Druze Pop Star Seeks to Bridge Palestinian and Israeli Divide

Israeli Druze singer Mike Sharif JALAA MAREY AFP
Israeli Druze singer Mike Sharif JALAA MAREY AFP
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Druze Pop Star Seeks to Bridge Palestinian and Israeli Divide

Israeli Druze singer Mike Sharif JALAA MAREY AFP
Israeli Druze singer Mike Sharif JALAA MAREY AFP

"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.

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.

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.

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 neighboring 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 that Israelis may not enter, he abandoned the idea "due to tensions", Sharif said.

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 politicize it explicitly, to mobilize 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 honor 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."



Nearby Sculptor Galaxy Revealed in Ultra-Detailed Galactic Image

This undated handout image released by European Southern Observatory on June 17, 2025 shows a detailed, thousand-color image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). (Handout / European Southern Observatory / AFP)
This undated handout image released by European Southern Observatory on June 17, 2025 shows a detailed, thousand-color image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). (Handout / European Southern Observatory / AFP)
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Nearby Sculptor Galaxy Revealed in Ultra-Detailed Galactic Image

This undated handout image released by European Southern Observatory on June 17, 2025 shows a detailed, thousand-color image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). (Handout / European Southern Observatory / AFP)
This undated handout image released by European Southern Observatory on June 17, 2025 shows a detailed, thousand-color image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). (Handout / European Southern Observatory / AFP)

The Sculptor galaxy is similar in many respects to our Milky Way. It is about the same size and mass, with a similar spiral structure. But while it is impossible to get a full view of the Milky Way from the vantage point of Earth because we are inside the galaxy, Sculptor is perfectly positioned for a good look.

Astronomers have done just that, releasing an ultra-detailed image of the Sculptor galaxy on Wednesday obtained with 50 hours of observations using one of the world's biggest telescopes, the European Southern Observatory's Chile-based Very Large Telescope.

The image shows Sculptor, also called NGC 253, in around 4,000 different colors, each corresponding to a specific wavelength in the optical spectrum.

Because various galactic components emit light differently across the spectrum, the observations are providing information at unprecedented detail on the inner workings of an entire galaxy, from star formation to the motion of interstellar gas on large scales. Conventional images in astronomy offer only a handful of colors, providing less information.

The researchers used the telescope's Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, or MUSE, instrument.

"NGC 253 is close enough that we can observe it in remarkable detail with MUSE, yet far enough that we can still see the entire galaxy in a single field of view," said astronomer Enrico Congiu, a fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, and lead author of research being published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"In the Milky Way, we can achieve extremely high resolution, but we lack a global view since we're inside it. For more distant galaxies, we can get a global view, but not the fine detail. That's why NGC 253 is such a perfect target: it acts as a bridge between the ultra-detailed studies of the Milky Way and the large-scale studies of more distant galaxies. It gives us a rare opportunity to connect the small-scale physics with the big-picture view," Congiu said.

Sculptor is about 11 million light-years from Earth, making it one of the closest big galaxies to the Milky Way. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Like the Milky Way, it is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning it has an elongated structure extending from its nucleus, with spiral arms extending from the ends of the bar. Its diameter of about 88,000 light-years is similar to the Milky Way's, as is its total mass. One major difference is Sculptor's rate of new star formation, estimated to be two to three times greater than that of the Milky Way.

Nearly 30% of this star formation is happening near the galaxy's nucleus in what is called a starburst region, as revealed in colorful emissions shown in the new image.

The observations have given information on a wide range of properties such as the motion, age and chemical composition of stars and the movement of interstellar gas, an important component of any galaxy.

"Since the light from stars is typically bluer if the stars are young or redder if the stars are old, having thousands of colors lets us learn a lot about what stars and populations of stars exist in the galaxy," said astronomer Kathryn Kreckel of Heidelberg University in Germany, a study co-author.

"Similarly for the gas, it glows in specific bright emission lines at very specific colors, and tells us about the different elements that exist in the gas, and what is causing it to glow," Kreckel said.

The initial research being published from the observations involves planetary nebulae, which are luminous clouds of gas and dust expelled by certain dying stars. Despite their name, they have nothing to do with planets. These nebulae can help astronomers measure the precise distances of faraway galaxies.

The researchers marveled at the scientific and aesthetic value of the new view of Sculptor.

"I personally find these images amazing," Congiu said. "What amazes me the most is that every time I look at them, I notice something new - another nebula, a splash of unexpected color or some subtle structure that hints at the incredible physics behind it all."