INTERVIEW: Mallee Songs

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I saw a crowd around dawn
They gathered and swarmed
Tore all the wood from your door
And then you were gone
Dragged through the fog on your back
The awful sound of the rifle crack









What was your impression of daily life in the West Bank?



Asira is a village just north of Nablus. On the first day I visited Nablus, the whole city was in shutdown and mourning, as the night before two young men had been killed by the IDF. They had been providing a military escort for settlers to come into Nablus overnight to worship at Joseph’s Tomb, a monthly occurrence. The IDF provides armed cover for the hard-core religious right – who are already living in illegal settlements on Palestinian land – to make further incursions into what’s left of Palestine proper. It’s a huge provocation in what is a fairly peaceful city. The residents there protest with whatever means they have; often the response from the IDF is live fire, and the cost is Palestinian lives. And whatever the specifics of each clash between residents and the IDF are, one thing remains constant: the occupation is the root cause of the violence.

I can’t talk about the occupation without mentioning Hebron, which has been a flashpoint for so much violence and death, again all underwritten by the constant expansion of illegal settlements. (Hebron is the only major Palestinian city with an illegal settlement right in the centre of town.) The first time fellow volunteer Max and I visited Hebron, we were shown such incredible hospitality by a group of young Palestinian guys, Omar, Omar and Zaid. They put us up in an apartment for next to nothing, gave us a tour of the old city and the settlements, shouted us dinner, even gave us free haircuts and clean shaves! (One of them runs a barbershop.)

As was so often the case in Palestine, any time we tried to pay for anything we were laughed at and pretty much had our wallets smacked out of our hands. Palestinian hospitality is on another level. Being welcomed, looked after and well fed is par for the course – generosity abounds. I realise this is a common experience across Arab countries, but I’m going to be biased and say the generosity is dialled up a few notches again in Palestine! It’s made me reflect on just how atomised, suspicious and out for my own I’ve felt since getting back home. Australia, like Israel, feels like an increasingly cold and cruel country.

The only place these guys couldn’t show us was the Al Ibrahimi mosque, which is behind a military checkpoint; I don’t know why, but the IDF wasn’t letting us through that day (this scene is in the music video actually). This was the case all over Palestine: young men between the ages of, say, 15 and 25 are policed with an extra degree of suspicion, callousness and derision. One of the guys from Hebron, the youngest, offered to take me to Al Ibrahimi mosque on another occasion, but backed out at the last minute because there was a good chance he’d be strip searched at the checkpoint.

I returned to Hebron a few weeks later and was given an even more thorough tour of the old city, the mosque and the settlements by a local high school teacher named Basel. As he was walking me through Al Ibrahimi mosque, pointing out the architecture and explaining the history, we came to a bullet hole-riddled column, which had protected him from Baruch Goldstein’s machine gun fire during the 1994 massacre in which 29 worshipers were murdered. So these are the stories you constantly encounter in the West Bank.

They’re the more violent and really tragic incidents I heard about, but more the more common complaints were about freedom of movement. A constant thing we heard, especially from young Palestinians wanting to travel outside of Palestine, was just how useless their Palestinian passports were. Palestinians are denied visas to most countries unless for study or humanitarian reasons. And getting one of those visas is no easy feat either. If they are granted permission to travel, they’re not allowed to go via Tel Aviv, so they must travel to Amman, Jordan, which involves passing through a complex series of Palestinian Authority, Israeli and Jordanian checkpoints. And you’ve got to be in a certain position of wealth and education to get to the point of travelling outside of the West Bank, too. Even then, you’re going to be subjected to some truly dystopian border control that sounds like something straight out of The Trial.

A long-time friend of SkatePal, one of the first skaters in the West Bank, travelled through Brazil for a few months in his early 20s. Over there, he met a Brazilian woman and they started dating. He wanted to bring her back to meet his family and see his homeland, so they flew into Amman with the intention of crossing the land border into the West Bank. Now he knew that if Israeli border control suspects they’re travelling together, it’s going to be complicated to say the least. So he schools her before they cross the border: you’re travelling alone, you don’t know me, you just want to visit the West Bank. He has a Palestinian and Jordanian passport and gets into the West Bank fine. He’s waiting for her on the other side and there’s been a long hold up. Border control is interrogating her and the game is up; they know the pair are travelling together, but the Israelis add their own layer of insane bullshit: they posit that the couple are married, and that he’s smuggling her into Judea and Samaria (the area otherwise known as the West Bank) with the intention of occupying land and building a home together. Then he’s stuck in the West Bank, and she’s sent back to Brazil after being put on a watchlist and accused of illegal settlement activities.

Where did you shoot the video? There’s a lovely contrast between the scenes in towns and at checkpoints, vs the time at skateparks and in the hills – a respite from the constant military presence.

I think the video is a pretty accurate representation of travelling up and down the West Bank. You get from city to city in shared taxis – this is where all the footage of soldiers manning checkpoints, setting up roadblocks and guard towers came from. When you leave a main city and get onto the highway, you see settlement after settlement, only made possible by drone-monitored fences, razor wire and checkpoints. It really does feel like a vision of the future for all these countries pursuing ethno-nationalist, hard border policies around the world. The end point is going to look precisely like what Israel has pursued in the West Bank: mono-ethnic enclaves surrounded by a stateless, demonised people with no real political power. It’s exactly what I expected it to be, only somehow more bleak, pathetic and indefensible. It seems insane to me that while all this is happening, the discourse in the US is all about the tenor of Ilhan Omar’s language when criticising Israel, and in Australia we see Labor forcing Melissa Parke out of contention because of her strident views on Palestine.

Most of the more peaceful footage comes from around Asira ash-Shamaliya, a beautiful, friendly village surrounded by lush green hills covered in olive and almond trees.

What does the song’s title refer to?

I lifted it from Amira Hass’s 1996 book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, which was one of the first books I read about Palestine. She’s an Israeli journalist who went into the Gaza strip in 1993 to cover a story for Haaretz and ended up living there and writing this eloquent humanist account of the Palestinian struggle and their resilience in the face of mind-boggling regulation of daily life and the brutal violence meted out by the Israeli state.

Now, over 20 years since Hass published that book, the situation in Gaza and the West Bank feels even more intractable: the settlements expand into the West Bank apace and Gaza is still reeling from 2014’s 51 Day War, an assault that was savagely violent even by the IDF’s standards.

You told me earlier that the song and video are ‘grappling with how to make protest music without being didactic’. The lyrics are slightly oblique; I didn’t actually realise the song was about Palestine till I saw the video. The story could be set almost anywhere in the world. Above all, it seems elegiac to me, mourning for these people’s lives, which I think can be a really effective approach. My favourite political music right now is stuff like ‘Pa’lante’ and ‘Beautiful Strangers’, which are both quite reflective and abstract compared to something scathing and direct like ‘Oxford Town’ or ‘Hattie Carroll’. How did you negotiate those ideas here?

It’s funny you saying this song is oblique, as I try to be as lyrically oblique as possible everywhere else, but I felt squeamish about putting this song out into the world because I thought it was too direct! The second verse, specifically, has some direct references to Palestine, but you’re right, the imagery is still broad enough to be transposed to any number of situations. I’ve been thinking a lot about the cluster of ideas in this last question. Without being too proscriptive about politically charged music I guess my answer is this: a song could never really explain the occupation of Palestine, unless it was like some three-hour spoken word dirge over ambient drone music, but who’d want to listen to that? The real work is done by Palestinians resisting, journalists, academics and activists. Songwriting is primarily about feeling, and I hope and think that in ‘Drinking the Sea’, the feeling, which you accurately described as elegiac, matches up with the imagery I put together in the video. I hope people come away from it wanting to learn more about the Palestinian struggle.



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