Palestinian Armenians fight to keep their music alive

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From Palestinian rock to modern folk, generations of Armenian musicians have thrived in Jerusalem. But Israeli attacks threaten the community’s future

Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.s Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continues into its seventh month, the Armenian community in Palestine and worldwide last week, on 24 April, commemorated the nearly 1.

In October 2021, however, it transpired that the Patriarchate had illicitly signed a lease agreement with private company Xana Capital, owned by Israeli-Australian businessman Danny Rothman , giving away about 60% of the area and thus endangering the community’s cultural and social heritage. The Patriarchate later sought to void this agreement, leaving the land in a state of legal flux.

The recording took us back to Jerusalem in 1966, when the first Palestinian rock band, The Flintstones, played to a hungry audience of music lovers in the hall of Schmidt’s Girls College. It was there, somewhere between the nadi and the performance spaces, that a new musical identity transcended the confines of separate religious spaces and travelled down the streets and into the performance halls of Palestine and beyond.

Those encounters with the community’s music were the pivotal inspiration that sparked Zaarour’s interest in music, as it did for many a Jerusalemite musician like him. “The songs played there evoked emotions of survival and urged us to never give up and to preserve our language and religion,” he explains.

The musicians who went to the missionary schools seem to have developed a more adventurous palate, according to Ohannessian. The instruments raised the suspicion of the customs officers at Jordan’s Aqaba port, where they had arrived by ship, and the band members had to send a respectable emissary to negotiate the release of their musical hostage.

The Flintstones proved an infectious force in the mid-1960s, inspiring the formation of a host of other bands, among them The Yarnies, The Mosquitos and the all-influential Al-Baraem. The band toured widely, playing mostly rock covers but also performing original songs. The radio station was just beside the Ritz Hotel in Jerusalem. Sadly, its archive was lost and the whereabouts of its recordings remain a job for another research project.Yet this golden era of rock music across the 1960s and 1970s did not last long. The occupation of Jerusalem in 1967 caused a massive rift in the native community, as Armenians began leaving the city in waves.

 

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