Concert Co Exist
an article by Joanne Tawfilis

I was transfixed as I watched a trio of musicians playing and singing a combination of Arab and Israeli songs together. Large screens flanked both sides of the stage where images of people caught up in war scenes were providing commentary.

A young Lebanese man and university classmates who had come together to fund raise for Lebanese and Israeli victims of war organized the concert. The group had even managed to organize and institutionalize a UNA Student Alliance at the University of California San Diego and together, worked many weeks to produce Concert Co Exist.

Rabeh became motivated during a “Semester Abroad” in Greece when he find himself among the students gathered there which included colleagues from the Balkans and Middle East, including Lebanese and Israeli’s.

As Rabeh tells it, the first few nights and days were simple torture as both groups of students were frenetic and shaken, distanced from their homes and loved ones. The arguments were passionately angry and fueled by the incessant press that continued to broadcast play-by-play activities from their views that only made students more worried.

But as Rabeh also tells it—throughout those nights and days, a transformation took hold that bound them all together when dialogue led to the discovery that none of them had a basis for a personal hatred toward one another and instead found they had more in common than they had differences. Thus, their commitment to make the Red Cross in Lebanon and in Israel the beneficiaries of aid to victims of war. Once again an art form proved that global harmony could exist with youth reaching out to one another during what we all had hoped was the Decade for the Culture of Peace and Non Violence Among Children of the World.

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What place does music have in the peace movement?


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This report was posted on February 8, 2007. The moderator is CPNN Administrator.

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