Palestinians File Objection to U.S. Plan to Build New Embassy on Stolen Land in Jerusalem

Editor’s Note: Originally published by New Frame

When Mo’min Swaitat stumbled upon thousands of cassettes in a dusty music shop in his home town of Jenin, he did not know that the treasure trove would lead him to uncover a significant moment in history. His journey across oceans led him to dig up a rare lost album, Riad Awwad’s Intifada 1987, found 34 years after it was originally recorded.

The album’s backstory unfolds in 1987 Palestine amid the First Intifada, mass uprisings by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip aimed at ending Israeli occupation. A week into the Intifada, multi-instrumentalist Awwad gathered his three sisters, Hanan, Alia and Nariman, and their friend, famed poet Mahmoud Darwish, to record an album of 11 songs in their living room in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Awwad printed 3 000 tapes and circulated them to neighbouring cities. Upon release, the Israeli military seized the copies. But more than three decades later, Swaitat uncovered a mysterious unmarked tape containing the lost album.

An Unlikely Connection

An actor, playwright and director, Swaitat started his career in theatre at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp in 2007. There, the theatre’s founder, activist and filmmaker Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was assassinated in 2011 for his powerful political work, mentored him. In 2012, Swaitat received a scholarship to study in London, where he now lives.

Swaitat went to Palestine with a German film crew in 2020, with the intention of staying for three weeks to film a documentary about Mer-Khamis. A week after he arrived, however, the world went into lockdown and he was unable to return. He stayed for a year at his parents’ home in Jenin.

Through the help of a family friend, he stumbled upon an old music shop, Taariq Cassettes, an oasis of thousands of Palestinian music cassettes. The shop had closed down years ago, but in its heyday had doubled up as a label that released tapes from the Palestinian archive, including revolutionary sounds, jazz, disco, funk, wedding and traditional music. The label had been defunct for the past 20 years and there were roughly 12 000 tapes in storage.

“It was completely abandoned. They allowed me to go inside the storage and look into what kind of music they had released as a label,” Swaitat says in an interview over Zoom.

An Archive of History 

For eight months, Swaitat went back and forth between the shop and his house, setting up his listening equipment in the space and searching for sounds of interest. He listened to as many tapes as possible.

Initially, Swaitat was looking for his own family archive, intending to make a music documentary. “I’m a Palestinian Bedouin and my family has a few bands who play at weddings,” he says. With some luck, he found most of his family sound archive in the store, amounting to nearly 400 cassettes, including recordings of his uncles’ and cousins’ weddings.

But that is not all he came across. “Then I found this massive Palestinian archive, with all of these different genres from the 1970s till the 1990s,” Swaitat says. The tapes included field recordings, interviews with Palestinian freedom fighters and leaders, and tapes recorded to pass on information during the First Intifada. He bought nearly 7 000 of them from the store.

When it was time to return to London, Swaitat managed to lug home five suitcases of roughly 2 000 tapes. Bound by London’s lockdown regulations, he spent months in his home studio listening repeatedly to the tapes.

Finding Intifada 1987 

One particular cassette stood out. It was bright yellow with nothing on it save for a sticker with the words “Al Intifada”. He listened to it over and over again. “I really loved the sound of it. As a Palestinian, it gave me the feeling of amplifying my voice. It was poetic and the songwriting was very uplifting.”

Unable to identify the artist, Swaitat listened to the tape almost 10 times before he let it run all the way to the end, whereupon he heard a voice introducing himself as Riad Awwad and naming the other band members.

Were it not for this announcement, the tape would have remained in obscurity. Swaitat immediately started googling the names, eventually finding information on Hanan Awwad, a writer, poet and activist who worked with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He reached out to her on social media, and Hanan welcomed a phone call.

“She was very happy that I reached out and said that she hadn’t heard the tape for the past 30 years,” he says. After sending her a digitised version, Hanan told him the tragic story behind the record.

One week after the Intifada broke out, her brother recorded the tape to capture his emotional state and contribute to the Intifada. Upon release and circulation of the album, the Israeli army confiscated most of the tapes over fears of their influence. Awwad was arrested, tortured and detained for months for creating the album.

Upon his release from prison, Awwad recorded another five-track album with a band called the Palestinian Union. He ran his own music shop in Jerusalem and studied sound engineering. He also founded a music school in the West Bank, teaching kids how to create their own electronic instruments.

“She told me he died in a car accident in 2004 and he never had managed to see this album released,” Swaitat says.

Intifada 1987 features Awwad as composer, singer and musician with contributions from his sisters as singers and songwriters. The album was made with homemade equipment, such as a “futuristic” customised keyboard, thus giving it a lo-fi, rough, textured sound. Darwish came on board after Hanan invited him to be part of the recording. His composition is a tune called The Graves.

Despite the violence and destruction unfolding around them during the Intifada, the album’s lyrical content is not focused on hate. Instead, it is a love letter to Palestine. The lyrics poetically describe the Palestinian landscape, the beauty of the mountains, sunrises and sunsets, nature, different animals and birds. But at the same time they tell a personal story of displacement of dreams since the Nakba and calls for liberation of freedom of movement, voice and existence.

Preserving Memory

Palestinian cassettes used to be circulated to different cities through one tape that was copied. Mostly, this was to avoid Israeli checkpoints. “Many of these tapes came out with no artwork. Some came out with Hebrew writing, so the soldiers would leave them alone,” Swaitat says. This could be one possible way the tape survived. Swaitat consulted many Palestinian archivists. None had come across Awwad’s tape.

Swaitat initially approached a few labels about the archive, but soon realised this was not a good idea, given the music’s historical significance. “It’s not about the music only. It’s also about the story behind this. Who are those musicians? What happened to them and why were they involved in the first place?” he asks.

After giving it some thought, Swaitat established his own record label to deal with the tape archive. This is how the Majazz Project label was born, as a way to digitise and release the tapes. Swaitat works with a small team, including an archivist and artist, all dedicated to doing the work of research. For them, preserving the stories and uncovering these lost histories is important, to give a voice to and identity from a Palestinian perspective.

While continuing to work in theatre, Swaitat also hosts a monthly radio show called the Palestinian Sound Archive. He has some incredible releases planned with Majazz. One of its latest is a tribute to his teacher Mer-Khamis, which uses voice clips from the artist.

Palestine remains close to his heart, always. “All of my family is still there. I’m the only one who is not there. My family was forced to leave their original home town. My mom is from Keisarya and my dad is from Haifa. In 1948, the family was forced to leave their home during the Nakba, the catastrophe.”

Decades after Awwad recorded this album, its relevance is stronger now than ever, as occupation and displacement in Palestine and the struggle for land and identity continue. “I grew up into this [conflict] all my life. I was born in 1989, just two years after the First Intifada broke out. I had my first childhood memory during the First Intifada. And then I was a teenager during the Second Intifada from the age of 13.”

Intifada 1987 is due for its vinyl release in July, and will come complete with an Arabic/English translation of the lyrics. Because of its tragic history, Swaitat views the album as a release, not a reissue. The album would have been lost to history were it not for Awwad’s foresight to mention his name. This preservation allows for his story to be told and passed forward to inspire hope in a new generation.

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s opinion.

“More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in the battle.” -statement of U.S. armed forces veterans on U.S. war on Vietnam

In the analysis of all exploitative systems, it is obvious to see how the exploited are harmed. This is where most attention has been focused, and understandably so.

Nevertheless, it is also important to examine and understand what happens to the exploiters at the other end of the process of exploitation.

The reason is, invariably, in any process of exploitation, exploiters are also harmed in ways that are serious and significant, even though they may be less visible and obvious immediately. This is partly the reason why this aspect of exploitation is less recognized. If there is a better understanding and a wider recognition of how exploiters suffer in the process of exploitation, new openings can emerge to convince the more powerful regarding the futility of prolonging exploitative relations and systems.

For the sake of brevity, here we speak mostly in terms of only two ends of exploitation systems—the exploiters and the exploited. But we also can speak of two ends of systems of dominance—the dominators and the dominated. Or the two ends of systems of conquest—the conqueror and the conquered.

One indication of what happens to the exploiter or the conqueror is available in some statements of the veterans of U.S. armed forces. One of these statements, which described the immense cruelties and killings, said, “We know what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder looks like, feels like and tastes like because the ghosts of over 2 million men, women and children still haunt our dreams. More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in battle.”

A detailed account followed the life of a pilot whose napalm bombing had led to the burning of a Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc. After returning home, this pilot kept looking at the picture of Kim in flames. This girl was roughly the same age as his son. “He could almost smell the child’s burning flesh.” The veteran had nightmares of screaming children pointing accusing fingers toward him. There was a breakdown in his family. He turned to alcohol. “He drank to put the bombing out of his mind, and the drinking made him more obsessed.”(Reader’s Digest, November 1997).

This is by no means an isolated case. Breakdowns in close relationships, substance abuse, domestic violence, self-violence and suicide attempts have been found to be very high among soldiers who return home after fighting highly unjust wars. More commonly, anyone who performs unjust and exploitative actions over a period of time is likely to be able to continue this only by giving up on the sensitivity needed for care, compassion and love. Hence, this person’s ability to fulfill close relationships based on this declines steadily, as also his ability to experience those forms of happiness associated with real love, caring relationships and compassion.

At a wider level, a group or society which seeks to enrich itself by plundering and exploiting others has to spread value systems that make their members insensitive to the sufferings of others. But in the process of making them insensitive, the foundation also is prepared for breakdown of internal social relations (including with the closest people), internal violence, self-violence and falsehoods. This can be seen in exploiter and conqueror societies as well as at individual levels, in the hollow lives of those who lead aggressions.

To give one example of such impacts, the example of Christopher Columbus may be cited. The extreme cruelties driven by the endless greed of this explorer are well-known. What kind of personality this turned him into is best revealed by a reputed doctor, Sigmundo Feliz, who attended to him in his final years:

“To be without roots, without a sense of home and place is one of the most serious, though one of the least emphasized, psychological disorders. This patient suffered from this to an unusual degree… This patient appears from all evidence to be someone who found it difficult, even in non-threatening circumstances, to tell the truth, a habit of delusion that at times turned into self-delusion.”

At the level of entire societies, those which lead by aggression toward others, culminating in wars, are often engaged in spreading falsehoods and self-delusions, media and education systems being two commonly used channels. The big lies cooked up to justify aggression for plunder or domination get transferred also to almost equally big lies cooked up to justify internal exploitation by big business interests. Hence, people are exposed to serious health hazards by big business interests; in some cases the toll in the longer term may be higher than that of even destructive wars. Therefore, not just at the level of individuals but also at the level of entire societies, exploiters also suffer in serious ways.

The aggression and weaponization abroad is also reflected in internal violence. The United States, for example, experienced:

• 1.2 million recorded violent incidents in 2019 (366 per 100,000 people), according to FBI data;
• Over 10 million arrests this year (not counting traffic violations), which comes out to 3,011 arrests for every 100,000 people;
• The highest number of prisoners per capita in the world;
• Seven people dying a violent death every hour; and
• 19,100 homicides and 47,500 suicides in 2019.

According to official U.S. data, this year 12 million people seriously thought about suicide, while 3.5 million planned a suicide attempt and 1.4 million attempted suicide. 

Among U.S. youth, suicide is the second highest cause of death. Plus, an unprecedented increasing trend of suicide attempts have been reported among U.S. youth during the last decade, and more pronounced among girls.

Some of this data points to a deep internal social crisis that can arise within an exploiter-and-conqueror society known for its invasion and aggression. Careful research is likely to reveal more links of aggression and internal distress. Such research should be used to convince more people about the futility of paths based on exploitation, dominance and conquest.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril and Earth Beyond Boundaries.

Correction: The Jerusalem mayor’s first name was incorrect in an earlier version. The Israel Land Fund replied to the reporter’s inquiry a week after publication to confirm King is no longer involved with the organization in an official capacity.

EAST JERUSALEM, Palestine—Once a mainstream headline, the protests at Sheikh Jarrah are now considered old news. But the threat of displacement still looms over the East Jerusalem neighborhood as new settler building projects could demolish existing homes and leave residents homeless within months.

Under the guise of urban renewal, the Israel Land Fund (ILF), a settler organization Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Arieh King leads, has initiated three building projects for Sheikh Jarrah. They are intended to double the number of settlers.

Construction is set to begin as early as next year and includes approximately 20 housing units plus an office building. If implemented, the housing-unit plans call for razing current residential buildings and evicting six Palestinian families in the Um Haroun section of Sheikh Jarrah. The six-story office building is designated for an empty plot at Sheikh Jarrah’s entrance. ILF did not respond to requests for comment.

The building plans were frozen for years until 2017, when U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration declared Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the U.S. embassy to the city. By 2019, all three projects received final approval from the Jerusalem District Planning Committee.

Building permits haven’t been issued yet, but actions recently have been taken to obtain the permits at Jerusalem’s planning and licensing department. Building permit requests can be processed within weeks or months.

Settlers and the State Working Hand in Hand

Um Haroun is home to 40 Palestinian families. Settler groups, collaborating for years with the Israeli government, have put them at risk of forced expulsion.

“Arieh King is using his power as deputy mayor to bypass this settler plan,” Palestinian resident Mahmoud Al-Hajj told Toward Freedom.

Like the rest of the families in Um Haroun, he’s descended from Palestinians driven from their homes in West Jerusalem and throughout Palestine as the state of Israel was being established in 1948. Al-Hajj’s family originally came from what is now the Old City of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter. The Jordanian government gave these homes in Um Haroun to the Palestinian refugees. But today, Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law allows Jews to reclaim these buildings. The legislation permits Jews to return to family properties lost during the violence of 1948, but it doesn’t apply the same standard to Palestinians who were displaced.

According to Al-Hajj, prior to 1948, the properties in Um Haroun were owned by three Palestinian families and rented out to Jews. In that regard, Al-Hajj claims, settler organizations like the ILF are now seeking out the descendants of previous Jewish tenants and urging them to retake these properties.

Additionally, under a 2018 government decision, Israeli authorities recently completed registering land rights to alleged Jewish owners without Palestinian residents’ knowledge. The registration prerequisite in obtaining building permits—The areas in question in Um Haroun are now registered as being owned by Israeli company, Beit Urim, and U.S.-based company, Debraly. Chaim Silberstein, founder and chairman of settler organization, Keep Jerusalem, is listed as Debraly’s representative in the building permit request’s file.

Silberstein has been active in attempts to steal land from Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, including trying to seize a yard belonging to the Salem family in Um Haroun. According to Al-Hajj, Silberstein tried in 2005 to use the Absentees’ Property Law to evict Al-Hajj from his home. However, the court ruled against Silberstein, citing Al-Hajj’s family’s status as protected tenants. Under Israeli law, they are allowed to remain in the home for three generations. Al-Hajj, now 55, is a third-generation tenant. Silberstein did not respond to press inquiries.

Yet, as Aviv Tatarsky, researcher with Israeli nonprofit Ir Amim, explained, the Al-Hajj family’s protected tenancy can become null if building owners wish to implement urban renewal projects. That is what settler plans in Um Haroun are considered.

‘There’s No Protection for Us’

The threat of eviction and home demolitions aren’t the only problems plaguing Sheikh Jarrah. Last month, Israeli parliament member and potentially the next public security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, brandished a gun when Palestinians with rocks confronted him and a group of stone-throwing settlers.

“[Israel] practices all types of pressure to bypass this plan through sending court orders, through not allowing us to renovate our houses,” Al-Hajj said. “But the second part of the pressure is arresting our children.”

More than 20 Palestinians were injured in October’s settler assault, including Muhammad Zahran, who suffered head injuries. While two Israelis were arrested for the alleged attack against Zahran, 15 Palestinians were arrested for the October clashes, according to Al-Hajj. Israeli police did not verify the number of people arrested, but they said all who were detained were Israelis holding Israeli IDs. However, reports indicate both Palestinians and Jews were arrested, as seen here and here.

“There’s no protection for us, neither from courts or police,” Al-Hajj said.

As former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to return to power and form Israel’s most right-wing coalition in its history, Al-Hajj sees no difference between the politicians leading now and in the past.

“It doesn’t matter if it was an extreme right-wing government or not. We look at it as it’s going to be the same policies against Palestinians, and especially Sheikh Jarrah,” Al-Hajj said. “What else would we have other than being expelled from our houses?”

Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.