Making music to make peace...
Music may be the most healing of all the arts. It is the most deeply embedded in the human brain: in patients losing their minds to Alzheimer’s Disease, memories of music are the last thing to flee.1 Many countries’ schools recognize the fundamental, irreplaceable value of music: Russia and North America are among the leaders. But South America may offer the best model. Venezuela’s musical-education El Sistema trains hundreds of thousands of children a year in classical music. The entire country plays or sings. El Sistema emerged from the brain of José Antonio Abreu’s work with his Social Action for Music program. Abreu believed that collaboration to create beauty made the symphony orchestra the ideal model for human harmony. One graduate of El Sistema, Gustavo Dudamel, became conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 28.
This Western model need not deter other cultures: many of today’s finest ‘Western” classical musicians are Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Indian. They could equally well be Iraqi, Egyptian or Jordanian – as Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said demonstrated brilliantly with their West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. If one were to take a single model for arts-and-beauty education – and as an education in brotherhood and peace -- this Middle-East but world-embracing Barenboim-Said orchestra might be the very best. It teaches mutual respect, collaboration, and joyful harmony. Is there a better definition of a peaceful world?
Palestine (like Kashmir) needs fixing...
The State of Israel deserves respect, security and legitimacy. The world community must stand by Israel and guarantee its existence with all reasonable means – political, economic and even, if necessary, military. For many reasons, and not just the Holocaust, Israel’s security is sacred.
But so is the Palestinians’ security. Dispossessed, and betrayed by their own leaders, Arab regimes and the West, they have had none for over 60 years. The only lasting solution to the two-peoples-one-land conundrum will be internationally assured security for two equal states, Israel and Palestine. Israel, as the “regional superpower,” must now accept what top American generals have publicly said: that failure to come to terms with the Palestinians has become a major security problem for the U.S. – and for all Western countries.