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."



Beloved Zurich Zoo Gorilla Euthanized after Years of Declining Health

FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)
FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)
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Beloved Zurich Zoo Gorilla Euthanized after Years of Declining Health

FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)
FILE - N'Gola, the silverback male of the gorilla group at Zurich Zoo celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, in Zurich. (Siggi Bucher/Keystone via AP, file)

The Zurich Zoo’s beloved gorilla of more than 40 years has been put down after a long struggle with declining health, a zoo official in the Swiss city said this week.
N’Gola was 47 and one of the oldest male gorillas in European zoos, said Zurich Zoo director Severin Dressen.
He was a Western lowland gorilla — a subspecies of the great apes found in Africa and listed as critically endangered — and because of his mature age he was a silverback, after the gray hair on his back, The Associated Press reported.
N'Gola had suffered a host of health ailments, including arthritis, a heart condition and a tapeworm infection. He had been on painkillers for several years, eating less, and losing weight and muscle mass.
“It’s a hard decision to euthanize a silverback,” Dressen said.
"We’ve seen a crash in the wild over the span of three generations of 80% of the population," Dressen said about the decline of gorillas in the wild. Zoos can be helpful for research and public education about species protection, he added.
N'Gola was born in captivity and fathered 34 children. He was known for his sensitive side, taking “care of his harem, his group of females,” Dressen said.
In 2012, the female Nache in his harem suffered a burst appendix during advanced pregnancy, and both she and the unborn baby gorilla died, according to the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuricher Zeitung.
N’Gola spent weeks whimpering through the zoo enclosure looking for her, the report said.
Dressen also recalled a time when N'Gola looked after a baby gorilla in the group. "The mother wasn’t there, and he kind of — which is not a typical silverback behavior — took care of that baby.”
As for humans, N'Gola mostly ignored "other bipedal species on the other side of the glass” of his enclosure, Dressen said.