By the Zonagirante.com team @spinning zone
Cover art by Zonagirante Studio
Music, Jewish dissent and critical memory in the face of violence in Gaza
There are historical moments when speaking out seems insufficient and remaining silent, quite simply, immoral. Moments when indignation is legitimate, but the surrounding noise ends up distorting it. In these scenarios, culture doesn't offer solutions, but it does offer something equally necessary: spaces where complexity can still exist.
This text stems from that conviction: that music, far from being an embellishment or a distraction, can function as an archive of dissent, as an ethical practice, and as active memory. Not to explain a conflict, but to resist its simplification.
Before moving forward, it is necessary to establish a clear position.
We oppose the genocidal policies of Benjamin Netanyahu's government and those who implement and support them. These policies have resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza and are deepening a pattern of systematic violence in the West Bank. There is no possible justification for massacre, collective punishment, or the dehumanization of the other.
Saying this is not a rhetorical gesture. It is a starting point.
But simply condemning the events, even when justified, is not enough. The problem isn't just what happens on the battlefield, but also how the conflict is narrated, reduced, and used to erase nuances, stories, and lives.
Two towns, one territory, one open question
We defend the right to the existence of two nations, Israel and Palestine, with full sovereignty, security, and dignity for both peoples. And, if political imagination allows, it is not unreasonable to recall that there have been and still are movements that have envisioned something even more radical: the possibility of a binational state, built above origins, creeds and races.
Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Judah Magnes imagined, at different times in the 20th century, models of coexistence that were not based on supremacy or exclusion., but in real political cohabitation. They were not naive. They knew that ethnic nationalism, taken to extremes, ends up devouring itself.
Bringing these ideas into the present is not an exercise in intellectual nostalgia, but an uncomfortable reminder at a time when political imagination seems shut down. Jewish history also harbors profound traditions of critical, universalist, and anti-authoritarian thought, traditions that are frequently erased from public debate today.
When Indignation Takes a Twist
One of the most perverse effects of the current conflict is the resurgence of anti-Semitism disguised as moral outrage. Criticizing a state, a government, or a specific policy is not only legitimate: it is necessary. But when that criticism becomes an indiscriminate condemnation of an entire people, pain ceases to be an engine of justice and becomes a tool of exclusion.
This is not a marginal excess in the debate, but a direct consequence of its oversimplification. Confusing the guilty with the innocent is no minor error: it is a form of symbolic violence that reproduces the very logic it claims to combat. Anti-Semitism does not illuminate the Palestinian tragedy; it obscures it. And, in doing so, it reinforces the most reactionary positions on all sides.
The other silenced majority
There is something that is often left out of the dominant narrative: the huge number of Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora, who openly oppose what is happening. People who protest, write, organize, and pay a real price for dissenting. People who do not accept that their identity is used as a shield for violence.
Recognizing this diversity is not a gesture of artificial balance, but an ethical necessity. Without it, conflict becomes trapped in a binary caricature where only the extremes win and all possibility of critical thinking is lost.
And it is precisely here that music begins to say things that political discourse can no longer formulate.
Music as an ethical practice: Daniel Barenboim
Daniel Barenboim He doesn't make "political" music in the traditional sense. His work, especially through the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, He proposes something more uncomfortable: music as a method.
In that orchestra, Israeli, Palestinian and other Middle Eastern musicians play together even though the conflict remains unresolved. There is no prior consensus or contrived reconciliation. There is rehearsal, listening, friction, and shared discipline. Fine-tuning together without agreeing.
The West-Eastern Divan does not symbolize peace. Practice something more difficult: functional coexistence. Music does not erase conflict, but it prevents it from becoming a denial of the other.
Identity in Combustion: Balkan Beat Box
If Barenboim represents the structure, Balkan Beat Box The body embodies it. Here, dissent doesn't come from the lectern, but from rhythm, movement, and mixing.
Balkan Beat Box operates from a hybrid Jewish identity, shaped by migration, Balkan influences, electronica, punk, and global energy. There is no purity to preserve, no frozen tradition. There is constant friction.
Her music doesn't ask for permission or explain much. It moves, it unsettles, it dances. And in that movement, it affirms something essential: identity doesn't have to be a trench. It can be crossing, collision, and transformation.
A tribute to solidarity: The Klezmatics and Woody Guthrie
The Klezmatics They demonstrate that tradition doesn't have to be conservative. Their project of setting unpublished lyrics to music by Woody Guthrie It is one of the most insightful cultural operations of recent decades.
A Jewish klezmer group reinterpreting one of the great chroniclers of the American workers' and anti-fascist struggle is not an anecdotal gesture, but a statement. It unites stories of migration, resistance and solidarity between different peoples, without erasing their differences.
Here, music functions as a chosen memory, not one inherited uncritically. Honoring the past doesn't mean defending everything, but rather engaging with it from the present.
Listening as a way of positioning oneself
These examples do not explain the conflict in the Middle East. They are not intended to. But they refuse to accept the logic of brutal simplification.
In a world that demands immediate action, listening attentively is already a form of resistance. Not to relativize violence, but to avoid reproducing it in language, culture, and the way we see others.
Music does not replace politics, but it reminds us of something essential: no people is a homogeneous bloc., No identity is a single thing, and dissent is not treason, but responsibility.
Not everything can be said.
Not everything should be kept silent.
And sometimes, when words are no longer enough, music knows how to fill that space with a lucidity that is both unsettling and, at the same time, supportive.
