Netanyahu and Haniyeh, enemies of the "Barenboim spirit"
In a seminar held in June 2021 at the Palacio de la Magdalena in Santander, organized by this magazine, ATALAYAR, and sponsored by the City Council of the Cantabrian capital and the Israeli Embassy in Spain, I defined what I understand as the "Barenboim spirit", as a unity of people, peoples, languages, cultures and religions for a higher good, and I suggested it as a possible future solution to the secular conflict that plunges the Middle East into the darkest pages of the Middle Ages.
Daniel Barenboim with his West Eastern Divan orchestra, pluri-national, pluri-linguistic and pluri-religious, shows that another world is possible. A world in which neither Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, nor Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Palestinian armed militia Hamas, believe. Both are extremist fanatics, and both seek to eradicate the "spirit of Barenboim".
The well-known Argentine Jewish musician and conductor Daniel Barenboim is neither a politician nor a substitute for political leaders. His statements on the Middle East conflict have been clear for years: the war between Palestinians and Israelis has no military or diplomatic solution, he argues. The only way to overcome this age-old conflict is to fight ignorance, poverty and ignorance. Barenboim has been adamant in condemning any kind of attack and retaliation against civilians, such as those perpetrated by Hamas in its military incursion into Israel and Israel's massive bombardment of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
The great project he leads with his multifaceted orchestra, which is about to celebrate a quarter of a century, says it all: young musicians from Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Spain, unite with a common goal that transcends religions and linguistic and family clans, showing perhaps the only possible solution to the current conflict.
It is precisely this spirit and praxis that Netanyahu and Haniyeh oppose. The Zionist leader advocates the thesis that as long as there is a Palestinian alive, Hamas will remain alive. This explains the exterminating bombings in Gaza, the last one against a convoy of ambulances in the strip, under the pretext that one of them was carrying a terrorist.
The behavior of Netanyahu and the Israeli military leadership is that of someone who wants to wipe out the enemy population. The release of the hostages is only an excuse, because they know that, if Gaza continues under the deluge of fire, the hostages will die, either by bombing or by execution.
At the opposite pole is the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh. He justifies his actions against women, children, the elderly and the kidnapping of civilians, by the resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the harassment, the dispossession of land and homes, the assassinations, torture and mass imprisonment of Palestinians, and in this he is right. But his terrorist methods exacerbate the conflict, not resolve it.
If Netanyahu thinks that a Palestinian is always the seed of a terrorist, Haniyeh does the same with a Jew, the seed of a Zionist. Both believe that to accomplish their goals they have to wipe out the other. It is more than a colonial war, more than a war of cultures and religions: it is a war of exclusionary survival. The opposite of Barenboim's spirit.
Colonization and extermination of native populations have been the hallmark of empires throughout history. With honorable exceptions, such as the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great and the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great, most of the earlier and later empires were built by conquering lands and razing or subjugating the native populations. Expansion and genocide are typical of colonial empires. That is why the old metropolises give their unconditional support to Israel.