One man’s search for harmony on the West Bank

posted on: Jul 19, 2015

In the spring of 1996, a pair of bullet-proof Chevy Suburbans pulled into the West Bank refugee camp of Al Amari, bearing an American chamber-music ensemble to teach music to the camp’s children. The Oslo process had brought a brief lull to 48 years of Israeli-Palestinian hostility, an interim Palestinian state in nearby Ramallah and a promise of something the country had never really seen: normality.

Ramzi fled from the soldiers’ bullets down the alleys and across the rooftops of the Al Amari camp.
This well-meaning silliness was typical of the “diplomatic cultural initiatives” that often occur in such thaws, devised in this case by the US Consulate General in Jerusalem. The seven-mile journey, taking hours to get past checkpoints, was all for one day’s teaching of foreign music to kids who’d grown up among tanks and barbed wire. Yet something magical happened that day for one of those children, Ramzi Aburedwan.

At 17, among the oldest assembled, he was certainly the most well-known. A photojournalist’s image of Ramzi at eight, grimly but determinedly throwing a stone at Israeli tanks, had made him the icon of the first intifada, the six-year uprising (1987-93) against occupation and the growth of Israeli settlements. The eldest of four children living with their grandfather, he’d been known in the camp as a quiet, determined boy of the streets, delivering newspapers on a bicycle his grandfather had salvaged from the trash. That street knowledge had kept him alive on the day he threw his first stone, with his parkour-like flight from the bullets of the soldiers’ Galil assault rifles down the alleys and across the rooftops of Al Amari.

By 1996 he was a determined young man with almost no English and a pronounced stutter, who surprised the visitors by sounding an almost perfect G on a viola during his lesson. Before their return to Jerusalem, the ensemble performed Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G Minor. One element of that music changed Ramzi’s life, instantly and forever.

Source: www.theguardian.com