NABIL - RADIO DERVISH WORDS ABOUT NOA & PEACE


(...) since a long time we have decided to take the journey on the path that leads to peace with Noa, Gil Dor and Zohar Fresco, intertwining our artistic and political engagement with theirs.  Our crossing eachothers has been first a choosing eachothers for musical and artistic reasons and then a political challenge that could make confront, through the dialogue, distant and sometimes antithetic experiences.
    Our approaching has been immediatly a narration about eachothers, making the myths and the believes (we have grown in) more objective, in order to begin to research the truths reading them directly in the face and the history of the other with the aid of the word and music.
     The collaboration between the Radiodervish, Noa and the musicians of her group has been, exactly, a way to work together to the construction of a possible dialogue in which preliminary matters were important: preliminary matters made of clarifications, analyses of the own convictions, battles engaged with ourselves and with our world in order to change it and manage to meet the other.
     The musical instrument, probably, has made this comparison more fluid as it's a language that allows an exchange at a deeper level than that one allowed by the words; and, in this sense, the visionary proposal made during the second world war by the famous musical critic Massimo Mila starts again to be topical: the proposal that consisted in the promotion of "Mozarth circles" in which the music lovers of any nationality could have met in order to interest a dialogue even at a distance starting from the listening and the common passion for the same music in an Europe split by the racial hatred and the war.
    Maybe a valid idea also in this conflict that gives back to the musical events an important role in the construction of precious oases where we can preserve a small source of humanity in a desert made of violence and injustice.
     As Radiodervish we have always believed in the preciousness of the dialogue between the diversities, having often had as ideal model that one of the "Faithfuls of love": transnational movement of XII the century constituted by western and eastern poets, among which there are Dante  Alighieri, Cavalcanti and many Sufi arab poets, who, against the sordid interests of the temporal and spiritual powers of the age, kept the underground relationships between the cultures in conflict alive.
    And, curiously, today that history  seems to repeat even in the reproposition of the places, Palestine, and in the return of some protagonists, like the Franciscans, who today defend the Basilica of the Nativity, and in those times basted, through their founder Francesco from Assisi, a dialogue of peace with the Saladin.
    Yes, we believe that music can help the cause of peace on condition that it shows the possibility of an authentic and not formal dialogue, on condition that it is brave in denouncing lie and the injustice, otherwise it risks to be just smoke in the eyes: an umpteenth form of mystification of a reality made of blood and suffering.
    On the contrary what we need now are those truths written on the faces of the men and the women of Israel and Palestine, that music can sing with simplicity, without hiding the difficulties of a conflict whose injustices  are in the basis of this war.
Music and collaborations between musicians can do much wether on the concrete plan or on that symbolic one, but it would be ingenuous to deny that strong contradictions remain beyond it.
    Peace, in fact, is something that has to be constructed. Nabil and Noa are surely friends in so far as they have chosen to walk side by side along the impassable path that leads to peace, without forgetting that their starting points are deeply different and this still today has repercussions on their daily existences.
    In our opinion peace will have necessarily to pass through the end of the absurd practice of the men bomb, that guarantees the right to a quiet and dignified life for Noa and all the Israelis; at the same time peace will have to recognize that Nabil, refugee and son of refugees, has the right to a native land, taken away by force from his family and all the Palestinians in 1948, in order to undertake finally a pacific cohabitation of the two people in two states.
    The way, surely, will be long and difficult, but we are comforted by the common conviction that peace has sense and value when friends with equal dignity and equal rights construct it.
    In order to testify these reasons we will play together with Noa and her group on the 1st of May in Brussels and on the 10th of  June in London: honor and privilege that come from having by our side, in spite of this horrible war, loyal mates of journey for the attainment of a fair and human peace.
©  Nabil e Michele Lobaccaro (RadioDervish) 2002