Israeli conductor 'now Palestinian'

Israeli conductor 'now Palestinian'
14 January 2008 21:29
Reuters
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3336183.ece

Daniel Barenboim, the world renowned Israeli pianist and conductor,
has taken Palestinian citizenship and said he believed his rare new
status could serve a model for peace between the two peoples.

"It is a great honour to be offered a passport," he said on Saturday
night after a Beethoven piano recital in Ramallah, the West Bank city
where he has been active for some years in promoting contact between
young Arab and Israeli musicians.

"I have also accepted it because I believe that the destinies of ...
the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are inextricably
linked," Barenboim said. "We are blessed - or cursed - to live with
each other. And I prefer the first."

"The fact that an Israeli citizen can be awarded a Palestinian
passport, can be a sign that it is actually possible."

Former Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouthi, who helped
organise Saturday's concert, said the passport had been approved by
the previous government of which he was a member and which was
replaced in June. The passport had actually been issued about six
weeks ago, he added.

Argentine-born Barenboim, 65, is a controversial figure in his
adoptive homeland, both for his promotion of German music and vocal
opposition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

Asked about US President George W. Bush's remarks last week on a visit
to the region that a peace could be signed this year, Barenboim warned
of the danger of raising hopes too high.

"It would be absolutely horrible if now, with good intentions,
expectations are raised which will not be able to be fulfilled,"
Barenboim said. "Then we will sink into an even greater depression."

Though he dismissed any wish to play a political role, the former
music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra took a dig at Bush's
strikingly forceful call in Jerusalem last week for Israel to end, in
the president's own words, "the occupation".

"Now even not very intelligent people are saying that the occupation
has to be stopped," Barenboim said.

Based in Berlin, he is closely identified with German music and in
2001 conducted an opera by 19th-century composer Richard Wagner in
Jerusalem despite anger in some quarters at a performance of a work by
a German accused of anti-Semitic views.

For the past decade, Barenboim has promoted Arab-Israeli cultural
contacts, notably alongside the late Palestinian-American writer
Edward Said.

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