Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 61

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
(4) Returnees and representations of conflict: the potential risks. Finally, and most
importantly, Barenboim’s action through the Divan faces the problem of the musicians
returning to their homelands, once the transformative experience is made. Those musicians
then cover the structural elements that make the Israeli–Palestinian conflict non-negotiable:
political actors on both sides, from the grass-root level to the elites, are keen to
maintain static images, myths, and stereotypes of their respective enemy in order to reassure
and consolidate their own identity in the conflict. After having engaged in a work
of (re-)humanization of the latter within the protected framework of the WEDO, many
musicians find themselves caught again in what Stuart Kaufman describes as a “symbolic
trap,” namely the prevalence of representations of the conflict which reproduce enmity
across time (Kaufman 2006:206). A few examples might illustrate this argument: according
to the autobiographical account by Sharon Cohen (an Israeli violinist, herself
army musician before joining the Divan), a Palestinian musician once complained about
his disturbing re-encounter with a female orchestra member, which happened in Ramallah
when the latter�as a reservist of the Israeli Defense Forces�was patrolling with a
gun (Cheah 2009:77). Beyond a purely anecdotal value, such scenes emphasize how
fragile the coexistence and the mutual trust were that have been laboriously struggled
through toward “a certain communal identity,” as a longstanding participant resumed
the Divan spirit (Daniel Cohen cited in Cheah 2009:19). The 34-day Lebanon War in
2006 proved a particularly severe “stress test” in this respect: Nassib Al Ahmadieh, the
aforementioned cellist whose family already had to flee from the Iraqi invasion in Kuwait
1990 back to their homeland Lebanon and later witnessed the Lebanese Civil War,
describes a situation of utmost psychological tensions: “I didn’t feel like going on tour
playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony�O Freude�at a time when 1.5 million people
were dislocated in Lebanon and a hundred people were dying every day for a month”
(Cheah 2009:106).
The musician expressed his frustration regarding the Divan’s artificial setting on the one
hand, and the conflicting geopolitical realities on the other even more generalized: “As
soon as crisis strikes, people on all sides react as if they had never been exposed to other
ideas” (ibid.:108). In sum, 15 musicians from Arab countries out of around 80 were
unable or, despite the insisting persuasive efforts of Barenboim himself, unwilling to
participate in the summer workshop that year. Generally speaking, WEDO returnees
seem often confronted with incomprehension, a biased press coverage on the orchestra
in Israel (which is characterized by reduction to isolated events that are perceived as
politically scandalous, such as the Ramallah concert or Barenboim’s decision to let descendants
of Holocaust survivors play compositions of Richard Wagner (ibid.:135), or
even reproached of having taken part in a “brainwashing” exercise by their relatives and
friends without first-hand experiences with people from their respective “enemy states”
(examples ibid.:81, 213, 215, 259). This phenomenon also includes cultural strata beyond
political discourses that aim for reproducing threats. A passive exposure to political
music can alter the process because such music strengthen militarism in the Israeli case
(Peled 2013): protest songs, most prominently the genre developed in the Intifadas as
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