Israeli-Argentinean conductor Daniel Barenboim says he is pleased with the path which the orchestra made up of young musicians from both Israel and the Arab world has taken since he founded it a decade ago.
Musically we have performed in the most important venues in the world, the most difficult works in the repertoire, he told AFP in Spain where the orchestra began its latest European tour on Sunday in Seville.
The orchestra has become a myth in Europe, it has become an alternative way to think of this conflict, he added at the base of the orchestra s summer camp in the southwestern town of Pilas.
Barenboim, who is tipped by many as a future recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, founded the orchestra in 1999 with his friend Edward W. Said, a Palestinian literary scholar who died in 2003. In April, Barenboim performed a sold-out concert in Egypt for the first time at the Cairo Opera House that was met by widely mixed reaction from both Egyptian intellectuals and media.
This year the so-called peace orchestra is made up 103 musicians, including 37 Israelis and 42 Palestinians.
The rest are from Muslim nations in the Middle East like Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Iran as well as a few members from Spain.
Spanish musicians have been given places in the orchestra since the regional government of the southern Andalusia region in 2002 began supporting it by providing the musicians with a base for their yearly summer workshop at Pilas.
The goal is to help bring about reconciliation in the fractious Middle East between young Arabs and Israelis by having them work together on music for which they have a common passion and hopefully break down assumptions they have about one another.
Our orchestra does not have a common political opinion. This orchestra has 10,000 political opinions. This is a project where everyone has the right to express their opinion, said Barenboim.
No one expects that anyone will be convinced by the other s arguments.
But we do expect that they have the curiosity to try to understand the logic of the arguments of the other, the 66-year-old added.
Aside from rehearsal sessions in preparation for concerts and tours and the intensive summer workshop, the musicians do not work often together.
But when they do Barenboim said inevitably there are always heated discussions.
There are people from enemy states. An Israeli and a Syrian, how are they going to agree? he added.
During a visit to the workshop at Pilas, an argument broke out among the musicians over the concrete wall that makes up segments of Israel s West Bank separation barrier as they decorated a panel that will be placed in Berlin for celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A Palestinian has written The Apartheid wall must fall in a reference to the West Bank barrier, which angered an Israeli.
A big part of Israelis have a closed mind, the Palestinian, Ramzi Abu Redwan, said.
I have come to defend my message and say that what his country is doing in Palestine is not good, added the 30-year-old, who was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
But for Lebanese cellist Nassib Ahmadieh, being in the orchestra has opened his eyes to the fact that there is a wide range of views in Israel regarding the conflict.
I know now that there are people in Israel that are against the Israeli politics, that are against the destruction, that are against war, that there are people in Israel that basically do have sympathies with the Palestinian cause, the 32-year-old said.
Or at least they try to understand the suffering of the Palestinian people, and this is a very calming idea for me, he added.
For Barenboim the highlight of the orchestra s 10-year run came in 2005 when it performed in Ramallah.
The concert only took place after tortuous diplomatic maneuvers.
The Israelis were forbidden by law to venture into Palestinian territory and the Syrians and Lebanese were not allowed to travel through Israeli land, which they had to do in order to reach Ramallah, by the laws of their own countries.
Traveling with Syrian, Israeli, Lebanese, Jordanians and Egyptians to Palestine, the occupied territories, was an historic event, Barenboim said.
It was only possible thanks to the vision of the Spanish government which gave all the musicians Spanish diplomatic passports, he added.
Barenboim, who lives in Berlin and holds Argentine, Israeli and Spanish citizenship in addition to an honorary Palestinian citizenship, called the existing situation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict depressing.
Where have we arrived? Two peoples who have the deep conviction that they have the right to live in the same land and that depend on an American president who is I don t know how many thousands of miles away to impose a solution, he said.
