By Thomas Suárez
In perfect unplanned poetry, the evening before a nation-wide strike in solidarity with Gaza brought business-as-usual in Italy to a halt, Palestine’s Amwaj Choir kicked off a seven-city tour of the country with a packed concert in Milan.
The tour was supposed to have taken place three months earlier, but was thwarted by the many flight cancellations during Israel’s attacks on Iran. This second attempt nearly failed as well: barely had the Choir successfully crossed the Allenby Bridge into Jordan when a Jordanian secretly crossing to deliver food to Gaza killed two Israeli occupation soldiers who discovered him, before he himself was killed — and the Bridge closed.
As with any artistic or academic endeavor for Palestinians in Palestine, the tour’s incredibly complex and expensive organizing challenges are imposed by Israel for one reason only: the musicians are not Jewish. The logic is straight-forward: Zionism requires genocide; genocide requires the total dehumanization of its victims; and dehumanization demands the denial of any achievement by any member of the targeted group. Israel’s incessant crippling of Palestinian academic and cultural life is not the side effect of apartheid and siege — it is a key purpose of the apartheid and siege.
The Amwaj Choir (Amwaj is Arabic for “waves”) was established in 2015 as an independent educational and artistic program whose young musicians come from Bethlehem, including its refugee camps and rural areas, and Hebron, both the old and new city. It is led by a team of French and Palestinian educators, offering high-quality music tuition through an intensive pedagogical program based on collective singing. Its social vision is inclusive — gender equality, non-affiliation to any social, religious, or political context, and a focus on cultural exchanges and intercultural dialogue. This vision stands in stark contrast to normalization projects such as Barenboim’s West-East Divan orchestra, that serve Israel by cynically reframing apartheid and genocide as a matter of Palestinians and Israelis getting along with each other.
The main work on the choir’s tour was the “Dalia Suite”, an adaptation of the opera Dalia, composed by Roxanna Panufnik with a libretto by Jessica Duchen. This shorter version replaces the orchestra with piano (Ramzi Shomali) and percussion (Maen Ghoul). The title role (Jude Abueisheh) is a young refugee adapting to life in the UK, separated from her mother and negotiating the xenophobia and resentment, as well as the love, of her new community.
Before the opera itself begins, its unsettled atmosphere is set by Yves Balmer’s Pollens: Musique d’exils, a demanding work handing the Choir vocal and ensemble challenges right from the start. Under conductor and vocal coach Mathilde Vittu, the choir deftly handled its soft, exposed alternating half-step motif, remaining impressively on-pitch without the support of any instrument. Over this eerie, almost hypnotic murmur, extremely tricky “interruptions” were so effective — successful — as to visibly unnerve audience members.
A sense of exile established, Dalia then followed seamlessly. Panufnik’s music blends the musical worlds of Dalia’s home with those of her adoptive home — for example, what might be called her leitmotif, “Dalia’s Song”, is based on the Syrian folk song Hal Asmar Ellon.
The second part of the Milan concert brought a variety of short works under two Palestinian conductors, Lina Shweiki and Rimah Natsheh. These included Biglietti di Viaggio (“travel tickets”) by Tala Abuomar, Rimah Natsheh, and Lina Shweiki, on a poem by Samih Al-Qasim. Written in the first person, the speaker, knowing of her impending murder, tells her assassin that after her murder he will find a travel ticket among her belongings, and describes the journeys that it must take him. Allusions to the Gaza of today are even more direct in I have no Address by Ahmed Muin: “…Children sleep beneath the rubble / But we are not afraid of your bombs. / The sun will rise and the darkness will fade…”
The Choir’s ambitious tour repertoire included, for example, a performance of Mozart’s Lacrimosa in Florence, with orchestra. Nor was it limited to formal concert venues: members of the Amwaj Choir joined a vigil for Gaza held every evening at the Milan cathedral, singing Bella Ciao.
In Modena, the Choir is greeted by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese [Photo: Fares S. Mansour]
On the 5th of October, three days after their final concert, the Choir crossed back over the Allenby Bridge and safely reached their homes in Bethlehem and Hebron. For the Jewish settlers in Bethlehem and Hebron who steal their land and attack them with impunity, the trip would have been an easy three-and-a-half hour flight from Venice to Tel Aviv, safer, vastly more predictable and less expensive.
In part in the spirit of “full disclosure”, but mainly to demonstrate that this report on the Choir is rooted in a solid view of the organization since its beginning: This writer is a long-time friend and former colleague of the two extraordinary individuals who founded it a decade ago, Mathilde Vittu and Michele Cantoni. To learn more about, and to support this unique Palestinian educational /artistic project, visit amwajchoir.org.
Thomas Suárez is the author, most recently, of Palestine Mapped / from the river to the sea in early geographic thought (Interlink, 2025)
6 October 2025
Source: countercurrents.org