1. Tablet Magazine（http://www.judithmiller.com/12493/zubin-mehta）
Zubin Mehta Speaks Out、30 October 2012
by Judith Miller
Last Thursday night, Zubin Mehta was not happy. Carnegie Hall's Maestro Room was being renovated and had been reduced to the size of a walk-in closet. There were no chairs for guests. The hanger for his garment bag was permanently affixed to the flimsy metal coat rack above the piano. "Did they think I would steal the hanger?" he said, glancing around the room. "It looks like a motel," he added, the unspoken adjective "cheap" hung limply in the air.
"Shall we begin?"
The conductor was clearly displeased, and not only by his shabby temporary headquarters. He was unhappy about, but not surprised by news that Adalah-NY was staging yet another protest of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra's concert on Thursday night. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters were among 50 artists and writers who signed a letter demanding that Carnegie Hall cancel the orchestra's appearance in response to the Palestinians' call for a cultural boycott of the Israeli "apartheid state" that is occupying Arab land, building settlements, and repressing Palestinians.
The IPO, Mehta admitted, was less welcome in many parts of the world these days because of such policies. "As long as they keep building settlements the world will be anti-Israeli," he said.
Is such criticism fair? "Most of it is unfair. Part of it is fair," he replied. Mehta opposes not only the settlements, but, he said, "the bombardments, by both sides! We're firing into Gaza! They're firing into Israel. Why? They're not bombing the settlements! When is this going to stop?" He added, "We see photos of militants mourning, and the pictures break your heart. And there are millions of such mourners."
Might the impending Israeli election change such policies? "We already know the results!" Mehta said. "Bibi is not a dictator. But he'll win like one. Dictators win for sure." The policies advocated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's newly formed coalition partner, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, are "isolating Israel from the world."
Zubin Mehta has strong opinions about politics, music, and his beloved orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, which he has advised since 1969, directed since 1977, and led as "musical director for life" since 1981. He is a public-relations executive's nightmare—a musician who wears his passions on his sleeve, or in this case, his baton.
Mehta, born in 1936 to a musical Parsi family in Bombay, is not Jewish. Nor does he speak Hebrew, despite having spent at least three months of most years in Israel since 1961, when he first directed the IPO. But he is passionately committed to Israel and his orchestra—and, one must add, irresistibly charming and articulate. He has a deep appreciation of Israel's complexity and its impact on global culture.
Israel's more than 7 million people, he says, are more deeply polarized than ever before, but in new ways. "There's no more left and right," he says. The traditional political dividing line has all but disappeared in Israel, as it has in America. But now there's "black and white, religious and non-religious, rich and poor"—so many cleavages.
The orchestra, however, brings people together. Which is why, he argues, trying to isolate Israel by targeting the IPO is both misguided—since the orchestra is a private foundation and not a state agency per se—and counter-productive. Music unifies people.
But not even his orchestra is immune from the pressures generated by Israel's burgeoning ultra-Orthodox population—the "half of the country that has eight children per family," as he referred to them. A source close to the orchestra said that Mehta had to find a replacement cantor to sing in the Thursday concert's featured composition—the New York premiere of Israeli composer Noam Sheriff's "Mechaye Hametim," ("Revival of the Dead")—after an ultra-Orthodox tenor refused to perform when he learned that women would be singing in the choir on stage. On other occasions, the source said, Mr. Mehta has had to warn at least two other orchestra members who objected on religious grounds to women singing that he would not tolerate such bias.
Mehta has been active in promoting music education for Israeli-Arabs, who now constitute roughly 20 percent of Israel's population. In cooperation with Bank Leumi and the Arab-Israel Bank, he founded in 2009 a music education program for Israeli Arabs called "Mifneh" (Change). He continues giving free concerts in predominantly Israeli-Arab towns like Acre—though fewer of them today due to financial pressures on the orchestra—and hopes to have at least one Arab-Israeli in his orchestra soon. There are seven or eight Arab-Israeli students in Mifneh who might soon be able to audition for the orchestra, he says. Musicians audition behind a curtain to prevent bias. "No one gets in based on religion, race, or color," Mehta told me.
Mehta's modesty about his own success and talent is unusual in conductors, who tend to have an obsessive, dictatorial streak. "Orchestras are not democracies," said Martin Mayer, a former music critic for Esquire and Opera magazines and the author of a book on the Metropolitan Opera's centennial. "Conductors are the original maximum leaders." Mayer called Mehta an "excellent" conductor, though not for everything. "He's not particularly strong on Beethoven and the orchestral staples of the early 19th century," he said. "But he's very good on early 20th-century music—like Schoenberg." So, Thursday's concert was playing to his strengths.
Mayer called Mehta "technically highly regarded." As for the IPO, "it's always been a good, but not a great orchestra." It's difficult, he added, "to have a great orchestra in such a small country. But the Israelis have always put a lot of time and money into it."
What Israelis value, Mayer added, is Mehta's loyalty to the orchestra and the state itself. In times of war and crisis, he has often canceled other commitments to perform with the IPO. During the '67 war, he left a Met tour to catch the last plane to Israel before the Tel Aviv airport closed. And in the 1991 Gulf War, he conducted performances during scud missile attacks. "Israelis remember such things," Mayer said. Such devotion has earned him the right to criticize the state and orchestra he has adopted. And criticize he does.
"I wish that only three residents of Tel Aviv could see what conditions on the West Bank are like," Mehta told me. "Living in such proximity, most Israelis have no idea about the adversity on the West Bank." He goes to Ramallah to look in on the music program sponsored by his friend Daniel Barenboim. "So, I see the conditions. Israel gives the West Bank water twice a week! One way of promoting good would be not to ration water."
Most Israelis are unaware of these conditions, he added. "They don't know. But many don't want to know."
Yet Israeli culture, said Mehta, has come into its own—despite the IPO's continued unwillingness to perform Richard Wagner—with new chamber music and folklore groups, ballet companies, and theater groups bringing Israeli culture to the world, and the work of Israeli and Jewish artists into the global mainstream.
Thursday's concert at Carnegie Hall was a prime example, he said, a "milestone" in which all three pieces were written by composers of Jewish extraction—Arnold Schoenberg's Kol Nidre; Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25; and the showcase of the program, "Revival of the Dead," by Noam Sheriff.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1935, Sheriff is one of Israel's best-known, most versatile composers. Commissioned by a wealthy Dutch fashion designer who survived the Holocaust and wanted to pay tribute to the Jews who perished, the symphony has four movements that offer a narrative of Jewish history—Jewish life before the Diaspora until the Holocaust, the genocide itself, the Kaddish and Yizkor, and revival and renaissance in Israel. Sheriff said he wrote the symphony while teaching in Cologne, Germany. His wife, Ella Milch-Sheriff, who is also a composer, described her husband to me as "annoyingly terribly talented."
Noam Sheriff was thrilled, he told me over breakfast with Ella at Balthazar's in downtown New York, when Mehta told him that he would perform the piece this year at the Salzburg Music Festival, Europe's and perhaps the world's most prestigious musical venue. "Never, in my wildest dreams," he said, "did I think it would be performed in Salzburg." Sheriff describes Mehta as "sensitive, intelligent, and modest. There's no big ego. Working with him is a joy."
And despite the threats of boycotts and disruptions, Thursday night's sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall went off without a hitch. Across the street, 60 protesters were clamoring against the presence of the IPO in New York in light of the conditions that Mehta described and complained about.
Would he have joined them if he weren't conducting? I asked him. "No!" he replied. That's neither his style nor his way. "I believe in music."
2. Y net News（http://www.ynetnews.com）
Weakness invites provocations
Op-ed: Obama has been supportive of Israel, but he is perceived as internationally weak president , 2 November 2012
by Manfred Gerstenfeld
President Obama is not popular among Israeli Jews. A few days ago, a poll asked which presidential candidate would be preferable concerning Israel's interests. Fifty-seven percent of Israeli Jews preferred Romney, while 22% said Obama. Among Israeli Arabs, Obama was the preferred candidate.
Yet the Obama administration has been supportive of Israel, after an initially hesitant period. It expressed itself in supplying military equipment, fighting the cyber war and broad strategic collaboration. This cooperation has been praised by Israel's senior leaders. The United States has also consistently supported Israel in the United Nations. Obama also personally intervened in the life-threatening situation for Israel's embassy personnel in Cairo during the Egyptian mob attack in September 2011.
Many of President Obama's actions have thus been supportive of Israel. One reason that they may not have had much effect upon Israeli Jews is his image as an internationally weak president, which is also very bad for Israel. Even if part of America's weakness is due to perception only, that translates into reality. It invites provocation by the US' enemies. One sees this in the posturing of Iranian leaders, the world's leading supporters of terrorism.
Also highly problematic is President Obama's view of the situation among radical Islamists. Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism found that many known radical Muslims have made hundreds of visits to the Obama White House, meeting with top administration officials. To illustrate his basic attitude toward the Muslim world, one can analyze Obama's Cairo speech in 2009. Obama expressed apologetics and appeasement and understated the major criminality within the Muslim world.
Obama applied double standards through omissions of many important facts. He said that it was time to put a halt to Israeli settlements. He did not say, "It is time for Egypt and many other Muslim states to stop the murderous anti-Semitic incitement against Jews. This hate-mongering is also widely spread in Egyptian government media. It was equaled only by Nazi Germany." He did not say, "Stop the death penalty." When he spoke about equality for women he did not say, "In many Muslim countries there are extreme cases of discrimination against women. This should be halted." Obama did not speak about the incitement against and persecution of Christians in a variety of Muslim countries. Nor did he say, "In the new century we have not seen any other terror attack on the scale of 9/11 which was driven by the religious conviction of major criminals."
Another omission was when he stated that civilization owed a debt to Al Azhar without mentioning prominent Muslim clerics who support suicide terrorism. When he spoke about the Palestinians, he said, "The Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland." That statement contains many fallacies. The largest part of the Palestinian Mandate is Jordan, a state with a Palestinian majority. The Palestinians were granted a second state through a United Nations General Assembly resolution in 1947. Yet it was not good enough for them and their Arab allies. They preferred to start a war to attempt to massacre the Jews in what became Israel. Until 1967, they could have publicly asked their Arab "brethren" for a second state when the Palestinian territories were controlled by Jordan and Egypt.
After the Arab defeat in 1967, the Palestinians could have once again obtained a second state. Yet they preferred to continue their fight to eliminate Israel. While Obama didn't mention the suffering of Christians in Muslim lands, he did mention the suffering of Palestinian Christians, without stating that this was mainly caused by Palestinian Muslims.
Obama also said things about the Muslim world in Cairo which were closer to lies than to half-truths. To state that "in our times many Muslim communities have been in the forefront of innovation" does not reflect the reality of the Muslim world. Tiny Israel has won more Nobel prizes than all Muslims put together, while there are about two hundred times more Muslims than Israelis.
The only area where major innovation has emerged from the extremist parts of the Muslim world is 'creative terrorism.' In this framework the Palestinians have also made a substantial contribution in inventing new modes of terror. If there were a Nobel Prize for terrorism, top candidates would be Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and various other Palestinian groupings as well as the initiators of 9/11.
It is probably due to Obama's attitude toward highly problematic extremist Islamists, the betrayal of long time political allies such as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his perceived international weakness that a majority of Israeli Jews continue to feel uncomfortable with him as president. One wonders to what extent Obama has genuinely abandoned the appeasing and apologetic spirit he exhibited in Cairo, or whether much of it will re-appear if he is reelected.
Manfred Gerstenfeld is a member of the Board of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, of which he has been chairman for12 years.
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