‘Turning Israelis Into Settlers After Death’: Israel to Build Cemetery In Ecological ‘Hotspot’ in Palestine

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.

KHAN AL-AHMAR, West Bank—More than 70 years after being expelled from the Naqab Desert, Bedouins in the occupied West Bank may become refugees once again.

This month, Israel’s Supreme Court gave the government until April 2 to respond to pro-settler Israeli NGO Regavim’s request to demolish the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. In 2018, the High Court green-lighted Khan al-Ahmar’s destruction, but the government has yet to formulate a plan for carrying out the ruling.

More than half of the village’s approximately 280 residents are children attending Khan al-Ahmar’s primary school, which could soon turn to rubble if the village is razed.

Khan al-Ahmar’s students aren’t the only Palestinian children whose academic futures are under threat, however. According to the Arab Campaign for Education for All, 58 Palestinian schools serving 6,550 children, including Khan al-Ahmar’s, are currently at risk of demolition.

“When our students face the challenges of occupation, it’s not only the damage of the schools, it’s not only the arrests of teachers and students, but the psychosocial part, which reflects in the [students’] attitudes and well-being,” Sadiq Al-Khadour, spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority’s Education Ministry, told Toward Freedom.

Israel Undermining Palestinian Education

Students face a myriad of obstacles while attempting to earn an education in Palestine. In addition to school demolitions, students experience detention or arrests by the Israeli army, military raids into their school, delays in their commutes due to checkpoints, and violence from Israeli settlers and soldiers on their way to school. According to the UN, students in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem experienced a more than 150-percent increase in education-related violations from 2021 to 2022.

Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem have had their licenses revoked for refusing to teach the Israeli narrative in their curriculum, while those who comply have received a boost in funding. According to the Education Ministry, Jerusalem schools are also the most overcrowded in Palestine, with an average of more than 37 students packed into a classroom. The average student-to-teacher ratio in Palestine is 24-1.

In the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli missiles have destroyed academic institutions and killed teachers and students.

“This undermines students’ and teachers’ right to access the appropriate educational process,” said Tamam Mohsen, advocacy officer at Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. Mohsen’s organization, which focuses on Gaza, explained that more than 571 educational facilities were wiped out by Israeli bombs from 2008 to 2021.

A School Born Out of Necessity

With April’s court deadline fast approaching, the Khan al-Ahmar school and the surrounding community are on edge.

“We’ve heard the news and this has put students in an unstable mood,” said Isra Zahran, who teaches mathematics to students from 7th to 10th grades. Zahran explained constant visits from NGOs and the press have distracted students.

Built in 2009, the school has become essential for Khan al-Ahmar’s children.

Headmistress Halima Zahaike explained that before the school’s establishment, children would take the arduous journey to Jericho for school while some—especially girls—would merely forgo their education.

“Today, girls who are 22 years old or more don’t even know how to write their name because they used to stay home with no education,” Zahaike said. With this clear need, the idea for a school in the heart of Khan al-Ahmar was born.

Like the majority of Palestinian villages in the Israeli-military-controlled Area C of the West Bank, Khan al-Ahmar doesn’t have a zoning plan. Therefore, any construction is deemed illegal. In order to circumvent Israeli military regulations, the school was built as a temporary structure using tires, clay, and mud. The project was built with the support of Italian non-profit Vento di Terra and the European Union.

Yet, even during the school’s construction, classrooms were razed by Israeli authorities.

‘I Will Keep Studying Atop Rubble’

With demolition looming, Khan al-Ahmar’s students are losing their will to learn.

“Many of the students say, ‘Our school will be demolished and we’ll have to go to Jericho. I know that I can’t go to Jericho, so let’s skip,’” Zahran said. “We try to encourage them, but there’s this feeling of not being motivated because they ask themselves ‘what I’m going to do after [the demolition].’”

With these barriers to education, 25 percent of Palestinian boys drop out of school by age 15. Despite this figure, the youth literacy rate is over 99 percent in Palestine.

The feeling of resilience is palpable among Palestinian students. While Zahran appears apprehensive, past school demolitions prove Palestinians’ determination to learn.

In November, Israeli forces demolished Isfey Al-Fawqa elementary school in Masafer Yatta, a collective of rural hamlets in the southern West Bank. Days later, students were studying in tents erected above the crushed cement.

The Ministry of Education provided the tents to Masafer Yatta’s students and said they will do the same for Khan al-Ahmar if dismantled.

“If you ask any one of them, they will say, ‘We will never leave our school,’” Zahaike said of her students. “They say, ‘If it gets demolished, I will keep studying atop the rubble.’”

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

SCORACE FOREST, Italy—On August 18, in the Italian region of Sicily, the Scorace Forest caught fire. Around 90 percent of the 750 hectares (1,853 acres) of vegetation were scorched.

“That day, I saw people crying as we looked at the forest burning. Some of them were people that have contributed to planting the trees, and people that have worked in the forest for many years,” recalled Cristoforo Mustazza, a grape and wine producer in Buseto, a town that neighbors the Scorace Forest. “I was also worried about my vineyard, but I had a small loss in comparison to what happened to the forest.”

Over the last 14 years, Sicily has reported more than half of Italy’s wooden (and non-wooden) burned area. That is an extraordinary figure considering the Mediterranean island represents only 8.5 percent of the country’s land.

Beyond Sicily, wildfires are a global issue. According to a recent study published by forest-monitoring platform Global Forest Watch, in association with the University of Maryland, fires have intensified over the last 20 years. Between 2001 and 2021, 437 million hectares (more than 1 billion acres)—or 11 percent—of tree cover was lost around the world.

This not only affects biodiversity and human settlements close by. The greenhouse gasses emitted exacerbate the current climate crisis. From 2001 to 2021, 174 gigatons (174 billion tons) of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere due to wildfires, explains the GFW report. That is a quantity that can be compared to the weight of 1.74 million fully loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.

Although the causes for the increase in fires are diverse, it is clear climate change exacerbates the wildfire crisis, explained Giuseppe Barbera, professor of agrarian and forestal science at Palermo University in Sicily’s capital city.

Besides that, many small farmers have abandoned the countryside because farming has become an increasingly fruitless endeavor. Plus, the Sicilian government has neglected the planning required to maintain artificial forests, Barbera said. Artificial forests can include non-native and/or native tree species, and they differ from natural forests in composition and structure, among other factors, according to a textbook, Tropical Biology and Conservation Management.

Sicily is a Mediterranean island of around 5 million inhabitants that has long been a crossroads between Europe and Africa. It is characterized by warm weather and beautiful beaches that attract millions of tourists every year. However, Sicilians endure fire hazards caused by high temperatures combined with “scirocco,” a hot wind that can reach hurricane speeds while carrying dust or rain from northern Africa.

How Agriculture Can Prevent Fires

Alongside tourism, Sicily’s economy relies on agriculture for local consumption as well as for export. Leading products include olives, grapes, peaches, citrus fruits and cereals. However, over the last two decades, agricultural production has declined.

According to data by ISTAT (Italy’s National Institute of Statistics), the number of farms decreased by 37.1 percent between 2000 and 2010; vineyards by 9.5 percent; and olive groves by 3.5 percent. Data for the last decade will be available soon, but further declines are likely. “[Agriculture] does not produce enough economic benefits,” Barbera said.

A study recently published in the Remoting Sensing journal points to other experts having “suggested that abandoned agricultural land can increase fuel continuity and consequently increase fire spread.” The authors of the recent paper went on to write, “There is also evidence that agricultural areas that are typically grazed or tilled annually (e.g., olive orchards) decrease wildfire activity by decreasing surface fuel continuity.”

All of this means regularly tilled land acts as a buffer against wildfires.

Palermo University’s Barbera concurs, describing farmers like Mustazza as the environment’s “main caretaker” because they are personally interested in avoiding wildfires. “Good farmers carry out many environmental and cultural functions that benefit society as a whole.”

Mustazza is one of the farmers resisting a reduction in income in a highly competitive wine market, as well as other adversities such as this year’s fire. He estimated the blazes caused a loss of 10,000 euros ($10,248) as about a hectare of cork oak and part of the vineyards on his property were destroyed. He will not receive any compensation from the government.

Studies in other countries, such as in Greece and Portugal, tell similar stories.

How to Effectively Manage a Forest

Sicily has 238 Natura 2000 sites, a network of nature protection areas in the European Union. Within Sicily’s 470,000 hectares of EU protected areas is the Scorace Forest, deemed so because of its environmental and social value. Its vegetation is characterized by native cork oak trees. Yet, like in many other natural areas of Sicily, non-native species, such as pine, eucalyptus and cypress have been introduced over the years. Conifers—for instance, pine—often generate a fire hazard, said Palermo University Professor Donato Salvatore La Mela, an expert in agrarian and forestal science.

“Reforestation has not only been done with inadequate species, but has also lacked a management plan,” he said. “We should take these mistakes as an example for the future, therefore selecting autochthonous [indigenous] species that are more resilient to fires.”

In this sense, the cork oak tree is crucial in the Mediterranean, as its thick and insulating bark resists fires.

“Here, we can see that the leaves of the cork oak are regrowing,” explained Giovanni Magaddino, head of the forest squad in Scorace, as he escorted this reporter and photographer through the charred landscape. “The problem is pine trees and cypresses. The part of [this] ecosystem that has only these two species will not recover.”

Planting a million trees is not the answer and sometimes can be counterproductive, Barbera said, underlining the importance of “planting the right species in the right place, always under continuous supervision.”

Developing a New Generation of Farmers and Forestry Experts

As an autonomous region, Sicily has its own Forestry Corporation that is in charge of preventing fires and managing forests. However, according to La Mela, “[it] has been reduced from 1,200 people to 300, and all of them will retire over the next few years.”

“I hope that, in the future, young people come to work [in the Forestry Corporation]. Right now, we are all elderly, from 55 onwards and the majority are over 60,” the forest squad’s Magaddino said, adding, “No new people have been admitted since 1996.”

Bringing young energy into fire prevention in Sicily is essential, not only within the forest squad working on the ground, but also in regional planning programs. According to Barbera, 700 people have specialized in silviculture, but there are no working opportunities for them in Sicily.

“These young people could work towards a fire preventive management plan,” the professor said. “However, they have to migrate to find employment in their area of expertise.”

Agricultural work also is not being taken up at the same rate. The European Commission reported “more than 45 percent of farmers [in Sicily] are over 60 years of age and 12 percent are managed by farmers under 40.”

Meanwhile, this year’s fire in the Scorace Forest is far from an isolated case.

“When fires re-appear in the same area, it is more difficult for the forest to regenerate itself due to soil degradation, sometimes even leading to desertification,” La Mela explained.

Integrating the community, local producers, and youngsters could have a positive effect on fire prevention and perhaps reduce the costs of firefighting. In 2021, the region of Sicily spent almost 3 million euros ($3.1 million) on aerial firefighting. State resources that go into all of Italy’s regions, however, reached up to 59 million euros (almost $61 million) during the same period.

“It is important to carry out a planning program to decide in what areas should agriculture be reintroduced and what areas should be left alone as natural areas,” La Mela said, adding that social and economic sustainability should be considered.