Oct 08 2013
Jordanian Band’s Israel-Palestine Tour Causes Uproar
By Daoud Kuttab
The content of the poster seems surreal. A well-known Jordanian music group lists the locations of its concerts for Oct. 5 through 12 — the Golan Heights, Nazareth, Haifa, Ramallah and Jerusalem’s Old City for its last show. The decision by the highly successful Autostrad, led by Yazan Rousan, to cross the Jordan River using a visa issued by the Israeli Embassy in Amman has resulted in a backlash among its young Arab fans.
The planned tour has been met with a barrage of online and social media attacks for the band “normalizing†relations with the State of Israel. Autostrad has no publicly stated plans to interact with non-Palestinian Israelis, and the band’s concerts are aimed at Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as Syrians and Palestinians living in the Golan Heights and other Arab areas occupied in 1967.
The most specific and repeated argument has been made by Budour Hassan, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who argued that obtaining a visa from the Israeli Embassy in Jordan is a slippery slope that will make it easier for Arabs to “normalize†relations with Israel, not only to sing in front of an Arab audience. To be fair, Hassan does recognize that the issue of traveling to Israel has many points of view and feels that her criticism does not apply to Palestinians and non-Arabs holding other passports.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx2WogalhQI&feature=youtu.be
Video of the group at a concert in Cyprus, September 2012 (Sonia Breda) Continue Reading »