"Yalla, yalla, raise your hands!" Israeli Druze singer Mike Sharif shouts in Arabic to the Palestinian crowd swaying to a Hebrew hit at a wedding in the occupied West Bank.
AFP 1 day ago
The scene, all the more unusual as it took place in Yatta, a Palestinian village near Hebron and site 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, interviewed in the northern Israeli Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel, told AFP.
The Druze, an Arabic-speaking minority offshoot of Shiite Islam, number around 140,000 in Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.
Nicknamed "the Druze prodigy" after winning a TV competition aged 12, Sharif -- now in his 40s -- rose to fame with his Mizrahi (Eastern) pop songs in the 1990s in Israel, but also in the West Bank, Gaza and Arab countries.
"I have always belonged to everyone," says the self-proclaimed "ambassador of peace" between Israelis and Palestinians.
- 'Hebrew in Hebron, Arabic in Tel Aviv'-
From the inception of Mizrahi pop, influenced by the Jewish cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, reciprocal influences were established with the music of neighbouring Arab territories.
Today, the popularity of artists like Israel's most popular singer Eyal Golan or the younger Eden Ben Zaken reaches well into Palestinian society.
At the same time, the big names in Arabic music -- Oum Kalsoum, Fairuz or Farid al-Atrash -- have long been popular among Israeli Jews.
To Sharif, this musical proximity should make it possible "to unite everyone" and contribute to ending 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 does not bring people together this way."
His Yatta show, however, brought 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 marriage.
And after having said he wanted to be "the first Israeli singer to perform in the Gaza Strip", the territory controlled by Hamas Islamists that Israelis may not enter, he abandoned 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 following the signing of interim peace accords.
Jewish singers like Zehava Ben or Sarit Hadad performed songs by Umm Kulthum in Palestinian cities in Arabic, he recalled, but according to the musicologist, this phenomenon collapsed along with the political failure of the Oslo accords.
"This shared investment in shared music and style and sound is not a platform for political change or political reconciliation per se, you would need to politicise it explicitly, to mobilise it politically, for it to become that," he said of current cultural musical exchanges.
Today, the musical affinity between Palestinians and Israelis is reduced to the essential: "more physical and emotional than intellectual", he said.
The request of the Palestinian revellers at the Yatta wedding was "not a demand for Hebrew per se" but rather for Sharif's "hits" from the 80s and 90s, when "his music was circulating" and some songs entered the wedding "canon", Erez said.
The same goes for the title "The sound of gunpowder", written in 2018 in honour of a Palestinian armed gang leader from a refugee camp near Nablus in the West Bank that is played repeatedly at Israeli weddings, Erez said.
"When there is music, people disconnect from all the wars, from politics, from differences of opinion," Sharif said.
"They forget everything, they just focus on the music."
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Druze (/ˈdruːz/;[20] Arabic: درزي darzī or durzī, plural دروز durūz) are members of an Arabic-speaking esoteric ethnoreligious group[21][22] originating in Western Asia. They practice Druzism, an Abrahamic,[23][24] monotheistic, syncretic, and ethnic religion based on the teachings of Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad and the sixth Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, and ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Zeno of Citium.[25][26] Adherents of the Druze religion are called The People of Monotheism (Al-Muwaḥḥidūn).[27]
The Epistles of Wisdom is the foundational and central text of the Druze faith.[28] The Druze faith incorporates elements of Isma'ilism,[29] Christianity, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism,[30][31] Zoroastrianism,[32][33] Buddhism,[34][35] Hinduism, Pythagoreanism,[36][37] and other philosophies and beliefs, creating a distinct and secretive theology based on an esoteric interpretation of scripture, which emphasizes the role of the mind and truthfulness.[27][37] Druze believe in theophany and reincarnation.[38] Druze believe that at the end of the cycle of rebirth, which is achieved through successive reincarnations, the soul is united with the Cosmic Mind (al-ʻaql al-kullī).[39]
Druze believe there were seven prophets at different periods in history: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Muhammad ibn Isma'il ad-Darazi.[40][41][42] Druze tradition also honors and reveres Salman the Persian,[43] al-Khidr (who identify as Elijah and reborn as John the Baptist and Saint George),[44] Job, Luke the Evangelist, and others as "mentors" and "prophets."[45] They also have a special affinity with Shuaib, or Jethro.[46]
Even though the faith originally developed out of Isma'ilism, Druze do not identify as Muslims.[47] The Druze faith is one of the major religious groups in the Levant, with between 800,000 and a million adherents. They are found primarily in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, with small communities in Jordan. They make up 5.5% of the population of Lebanon, 3% of Syria and 1.6% of Israel. The oldest and most densely-populated Druze communities exist in Mount Lebanon and in the south of Syria around Jabal al-Druze (literally the "Mountain of the Druze").[48]
The Druze community played a critically important role in shaping the history of the Levant, where it continues to play a significant political role. As a religious minority in every country in which they are found, they have frequently experienced persecution by different Muslim regimes, including contemporary Islamic extremism.
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