Nili Belkind is a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University (2014) and is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the Middle East—with a special focus on Palestine/Israel— and the Caribbean

Nili’s award-winning book (International Council of Traditions of Music and Dance [ICTMD] 2022) Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production (Routledge 2021) studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities. Author has "followed the conflict" by "following the music," from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes and even a checkpoint. In all the contexts presented, the monograph is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize spatial and social boundaries in a situation of ongoing political violence.

Prior to her academic career, Nili spent many years in the US-based music industry. She worked as a world, Latin and reggae music product manager for Virgin megastores; label manager for RykoLatino and other companies; album producer and compiler; live showcase producer; booker; radio DJ; music writer (National Geographic Music Online; liner notes) and other roles. Two albums she co-produced (by Plena Libre) were nominated for a Grammy. In her research projects she always seeks to contribute to the artists and communities that have brought her into their fold. 

Nili Belkind conducted most of her fieldwork about music in the context of the conflict in Palestine/Israel between 2011 and 2012 and in follow up visits. . In 2018 she returned to live in Jaffa.

Her current research project, together with Professor Seroussi, is centered on historical and contemporary Muslim-Jewish musical relations in Muslim-majority countries and their diasporas. . This interview, recorded on July 2nd, 2025, is meant to shed light on the cultural aspects of conflict, and the ways that musical life can both reflect and shape communities.

Marion Brachet : You have worked in the music industry for a long time, notably as a producer. From this, what brought you to the field of ethnomusicology?

Nili Belkind : Well, around 2000, at that time I was running a Latin record label in New York that was owned by Chris Blackwell. And things started falling apart in the industry, starting with the MP3…. And I sort of did more projects, as labels closed. I did a lot more projects in the next six years, but it was as a freelancer. I realized that the kinds of exciting things that I was doing [before], music production and A&R support and developing artists and so on… I was doing less and less things that I loved and more and more things that I did for a living. And I decided I wanted to change that. And so that's why I went back to study ethnomusicology, because music is my life. So what else would you do? And then I thought that I would work mostly in the Caribbean, which is where so much of my previous work in the industry happened. I did that for my MA. My MA is on Haitian artists, but I did not continue with the Caribbean for my PhD.

Marion Brachet : During your book launch in 2021, after your PhD thesis, when explaining what was different in your approach to music in conflict, you said that you tried to avoid writing from only one position. Could you explain what that means for you?2

Nili Belkind : So my Ph. D. was on music and conflict in Palestine/Israel. And I felt that a lot of the literature until then was either coming in from a very Palestinian perspective -  not that there was so much on Palestine, there wasn't - but what there was, was really engaged in explaining resistance. And I felt that the literature on Israeli culture or Israeli music that related to the conflict was either Oslo-inspired and very much assuming that music is a path to coexistence. Or alternatively, literature that was kind of coming from the nationalist perspective: “oh, this [the creation of Hebrew genres of popular music] is how Israel was created,” and the foregrounding Israeli culture that completely ignores… because when you're talking nationalism as the Jewish-Israeli story, you're ignoring the huge minority among you - or majority, if you look at the entire region that you control, which includes in this case Gaza and the West Bank. And I felt like these discourses, the discourses of resistance and discourses of coexistence had to be kind of juxtaposed and understood for the politics within them, not just followed with the assumption that this is solely what they represent. And I found that once you start looking at all of these framings, you start to see things from a different perspective. And here I want to quote a student of mine actually—(and when you hear that from students, it's really wonderful)—who studied with me for two semesters, and what he learned was to look at power from the margins, not from the center. And that I taught him that. I think that looking at power from the margins is a very different approach than most undertake. I don't want to say that folks who write about resistance are speaking from power positions, but rather, that that they're speaking from a very particular narrative and position. And I wanted to expand that. I wanted to really see for myself on the ground what that means. And for me, that also meant looking not just at the West Bank, or hip hop artists that participate in this kind of resistance, but also looking at this town that I live [in], which is Jaffa, and happens to be a mixed town. And those kinds of borderline or in-between places are usually underrepresented in the literature. I call them third spaces.3 They're usually underrepresented in both in the ethnomusicological literature and in the general literature that seeks to speak from either this [Palestinian] or that [Jewish-Israeli] perspective.

Marion Brachet : Does this principle of looking at power from the margins and including all points of view affect the way you position yourself as an ethnographer during the fieldwork? And the way you were trying to be perceived? Were you already living in Jaffa when you did your fieldwork there for your Ph. D.?

Nili Belkind : I came to Jaffa [in 2011, after a prepatory visity in 2010] to do my PhD, to do my fieldwork. And the reason I chose Jaffa was because I knew I was going to work in Ramallah and places in the West Bank. And it's relatively central in the country, and within 484. And I also wanted access to the Galilee where  a lot of musical projects are happening. So it was a good place to have as a base. But I stayed a lot in Ramallah and later I stayed a lot in Bethlehem as well and took a lot of trips. I kind of followed the music rather than, you know, just stuck with one or two institutions. It was important for me to look at institutions as well as private initiatives. As far as fieldwork is concerned, it was a little complicated because in the West Bank, I've worked with organizations that are part of the PACBI [Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel], the cultural boycott on Israel. And, you know, in Israel, I've worked with these coexistence projects to understand the politics, and understand the discourses, and understand how to look at performance in those frameworks and what it does and what it substantiates within a performance. So in that sense, it was a little complicated. My own identity was a little complicated, because I'm American, but I'm from Israeli Jewish background, and I also have Palestinian family. So maybe another borderline or third space kind of representation of who I am that in some cases gave me much more access, in other cases, made it more complicated. And certainly, what living in Jaffa and traveling so much really taught me—and that became a major theme in my book which I never would have imagined beforehand—was the whole idea about music and space, and spaces of oppression and how musical activity works with that or counteracts  them. And the ways in which checkpoints figure into it, and even the occupation bureaucracy and permits and things like that, how they can figure into Palestinian time and Palestinian space and how music interacts with all that. And that totally grew out of what I was doing in the field. It wasn’t a preconceived idea that I had, that I was going to study that.

Marion Brachet : I’d like to come back to your relationship with the field of ethnomusicology. You seem to make a point to clarify that the music you study as part of your work on Palestinian/Israeli music, be it in Jaffa or even in Eurovision music,5 is often closer to the global category of popular music than traditional music. What would you say is the relevance or irrelevance of these categories for the music you work on? And in what way do you link your work to ethnomusicology? Is it a question of corpus, of methods?

Nili Belkind : It's simply a methodological perspective, because in my work, I don't follow specific genres. I follow everything that leads me somewhere. And so in my book, you'll find a classical music chamber orchestra performing Mozart at Qalandia checkpoint. And to me, if I just stuck with genres, which have been kind of a mainstay for ethnomusicology, right? People go and study Congolese rumba or they study some other genre. I think it limits us from understanding how cultural production translates into social and political production. I think this is another thing that my book does differently. Because if you study, say, just Palestinian folklore, and then afterwards hip hop, you're missing a lot of sociopolitical statements and activities and work that's done beyond these genres. And I also feel like the boundaries of genres could be very, very porous. And their geography can be very porous, too. So, for example, we're in such a globalized space now that for a lot of demonstrations that have been going on for the unrecognized Palestinian or Bedouin villages, you'll go and find the surdos and cuicas because rhythms of resistance are now exporting Brazilian music as resistance music everywhere in the world. And again, if we just look for the authentic local, we're going to miss a lot of these politics, right? So, I kind of veer away from, you know, authenticity and cultural authenticity and everything that it implies. But I will write about it if it comes up from the people that I work with, the interlocutors. Because for them…there's always the boundaries and who gets to set them is always a political issue. And so I try to understand discourses around them without actually centering my work on some kind of authentic expression.

Marion Brachet : We will come back to these questions of authenticity and who gets to have discourses around it. I'd like to ask you some things about the musicians you worked on and with, and their relationship between activism and professionalization. You raise this issue of professionalization for musicians, notably for System Ali6 – the band from Jaffa you extensively worked with. Are they facing specific challenges? And do these vary depending on the kind of activism the musicians are involved in?

Nili Belkind : Yes. Although I must say System Ali right now is not a working project. One of the main guys who was in leadership of this project, Neta Weiner, is right now in Boston. So occasionally when he’s back there are things they do together but it’s not an active project. He does work a lot with Samira Saraya and tours with her a lot in the States—she also came from the band although not in the period I was working intensively with them, it’s not the repertoire I wrote the book about.  So I think the question of professionalization is very key for folks that have come together, in sort of bottom up projects that are about community and about local work and about enabling access to the have-nots in the spaces where you live. And there are those who it's very clear that they will end up being professional, whether actors and musicians or, you know, folks for whom this will be their life's work. And with System Ali, it's a 10-piece band, so it wasn't always easy for those who also were working dayjobs. For example, one of them was a lifeguard on the beach… and then they come in the evening and they can’t do rehearsals five times a week and so on. So the question of professionalization, I think for System Ali, the fact is that they spent well more than a decade with a core of personalities and musicians and rappers and so on that kept on and are still occasionally doing all kinds of work together—I think that's pretty amazing because there are some professional musicians among them and some are not.

I think the question of professionalization, when you look at Palestine and the kind of Western style pedagogy, and tools for studying music, which is a recent thing there—it started in 1993—before that, you just had to go to somebody and learn with him, you couldn't get any kind of institutional stamp of approval necessary for this kind of work. And in Palestine, what I see is that becoming a music professional is partly also a way of putting Palestine on the map as well. Certainly the discourses and how people relate to it is very much part of this process. And of course, not all the folks that studied at Al-Kamandjati or the Edward Saïd Conservatory will become professionals, but it's very much about building up a collectivity that has a distinct culture and distinct presence and so on. And it's not surprising that ensemble work is a very key aspect of it, not just one-on-one coming to study say, the violin, but the togetherness of ensemble work is very, very important there.

Marion Brachet : You mentioned Palestinian professional musicians having almost a geopolitical role for Palestine. I was wondering, how difficult would you say it is for musicians to keep their music at the forefront when they are involved in activism and direct or indirect political action? I'm asking because during the book launch for Music in Conflict, singer Amal Murkus said that her position was unfair because she had no other choice but to be involved in politics. And it sounded like the subtext was that she would love to only make music, but that it simply wasn't possible for someone like her.

Nili Belkind : It also wasn't possible because of who she grew up as. I mean, she's the daughter of somebody who was a leader in the Communist Party. That's actually where she started singing at the age of five, in these rallies. That's a very interesting place and space to come from because the Communist Party is the only party that's always been binational. So it always had Jews and Palestinians in it. Jews more the minority, but still, it always had a binational framework. I think that a lot of times, on the other hand, Amal has been asked to represent something in places, spaces, causes that she doesn't identify with. I think they scheduled her performance during Israeli Independence Day in London. And she didn't even know that it was an Independence Day performance. And she refused, of course. So in her situation and context, there always this problem, as much as you try to just focus on beautiful music—and she does a lot of that. She has put to music or had other people put to music a lot of work by Palestinian poets. A lot of them from 48’ that she covers, that she then turns into song, as well as older generation poets, like Mahmoud Darwish. So she's very engaged in promoting Palestinian culture in that way. But yes, I think it's very difficult to be just about the music when your whole being is saturated from childhood with a lot of activism. And today when the political and cultural and social and ethnic and national barriers and wedges are so incredibly difficult for anyone here, I think, and for Palestinians much more so, 48’ Palestinians also, not just those under occupation or in Gaza.

Marion Brachet : In your work about affective authenticity in other cultures and other regions than the Middle East, questions of identity and imposing identities remain very important.7 For instance, you insist that enforcing fixed categories often serves the interest of the dominant culture at play, be it the white population in the US, or Israeli ethno-nationalist identity. Would you say that confining the other's music as other, precisely, is even more important for dominant groups than asserting their own cultural dominance?

Nili Belkind : I think it's part of it. I think it's a huge, huge part of it. And I think that those kinds of barriers, they're not just about asserting cultural dominance. They're representations of deep seated fears. I think that what I wrote about in “Affective Authenticity” is quite about that. There’s a lot of orientalist viewing of the other and at the same time, excitement about it because of the difference. But this viewpoint is oftentimes very much anchored in a need to police. That article specifically is about a collaboration of Letta Mbulu, South African singer who was then in exile in the US, and Quincy Jones, on the music of “Roots”, the theme song of “Roots.” And we're talking a very, very charged time. We're talking McCarthyism, post McCarthyism, we're talking civil rights. What I find also that this kind of policing, this kind of search for authenticity has continued to plague ethnomusicology well into the two-thousands in some ways. And so that search for the authentic, which once was about grassroots and working class and, you know, promoting minorities who are repressed is so often also about policing them. Did you see the new movie about Dylan going electric? It's an interesting film, but there's a moment where there's Dylan at the Newport festival. Pete Seeger is the one who's curating, and Dylan is supposed to go on stage after this African American group that's on the stage and they brought them logs so they can split the logs while they're singing this work song, to make it “authentic” for the mostly white audience at Newport. I was like, they really did that? They really made them work with axes while they were singing? ‘Cause it needed to look authentic, right? It's crazy. But that kind of classification and systematization of things, it's partly why people couldn't stand that Dylan went electric. The film is about that moment. I think it can support… of course, folk music and folk musicians have supported a lot of equal rights fights in the US but they've also policed them in ways that are very strange. And sort of staged them in ways that to me, I find them strange. So I really try to… any talk about authenticity—which sometimes is an important discourse, you know, as in “this is my music, this is how I assert myself”. But one needs to look at it as a discourse, not as something that's authentic or inauthentic.

Marion Brachet : Be it for folk music in the US or for other music elsewhere, would you link this question of policing music and questions of cultural appropriation? Is policing also a way to have some control over what can be done publicly with this music?

Nili Belkind : It's exactly that. It’s the dominant culture that has and that's true for example for aborigines in Australia as well—We write a lot in “Affective Authenticity” about this idea that if Quincy Jones actually put into “Roots” instruments and singing styles and vocalisms and so on that didn't come from Gambia, where the author of “Roots”’ supposed family came from, that it made it inauthentic for critics of “Roots”. But Quincy Jones isn't operating in that space of authenticity. He's operating in a whole other kind of space, as is Letta Mbulu. Sometimes it makes you wonder if it's critics who want the Africans to go back to their original countries in Africa, or whatever, that their critique about authenticity showcases their deep seated anxieties about racial democracy, and they use classification and science and so on as covers for a kind of a deep seated bias, really.

Marion Brachet : You mentioned orientalism earlier. You link musical practices with local politics and urbanization, in Jaffa for instance, through the question of gentrification.8 You show that it happens through an exoticization of Palestinian traditions. Does this have any reality in the musical movements between dominant Israeli culture and Palestinian traditions, if they can even be separated in such a way from a musical point of view?

Nili Belkind : That's a hard question for me to answer. If we go back to questions about music and space, what I mostly saw in the context of this gentrification is that as Tel Aviv is expanding and hitting its very margins, there are borders that demarcate where Jaffa ends, for example, and where the next town begins. And people who work across these borders through music-making are actually shifting personal geographies that mark them. And so I found it very interesting to look at, not just at gentrification and what it does and how it exoticizes things from the top, but how people work bottom up to shift these. There's a lot of violence between folks from Bat Yam and Palestinians from Jaffa. We’ve seen it in the last few years, in pogroms and all kinds of things. So when a musical project that actually manages to reshift things and have Palestinians from Jaffa work musically together with, you know, Jews from Bat Yam, which is very right wing, Likud based, generally; and for these people, for that borderline between Bat Yam and Jaffa to totally shift in their own epistemology, I think that's very interesting.

Marion Brachet : Your article about master musician Ezra Aharon/Azuri Effendi shows that in the 1930s, his professional survival might have depended on his accepting diverse cultural identities that were imposed on him, from both Zionist and Palestinian sides.9 Do musicians still have to adapt in this way today? Is it still even possible with the degree of polarization that each positioning implies nowadays?

Nili Belkind : If you're looking at 48’, a lot of musicians that work within the establishment, say, on Israeli radio in Arabic or something like that, I find that for them, they oftentimes face criticism from within their own community for willing to be part of institutions that are oppressive of their own people. So I find that to be difficult. I think that the moment that I write about, which is Jerusalem 1930s is a really fascinating moment because people often talk about either the Great Arab Revolt, which was happening that time, 1936 to 1939 and all the violence that came with it; or people tend to talk about the period again from within Israeli nationalism. And we found scores of this ensemble that Azuri played in. They were hidden in the closet of a professor who had retired. And that professor had written about music in the Jewish settlements before 1948. And he writes about Ezra Aharon, but he only writes about what he did on the slot where he had to write Arabic music but to Hebrew lyrics, on the Mandate-era radio. I'm talking a pile this big of scores that were meant for the Arabic al-Firka, that he also worked with on the Arabic radio, same PBS, the same British station. So things are often described from a point of view in which musicians on the ground are not adhering to, but they're also having to play the game. And so here, what we have are the Orientalist kind of British ideas about Palestine and Palestinians, and their support of Zionism, that Azuri must contend with. Then we have the Zionists that might want to appeal to other Zionist Orientals, people from Muslim majority countries and so on. But they also only want the Arabic music if it has Hebrew lyrics, because this is how we're going to find “our own” ancient path. Very Orientalist gaze as well. And then we have somebody like Ezra Aharon or Azuri who just wants to play music and he'll do it in Hebrew and he’ll do it in Arabic. In the Firka, he also writes songs for Muslim holidays, like Eid al-Adha. You know, he's an Arab Jew. His Arabness and Jewishness is all intertwined. And that's something that from today's perspective is interesting. What you have in Palestine in the 1930s is these very different Orientalist perspectives that kind of all come together on the ground in different ways. And musically, it's very interesting to look at that.10

Marion Brachet : I'm interested in Western music versus Eastern music in that region. We know Israel likes to position itself as a Western outpost in the Middle East. So is that something we can still find today in the institutional Israeli music culture today or not? I was wondering if you would like to develop on the concepts of cultural citizenship and nativization, that you used in a recent article about music schools for Jewish and Israeli population and the way they also use Arab music.11

Nili Belkind : So, let's just look at East and West and then we can come to Musrara. Musrara is a school that was established in the 90s, during the Oslo peace talks when this idea that East and West put together is going to bring peace was being promoted. Now the idea that Israel represents West culturally is totally bogus. There's a majority of people, of Jews, that come from Arab countries or Muslim majority countries. But at least in the nineties, there were so many projects where that assumption was turned into musical projects of coexistence. Or with cross nationalism—which is how we would supposedly bring peace. And that fusion was performed in Oslo when they signed the peace Accords and so on. That discourse, it still continues today, although it's very, very minoritized. I don't think the government puts in any kind of money into projects of coexistence. What you have now is, “oh, of course, Andalusian music was always Jewish music”. Which is not totally wrong because Jews were the tradition bearers after 1492, after they were kicked out of Spain and ended up in North Africa. So it's not completely wrong, but it's, to me, very wrong when there are Palestinians sitting there, part of the ensemble, playing that music too. So that's another kind of policing, the policing of the East. What we have in Musrara, the discourse at the school that we're talking about, is the discourse that Muslims and Jews have always shared music. They [Musrara] always used to have a Jewish majority of students, but also some Palestinians because they were located on the East side of Jerusalem. Since they've moved to West Jerusalem, like three years ago [in 2022], I believe there have been no Palestinian students. So this talk about sharing the music, or music as a shared tradition, with this move, has become a little vacant, let's put it that way. But this idea of returning to roots, participating in world music trends, comes in various kinds of discourses. What was interesting for me in that article is the way that settlers are using the music, because it is most fascinating that what they learn is classical music. So when they go to school, they learn how to play classical Arab music, Indian music. Some of them study very particular traditions, whether it's Andalusian or tarab. But these settlers listen to Arabic radio where they live, among people they want to ethnically cleanse. And they play their music. They play Palestinian folklore in these settlers’ weddings. So theirs’  is an act of crazy appropriation, that is also an act of violence. It's like, “you belong to me too. Your music belongs, everything belongs to me. Your sheep, your…”. I've done some protective presence with shepherds in the West Bank. I even took videos of it. The shepherding communities in the Jordan Valley where I went are some of the most vulnerable communities. And they're the last… since the war began, there are new outpost settlements everywhere. Oftentimes, the shepherds of those outposts are very young, like 14, 15, and they come with their herds. And they come to make sure that the Palestinians, or Bedouins, can't get their herds out. And they open the Palestinians’ water tanks to empty them and so on, they're very violent. At the same time, when I had to face one of these kids for hours to try to prevent him from entering the Bedouin hamlet, and also trying to create space for the Bedouins to get their sheep out, he was there with the transistor radio, singing along to Arabic, to Palestinian folklore [this was the second week of January 2025].12 And that was one of the most eerie experiences for me in that context. And a lot of those guys [i.e. settlers] have studied at Musrara, where they studied classical and then became folklore musicians as well, of Palestinian folklore. And they speak Arabic very well too. These are second and third generation settlers. And they play Palestinian folklore in their weddings. Back to the settler kid with the radio at the hamlet I spoke about, it's incredible. These young settlers from the outposts—a lot of these are at risk youth, that the government actually places at these outposts, which are usually maintained by just one guy or one family, as a supposed rehab. But this outpost model is actually part of the ethnic cleansing that's going on in the West Bank. You see these youth everywhere.

Marion Brachet : Following this, could you develop what you mean with the concept of cultural intimacy ? And what becomes of cultural intimacy in the midst of such cultural appropriation and violence ?

Nili Belkind : Michael Herzfeld wrote this classical book on cultural intimacy. His concept of cultural intimacy is something that's very nation-focused. For him, the reason that we feel comfortable with other people in our society is because there is a cultural intimacy, and that cultural intimacy includes all kinds of things we don't necessarily assume all citizens to be a part of. Like for example, this common knowledge of inappropriate things going on, this idea of this is just how things are. So if you need to, I don't know, get your car registered, you're going to have to pay somebody under the table so that you can finally register your car. All kinds of practices that are part of how people manage themselves in a society. And they know the codes to that—including the codes for how they laugh about themselves and at the corruption in their society, and so on. Herzfeld puts all such practices within the things that we don't even think about as part of this national intimacy or space of intimacy for citizens, yet with the assumption that the borderlines are the national borderlines where cultural intimacy ends. I come and I try to look at cultural intimacy in a place where that mutual togetherness or belongingness is not assumed at all. But I see it all around me. We’ll get to Jowan who I wrote about in the article. But where I live in Jaffa, all my neighbors are Palestinians, and it's fascinating to me. I hear my neighbor taking a shower sometimes, he'll be singing anashid [religious music], and then Mizrahi music in Hebrew, while he's taking a shower. He might not feel like he belongs, or maybe belongs only as a second class citizen in Israel, but there's cultural intimacy because it's part of his sonic space. So he'll sing Mizrahi pop in the shower in Hebrew. So I think that it's interesting to look at cultural intimacy in places where citizenship cannot be assumed, and that kind of national belongingness cannot be assumed.

A fascinating example is Jowan Safadi, I spent a whole article on this one song, because it codes so many things by him, and it's called “To be an Arab”.13Now it's the only song that he sings in Hebrew. It's always English or Arabic. More lately, more so in Arabic. But he uses exactly all the codes that would make it a really good Mizrahi pop song. It’s got the bouzuki style guitar that's playing in the high register arpeggios. It's got so much signage in it. And really, when you look at the video, the point of it is you and I [i.e.Mizrahim] are really the same. We're both Arabs. Underneath it, Mizrahim and Palestinians are all Arabs. But then the video also reveals how violent that encounter is because Jowan wrote it after one of Israel's wars on Gaza, the 2014 one, where the violence towards Palestinians of ‘48, Palestinian citizens, was just at a surge, and Mizrahim were writing awful songs about on Palestinians. And so Jowan was like, you're like me, except you're the import and I'm the one who belongs to this country. So I think it's a really brilliant example of how cultural intimacy can be used in spaces that are very conflictual and where citizenship is not assumed. But yet culture, especially music, has no boundaries. You hear it everywhere, right? It's not like it's even your choice necessarily. I remember listening to some Hamas releases, where there's a singer who clearly listens to Mizrahi pop music and imitates it. He’s probably never been to Israel because Gaza had been under siege for so long, but you can hear it. Sound and intimacy are very different by nature from what is accepted in your geographical space or its boundaries.

Marion Brachet : So you were saying that Hamas releases records ?

Nili Belkind : Not now, but they released a version of Hatikvah which is fascinating to look at—which is the Israeli anthem. They've also released a propaganda song that is kind of like a trans EDM-Mizrahi pop song. And it's really about committing terror attacks in Israel [the song was first put out in Arabic in 2012 by Hamas and during the 2014 war in Gaza they released a Hebrew version] . And the song became a huge hit in Israel, huge hit with dozens of covers that satirized the Hamas original. They've released other songs. They’re always changing the lyrics. It's fascinating. At some point I wanted to write an article about that, but I didn't want to do it without talking to the people who created it. I need that, the understanding of how cultural intimacy works with people, to know really how they think. I wasn't sure how to do it in a way that does it justice. Maybe if there was a Palestinian who wanted to do it with me or something… but now it's not relevant anyway.

Marion Brachet : My next question is kind of a big one, but I think you started answering it already. Nationalistic and more generally binary belligerent logics often rely on the confining of another group of people as fundamentally other. So I was wondering whether cultural intimacy can help prevent this. I'm guessing that’s not necessarily the case, from what you've said until now. But I was wondering to what extent is cultural intimacy entangled with exoticization and Orientalism.

Nili Belkind : I think it can be a space of intimacy and I also think it can be a space of conflict, of dealing with conflict in different ways. I think the assumption that if culturally we share a lot, we will overcome a lot of conflict, is not necessarily true. And I think even when you look at national politics, even if you look at the folks who are running this country right now, they all speak Hebrew. But I share nothing with them except the language. You know what I'm saying? I think when you start looking at units that are assumed to be culturally intact or bounded… It's actually weird for me because I actually love Hertzfeld's analysis, but I also feel like there's too much in the assumption of intimacy. Even if you look at a couple, intimacy can be very loving and intimacy can be very violent. And if you take that into the cultural arena, I think intimacy can do double-edged kind of work. It can do the work of violence and it can do the work of subsuming violence and going towards other things. Actually the more I look at what's going on here – what Israel accuses Hamas of doing, it is doing itself. You know, people become like each other in violence. Face-to-face violence is a very intimate thing. Just as much as face-to-face love can be very intimate. So I think it's interesting to look at intimacy that way.

Marion Brachet : And intimacy gives more tools for oppression and violence, I guess, in that sense.

Nili Belkind : And also resistance and also love. Or care or empathy or whatever. It can be all of these. You can never assume.

Marion Brachet : This next question might be a hard one, but when talking about the crisis of May, 2021 in another interview, you said that in times like these music goes silent. At least as far as you are concerned. So I can't help but ask how you feel about this statement today, given the current situation. Has music been silent this past few months/years?

Nili Belkind : Yes. For me, for the last 20 months [since October 7th, 2023], I listen very rarely, except for what I need to do for work. Like if I'm preparing a class of course. So in that sense for me personally… other people go to music to escape or to, you know, feel human. For me, my aurality grows around the sounds of war. With the air raids that we had here, we now have the screeching sound where it feels like the phone is jumping up and down. And that screeching sound just tells you, because the ballistic missiles— they know well before they arrive, they'll know 10, 15 minutes before they hit. So I hear that. And then that means be ready to run to the shelter. And of course we have shelters, not everyone, but a lot of folks do. In Gaza, there's nothing. And I'm so aware of that all the time. And then comes this other siren going up and down that tells us to… Your sonic geography—this is just a small example of what I'm learning. In 2022 or 21, I can’t remember what it was called, there were sort of little intifadas in mixed cities. And I learned to identify so many sounds outside of my window, including stun grenades, things like that. The one thing that really gave me comfort, the moment that really gave me comfort during the week of the war with Iran, where we were constantly… the air raids were constant. I mean, not constant, but every couple of hours, almost always at night, there would be…something. Across the parking lot from where I live, there is a mosque. And so I hear the mu’ezzin five times a day. And it's kind of rare for the siren and call to prayer to converge. It's not the first time I heard it. I actually recorded it because while the siren was going on, telling everybody to run for safety, the muezzin continued with the azan until it was all done14. That was a really powerful moment for me, because for me, that was a « this is what I'm doing. I'm here », kind of thing. But I don't listen as much to music in times like this. It's really hard for me.

Marion Brachet : Even in Israel, there are less musical events nowadays ?

Nili Belkind : Well, there's no flights, and people don't want to come. Airport is shut down a lot of the time. During the war with Iran, everything was canceled. I was going to go to a concert, but everything was canceled. Cultural life is very different. There is a lot of music played at demonstrations that I go to. I've started standing together with a group, we do a vigil for the children of Gaza. We stand with pictures with their names on it and when they lived and so on, with candles. The last one, we turned it into a kind of memorial thing. And there was a woman who played harp while we were doing that, in a public place, to try to get people to understand, to see what's not shown here on television. But sometimes that's all you can ...  For me, sometimes it's all I can handle musically. Once in a while I'll put an album on, but since the war with Iran, I haven't put an album on.