Anti-Israel demonstrators want to erase Jewish existence, including its music

Israel-haters had been advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza ever since the Hamas-led mobs of Palestinians completed their orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7, 2023.

A ceasefire is now in place, albeit a shaky one already being violated by Hamas terrorists who not only won’t stop shooting but also have no intention of abiding by President Donald Trump’s war-ending scheme, including their commitment to disarming and giving up control of the Strip. But if anyone imagined that this would also signal a ceasefire in the surge of antisemitic delegitimization of Israel and its supporters, they were wrong.

Graphic proof of this was provided in New York City this past week as groups of Israel-haters turned out to protest the appearance of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. As their signs made plain, they weren’t really there to protest against the war that Hamas and the Palestinians started on Oct. 7, the policies of the Israeli government or even those of the Trump administration. What they didn’t like about the concert was the fact that people from a country they don’t think should exist were there. Their message, frankly, was eliminationist. As far as they were concerned, Israeli music and the musicians who played it were representatives of an illegitimate culture that should be silenced and erased.

Did the Israelis ‘steal’ music?

Unlike what has often happened during recent tours of the IPO, their performances were not disrupted. Still, those attending the concerts had to navigate their way past a line of mostly masked demonstrators, who were allowed by police to occupy part of the sidewalk on 57th Street in front of the famed artistic venue, rather than being confined to an area across the street where they might have just as easily exercised their First Amendment right to protest.

The result was something of a security tangle as concert-goers were forced to wait in long lines to get in as a result of ramped-up security measures. Many stopped to argue or shout at the protesters—or in one case, even made futile efforts to get them to watch videos of the Oct. 7 atrocities—all of which were met with either silence or contempt.

Arriving early before the sidewalk traffic jam they had created became too much of a problem, I tried to ask them some questions. None gave their names, including the few who were not masked to conceal their identities. Nor did they respond to inquiries about whether they were paid to be there or who it was that financed or provided the slickly printed signs they carried, which in previous such efforts at anti-Israel agitation turned out to be foundations funded by billionaire activist George Soros or even the Iranian government. They merely nodded in assent when I asked them if, as one of their signs said, they believed that all Israelis, including an orchestra whose members are, like most artists, largely left-wing in their politics, were “criminally Zionist.”

None had an answer to my query: If they really thought the music of Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984), whose often-overlooked compositions were being featured in the IPO’s concert tour, had written “music of oppression, apartheid and genocide.” Nor were they interested in explaining the sign that said that “every note” the orchestra plays “is stolen.” When I asked whether they believed that the Jews had stolen classical music from the Arabs, they got testy and profane.

The only question that produced any sort of positive response from some of them was when I asked whether they were supporting fellow antisemite and anti-Zionist Zohran Mamdani in the upcoming mayoral election.

Antisemitic boycotts

It’s easy to dismiss the sign-holders as ignorant about the history of the Middle East, Jewish history, the fact that Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel or that the Zionism they denounce as criminal racism is merely the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

The point of the demonstrations—and boycotts of Israeli artists and institutions organized by celebrities—isn’t only political. It is rooted in the idea that the existence of the Jewish state is a problem itself. For them, as otherwise obscure Irish actress Denise Gough explained in a viral video in which she analogized Israel to a hole in the “Death Star” in the original “Star Wars” movie by which the weapon of the story’s “Evil Empire” could be destroyed, it’s more than a symbol of everything they hate. Gough, who spoke at a mass demonstration in London against the ceasefire—since in her view, Hamas’s goals of Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide must continue to be pursued—believes that ending Israel’s existence is the key to liberating the whole world and solving all of its problems, including the completely unrelated conflicts in Sudan and the Congo.

That’s a classic trope of antisemitism that reveals how they think Jews are at the heart of all that is bad, which explains why they expend so much effort on their efforts to demonize and support the destruction of such a tiny country and a people who make up only about two-tenths of a percent of the world’s population.

Such openness about the real object of their anger, embodied in those sentiments and signs, is informative. It’s not really the fake charges of “genocide” that is driving the rising tide of anti-Israel invective sweeping across the globe and causing hatred to surge. It’s a desire to erase the Jews—their language, history, culture and even music, which they somehow have come to believe is “stolen” from the Arabs.

Contemporary “progressives” have fetishized the idea of transforming the State of Israel into a “free Palestine” where Jews and their language, culture and sovereign existence will be erased. Indeed, as the flotilla-related antics of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg prove, the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7 has seemingly replaced the obsession with “global warming” as one of the left’s top priorities.

It’s no small irony that the venue often provided proof that respect for culture and music could transcend political and ideological differences. Even during the height of the Cold War, when Americans were up in arms about the threat from communism and many thought the world was trembling on the brink of nuclear war, Soviet artists often appeared in the United States, particularly at Carnegie Hall. Whatever one thought of the tyrannical system that ruled their country, respectable opinion didn’t treat their musicians, singers or even their national culture as beyond the pale.

The notion of treating music as above politics—which, for example, continues to drive the extensive and lucrative cooperation between American artistic institutions and those of Communist China—is dismissed when it comes to Israel. As a New York Times article about the IPO protests made clear, enlightened liberals see the concerts as political propaganda for an evil system. In the words of music critic Joshua Kosman, the orchestra’s appearances are “an overt act of culture diplomacy” that ought to be treated as genocidal propaganda.

That sort of attitude is becoming increasingly common in an arts world dominated by leftist ideology. Most American artistic institutions, including classical orchestras and opera companies, have adopted the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as their guiding principle. As such, they hire officials to act as commissars to enforce its race-obsessed rules that also grant a permission slip to antisemitism since Jews and Israel are falsely labeled as “white” oppressors.

The music of refugees from Nazism

The history of the Israel Philharmonic is itself part of the story of modern-day antisemitism, as well as that of the Jewish state.

It was founded in 1936 as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra by Polish-born violinist Bronislaw Huberman. Its players were largely made up of German Jewish musicians who had been subjected to discrimination and firings after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in 1933. They were among the lucky ones who were able to flee for their lives.

Its first concert was conducted by the legendary Arturo Toscanini, and it has long been considered to be among the world’s great orchestras.

But as the IPO and its current music director, Lahav Shani, have come to expect, protests, bigoted boycotts and cancellations are simply a given these days. Shani, the talented Tel Aviv-born conductor and pianist who replaced longtime music director Zubin Mehta upon his retirement in 2019, is also the chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, and spends more of his time in Europe than at home in Israel. But in September, a music festival in Ghent, Belgium, canceled the appearance of the Munich Philharmonic because he was its conductor.

The IPO itself hasn’t played in the United Kingdom since its 2011 appearance at the annual Proms concerts in the Royal Albert Hall was disrupted by protesters, and the management of that famed venue refused to prosecute those responsible. In August of this year, a concert of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was similarly interrupted at the Proms. That happened because the Australian group had canceled the appearance of a pianist who had engaged in incitement motivated by hatred of Israel. That made it “complicit in genocide” in the eyes of the protesters, even though that orchestra had apologized for the “mistake.”

The music of Paul Ben-Haim

It’s also no small irony that the mobs that treat Israeli music as “stolen” were there to protest against the efforts of Shani to revive interest in the music of Ben-Haim, which was featured in the New York concerts along with standard works by Tchaikovsky.

Born Paul Frankenberger in Munich, the artist who later Hebraicized his name to Ben-Haim after Israel attended its independence in 1948, had fought in the German Army during World War I and was a rising star in German music.

He served as an assistant to famous conductors Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch before being appointed as music director in the Bavarian city of Augsburg. Due to the influence of the Nazis, he was let go there and unable to find work as a conductor before making aliyah in 1933 after they took power. In what was then British-ruled Palestine, he devoted himself to teaching and composing music.

Ben-Haim’s music has its roots in the full flowering of German romanticism that found its expression in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, whose influence is clearly heard in his symphonies. But once in the Jewish homeland, he seems to have made a conscious decision to write music that is also explicitly Jewish in its themes.

His first symphony, which was completed in 1940, might well be compared to the tragic angst of the symphonies written by Dmitri Shostakovich written under the rule of Joseph Stalin, balances sadness about the calamity befalling the Jews in Europe with hope for renewal.

His second symphony, completed in 1945 and given its premiere in 1948, is far more optimistic. Though not strictly programmatic in its intent, this piece played on the final night of the IPO at Carnegie Hall, reflects the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century.

On its manuscript, Ben-Haim wrote out a line from a work by Hebrew poet Shalom Yosef Shapira, known as “Shin Shalom,” which read: “Wake up with the dawn, O my soul, on the peak of the Carmel above the Sea.” And from the moment it begins with a flute melody, its opening two movements reflect the energy of a land renewed by the presence of its people, coupled with influences of the Sephardi culture that was merging with that of Jewish Europe to form what would be that of Israel.

The third movement begins with quotations from a Hebrew folk song set to the words of poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, and leads into an elegy played by solo violin, and then flutes, violins and harp mourning the victims of the Holocaust, among them Ben-Haim’s sister. The fourth movement is dominated by an irresistible hora-like theme that concludes the work on an upbeat note.

Ironically, American orchestras are currently doing their best to revive the music of long-forgotten African-American composers, such as Florence Price, for the sake of diversity. Yet from the perspective of DEI, efforts of the IPO to bring the work of Ben-Haim to a world unfamiliar with him isn’t analogous to that since, to fashionable left-wing sensibilities, a Jewish refugee like him was part of a racist oppressor class who should be reviled rather than given a new hearing. That sort of attitude, encapsulated by signs declaring that the IPO is playing “stolen” music, illustrates the antisemitism of these toxic ideas.

At stake in these boycotts

Like so many other Jews of that era and even today, Ben-Haim was a target of antisemitic oppression. But like the Jewish people, he not only refused to die; he became part of the rebirth of Jewish life in Israel and his long-neglected work deserves to find new audiences among music lovers throughout the world.

That somewhat esoteric goal may be far from the minds of most supporters of Israel and even those of its enemies. Still, the campaign to boycott and isolate Israel and its people while falsely accusing them of crimes like “genocide” (what the Palestinians and their cheerleaders actually intend for the Jews) isn’t just about wars and politics. It is nothing less than an effort to expunge Israel and its culture—which is to say, that of modern Jewish life—from the world’s consciousness as well as its stages.

The good news is that efforts to sabotage the IPO’s stay in New York failed. The Carnegie Hall concerts were a triumph. The cheers of the sold-out audiences for the Israelis, which like most visiting orchestras, sounded even better in the famously exceptionally warm acoustics of Carnegie Hall than they do at home at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, drowned out any bad feelings caused by the demonstrations.

Yet the willingness of the antisemites who chant “globalize the intifada” in support of terrorism against Jews everywhere to also embrace a war against Israeli culture and to smear its music as “stolen,” rather than the authentic expression of the Jewish people, is not a sidebar or footnote to the broader struggle. It speaks volumes about what is at stake in the boycotts against Israel. Like the Nazis who drove Paul Ben-Haim and so many other Jews out of Germany, the “Free Palestine” mobs will not succeed in erasing the Jewish people or their culture.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin