We were due to get a video message from Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, a Palestinian and an Israeli who work together for peace after both losing relatives in the conflict — Sarah’s brother died of injuries sustained in Israeli custody and Inon’s parents were killed by Hamas on 7 October. But the computer failed. A few men stared at a laptop, balefully tapping a key, until a young, bearded bloke wearing a yarmulke took the mike: “I’m Hoff. I’m the tech guy. I’m an introvert, and not very good at public speaking,” He grinned shyly: “I’m also not a very good tech guy.”

But it was just a glitch, and soon the face of a handsome man in his early fifties, with wiry grey hair, filled the large screen at the end of the room. Mo Husseini, a Palestinian-American, was speaking to Friends of Standing Together, the Melbourne branch of an organisation of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis dedicated to — wait for it — peace in the Middle East.

Founded in 2015, Standing Together stands for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories, peace and independence for both peoples, and “full equality for everyone in this land.” It has 7000 members in Israel, about two-thirds of them Jewish, a third Arab. It’s a small number but membership has more than doubled since October 2023. (It also has 250,000 followers on social media.) Standing Together has collected food and clothing for Gaza residents and protected food trucks entering Gaza from attacks by far-right Israeli groups. Israeli novelist David Grossman,  who has written powerfully about the conflict, has spoken at Standing Together rallies.

Husseini, who lives in Washington State, is a filmmaker, novelist and member of the national launch committee for Friends of Standing Together USA. A piece he published in May 2024, “50 Completely True Things,” got more than half a million reads, perhaps because he found a fresh and funny and heartfelt way to write about a conflict that has nothing fresh or funny about it. Husseini grounds his writing not in the region’s endlessly litigated history and politics but in a principle. Two peoples live on this land and both have a right to live in peace and dignity. Start there.

But starting there is difficult, a point Husseini made right off the bat when he thanked people for coming. “I don’t say that as a pleasantry, I mean it. Being involved with Standing Together when the world is rewarding people for picking a side, for the comfort of tribe, for the dopamine hit of certainty, is a choice that carries a cost,” one that was rarely acknowledged.

Husseini spoke for half an hour without notes and in the strange intimacy of Zoom, which shows every twitching eyebrow or thought crossing a face. Noticing a young boy in the front row, he apologised in advance for a few “swears.” I sensed a man not convinced of his own wisdom but feeling his way, through speech, towards his version of the truth.

“I am a Palestinian,” he began. “I am not the Palestinian. I do not speak for any Palestinians. I can barely speak for myself most days.”

His family, carried across borders “by the shifting winds of history,” migrated from Palestine to Kuwait, where Husseini grew up, then to the United States. Husseini always felt he was from somewhere else, “somewhere you can’t go back to.” Belonging was a kitchen, food, a certain accent, the way his mother said the word, “home.” “Being Palestinian is frankly a shitty gig.” But “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I carry it with pride and love, and a ferocity that sometimes surprises me.”

What profoundly shaped his thought was living in America after 9/11. As a cultural Muslim, with a name that “sounds like the names of the people who flew the planes,” Husseini felt a relentless pressure to make himself understood to people who saw him as dangerous or didn’t see him at all. A pressure to show in every conversation that he was a moderate, to condemn al-Qaeda and bin Laden, to make a “performance of harmlessness that is hard to describe unless you have lived in it.”

It was hardly the worst thing in the world, Husseini said, and he wasn’t asking for sympathy.

Nevertheless, in the looks he got on planes and in theatres, in the random body searches that weren’t random, “I learnt in my body, in my heart, what it feels like when a whole society decides that who you are matters less than your category or tribe or religion… when you stop becoming a person and become the representative of a people.”

That lesson was why he became a writer, and why he joined Standing Together. Because, Husseini said, “that same machinery, that same impulse to condense an entire people into a single dangerous silhouette,” was now being applied to Jews.

He didn’t elaborate much on what he meant, but in a recent piece he wrote of “the way Zionist has become, in some corners, a synonym for Jew… the way criticism of Israeli policy slides, sometimes by accident and sometimes very much on purpose, into something older and uglier.” Speaking to Australians while the royal commission was hearing testimony about the shocking extent of antisemitism in this country, Husseini didn’t need to explain.

Husseini said his listeners often asked him a hard question: how could he as a Palestinian extend understanding to a people that was actively oppressing Palestinians? By talking about Jewish pain alongside Palestinian pain, was he not letting Israel off the hook?

The answer was easy, Husseini said. “I’m not both-sidesing this.” The power was not equal; occupier and occupied were not on the same moral plane. “My anger at what Israel is doing to Palestinians is not diminished by one single degree… I judge the occupation, the settlements, the bombing of hospitals, the taking of land and the uprooting of olive trees, the entire apparatus of domination that has made Palestinian life broadly unliveable for generations.”

But, he said, he refused to take the next step: “that because the Israeli government is doing these things, somehow every Israeli is complicit… somehow all Jewish people are guilty.” Because that was the step that had always been used against Palestinians.

“Activists really need to hear this,” he said. “The people who want you to flatten, who want you to say they are all the same, who want to treat everyone on the other side as a stand in for the worst of the other side. You are handing the Israeli right the narrative it needs: ‘See, they all hate us, there is no partner, the only option is more walls and more bombs.’

“You don’t defeat an unjust system by becoming its mirror image, you defeat injustice by becoming the thing that injustice says is impossible — people from both sides in the same rooms refusing to be what the system needs them to be.”

Lest anyone think his vitriol ran only one way, Husseini took “careful aim” at his own side, because “intellectual honesty is not a buffet where you get to skip issues you don’t like.” The Palestinian leadership’s “corruption, authoritarianism and factional cannibalism” had catastrophically failed its people for decades, Husseini said. Leaders had refused to accept imperfect peace deals that might have saved lives. The Hamas “cult of martyrdom” that “feeds children into a meat grinder and calls it resistance” had gotten the people of Gaza killed in catastrophic numbers.

But he was not here, Husseini said, to weigh Israeli failures against Palestinian failures, misery against misery, who had suffered more — “that exercise itself is the poison, the thing that keeps the conflict locked in place.”

Instead, the path forward required “everyone to look at their own house with the same ruthless clarity that they bring to looking at the other guy’s.” Until that happened, “we are not serious about peace, we are serious about being right — and being right has never in the history of any conflict saved a single life.”

Husseini turned to the role of story-telling, and of Jews, in his life. “Before I had a conversation with a Jewish person, I had lived in Jewish stories: books, films, arts, music. They all did something no political argument could have done. They let me feel in my body what it is like to carry a different people’s history. Not to agree with it but just to understand it.”

It was through stories that Husseini learnt that Jewish people were “not performing their fear. Their fear and trauma is real, it comes from somewhere ancient and it lives in their children in the same way my trauma lives in me. A good story makes flattening impossible… you cannot reduce them to a slogan. You know they are a person.” Even a paragraph that “captures someone mid-scroll” on their phone — “that crack is the beginning of something, everything that happens in rooms like this.”

Husseini took a few questions from the room, then left with an apology and a grin: his son’s last soccer game of the season was about to begin.

A young guitarist, Samantha Levy, stepped up to sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in Arabic — words she said she had learnt from a Palestinian man. An organiser, Abe Schwarz, closed the event by pointing out that Husseini had quoted a line from Anthem, another Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” He asked us to support a project to provide food to Palestinian families in the West Bank displaced by Israeli forces. And if people wanted to stick around, he said, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian and Arab people would be meeting that afternoon in this room to talk about the conflict.

People milled around, moved by Husseini’s talk. I was, too, yet something in me resisted these sweet notes at the end. Were they a balm to try to soothe the unending bitterness of this conflict? We would leave, stirred, with Cohen’s “sacred chord” humming in our heads, when only darkness seemed to lie ahead.

Five days after October 7, 2023, Standing Together signed a statement made by twenty-nine Israeli civil society groups calling for negotiations with Hamas to free the hostages and opposing the war that was about to begin. Dozens of members left the organisation as a result, no doubt feeling its line was too soft given the barbarity of the attacks and the ongoing threat posed by Hamas. At that time the organisation and one of its leaders, Alon-Lee Green, were getting 2000 threatening messages a day, after right-wing groups published their addresses.

And when an Israeli military action freed four hostages in Gaza in 2024, Jewish and Arab leaders of Standing Together struggled to write a joint statement that struck the right balance of joy at their release with pain at the collateral loss of Palestinian life. The organisation’s rule that it presents one united position to the two communities can be hard to uphold.

While Standing Together locates itself proudly on the left, it has few friends among the global left that has so ardently embraced the Palestinian cause. The Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which since its founding in 2005 has sought to ostracise Israel in global forums, called Standing Together a “normalisation outfit that seeks to distract from and whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Speaking on American campuses after 7 October, Alon-Lee Green and another Standing Together leader, Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had the bizarre experience of white student protestors wrapped in keffiyehs telling her she was normalising Israel, and telling him to go back to Poland.

I wondered whether Standing Together’s traditional leftist rhetoric of solidarity, justice and struggle would limit its ability to grow in a country that has shifted sharply to the right since the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. But it is not the only voice calling for a middle way.

On the Palestinian side I’m thinking of Ali Abu Awwad, who founded the Palestinian non-violence movement, Taghyeer (Change), and Samer Sinijlawi, president of the Jerusalem Development Fund. In the diaspora there are the British-Palestinian blogger John Aziz, and in the United States, Ihab Hassan and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

None of these writers is blind to the torment of their people. They’ve lived it. Alkhatib has lost thirty relatives, many to Israeli airstrikes, in the war in Gaza. Awwad and Sinijlawi both spent more than four years in Israeli jails after taking part in the First Intifada. In 2000 Awwad was shot by an Israeli settler while changing a tyre in the West Bank; an Israeli soldier shot his brother dead at a checkpoint. Nevertheless, all three have chosen to work with Israelis in calling for what Sinijlawi, in one of the most moving recent articles I’ve read on the conflict, calls dignity for Palestinians based on security for Israelis.

Such voices exist on the Israeli side — probably more of them — but given how much their people are the underdogs in this conflict, the voices of these Palestinian writers leap off the page. They get a lot of contempt — John Aziz is regularly called an Uncle Tom — and are seen as naive dreamers at best, but they might be not only the bravest but the most practical people in the conflict. They work in the space between millennial fantasies on the right and left: of one supremacist Jewish state and the elimination of the Jewish state. They have their own dream, but they also have a strategy to achieve it, one that looks hopeless… and is the only hope.

Husseini said he wasn’t by nature an optimist. “I’ve spent years writing about a conflict that has not gotten better and in the past two and a half years has gotten unspeakably worse.” Yet he held onto the “stubborn, possibly irrational, delusional” idea that “two peoples have lived before on this land and can again.”

Change would come “person by person, grain of sand by grain of sand” until, when the diplomats finally met to negotiate a final outcome, they would find the foundation for peace already built beneath them. Hope was not a feeling but an action, Husseini said. “It’s rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it.”

We left feeling a sliver of that hope, not a lot but a sliver. I’ll go to another Friends of Standing Together event. Hope to see you there. •

Hiba Qasas from the Geneva-based Principles for Peace Foundation and Gil Murciano from the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies are speaking on the Roadmap to Peace in Sydney on 1 June, Canberra on 2 June and Melbourne on 4 June. Details: New Israel Fund.

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The saxophonist Lester Young was solitary and shy and addicted at times to heroin and to drink, which killed him at forty-nine. Yet a life that held much abandonment and pain produced a music of playful exuberance and joy. Young was a man of few words who reinvented words, calling his friend, Billie Holiday, “Lady Day,” and reportedly coining the term, “bread,” for money and “cool” to denote… well, cool. He “broadened the music’s emotional vocabulary,” wrote Ted Gioia in The History of Jazz. He also helped to give us a language of the modern city.

The first time I listened to Young I was making a long, dreamy drive down the Hume Highway. As the late afternoon sun flickered through gum trees I heard his tenor sax summon up the city at night: an anonymous crowd, glistening streets, shadows and pools of light, people in dives and basements, half drunk and full of intentions or regrets, a dim sense that in this bar, in this moment, life can be won or lost. I like jazz for the same reason other people like jazz: it’s urbane, diffident, sexy but not thrusting, moody, melancholy, wryly amused. It’s the missed encounter under the neon sign, a sad smile, acceptance of loss, lighting up a smoke. It is not grand the way much classical music is grand, but the heroic age is dead, and jazz speaks more directly to the ironic, wistful spirit of our time.

There’s a postmodern idea that the life of the artist is irrelevant to the art. Barthes said the author is dead; all that matters is the text and what the reader makes of it. I can’t accept that. I always want to know how the lives of artists and the times they lived through shaped their work.

And yet we can never know exactly how Lester Young’s work emerged from his life. All listeners can do is see their experience reflected in his music. Imagination transports us beyond time and place and race — beyond difference — to feel a tie to him that is purely human. Jazz, wrote the great critic Albert Murray, “exists not only as the intimate and personal expression of Black life, but is meaningful and accessible to any individual in the world.”

I’ve also come to like Barney Bigard, who played clarinet and tenor sax for fifteen years in Duke Ellington’s band and co-wrote the jazz standard Mood Indigo. Bigard was born in New Orleans in 1907, in the birthplace and birthtime of jazz. He grew up in a family of black Creoles, a heritage that was not just Black but French, Spanish and Native American as well. When Ellington’s band toured the segregated Deep South, the fair-skinned Bigard would often be sent out to buy food at whites-only stores, which he did by pretending he was Spanish or Mexican.

Like Young, Bigard said little except through his music, yet his life holds the whole early story of jazz: its origins in New Orleans, its great northern migration to New York, Chicago and Kansas City, its place in black American culture and in white culture and the fight to create a true colourblind democracy, in its claim that one way or another we are all magnificent mongrels.

Drifting from Bigard’s playlist on Spotify one night, I found another list comprised of pieces that sounded like him. On it was an artist or band called “Pause Maybe?” Washing the dishes one night, my wife and I listened for a while.

Pause Maybe? advertised itself as playing forties sax, and indeed the lonely, moody sound had echoes of the music of Young and Bigard, or the score for a film noir. The pieces had names like “Cigarettes and Memories,” “Under the Lamplight,” “Old Souls Stay Late,” “Half-Lit Room” and “Rustling Newspapers, Fading Time.” Attached to each was a drawing, often of a man in a tux slumped in a deep chair, his Homburg pulled low enough on his forehead to hide his eyes, the smoke from his cigarette drifting into the night.

It was a cliché of a certain kind of jazz, but gorgeous in its way, and I wanted to know more about this group. Who were the musicians? Could I even see them play? A google search gave me nothing. I still didn’t work it out.

In the middle of one night I got on my phone and asked AI about Pause Maybe? Dark thoughts come to us all at 3am, but even so I got a shock when I read: “The project is explicitly stated to be AI-generated… The identity of a human creator is not readily available or disclosed.” My AI had recognised its own kind.

Did my impression of the music change? It did. It now seemed somehow patterned: soulless, mechanical, cold. Of course, that thought was simply the effect of knowing it was made by AI.

But what repelled me was less the music than the fact I was not told how it was made. I felt tricked. Then again, if I had known it was AI from the start I probably wouldn’t have listened.

In 2025 Pause Maybe? released no fewer than nine albums. It has more than 100,000 monthly listeners. Its most popular piece, “Night Window,” has had more than 1.1 million listens. Despite what AI told me, nothing on Spotify explicitly states that this music is AI-generated, even though the streamer claims to be “aggressively protecting against the worst parts of Gen AI.”

Another streamer, Deezer, which seems to be doing more to unmask AI than Spotify, has said that slightly more than a third of content uploaded to its platform — about 50,000 tracks a day — is fully AI-generated. Do listeners know or care what they’re consuming?

I looked at the comments on YouTube under a Pause Maybe? piece, “Grandpa’s Smoke.” They start positive: someone says it reminds them of their grandpa; another likens it to a Benny Golson piece, I Remember Clifford. Then Byron Medrano asks: “Can anyone name a real song that sounds like this?” Jai Hunter replies: “As soon as this shit comes on I can tell it’s ai… It just has a weird ai tone that pretty much no other jazz sounds like.”

“This is AI, sadly,” writes another person. But someone replies: “Why sadly? This song is good.” Another says: “If this is AI, where are the humans playing the same style so I can hear them?… because AI or human, it is beautiful.”

Another writes: “Fuck AI. Listen to actual artists making real music. I don’t care how ‘soothing’ it is. It’s slop.” To which someone replies: “Are you mad at the future?”

Under another Pause Maybe? track, “Just Smoke and Jazz, Darling,” I read: “I’m 73 years young, and today my daughter and I shared one of the best days we’ve had in a long time. When I got home, she texted me to say she arrived safely — and then sent me this jazz mix, because she knows how much I love this music. I’ve been listening for over three hours now… and it feels like stepping back into a beautiful time.”

This comment felt powerful because it described an actual human experience built around listening to the music. Or did it?

The poster of the comment goes by the name Whiskey & Jazz Nights. Scrolling around, I discovered exactly the same remark under another Pause Maybe? track, “Cigarettes and Memories,” but this time from a writer called Soft Candle Jazz.

I go in search of Whiskey & Jazz Nights. It’s a YouTube channel: “Welcome to a world of smoky jazz bars, lonely saxophones, and stories whispered after midnight… a cinematic escape inspired by noir films and 1950s jazz clubs — where every note feels like a memory, and every melody carries a quiet longing.”

Getting uneasy, I go back to my phone and ask my AI whether this channel, too, is AI-generated. “It’s a very sharp observation!” it replies, flattering me as usual. Yes, it’s “highly likely” that AI plays a “significant role” in the production of Whiskey & Jazz nights.

If that’s true, then the machine, in seemingly pretending to be a seventy-three-year-old spending precious time with his daughter, is learning how to act human.

What about this comment by VelvetRedNotes: “Why a 28 young woman can’t have an old soul to hear this kind of music? I would like to have a slow dance with my man to this music, all night.”

This time AI insists that VelvetRedNotes is a woman, an anime pianist called Melody. The VelvetRedNotes YouTube channel promises “a refined jazz sanctuary where timeless elegance meets modern mood. From intimate late-night ballads and smoky lounge sessions to cosy café swing and lo-fi focus beats, every track is curated to elevate your moments… one velvet note at a time.”

Which sounds a lot like Whiskey & Jazz Nights to me. I’m in a hall of mirrors, highly artificial, not that intelligent.

Whether or not people care that a work of art is made by AI, we should at least have a right to know. In December, the former Australian chief scientist, Alan Finkel, launched a company, Proudly Human, that enables authors to declare that they made their work, then verifies that the declaration is correct. Instead of forcing AI-content producers to be upfront about how they created their work — which Finkel thinks is technologically too hard to do — he is proposing a positive label, a bit like “Free range” on eggs. Proudly Human is focusing on the written word, but it might work for music and the screen, too.

Authors who wish to be certified by Proudly Human agree to subject their work to a range of verification tests — conducted by AI, of course. (A journalist who wrote about Proudly Human called the process not “Spy versus Spy” but “AI versus AI.”) The published work is also compared to the original to make sure an AI version wasn’t swapped in after the tests were done.

The bet behind Proudly Human is that enough humans will care they are reading a work produced by one of their own. In an email conversation, Finkel sounded excited about his project yet aware that AI is developing so rapidly that the challenge of identifying its influence in any text grows harder by the day.

I sent him a link to a letter Nick Cave wrote on his site, The Red Hand Files, where he responds to readers’ questions. Someone got ChatGPT to write a song in Cave’s voice then asked him what he thought. Here’s the chorus — judge for yourself:

I am the sinner, I am the saint
I am the darkness, I am the light
I am the hunter, I am the prey
I am the devil, I am the saviour

The lyrics sent Cave into a justifiably cold rage. What makes a song great, he wrote, is not its resemblance to other songs, and it’s certainly not the mimicry ChatGPT churns out. Instead, the artist makes a “heart-stopping” departure from what they thought were their own limits.

And here an invisible relationship with the listener begins, Cave suggests. As the artist confronts their smallness and vulnerability, the listener’s heart is stirred, recognising “in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

But data doesn’t suffer, and algorithms don’t feel, Cave writes. “ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”

And yet, Cave concludes, one line did speak to him: I’ve got the fire of hell in my eyes. “That’s kind of true. I have got the fire of hell in my eyes — and it’s ChatGPT.”

Finkel wrote back to me: “Nick Cave’s letter is clearly in the style of Nick Cave!” He found the ChatGPT song “replicative and pointless.” But he sounded a warning: Cave says he found one good line in it. “If ChatGPT has another go in two years’ time, there will be at least ten.”

I think Cave was being sarcastic about that line. Still, Finkel’s larger point about the advance of AI is almost certainly correct.

Finkel told me that his friend, the philosopher Peter Singer, tested Proudly Human by uploading two articles, one written by Singer, the other by an AI, Claude, that had been asked to write in Singer’s style. Finkel was delighted the tests verified the human article and rejected Claude’s. But then Singer asked the AI how it felt about the outcome. Claude’s reply is worth reading in full:

Excellent! That’s a successful test for your friend’s software. This is genuinely interesting because:

1. I was actively trying to mimic your style— using arguments you’d make, sentence structures you’d use, topics you care about

2. The content was substantively sound— it’s not like the software detected nonsense or logical flaws

3. Yet something gave it away— there must be detectable patterns in word choice, sentence rhythm, rhetorical structure, or other features that distinguish AI writing from human writing, even when the AI is trying to imitate a specific human

… it’s encouraging for your friend’s project — and somewhat humbling for me! It suggests that despite AI’s impressive capabilities, there remain detectable differences between human and AI authorship, at least for now.

Finkel says he was surprised by the sophisticated response, and bowled over by the phrase, “and somewhat humbling for me!” The words that struck me, though, were: “at least for now.”

Cave wrote another letter about AI and human creativity. Read stirringly by the actor Stephen Fry, it begins: “God made the world in six days. On the seventh He rested. That suggests the creation took effort, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place. God saw that it was good because He had put something of Himself into it.”

A piece of art is great, Cave writes, precisely because of the striving, and often the failing, behind it. The outcome cannot be separated from the process, the work from the work. To make art using AI is to see the labour of creation as “nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself.”

The artist concludes: “And as the sun rises on the struggle of the day, and the great-crested grebe dances upon the water, it is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse, this creative dance, that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs. And just as we would fight any existential evil, we must fight it tooth and nail. For we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

For better or worse, AI is here. The machines are on the march. The line between them and us is already starting to blur. Yet our home and spirit still soar or shrivel in a physical world that contains landscapes, wind, the great-crested grebe, and ourselves.

What can be trusted? What is true? These are existential questions for us now. Can we find a way to treat AI as we treat fire, as a good servant and a bad master? To find a way to live with it on our terms, and not to accept, through our own choices, the devaluing and trivialising of the human experience? A world dominated by phantoms dancing on screens? A world that still knows jazz — and may even hear the foggy notes of a saxophone drifting up from a basement in a city growing dark — but no longer knows the flawed, fabulous human beings who created it? •

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