This summer I had the pleasure of listening to the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra
performing in the once-ravaged Croatian coastal town of Dubrovnik. The concert, conducted by the Indian maestro Zubin Mehta, was beautiful and moving. A particularly memorable moment came when a
Croatian tenor sang a duet with a Serbian soprano. Under the Dalmatian sky, music served as a vehicle for human understanding and reconciliation.
How different the audience – and Zubin Mehta – must have felt when the performance of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall was disrupted by pro-Palestinian hoodlums, who brought the Promenade Concerts to a halt for the first time since 1895. Dissatisfied with disrupting the concert, some of the protesters had earlier decided to pollute the newspapers, sending a letter to the Independent denouncing the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s “involvement with the Israeli state.”
The level of ignorance and philistinism of the protesters is simply staggering. And, as Stephen Pollard noted in the Daily Telegraph, there is a clear whiff of anti-Semitism, not simply anti-Israelism, about their behaviour.
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is obviously related to the State of Israel but is not an agent thereof. Its audience is both Jewish and Arab and Zubin Mehta has worked tirelessly since he came to Israel for the cause of reconciliation, most recently focusing on getting an Israeli Arab musician into the orchestra, something he told the BBC before the Proms was “not far away”. In 2009 he established Mifneh, a music education programme for Israeli Arabs, which is sponsored by one of Israel’s biggest banks.
But even if the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra had done little for reconciliation and simply focused on what they are meant to do: play music, trying to tame the savage beast within all of us, and show themselves, Israelis, as normal people, the protesters would still be exposed as the uncivilised brutes they are. For how can the civility of one people be showed and their cause advanced by the stereotyping of another? The protesters have every right to protest and thankfully in this country plenty of legal ways of protesting. But this act was disgraceful.
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