By Daniel Barenboim
After 1967 Israel turned very much toward the United States - not necessarily to its own advantage. The traditionalists said, "We will not give up the newly occupied territories." The religious Jews said, "These are not occupied but liberated, biblical territories." And with that the end of Socialism in Israel was sealed. Since then the conflict in the Middle East has been instrumentalized by world politics.
For decades we have seen headlines about exploding violence; one war and terrorist act follows another. This has cemented the situation in people's minds. Today, in the times of Iraq and Iran, one hardly reads anything more about it, which is even worse.
Many Israelis dream that when they wake up, the Palestinians will be gone, and the Palestinians dream that when they wake up, the Israelis will be gone. Both sides can no longer differentiate between dream and reality, and this is the psychological core of the problem.
Since the '60s I have no longer felt comfortable in Israel. Of course it is my home; my parents lived there and are both buried in Jerusalem. Whenever there was war in Israel, I played there: 1956, 1967, 1973. Music was my language, my "weapon."
However, after the black September of 1970, Golda Meir said, what is this talk of the Palestinians? We are the Palestinian people! At that point it clicked in my mind: This was morally unacceptable.
Yes, the Jews had a right to their own state, and they had a right to this state. This demand was made even stronger by the Holocaust and the guilt of the Europeans after 1945. It is all too easily forgotten, however, that there was a moderate Zionism, there were people like Martin Buber who said from the beginning that the right to a Jewish state must be made acceptable to the existent population, the non-Jews. Militant Zionism, on the other hand, did not develop any further in its thinking. Even today, it is still based on a lie: that the land that the Jews settled was empty.
Today, many Israelis have no idea what it must feel like to be Palestinian -- how it is to live in a city like Nablus, a prison for 180,000 people. What has become of the famous Jewish intellect here? I am not even speaking of justice or love. Why does one continue to feed the hate in the Gaza Strip?
There will never be a military solution. Two peoples are fighting over one and the same land. No matter how strong Israel becomes, there will always be insecurity and fear. The conflict is eating away at itself and at the Jewish soul, and it has been allowed to do so.
We wanted to own land that had never belonged to Jews and built settlements there. The Palestinians see this as imperialistic provocation, and rightly so. Their resistance is absolutely understandable -- not the means they use to this end, not the violence nor the wanton inhumanity -- but their "no."
We Israelis must finally find the courage to not react to this violence, the courage to stand by our history.
The Palestinians cannot expect that we should have been able to take care of anyone besides ourselves after the Holocaust; we had to survive. Now that we have done so, we must both look forward collectively.
The Israeli Prime Minister who can do this has not yet been born. Essentially, we are no further today than we were in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide Palestine. Worse yet: in 1947 one could still imagine a binational state; sixty years later, this seems unthinkable. Today, people in Israel speak of separation, of divorce in respect to a two-state solution: What cynicism! Divorce is normally only possible between people who once loved each other. . . .
I suffer from this situation, and everything I do has something to do with this suffering, whether I am conducting Wagner in Israel (and I was by no means the first to do so!), citing the Israeli Constitution in the Knesset, founding the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with the writer Edward Said, establishing a music kindergarten in Berlin, or -- as recently in Jerusalem -- performing a concert for two peoples.
Some of these things are exaggerated by the media, but I do as I do because it drives me crazy to see how much injustice we Jews commit daily, and how much we endanger the future existence of Israel.
As cynical as it sounds, I am glad to have been born in 1942 and not in 1972. As it is, hopefully I will not live to see the day when it becomes possible that the State of Israel might no longer exist, just as I will no longer live to see the day when perhaps classical music may no longer play a role in our thinking and feeling.
For many years now I have not lived in Israel, and I am very conscious of my outsider's perspective. Sometimes people ask me, "what is a Jew?" The answer is the following: A Jew who has anti-Semitic experiences in Berlin in 2008 is different from the Jew who had anti-Semitic experiences in 1940. The Jew of 1940 felt threatened; the Jew of today can think of his own land, of Israel.
Today I can say, "Either you learn to deal with me, you anti-Semite, or we go our separate ways, period.' That makes an existential difference. I am a short-term pessimist about the Middle East, but a long-term optimist.
Either we will find a way to live with each other or we will kill each other. What gives me hope? Music-making. Because, before a Beethoven symphony, Mozart's Don Giovanni or Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, all human beings are equal.
Daniel Barenboim, a pianist and conductor, is music director of the Staatskapelle Berlin and principal guest conductor at La Scala Opera in Milan. He is co-founder with Edward Said of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together Arab and Israeli musicians.
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