🎵 2022-03-12 17:02:00 – Paris/France.
DALIAT AL-CARMEL (AFP) — “Yalla, yalla, raise your hands! Israeli Druze singer Mike Sharif shouts in Arabic to the Palestinian crowd rocking to a Hebrew hit at a wedding in the West Bank.
The scene, all the more unusual as it took place in Yatta, a Palestinian village near Hebron and a place of frequent friction with the Israeli army and Jewish settlers, created a buzz on social networks and local media.
“I had prepared three hours of performance in Arabic only. After half an hour, everyone – the families of the bride and groom, the guests – asked me to sing in Hebrew,” Sharif told AFP, interviewed in the Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel, in northern Israel.
The Druze, an Arabic-speaking minority descended from Shia Islam, number around 140 in Israel and the Golan Heights.
Nicknamed "the Druze wonderkid" after winning a TV competition at the age of 12, Sharif - now in his 1990s - shot to fame with his Mizrahi (Eastern) pop songs in the XNUMXs in Israel, but also in West Bank, Gaza and Arab countries. .
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“I have always belonged to everyone,” says the self-proclaimed “ambassador of peace” between Israelis and Palestinians.
Israeli Druze singer Mike Sharif is pictured during an interview with AFP in the village of Daliyat al-Karmel in northern Israel on January 10, 2022. (Jalaa Marey/AFP)
“Hebrew in Hebron, Arabic in Tel-Aviv”
From the beginnings of Mizrahi pop, influenced by the Jewish cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, reciprocal influences were established with the music of neighboring Arab territories.
Today, the popularity of artists like Eyal Golan or the young Eden Ben Zaken has reached Palestinian society.
At the same time, big names in Arabic music — like Umm Kulthum and Farid al-Atrash — have long been popular among Israeli Jews.
For Sharif, this musical proximity should make it possible "to bring everyone together" and help to put an end to conflicts.
“I sing in Hebrew in Hebron, in Arabic in Tel-Aviv and Herzliya. I sing in both languages and everyone sings on both sides,” he said.
“Music can contribute to peace. Politics doesn't bring people together that way.
His show Yatta, however, drew waves of criticism and even threats from both sides, with some Palestinians and Israelis calling him a “traitor” – the former for singing in Hebrew in the West Bank, the latter for performing at a Palestinian wedding.
And after saying he wanted to be “the first Israeli singer to perform in the Gaza Strip,” the territory controlled by Hamas terrorists that Israelis cannot enter, he dropped the idea “due to tensions,” Sharif said.
"Emotional experience"
Oded Erez, a popular music expert at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, links the notion of music as a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians to the "Oslo years" of the early 1990s after the signing of the interim peace accords.
Jewish singers like Zehava Ben or Sarit Hadad performed Umm Kulthum songs in Palestinian cities in Arabic, he recalled, but according to the musicologist, this phenomenon collapsed with the political failure of the peace accords. 'Oslo.
Sarit Hadad. (Kobi Gideon/Flash 90)
“This shared investment in shared music, style and sound is not a platform for political change or political reconciliation per se, you would need to explicitly politicize it, mobilize it politically, for it to become that,” he said of current cultural music. Trades.
Today, the musical affinity between Palestinians and Israelis is reduced to the bare essentials, "more physical and emotional than intellectual", he says.
Request from Palestinian revelers at Yatta's wedding was 'not a request for Hebrew per se', but rather for Sharif's 'hits' of the 80s and 90s, when 'his music was flowing' and certain songs entered in the "canon" of marriage. Erez said.
The same goes for the title "The sound of gunpowder", written in 2018 in honor of a Palestinian armed gang leader from a refugee camp near Nablus in the West Bank, which is played several times during Israeli weddings, Erez said.
"When there's music, people disconnect from all the wars, politics, differences of opinion," Sharif said.
“They forget everything, they just focus on the music. »
ToI staff contributed to this report.
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