All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Since I wore radio, I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Sandy Tolan.
He's the author of the lemon tree, an Arab, a Jew and the heart of the Middle East.
He's associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC.
And he's at work on a new book, Operation Mozart, about music and life in Palestine.
He blogs at Ramallah Cafe dot com.
Welcome to the show, Sandy.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And this is an excellent piece, brand new at Tom Dispatch.
It will certainly be running.
Well, 99 percent chance it'll be running under Tom Engelhardt's name in his archive at antiwar dot com tomorrow.
And in our viewpoint section, they're a great piece.
It begins by saying, hey, look, here's all these things going on in the world, you know, high above life as it really is in the West Bank.
And you say that you just spent the summer living in the West Bank and you have such a great write up of what it's really like to be there, what the permanent occupation of the West Bank by the Israeli military and the settlers is.
And so I was hoping you could just kind of get into that and tell us your story here.
Yeah, well, thank you.
Thank you for having me.
It's really a pleasure to be able to.
Well, I don't know if pleasure is the right word, but it's an honor to be able to talk about it.
I did spend the last four and a half months on the road from my home in Los Angeles, where I just returned to a few days ago.
Most of the time I was in the West Bank, about three months worth, also Lebanon and Egypt a little bit.
But the primary reason was to report my new book, which you mentioned.
And it's about music and it's about a guy who started a series of music schools after himself having been a child of the first Intifada of 1987, a guy named Ramzi Abu Adwan.
And in beginning in 87, the first Intifada, of course, the kids and all kinds of Palestinian youths were throwing stones in an attempt to try to end the occupation back then and create the conditions for a state of the Palestinians' own state.
There was a lot of hope back then that that would happen.
My book was about what happened to Ramzi and how he went off and studied music and came back and then began a series of music schools for these children.
So they get some idea that there's something else for them.
So I went this summer to work on that, but also, you know, the sort of subtext of the book is to say, OK, well, what is life actually like here in the West Bank?
It's amazing that there have been so many, you know, millions, literally millions of words written about this issue and this place in the world, the so-called Holy Land.
And so precious little actually talks about how people are affected by one of the world's longest occupations.
And it's it's hard to imagine how that's the case.
But but just the daily life of people who are affected by what is now a forty four and a half year old occupation is just kind of mind boggling.
I mean, you have, of course, the checkpoints and the roadblocks and the wall and and you have the restrictions of travel and you have the inability for Palestinians to so much as drill a well underneath their feet.
And you also have what a lot of people don't realize.
You have 60, you know, the West Bank is the size of Delaware, which is our third smallest state, the the original Palestine, you know, which includes Israel.
Now, the historic Palestine was the the size of it's about the size of New Jersey.
But if you look at what the Palestinians agreed to, most of the Palestinians agreed to the Palestinian Authority, Nasser Arafat back, you know, beginning in 1988 with the Oslo process that was signed in 93, they agreed to a state on the size, you know, of West Bank and Gaza and 22 percent of historic Palestine.
For them, that was the historic compromise.
But now Israel controls militarily, controls 60 percent of the West Bank.
So what you're really talking about is relative and very limited freedom within the cities on about in other areas, on about 40 percent of the West Bank.
So now you're down to, you know, close to 10 percent of the original historic Palestine and the ability to to to move around is severely restricted.
The ability to pray in Jerusalem is is off limits to most Palestinians.
They can't get through the wall.
They can't get permission.
They can't go to the sea, which is part of historic Palestine.
They can't travel there.
There's some Israelis, good Samaritans who actually smuggling Palestinians so they can go see the sea.
It's just such a mythic part of Palestine.
And then just the violence, you know, the number of people who are in prison.
I mean, one estimate says that 40 percent of all Palestinian men since 1967 have spent time in Israeli jails or prisons, which means that affects almost every single family in the West Bank and Gaza.
So I'm happy to talk specifically about some of the things I saw.
But that was basically my journey was to do a story about these beautiful students in this amazing music school and these other musical efforts to create a sense of hope and spirit and freedom in the midst of this and sort of, you know, the sort of indomitable human spirit and the beautiful story of how this was built.
So it's not all sort of a depressing story.
But beneath that is how do people contend day to day in their lives with with a daily occupation?
Well, we have plenty of time, I think, with the two segments, so I hope that we can talk about the music school and some of that toward the end here.
But as far as what they call facts on the ground and the the existence of the settlements, the expansion of the settlements and the separation wall, I was wondering if you could kind of give a portrayal of what that's really like.
I think you say in the article that you would play a game where you drive and see if you could go a whole minute in a row without seeing a symbol or an example of the military occupation in your line of sight.
Yeah, I mean, it was it was.
I actually I wrote along with a lot of friends and colleagues who would take me from one place to another, whether it was with the music students or with, you know, journalist colleagues, Palestinian colleagues of mine.
And, you know, I actually would say, let me see if I can go an entire minute.
And I did that a number of occasions, you know, and sometimes, you know, you go through and you you curve around through a kind of a narrow passage and there'll be a high hillside on each side.
And, you know, you go if that was long enough, you could actually go a minute without seeing evidence of the occupation.
And there were other places where you could do that.
But generally, if you look around and you're you're driving through the West Bank and it's such a striking difference from when I reported my my other book about the region, the Lemon Tree, back in when I finished my reporting there at the end of 2004, I believe.
And when I came back in 2007 and every year since, I've been back just about every year since the change is dramatic and incremental.
But if you've been away for a few years, it's really dramatic.
You can't it's very difficult to be in the West Bank and not see evidence of the occupation, whether it's, of course, one of the hilltop settlements, which are so ubiquitous.
But even if you're in an area where you can't see that, there's likely to be, you know, an Israeli jeep patrol going along Palestinian land.
There will be a sign saying, you know, restricted area in English, Arabic and Hebrew, which is, you know, the so-called Area C, which is, you know, these so-called restricted military zones.
There'll be a watchtower.
There'll be an encampment.
There'll be some, you know, indication that the land is being transformed.
And that's the thing that I think is most striking to me.
You know, when people talk about the two state solution, you know, some people are opposed to it on the grounds of right of return.
But even if you leave that issue aside for the moment, it's really hard to imagine how you can even get a two state solution given the utter transformation of the landscape.
I mean, you have the settlement of Ariel, which is, you know, calls itself a city.
And, you know, in some sense, it is a city.
It's 20,000 people inside the West Bank, almost a third of the way inside the West Bank.
And then you have Mali Al-Dunim with 34,000 people.
These are huge populations.
And how are you going to be a viable state is really hard to know.
We've got to go out and take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Sandy Tolan.
The new piece is at TomDispatch.com.
It's the occupation, stupid.
All right, y'all, welcome back, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Sandy Tolan.
He's got a new piece at TomDispatch.com, the occupation that time forgot, aka it's the occupation, stupid.
And when we went out to break, Sandy, you were talking about how these settlements are so big in the West Bank that it's hard to imagine that anyone could ever make a state out of the West Bank of any kind.
And I wonder whether, let's say for, you know, I don't know, Benjamin Netanyahu went sane or something and decided he was going to close down all the settlements and have the IDF bring all those Jews back out of the occupied territory and into Israel and let the West Bank go, then would he have a civil war on his hands?
I mean, it sounds to me like, I mean, if the settlers are the most right wing nationalists, greater Israel inspired people in the first place that they could have.
And aren't there examples of them having a major problem trying to close down any of these settlements?
Well, I mean, the settlers themselves, we we do need to remember that.
Yeah.
I mean, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by by a zealot connected to to this movement, as I recall.
But and so I have two minds about that.
One is, yeah, I mean, this is Shimon Peres, who actually was a champion for some of the early settlements.
People don't realize that often.
But, you know, he was fond of saying, you know, you could have a revolution.
You're talking about, you know, 500000 people, if you include the East Jerusalem settlements.
And so, you know, what what the practical, you know, practically speaking, what the talk has been over the last 15 years or so is swaps that would involve, you know, land that the Palestinians would get in exchange for land that where some of the settlements are, where where this broke down and they actually came not that close.
But but the closest they've come in recent years is is when the Olmert government of Israel refused to to turn over Mali Adumim, which is well inside the West Bank.
It has 34000 settlers and and the settlement of Ariel, which is a third of the way into the West Bank, basically halfway from from the sea to to the eastern edge of the West Bank.
The wall actually goes well off the so-called Green Line that divides Israel from the West Bank and and absorbs Ariel inside the Israeli side, even though Ariel itself is a third of the way inside the West Bank.
So it's really those two settlements that that made the latest deal impossible.
I mean, I think there would have been a lot of problems with that deal anyway.
But it's why Mahmoud Abbas, who is the you know, up till now, has been the most compromising of all the Palestinian leaders.
Even he wouldn't approve that.
And that's why it fell.
But there would be in theory there'd be a land swaps.
But but those two settlements, Israel is determined to never give up.
And under the Netanyahu government, he says we'll never give up the Jordan Valley.
I mean, you have people there living, you know, in the so-called Area C, which is the restricted military area.
Palestinians can't move at all in these.
I mean, it's really hard for them to move.
They can't make improvements on their land.
They can't even smooth out a road in these areas.
They want to retain control of these areas, the Jordan Valley and other areas of Area C and not give up East Jerusalem, not give up these big settlements.
So it's really the the Palestinians that haven't had a partner for peace in recent years, not the other way around, like like people like to say.
Well, there's that video of Netanyahu saying that, well, we'll just call everything a security zone around any military base, a military necessity.
And that's our big loophole through the agreement that says we're supposed to respect anybody's property whatsoever.
And this is this is the whole issue of security is is what has I think it's really a matter of of of what becomes the master narrative in in our culture and in and certainly in Israel, although there's more criticism of Israel's policy in Israel than there is in the United States.
Interestingly, I mean, with some exceptions, including your show, but but you're looking at this idea of security as the only thing that's important now.
Of course, Israel and Israelis deserve to be secure.
So do Palestinians.
But the issue of freedom is never on the agenda, it seems.
And this is where there's a huge deficit.
I mean, the idea that a child who's 10 years old with her violin going to a concert from one part of the West Bank to the other should be stopped at a checkpoint by a soldier.
This is a girl I interviewed this summer and told to get out of the van and unzip her violin case and prove that the violin and then play something.
Play me a song, the soldier said.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that scars people for, you know, for a long, long time.
Well, you know, yesterday we had a daily life.
Yesterday we had a debate on the show between Adam Lankford and Robert Pape about the cause of suicide bombing.
And one thing that they agreed on the whole show is that occupation drives people crazy and particularly as as Pape, I'm sure, would emphasize when the people doing the occupying look different, speak different, have a different religion than you.
That makes it all the worse.
And this has been going on for almost 45 years now.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I have I think that that rage and frustration does sometimes drive people to extremes.
I think also the strategy of suicide bombing by some of the Palestinian factions after the second Intifada, you could say, well, they were they were pushed into this by Israeli violence that, you know, was a five to one ratio of casualties before the suicide bombings even started.
That may all be true, but it was a disastrous.
And, you know, morally, it's not a defensible strategy.
You can say, well, the the the Gaza casualty rate was 100 to one.
That's not moral either.
I agree.
But but what happened to the suicide bombing strategies by some of the factions, whatever the rage and frustration of the individuals, you know, I've met some of these some some of the people who contemplated this and whatever their motivations and their frustrations and how much they saw their own family, in one case, a brother crippled by by an Israeli bullet, the strategy gave Israel cover for all kinds of retaliatory and quasi defensive measures.
And the wall has been justified on the basis of that.
And most people accept that.
Well, I think you make Pape's point very well that it's an organized campaign.
It's a tactic in a war by an organization and that being depressed isn't enough to make it happen because of all the people, you know, you just look at since they made this strategic decision to call off the suicide bombing campaign, there hasn't been one.
But the point I was really trying to get to was the stress, the post-traumatic shock.
I mean, you look at our soldiers coming home from our wars and how messed up they are.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Fallujah for a minute or of a occupant of the West Bank who, like you say, this little girl who has to display her violin skills or whatever for these people in order to just get where she's going and has to, you know, kind of deal with that, you know, metaphysical rape in a way for the rest of her life.
This is the kind of thing that really crushes human spirits.
Well, you know, the thing is that it's I mean, one thing that I absorbed from living there for three months is, you know, I've been there probably 12, 15 times, but I've never spent this much time continuously in the West Bank.
And I lived there and I rented a flat and so on to research this book, Operation Mozart.
And just seeing how it affects families on a day to day basis, you know, so many families.
I mean, I don't know if I'd say the majority, but like everywhere you turn, somebody's got an uncle or a brother or a son or a father, cousin in jail, in prison, and they don't know when they're going to get back off and they can't go visit them.
You know, I, you know, I was walking down the street with one kid who's now makes violins and he's studying violin making in London.
He said, oh, yeah, this is where I was.
He hears this bullet hole in the door jam.
That's where my cousin was shot.
We during the Second Intifada around, you know, 2002, we broke the curfew to go buy bread.
And he was with this kid.
And it's almost matter of fact, because he told me this amazing thing.
He said, you know what?
I got a chance to go to Italy when I was 15.
He was invited by by a teacher who is Italian to come and visit.
He said, I was so amazed when I got there.
I thought everybody lived under occupation around the world.
And then I saw you could drive so far without a wall and you could drive so far and see so far without no checkpoints.
And he said it was so happy.
And then I was so sad because we don't have that in my country.
And this is this is sort of like, you know, this is really it's tragic and it's completely unacceptable.
And it's fine to talk about how everybody needs to be secure.
But you can't use that to take away someone's freedom.
Yeah.
Now, can I keep you one more segment to talk about the good part of this?
Yes, of course.
OK, great.
Stay tuned, everybody.
We'll be back with more from Sandy Tolan, Tom Dispatch dot com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Sandy Tolan.
He's the author of The Lemon Tree, an Arab, a Jew and the heart of the Middle East.
He is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
And his new book is coming out soon, I guess.
It's called Operation Mozart about music and life in Palestine.
He blogs at Ramallah Cafe dot com.
And he's got a new piece at Tom Dispatch dot com, which will certainly be running an anti-war dot com tomorrow under Tom Englehardt's name.
It's the occupation that time forgot.
The state to which the UN may grant membership is disappearing.
What state at all?
All right.
So now let's talk about this new book.
You mentioned that I think a story from your first book was you met a guy whose life had been changed during the first Intifada and he created this music school.
Yeah, this is a kid that I actually did a profile and I do a lot of work for NPR and I did a piece back in 98.
I met these posters all around Ramallah that showed this little boy, eight years old, throwing a stone at this rage and fear in his eyes and, you know, sort of a straight on shot of this kid.
And then superimposed over that in the same poster was a young man pulling a string across his bow, across the viola.
And it was the same guy.
And I thought, wow.
And I was doing research for what would become my book, The Lemon Tree.
And I thought, I have to meet this guy.
And I went and met him in a refugee camp in Ramallah.
And at the time he was only 18.
He said, you know, I have this dream.
I want to get really good at the viola.
And I want to go and study and come back and start music schools all over Palestine and show the world that we Palestinians are like anybody else.
And we can be, you know, I want to be in the first national symphony of Palestine.
I want to show the world that we are here on the map.
And I thought, wow, what a vision for an 18-year-old boy who was, you know, raised in the sort of fire of the Intifada, the first Intifada.
Anyway, I kept in touch with him for a little while and then lost track of him.
And then in December 2009, I was working on some other stories in the West Bank.
And I walk in to this restaurant and by chance I run into him again, Ramzi.
And I said, Ramzi, what are you doing here?
I thought because I had heard he had gone and actually seen him in France where he was studying the viola at a conservatory, he had gotten really good and come back.
And I said, what are you doing?
He goes, well, I'm opening up music schools all over Palestine.
And, you know, my sort of my hair is on my arms stood up.
I thought, you know, how did he do that?
I mean, 18 years old.
I mean, poor kid from a refugee camp.
And he managed to do it.
And the story of what he went through as a child in the Intifada and then how he in the sort of furnace of the West Bank and the conflict and the struggle for freedom and the occupation of Israel and how they nevertheless managed him and a lot of other people, people who left their careers or at least suspended them in France and the UK and Germany and the United States, how that how that all happened is the story of my book, which I'm calling Operation Mozart.
That's awesome.
So how many schools has he opened up so far, then?
Well, I mean, he's got one school is called Al-Qamunjati, which is Arabic for the violinist.
But it's he's also got branches, you know, as a school in Jenin.
And and then they they're in a lot of the refugee camps.
They're in a couple of refugee camps in Lebanon.
But but, you know, so part of it is just sort of the whole drama of how this happened.
But within that, each each, you know, chapter, each page hopefully will be will also reveal what life is like there through this sort of central drama that I want to feel like a novel of the of the making of the school and of Ramzi's own kind of amazing life.
There's going to be a story about what you know, what it's like in to to live under occupation to be a 10 year old girl who is just trying to play the violin and has to show her violin at a checkpoint and play it for a soldier.
You know, there there are, you know, some other kinds of stories about the sort of rise and fall of of hope of of an independent state in, you know, some people were skeptical, but other people very optimistic that there could be a state around the time of the early time of Oslo.
And that's the time around the time that I met Ramzi.
And, you know, he got to be close with the Israeli composer Daniel Barenboim, who with Edward Said started an orchestra called the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, which plays around the world.
And Ramzi was part of that orchestra.
But increasingly, there have been calls to boycott the orchestra because there are a lot of Israelis in it.
Other people say, no, we should have cultural boycotts.
And Ramzi has sort of been in the middle of all this.
And and this year, for the first time, he did decline to go to the play with the orchestra as they were playing all nine Beethoven symphonies.
So I happened to go to Germany and I interviewed Barenboim and Edward Said's widow, Mariam, and Ramzi about all this.
So in a way, the the arc of the conflict and the hopes and the and the sort of devastation of of the occupation are kind of going to be on every page.
But but hopefully readers will feel like they're also reading this kind of riveting drama of of the building of a music school.
So it'll be kind of a novel and a history book in disguise at the same time.
Well, in your article, again, it's The Occupation That Time Forgot at TomDispatch.com.
You talk about this kind of impromptu orchestra session at the checkpoint or Yeah, yeah.
It was really actually, Scott, I'd say it's one of the one of the most moving experience I've ever had in my 30 some year career as a journalist.
Ramzi and his music teacher colleagues decided that they wanted to somehow confront the occupation with what they would call a musical intifada.
And they decided, you know, Columbia, the checkpoint at Columbia used to be a sort of a simple, relatively simple checkpoint.
It's now essentially an international border crossing.
It's got the 25 foot wall.
It's got these cage like corridors with, you know, a series of, you know, floor to ceiling, seven foot high turnstiles where people click in and those, you know, with the the ability to secure a permit, which is not that many people, you know, are able to go through the Columbia checkpoint from Ramallah and go towards Jerusalem.
Increasingly, fewer and fewer people are able to do that.
And it's Columbia is kind of a symbol of how Israel does not have any intention of sharing Jerusalem, as Benjamin Netanyahu has clearly stated.
So these the people at the music school, El Kamenjaki, decided they were going to go to the checkpoint, stand right in front of the bars, right in front of the Israeli soldiers on the other side and play Mozart and Georges Bizet.
And so I called this little blog I did for my own blog, which is Ramallah Cafe Operation Mozart.
And I'm thinking of calling the book Operation Mozart.
They just set up.
It was like an operation.
They like got out of the bus.
They took their and because this is Area C, they're not supposed to have these kinds of so-called shenanigans.
And they just stood up, set their music stands up.
You know, Jason Crompton, the American pianist who is the conductor of the Ramallah Youth Orchestra, got out and this this little girl, Allah, the one I was talking about before and her, you know, colleagues, you know, there's like a 40 person orchestra of faculty and students.
And they just started playing Mozart Symphony No.
Six.
And I tell you, all these Palestinians who are about to cross in, you know, with the permits, they just stopped.
And people were just like amazed.
There were smiles and people were standing with their mouth open.
Even the soldiers started looking through the bars.
You know, there was a question about whether they would try to stop it because this kind of thing has happened in the past, but they didn't.
And these people, the band played on, so to speak.
And the Palestinians, I mean, it was this this really Columbia is a really, really grim place.
And it was transformed into this like for this moment, into this place of joy.
And the children were so thrilled at what they had done.
And Allah, the little 13 year old, the one who had been stopped at the checkpoint I told you about earlier by the soldier and forced to play the violin for him.
She told me she was back on the bus with this big smile.
She said, you know, that was the greatest concert of my life.
Well, she's only 13, so hopefully she'll have lots of more chances.
But it was really an astonishing thing.
And it's a symbol of both the music and the conflict at the same time.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and that's a great place to leave it.
Thanks very much for your time.
And for you, Scott, it was really good to be with you.
All right, everybody, that is Sandy Tolan.
His new piece at Tom Dispatch dot com is called The Occupation That Time Forgot.
And he's an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication Journalism at USC.
The last book is The Lemon Tree.
The new one is Operation Mozart.
We'll be right back.
