Live from MATA Presents: New Music from the Islamic World
The Tyranny of Separation

Sharon Harms, soprano
Isabelle O'Connor, piano

July 8, 2017
DiMenna Center for New Music
New York, NY

Zaid Jabri: Beati Pacifici / In Memorial Rachel Corrie (2010)
As a part of her school’s fifth grade press conference on world hunger, Rachel Corrie delivered a forceful speech in which she said: “I’m here for other children, I’m here because I care...We’ve got to understand that they are us. We are them.”
Activist Rachel Corrie was killed in Rafah, in the southern portion of the Gaza strip on March 16, 2003, while protesting together with several other members of the International Solidarity Movement. Accounts differ as to the details of her death, but what is agreed upon is that she was run over or smothered by an Israeli armored bulldozer while opposing an IDF operation to demolish either Palestinian houses or smuggling tunnels during the Second Intifada.
Shortly before her death, Corrie began to question her outlook. She wrote her mother from Gaza:
“For a long time I've been operating from a certain core assumption that we are essentially the same inside, and that our differences are by and large situational. .... I know there is a good chance that this assumption actually is false. But it's convenient, because it always leads to questions about the way privilege shelters people from the consequences of their actions. It's also convenient because it leads to some level of forgiveness, whether justified or not. It is my own selfishness and will to optimism that wants to believe that even people with a great deal of privilege don't just idly sit by and watch.”
In Beati Pacifici, Jabri sets one of the more famous passages of the Bible, the seventh of the Beatitudes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5:9)
Text: Beata Pacifici quoniam filii dei vocabantur

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