ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of a musician and educator-activist working alongside Palestinian and Israeli youth musicians in music education – encounter dialogue programs. Separation between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs is widespread on a systemic level, sustained through separate schools and school systems, divided neighborhoods, travel restrictions, and a myriad of physical and psychological barriers. These cyclical symptoms of the conflict result in youth socialization toward ignoring or making invisible inequality and injustice, to normalize separation and violence, to suppress multiple narratives, and ultimately, to dehumanize the ‘other’. This chapter calls for a dialogical musical space for Palestinianness, Israeliness, and binationality, which would engender a plasticity of identity that can be explored, decoded, recoded, established, and re-established through the analyzation of and openness to evoking alteration of socialization. Within this educational process, critical thinking and empathy are hand in hand. Even as the conflict, occupation, and systemic violence continue to see another day, we can continue enabling a multiplicity of possibilities through self-reflexivity and the co-creation of realities, existences, and authoring by way of positing further questions, challenges, and possibilities.
