WITH THE WHITE HOUSE ‘initiative’ for Mid-East peace now wholly failed (because wholly biased), the words ‘peace’ or even ‘accommodation’ now appear unspeakable in the Oval Office, in all matters foreign and domestic. The divisive viciousness of the Trump campaign is now set for the months until November.
That’s clear enough in the President’s diatribal rhetoric at home, as clear as his ignominious withdrawal from the world stage into greater isolationism.
They used to say, regarding nepotism in Hollywood, that ‘the son-in-law also rises’, but in the West Wing it seems that the boss is now fed up with young Kushner (below right). The often highly reliable Axios political website quotes Trump (albeit at second hand) as wanting “No more of Jared’s ‘woke’ sh*t.”
The First Son-in-law’s reported neutralization might even be greeted as a relief in the Middle East, since he was behind the non-starter of a settlement proposal. Arab media, for instance, fully amplified throughout the region the Arab League Secretary-General’s outright rejection of the plan as an effort to replicate nothing less than racist South African-style apartheid.
So with deadlock at the level of political leadership, people of goodwill on the ground meanwhile continue, as they often have, to do the best they can with an intractable situation. For many years now I’ve followed the fortunes of a remarkable experiment begun by two cultural giants of the Middle East — an Israeli (and American) citizen, Daniel Barenboim, the renowned pianist and conductor … and the Palestinian (and American) critic and all-round public intellectual, Edward Said, now sadly dead since 2003.
Together, in a spirit of connecting their antagonized communities in purely human terms, they formed an orchestra, initially of mainly young musicians, drawn from both sides of the Middle-East’s bitter divide. It has prospered, despite its unlikely odds, and this year is celebrating its twentieth anniversary; part of those celebrations was a performance by the Orchestra’s string ensemble at Carnegie Hall (just before our anti-pandemic shut-down).
I WAS CONSEQUENTLY pleased that the PBS NewsHour Weekend decided to take a video-report from me about the Orchestra, which is named DIVAN (an Arabic word meaning a council, or assembly of people coming together). And it was particularly apt journalistically that Executive Producer Dana Roberson, despite our overwhelming welter of COVID 19 news and the strong currency of racial injustice issues, should have scheduled my report’s airing over the July 4th holiday.
It’s a time, after all – or traditionally always has been – when we celebrate, I hope without irony even now, America’s ending of tyranny and the upholding of equality.
During the report, Edward’s widow, Mariam Said, tells me that the Orchestra, among its many purposes both musical and social, enables young Arabs to experience their unequal status generally in Israel being firmly countered:
“For the Arabs, this is a big thing that when they are sitting in the orchestra playing together, they are equal. And ‘the other’ [meaning of course Israel’s Jewish community] … that has been brought up to think – that he or she are superior than the other side, realize that here they are not. We are equal.”
WATCH the report here:
How uplifting!