Ha’aretz ran a cartoon with the caption "Kurt and Ilse, Cover Me!" on July 9, showing conductor Daniel Barenboim asking his German orchestra to protect him from an angry Israeli audience, after he violated his agreement not to play Wagner in Jerusalem.

Barenboim was appearing under the auspices of the state-sponsored Israel Festival. This was his explanation: “The Festival asked me to change the program, and to me this is undemocratic.” (Breaking the terms of his freely entered upon contract, on the other hand, makes him a man of principle.)

Barenboim: “This is the democratic principle – the majority rules…. This gave me the personal and private opportunity to express my opinion about the democratic principle according to which you cannot let the minority decide for the majority.”

Of course, unfettered majority rule is the danger, not the principle, of democracy. That’s why constitutions come in handy. But Israel doesn’t have a constitution, or any concept of a limited government, or any concept of restraining the majority or state power. That’s why Labor party prime ministers in Israel fire teachers with whom they have political differences (In the early 1950s Ben Gurion forbade Israel Eldad from teaching high school; more recently Ehud Barak fired elementary school teacher Margalit Har Shefi), or people whose parties lose elections are in danger of losing their homes, as newly elected prime ministers decide who shall live where, and which homes to give away to encourage peace processes.

In this particular case, of which Barenboim was speaking, the “minority” consists of Holocaust survivors who heard Wagner as they were marched into the death camps and don’t want to hear Wagner in Jerusalem. It also consists of a large number of the public, not themselves Holocaust survivors, who favor maintaining the voluntary ban on playing Wagner. (This ban appears nowhere in law, and is not state censorship; it was originally adopted on the self-initiative of the local philharmonic orchestra decades ago.)

So far we have a case of one man, a famed cultural figure, who feels that his understanding of democracy is more important than the feelings of a few Holocaust survivors. Barenboim, in this, is no different than any other little tyrant who imposes his will on others while pontificating about democracy. But that generalizes the matter, reaching the concept according to which Barenboim proceeded. The particulars in this case are edifying in their own right.

What was the audience response to Barenboim’s “backdoor” incursion of Wagner? (The phrase is from Ha’aretz). Some people walked out, many argued, heckled, debated, and then left. But on television, viewers could see the arguments. One famous local actor (given the state of Israel’s state-supported theater industry, undoubtedly earning his salary at taxpayer expense) shouted, as did others, at the protesters, “Get out of here! Go home!”

This was not a civilized debate. This was the socialist, secular elite of Israel telling people who either survived the Holocaust themselves, or who felt sympathy for survivors, or who harbor feelings of national pride that favor the ban on Wagner, to go away, in ugly threatening tones, accompanied by violent hand motions.

These are the same people who pursued a peace process for ten years though it led to hundreds of Israeli deaths, hoping that these dead people would just “go away.” As Rabin said of people whose homes he was turning over to Arafat, let them spin their propellers, it doesn’t affect him.

These are the people who pretend to be cultured and who say openly that they feel more at home with Arafat’s henchmen than with Likud members (MK Yael Dayan; the late Leah Rabin). These are they who write textbooks glorifying the Arab struggle and condemning settlers. Wagner and Nazi culture – are acceptable. Worth fighting for, in fact.  National pride – no.

Judaism is all about distinctions: Sabbath from the workdays, Jews from non-Jews, the Holy Land from abroad, good from evil. Boundaries, moral as well as physical, are imperative. Borders must exist, and national units be preserved. Barenboim is part of the “advanced case of Western afflictions,” as IASPS put it in a 1997 Washington conference. Wagner in Jerusalem…why not? This is the same outlook that was expressed by Shimon Peres a few years ago when he asked the Arab League to admit Israel. National differences shouldn’t exist. Borders are passé. The process is what matters. We can all be friends. So, why not give Arafat Bethlehem. Anyone who cares about their matriarch Rachel’s grave there is nationalistic, like those who don’t want to hear Wagner in Jerusalem, or they are harping on Jewish history, like Holocaust survivors, or they are obsessing with borders in an age that has gone beyond them.

But there is more. Barenboim took pains to tell Ha’aretz that he acted alone, without the knowledge of the Festival management. “The Festival management didn’t even know anything about this,” he said. Yet this claim was belied by Festival director Yossi Tel-Gan who admitted on television on July 8 that he heard about the planned introduction of Wagner from people in the orchestra, before the event. He claimed he protested to Barenboim, but it was obvious what form those protests took. His description of the event was almost mystical: “Barenboim stood alone…all alone…by himself…speaking to thousands of people…without a microphone…” The awe in Tel-Gan’s voice was audible. And even he was outdone by Micah Levinson, the Festival’s artistic director, who protested to Ha’aretz about Barenboim’s action, then called it “an historic moment.” One gets the sense that perhaps Tel-Gan and Levinson protested for the record, or for their salaries, while both supported the move.

If so, that means that the state – which pays for the Festival, and pays the directors’ salaries, and brought Barenboim here – pretended to empathize with Holocaust survivors and others while secretly planning to bring Wagner to Jerusalem despite Israelis’ opposition. Thus the Festival’s actions were not much different from those of the actor in the audience. Essentially they were telling Israelis with a sense of history or national identity: Go away. The state and its state-supported elites have been telling Israelis this for quiet some time.

The Holocaust, borders, some objective truth out there, some standard for justice, do any of these exist? No, history is malleable (and as Peres says, “we can learn nothing from history”), borders unnecessary, truth a matter of opinion, distinctions unnecessary, justice – it is just what the elite says it is. All these “principles” came together a few years ago when the state’s highest court freed a man it found was without a doubt a Nazi criminal who persecuted Jews (Demjanjuk), on a loophole (that there was a possibility that he didn’t kill Jews in one particular death camp), setting him free and letting him leave the Jewish state. Thus according to the Israeli High Court rulings, parents who spank their child get locked up but Nazi criminals go free. And if you disagree, well, just “go away.”

The Israelis involved in Barenboim’s fraud perpetrated on the Israeli public, as those involved in the fraud of the peace process, or the rewriting of Zionist history based on doctored evidence (Haifa U. announced last month that it had discovered that a University Ph.D. created his own evidence to blame Jews for a massacre that never actually took place, but the University did not revoke the man’s Ph.D., which Ph.D. was granted specifically for his research into that nonexistent massacre), are those who deny reality – the reality of nationhood, and history, and borders and distinctions of all sorts – and who try to impose their denial of reality on others, by hook or by crook, and who condemn any who dare disagree.

  This affliction is not unique to Israel. On the contrary, the 1997 IASPS conference called Israel an advanced case of the Western afflictions. The lack of moral clarity and distinctions described above is what allows the U.S. on July 9 to condemn Israel for dismantling illegally erected homes in Arab neighborhoods of Israel while calling legally erected homes of Jews impediments to peace that have to come down; or to say in the official condemnation that such actions will ruin Israel’s relations with the PA. How can the current relationship of war be ruined? (Perhaps by bringing peace.) The only way one can speak of ruining relations is by ignoring the distinctions between war and peace. Jews are being killed: for the US – and certainly Europe - that means peace reigns, and a relationship exists which can be ruined by Israel enforcing its construction zoning laws. (Without going into detail here, these are the same afflictions which allow people to oppose defense against incoming missiles, or to support destructive foreign aid programs. See the IASPS NBNs and op-eds on those subjects on this website.)

There is one more point to be made in this op-ed. The above analysis explains the actions of Barenboim, a Jew living in post-Holocaust Germany, and Peres and Rabin and Beilin, Jews living in their own post-Zionist world. It doesn’t explain the Berlin Orchestra that played Wagner. To come to Jerusalem and dare to play the music of the gas chambers in front of a Jewish audience is an affront to morality of its own, slightly different from the Barenboim affront, but nonetheless a statement that morality doesn’t exist and there are no distinctions and history doesn’t matter and Jews should just “go away.”

Barenboim may be ill with the above afflictions; the festival producers professional con men; but the Germans are just Germans.

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