toward them is simply not justified.
I'm sorry, we're out of time.
I'm sorry for the big argument.
I'm just been in a shape.
No, no, it's not.
It's not.
I don't want to have to agree on it.
Yeah, no, that's right.
All right.
So thanks very much for your time, Sandy.
Great to have you again.
OK.
All right, so that's Sandy Tolan, and he is the author of The Lemon Tree, an Arabid Jew and the Heart of the Middle East.
And you can find this great article, A Musical Intifada in the West Bank.
The URL is a pain, but just Google Sandy and a musical intifada.
It'll come right up for you.
Yeah, check it out.
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