Arab music and the changing political imaginaries of cultural citizenship in Israel: the Musrara School as a case study

The past three decades have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of Arab music among Jewish Israelis. This stands in seeming contradiction with developments in the political arena, which have furthered the epistemic divide between Arab/Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli. This article traces how Israeli national culture invested in projects of nativization, has historically been repeatedly redefined vis-à-vis Arabness in contradictory ways, and in relation to a variety of Arab Others; including different groups of Palestinians and Arab Jews (Mizrahim). A focus on the Jerusalem-based Musrara School, which teaches different classical Eastern music styles, grounds this research ethnographically in the changing formations of (sonic) cultural citizenship among Jewish Israelis. The article shows how these changes lead to the current association of Arab musics with Jewish Mizrahi culture divorced from its conflictual ethnonational registers, and increasingly, also becoming a vector of indigeneity and Jewish exclusivity among the religious settler population in the West Bank.