For some, peace means being left alone, without having to be reminded of the existence of the other. The bill to ban muezzin’s is honest about achieving that.

By Sean O’Neill

Last spring I sat on the small white couch I had retrieved from a street curb, working on a paper, when the call to prayer rang out not far away.  I didn’t think anything of it for a moment; then I remembered that I was not in the Middle East, I was in Brooklyn.  I had only recently moved to my new apartment and hadn’t noticed the call to prayer before.  During three years in the Middle East, I had become accustomed to the sound of the muezzin urging Muslims to pause momentarily from their daily lives and reflect on the cosmos, but had never heard it in the U.S.  I was pleasantly surprised at the discovery.

I first heard the call to prayer in Sarajevo in 2002.  Church bells joined the melee halfway through and the two danced in the sky, echoing off the surrounding mountains.  I was standing at the time in a rather fresh looking cemetery full of young men who had died defending a Sarajevo where muezzin and bell could share the valley.

In the village of At-Tuwani, south of Hebron, a sound system was added to the mosque’s skeletal minaret in 2008.  The original mosque had been destroyed by the Israeli army in 1987 and the village had finally been able to build new one, although of course not without a demolition order.  It gave the project a sense of completion.  It also meant that from that day forward a stream of young boys got their chance to call the village to prayer, participating in their faith, their community, in a way that being an altar boy growing up didn’t quite seem to equal.  Their calls couldn’t match the melodic beauty of a more practiced muezzin, but trying to identify each screeching tone deaf voice with the boy at the mic had a beauty of its own – a beauty stemming from relationship.

Beauty, however, is in the eye, or ear, of the beholder.  And in the lack of relationship, or the lack even of a willingness for relationship, the call to prayer may come off as noise pollution.  Enter MK Anastassia Michaeli from Yisrael Beitenu, author of a recent controversial bill in the Israeli Parliament. Michaeli and her supporters, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, wish to ban the use of a loudspeaker for the call to prayer.  She claims it is an environmental concern.  She ought to get together for coffee with Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, who this fall discovered a new-found obsession with hygiene and noise pollution in relation to the Occupy Wall St. protests in New York, that famously quiet and clean city.  As for Netanyahu, he insists that Israel does not have to be more liberal than Europe.  Bibi, buddy, I’d say you’re in the clear there.

In a strange way, I understand Michaeli’s motivation, environmental nonsense aside.  It did occur to me one evening waiting in Qalandia checkpoint when a distant muezzin called out that the occupation had given a political coating to an otherwise apolitical act.  In that moment it felt as if the muezzin was speaking to the soldiers at the checkpoint.  Allahu akbar.  God greater than – what?  Anything you got, I suppose.  Checkpoints, Humvees, M16s, Apaches.  If Palestinians are losing more land every day, they have at least until now held a firmer line in the country’s soundscape.

It is something of a cliché to say that the vast majority of people on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict want peace.  And in a way it’s true.  But I have found over the years that peace means different things for different people.  For some, such as the Palestinians of At-Tuwani and the Israeli activists of Ta’ayush who stand with them, peace means existing together in equality and justice.

For others, however, peace means being left alone, living a quietish, comfortable life without having to be reminded of the existence of the other.  Especially if the other’s existence serves as an uncomfortable reminder that the nationalist story you have been raised with – you know the one, the land without the people for the people without the land – has some gaping holes in it.  I can only imagine how irritating it is for such a person to be reminded, via loudspeaker, five times a day, of this inconvenient fact.

So I at least I have some sympathy, on a strictly intellectual level mind you, with Netanyahu and the other supporters of this law than with the Likud ministers who are against it, who feel it’s a step too far, a provocation not worth the trouble.  As if banning the use of a loudspeaker to call Muslims to prayer is crossing some line that shooting a unarmed man in the face with a tear gas canister, or destroying a village’s well while the settlers up the hill water their green lawns, hasn’t already crossed.

Sean O’Neill worked for Christian Peacemaker Teams from 2006-2009 in the South Hebron Hills supporting Palestinian-led nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and continued settlement expansion. He is currently an MA candidate at New York University in Near Eastern Studies and Journalism. He is in Israel/Palestine this summer researching for his masters’ thesis.