Whatever symbolic satisfaction the Palestinian Authority may get at the U.N., there’s always the Occupation and there — take it from someone who just got back from three months in the West Bank — Israel is winning the battle,  the one for control over every square foot of ground.  Inch by inch, meter by meter, Israel’s expansion project in the West Bank and Jerusalem is, in fact, gaining momentum, ensuring that the “nation” that the U.N. might grant membership will be each day a little smaller, a little less viable, a little less there.

Signs of strains between secular and Islamist forces have been showing for months.  But both sides were to be represented in Friday’s mass demonstration.  Between 800,000 and a million people were expected.

Friday prayer, Tahrir Square, July 29 2011. Photo by Sandy Tolan

After midnight the Cairo heat finally broke.  Mamdouh Hamza, Egyptian civil engineer, businessman and longtime government critic, was sitting in a plastic chair in an outdoor café at Tahrir Square, puffing on a water pipe.  The white-haired Hamza was holding court with his cadre of young revolutionaries, to whom he’d become a kind of beneficent godfather.  (My colleague Charlotte and I had met him an hour earlier, having interviewed him for a story on Egyptian agriculture and food issues we’re producing for U.S. public radio (Marketplace) and television.)  Hamza – builder of big Egyptian development projects and nevertheless a longtime critic of the regime – had been trying to keep a dialogue going between the military council and his “kids.”  But recently things had broken down, and that morning at 5, he said, something disturbing and perhaps unrelated happened:  Someone called Hamza to say he’d been hired to kill him.  But the would-be hit man had changed his mind – “I like you,” he told Hamza – and so he gave the blood money back. Or so the story went.  Hamza seemed to think this was all a hoax, designed to rattle him, and he had no plans to heed the reluctant killer’s warning:  that Hamza shouldn’t show up at the square the next day, lest he take a bullet.

During “Operation Mozart” at Qalandia, say young Palestinian musicians, soldiers laughed, snapped pictures, and danced.  Does it matter?

Rashed Zarour, 12, says he saw Israeli soldiers dancing during the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra performance at the Qalandia military checkpoint on June 23rd. But he says, "Whether they danced, or were angry, I don't care. I'm just there to play music for my country."

The other day two dozen Palestinian children, armed with violins, cellos, woodwinds and brass, confronted Israel’s occupation at the Qalandia military checkpoint. [Listen to Mozart's Symphony No. 6 from Qalandia.]  A grim barrier of confinement was transformed, if only for a short time, into a space of assertive joy, as the young musicians played Mozart’s Sixth Symphony in F Major, and three selections from Bizet, just a few feet from machine-gun glad conscripts of the Israel Defense Forces.  Now comes word of dancing soldiers.

Children and their “musical intifada” prevail at Qalandia

Jason Crompton, conductor of the Al Kamandjati youth orchestra, silhouetted in front of the bars at Qalandia military checkpoint. (To listen, click on "Symphony No. 6," or near "Bizet's Farandole," below.)

The operation was planned well in advance, and down to the last detail.  Target: Passenger terminal at Israel’s Qalandia military checkpoint, near the entry cage where every day, hundreds of Palestinians cross to Jerusalem.  Time of day: High noon, June 23^rd, 2011. Operatives: More than two dozen Palestinian children. Weapons: molded wood, metal string, curved brass.  Known co-conspirators: Georges Bizet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  ”This is a musical intifada,” declared Ramzi Aburedwan, founder of the Ramallah-based Al Kamandjati (The Violinist, in Arabic).

Lovely Toys, just north of the Qalandia checkpoint. Owner Wisam Afaneh stands at the entrance.

Lovely Toys is the key to your checkpoint destiny.  It’s the kids’ store, brightly festooned with stuffed tigers, scooters, beach balls and racing cars, that sits about 200 meters from Qalandia, where the 25-foot-high wall, watchtowers and military checkpoint divide Jerusalem from Ramallah.  The toy store serves commuters, and the occasional mom and her shebab at the Qalandia refugee camp across the chaotic street, reports owner Wisam Afaneh.

If your taxi or service (sir-VEECE, a collective van) gets snarled in traffic by or before Lovely Toys, you can count on a long wait in your car going south, or walking through the steel and concrete chambers on your way to Jerusalem.  If on the other hand you breeze past Lovely Toys – and the boys peddling bottled water and verses from the Quran, and the squeegee men wiping the windshields of reluctant drivers, and the huge chunks of broken concrete and scattered plastic debris, and the murals of a young Yasser Arafat and the handcuffed Marwan Barghouti along the wall, and the overflowing dumpster where a dead cat has been lying belly-up, paws reaching for the sky, for the last couple of weeks – then you might just get through quickly and make your appointment in the Holy City on time.

A Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus, from the falcon family), in the sky over Jenin. Photo copyright by Walid Basha. Used with permission.

Say “Jenin” to a friend and ask what word comes to mind.  I’m guessing that word would not be “birdwatcher.”  Unless, perhaps, you’d had the good fortune to meet Walid Salim Basha, microbiologist, university professor, environmentalist, and scientific and photographic observer of the great bird migration over the West Bank, especially in the Jenin governorate. “In the Holy Land, all birds migrating from Europe to Africa avoid passing over the Mediterranean, so they will pass over Palestine – more than 600 million birds will fly over Palestine during the year,” Walid told me as he navigated the crowded streets of Jenin in his old Opel.  We were driving toward his house so he could show me photographs he took of 120 species of  migratory birds in the Jenin mountains.  “This year, over Jenin, I recorded more than 500 kites [a hawk-like bird of prey].  You have the white stork – we have thousands in Jenin, in the valley between Jenin and Nablus.”

I’d met Walid only a few minutes earlier, at the Al Kamandjati music center in Jenin, where his 11-year-old son Fadi is taking singing lessons with the British soprano, Julia Katarina.  (My new book is about Al Kamandjati and the transformational power of music in the lives of children.)  Fadi, who at this stage in life is also a soprano, has a strikingly powerful, clear voice, and was preparing for a performance of Italian arias for the Italian consulate in Bethlehem in a few days’ time.  (Right; of course he was.)  While Julia went upstairs to work with Fadi, Walid happened to mention his passion for birds, and soon he was inviting me back to the house to see the photos.

On the 44^th anniversary of the first day of the Six Day War and the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Maddalena Pastorelli made plans to teach her regular music appreciation class to Palestinian children at the Qalandia refugee camp.  Under the circumstances – Palestinian youth groups were calling for a mass nonviolent march to the Israeli’s Qalandia checkpoint, alongside its 25-foot-high wall, and Israeli troops were mobilizing – it was an ambitious goal.

Maddalena Pastorelli, a teacher at Al Kamandjati (The Violinist) in Ramallah, with her box of homemade musical instruments to share with the children of Qalandia refugee camp.

Nevertheless, we set out in a white van in the late morning, Maddalena accompanied by two of her colleagues in the Al Kamandjati music school. At her feet was a cardboard box full of simple instruments: a tambourine, a triangle, small plastic sheets to make rattling sounds, a piece of plastic garden hose to evoke the sound of the wind, and plastic jugs filled with chickpeas, orange lentils, and rice. “The rice is the best for the rain,” Maddalena declared.

Abdallah Qazwah, 11, looks over sheet music to Beethoven's "Romance" in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. His brother, Khalil, a tabla player, stands at the ready with Abdallah's violin

“Romance!” exclaims 11-year-old Abdallah, standing astride his violin case in a narrow alley of Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. His eyes are alive, his smile wide. The exclamation comes in response to a question: What is your favorite music? The interviewer (that would be me) is not exactly a classical music aficionado, and so I had to wait for Abdallah’s violin teacher, the classically-trained Cambridge (UK) grad, Alice Howick, to tell me that the boy was not talking about a type of music, but rather an actual piece called Romance, by Beethoven.

Abdallah Qazwah is a student at Al Kamandjati, the Ramallah-based Palestinian classical and Arabic music school founded by Ramzi Aburedwan, who grew up in the Al-Amari refugee camp near Ramallah.