December 20, 2004
The Palestinians Need an Orchestra
(Whew! After singing in three Messiah concerts in 27 hours, it's time for some non-vocal communication.)
I want to go back to something Kevin said on May 5, 2004 (post: "The State of Diplomacy"):
It means that the palestinians won't get a state until they get serious about being a nation and not just an odd cross between victims and terrorists.
This statement is insightful, profound, and (best of all) true.
About a year ago I was reading the book: "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East", by Michael B. Oren, Oxford University Press, 2002. On page 3 Oren is talking about the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine:
"By the 1940s, the Yishuv was a powerhouse in the making: dynamic, inventive, ideologically and politically pluralistic. Drawing on Western and Eastern European models, the Jews of Palestine created new vehicles for agrarian settlement (the communal kibbutz and cooperative moshav), a viable socialist economy with systems for national health, reforestation, and infrastructure development, a respectable university, and a symphony orchestra - and to defend them all, an underground citizen's army, the Haganah."
When I read that paragraph I thought, "What? An orchestra??!!!" I had thought of the early Jewish community in Palestine as a bunch of huddled refugees, hunkering down in the basement shelter and trying desperately to avoid being annihilated!
Well, I was wrong. The Yishuv did have somewhat of a siege mentality, but they also found time and enough violins to create a symphony orchestra and give concerts. That's very interesting.
Victims don't have orchestras. Terrorists don't give concerts.
Nations do both of these things. And that's a big difference.
I also remember reading sometime in the 1990s about the newly established Palestinian Authority. If I remember correctly, the article in Time magazine stated that the P.A. managed to collect even less money in taxes from the Palestinian areas than the Israelis had during their authority. If true, that's pathetic!
Victims don't pay taxes. Terrorists don't pay taxes. Nations do pay taxes, and that's partly how they build themselves into a functioning society and respectable member of the family of nations.
The Palestinians' fate is not in their own hands. Their unhappy situation is partly a consequence of their own actions. That is reality. Behaving like a nation would go a long way toward changing their perception in the eyes of the rest of the world, where it really matters. Having an orchestra, and paying taxes, would also change their own self-image.
(I'm aware that the P.A. was corrupt, and perhaps Palestinian individuals avoided paying taxes that would just go to line some official's pocket. If true, this would be a profound betrayal of a people's hopes and dreams by Yasser Arafat. 'Nuff said.)
So if you Palestinians want a state, you should start an orchestra and pay your taxes. Continue in that theme, and renounce your destructive intifada and the Hamas terrorists. After two generations of failure, it's time to try doing something different.
If you search on Google for "Palestinian orchestra", you will get some hits. Some of those links appear to refer to the early Jewish orchestra mentioned in the "Six Days of War" book. But there are also some references to an orchestra in Ramallah. It appears that some musicians had this idea before I did, and a few Palestinians aspire to play in the orchestra or to conduct it!
I wish them the best of success. Perhaps they could start with the opening Tenor aria from Messiah:
Comfort ye, my people, saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,
And cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished [over],
That her iniquity is pardoned,
That her iniquity is pardoned.
