Oud Festival in Jerusalem

Every year the Confederation House of Jerusalem with the help of the Jerusalem Foundation and the municipality present an Oud Festival which consists of some of the best oud concerts of all different varieties. This year's festival included such works as "The Arab-Jewish Ensemble", "The Algerian Tradition", and "A Tribute to Oud Artist Mounir Bashir". Tonight featured three amazing performers - two of them Palestinians from the Galilee playing together with their good friend of over twenty years, veteran Israeli guitarist and newly religious Jew, Ehud Banai. They played to a mixed audience of Arabs, and both secular and religious Jews.

The concert started with George Sam'an on the Oud and Salem Darwish on the Darabuka singing some traditional Arabic Galilean folk songs. Then George Sam'an spoke a few very moving words about friendship and brotherhood before calling out his close friend for the past 20 years, popular Israeli folk singer Ehud Banai who because of his newly religious observance was wearing a yarmulke (skullcap) and tzizit. From then on Ehud Banai and George and Salem would switch off in a fusion of Hebrew, Arabic, modern, pop, and folk. Ehud Banai would sing a Jewish Sabbath liturgical piece while George would intersperse it with Arabic. When George and Salem started singing village love songs in Arabic, Ehud would jump in to the tune with his own Hebrew interpretation. The evening was beautiful and moving and probably only something that would occur in Israel (contrary to the impression you might get from certain media reports).

Haaretz has a wonderful interview with Ehud Banai here discussing his views on the expropriation of religion in the name of causes he objects to.

On Thursday the Oud Festival will feature Amal Murkus singing a tribute to Fairuz. Amal Murkus is an Israeli-Palestinian who lives in the Galilee and is a self proclaimed communist. She has been championed by famous Israeli singers such as David Broza and has insisted on having her first album (titled Amal-hope in Arabic) produced in Israel by an Israeli recording studio instead of abroad.

I was born in Israel, I live in Israel, I am a citizen of Israel, and I think this is within my rights to make my own CD in my own country, as other Israeli singers make their own CD's. So I started to be stubborn. I intended to make my CD just in Israel."

She is the first Arab to record on an Israeli label (wikipedia).

The woman who she will be singing a tribute for is the famous Lebanese singer Fairuz who also sang Arab nationalist songs about Jerusalem and Palestine. Whatever one may think of certain practices of the government of Israel, the fact that the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem would actually fund this type of show demonstrates, to Israel's credit, a very independent, liberal, and self-reflective streak in Israeli society which would definitely not occur in any of the surrounding authoritarian countries let alone certain other Western democracies.