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January 8, 2021
The peace accords that Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and more recently with Morocco are exposing Israelis to the rich Arab cultures of these various states. They now have a chance to appreciate its food, music, and architecture, which is obviously not entirely new to Israelis. After all, they live in the Middle East and many are immigrants from the Arab world. This special bond is particularly evident between Israel and Morocco. Ron Peretz, a 27-year-old performer from Tel Aviv, embodies these ties in his music and his unique voice.
Some 400,000 Jews have immigrated to Israel from the Maghreb region of North Africa, more than half of them from Morocco. Most arrived in the early years of statehood, from 1948 to 1953, with additional waves of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s. Only a handful of immigrants from these lands passed their language on to the next generation.
Morocco has been accessible to Israelis since the 1990s, excluding brief periods of tension between the two countries. Many Israelis took the opportunity to fly to Morocco in search of their roots and spend time touring the country. Local Israeli bands and orchestras perpetuated Moroccan musical traditions. One of them, the Andalusian Orchestra of Ashdod, received the prestigious Israel Prize in 2006.
Peretz was born in Kiryat Gat, a city in southern Israel whose population is mainly made up of North African, Russian and Ethiopian immigrants. She comes from a musical family. She told Haaretz: “My grandfather, Eliyahu Tobol, was a well-known singer. He was also a teacher and a school principal, which made him the best known person in all of Kiryat Gat. I am proud to be his granddaughter. It was an inspiration to a lot of people. ”
After completing his military service, Peretz spent five years studying music, performing in small clubs and competitions. As a student, he found that he feels the greatest affinity for the sounds he hears at home, mainly Moroccan music and language. He spoke Moroccan Arabic with his grandmothers at home and worked with Dr. Moshe Cohen, a philologist who specializes in North African Arabic dialects, to hone his language skills.
Peretz began to perform Moroccan music with a unique touch, infusing it with his personality incorporating hip hop. “When I translated my song into Moroccan Arabic and heard it for the first time, I immediately felt a connection to my home. My parents speak Hebrew, but there is always Moroccan Arabic in the background. Every now and then, they include a word or even a complete sentence in Arabic. My parents also spoke Moroccan Arabic with each other, so I didn’t understand what they were saying. I never imagined singing in the same language my parents spoke. I suddenly realized that I needed to turn this into a complete project, rather than just one or two songs. I realized that the combination of hip hop and Moroccan music speaks to young people. Hip hop provides a certain balance. I grew up on it; it’s kind of my place. So what I’m doing is bringing the language and music of my childhood to a fun new place. When I sing in a club, everyone gets up to dance, even though it’s a language they don’t really know. ”
Peretz can be called a protest singer. The Moroccan Arabic dialect spoken by Moroccan Jews differs from the languages spoken by immigrants from other countries in that it has no official recognition in Israel and, despite its immense popularity throughout the country, North African music and other Mizrahi music always it was considered an inferior genre in the Israeli mainstream.
Singer-songwriter Avihu Medina is behind some of Israel’s biggest Middle Eastern hits. However, he told Al-Monitor in the summer of 2019 that he sometimes thinks that Israeli music from the Middle East is more popular in the Arab world than in Israel. Born in 1948 of Yemeni descent, Medina was one of the people who struggled to achieve acceptance of the genre on the Israeli music scene, a scene dominated for decades by patrons promoting the musical styles of Eastern and Western Europe. However disparaging Israeli Middle Eastern music as they were, Medina pointed out that artists from the Arab world had been there much longer than any other group of Israelis.
Israeli Mediterranean music is especially popular with music fans in the Arab states. Singers like Zehava Ben and Sarit Hadad have performed in Jordan and even the Palestinian territories, and Hadad is scheduled for a concert tour of the United Arab Emirates with Itay Levi, another popular Israeli artist. Israeli singer Elkana Marziano recorded a song with Emirati artist Waleed Aljasim.
Israel Prize recipient Edwin Seroussi, a professor of Middle Eastern and Arabic music, told Al-Monitor that the Internet has removed national borders, allowing Arabs to listen to Israeli and Oriental music. Peretz has a large fan base in the Arab states who follow his work on YouTube, Spotify, and other applications. Now she hopes to perform for them in person. He visited Morocco with his family last year to explore his roots, including a visit to the house where one of his parents was born.
Peretz’s cover of “The Drunken Song” protests the discrimination against Jews from Arab lands and the racism they have faced in Israel for many years. The music video was filmed in Wadi Salib, a Haifa neighborhood famous for the demonstrations of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries in the 1950s.
“I said to myself, ‘Why not link all of this?’ Jo Amar wrote the song about the protests of the 1960s. I found that it connected well with contemporary artist Tomer Yosef’s protest message. It is the old world meeting the new world. It’s just natural. I immediately imagined myself shooting the video in Wadi Salib. I didn’t focus on the street. People will understand. Several communities in Israel, including Moroccans, Ethiopians and Russians, still face discrimination. I hope that people will at least be ashamed of their racism once we make them more aware of it. “
Peretz emphasizes singing primarily in Arabic. When asked about people’s reactions, he said: “I think once again there was antagonism towards the language. There isn’t so much of that anymore. Someone asked me on YouTube, ‘Why do you sing in the language of our enemies?’ But we are also Arabs. Where we come from? We are the gathering of exiles. I am a Jew with roots in Morocco and my language is Arabic. “
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