West-Eastern Divan Ensemble
Where Israelis, Palestinians and Iranians Must Listen to One Another
Students from the Middle East come to Berlin to study music with the star conductor Daniel Barenboim. Now the Israel-Hamas war is testing their ideals.
By Javier C. Hernández
The young musicians, in jeans and fuzzy sweaters, had just finished rehearsing a Prokofiev symphony in an empty concert hall. Then they put away their instruments and settled back into their orchestra chairs to talk about the war.
It was a recent afternoon at the Barenboim-Said Academy, a sleekly modern music conservatory in Berlin founded by the renowned Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim with the intention of bringing together students from across the Middle East, and the musicians were wrestling with the Israel-Hamas conflict and their raw emotions.
An Israeli music student described the trauma of the Hamas attacks. A Palestinian spoke of feeling voiceless and vulnerable. An Iranian described fears that violence could spread across the entire region.
“It takes courage for you to be here,” Mr. Barenboim, 80, who has worked almost 25 years in pursuit of the elusive goal of Middle East peace, said from the podium. “We have to listen to each other,” he declared, giving voice to what might be the academy’s unofficial credo, both for music-making and politics.
The academy, like other peace projects, has long had to deal with the volatility of the Middle East, navigating bursts of violence, unrest and shifting politics.
But the Israel-Hamas war has tested these efforts in new ways, as became clear during a visit to the academy earlier this month when Mr. Barenboim and the students were preparing for their first concert together since the fighting began. The scale of the conflict, the rapid spread of images of death and destruction on social media and the ubiquity of misinformation have made it harder to promote civil debate and to find common ground.
The students performing for the first time since the war began.Credit…Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times
In an environment where Israelis, Palestinians, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, Lebanese and others study and live together, the war has prompted a reckoning. Some students, after heated debates with classmates over who is to blame for the carnage, have questioned whether they should even play music together in a time of war. Others say that music has brought them closer.
“We will not bring peace, and we will not solve the world’s problems, as much as we might want to,” said Katia Abdel Kader, 23, a Palestinian violinist from Ramallah who is in her fourth year at the academy, which offers music degrees and courses in the humanities. “But we create a space, and that’s what is missing in the world, not only in the Middle East. Places for people to be accepted by the other.”
Itamar Carmeli, 22, a pianist from Tel Aviv who is in his third year, said it was impossible to escape the conflict because “our families are there and our childhood is there.” He said he had learned to accept his classmates’ views even if he disagreed with them, partly because music had taught him to listen more deeply.
“There is no harmony,” he said, “without dissonance.”
The current conflict has even tested the idealism of the school’s founder, Mr. Barenboim, who makes a point of noting that he holds both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship. He and Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary scholar who died in 2003, founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999 to bring Israeli and Arab musicians together.
The academy, which is rooted in the same principles as the Divan, now has 78 students — about 70 percent from the Middle East and North Africa — who study in a well-appointed building in the heart of Berlin that opened in 2016; its concert hall was designed by Frank Gehry.
Mr. Barenboim, a titan of classical music who led the Berlin State Opera for three decades before stepping down this year, has drastically reduced his commitments because of a serious neurological condition. But he has made a special effort to be with the students in recent weeks for rehearsals and discussions.
In an interview after a recent rehearsal, Mr. Barenboim said he worried the latest war could morph into a “world catastrophe” in the absence of more efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians together.
“There’s no use saying, ‘We the Jews have suffered more than anybody else,’ or the Palestinians’ saying, ‘We suffered more than all of you,’” he said. “This has been a very difficult century with little rest. I think we have to keep going, and forget our own positions, and get along with a sense of equality.”
The school year at the Barenboim-Said Academy began this month with the usual orientation sessions on Israeli-Palestinian tensions, how to respect differences and ways to see beyond stereotypes.
Then came the deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 and the ensuing Israeli strikes on Gaza. Many students, their phones buzzing with frantic messages from friends and relatives and displaying images of devastation, were too disturbed to practice their instruments. The school’s leaders, including Regula Rapp, the rector, and Mr. Barenboim’s son, Michael, who serves as dean, brought in counselors fluent in Hebrew and Arabic.
The students made a point of checking in with each other, and they organized meetings to try to work through some of their differences. Unsure of what to say, they sometimes offered only hugs. At one point, they gathered for a start-of-the-semester dinner, sharing homemade dishes: hummus, baba ghanouj, labneh and bulgur salad.
Their conversations were sometimes tense, as musicians from Israel spoke of losing a sense of security and the Palestinians described life under the suffocating blockade Israel has imposed on Gaza for 16 years. The conversations were also deeply personal, with some students sharing stories of losing loved ones during decades of violence in the Middle East.
The students tried to support each other as they faced new difficulties in German society; the authorities banned many pro-Palestinian gatherings, and a synagogue in Berlin was attacked with firebombs. They met at their dorms or went out for beer and cigarettes and talked about how they felt guilty being away from their families.
Roshanak Rafani, 29, a percussionist from Tehran who is a member of the student government, said the tumult in the region could be shattering; she has at times contemplated abandoning her studies.
“Imagine that people are dying, and now I’m just practicing to see which hand I should put here or there,” she said. “We all feel this inner conflict.”
She added that the young musicians had gotten beyond their differences by embracing the idea that “we’re all students, and there is no side now for us here.”
“We’ve all accepted the fact that we cannot really convince each other about many things,” she said. “People talk and raise their voices and yell and cry, but two hours later, they are hugging each other.”
The war has hung over classroom discussions as well.
In a recent philosophy class, the topic was Plato’s allegory of the cave, a metaphor for contemplating the divide between ignorance and enlightenment.
A student plays the cello, with his cello teacher visible in a mirror behind him.
At a cello lesson, Frans Helmerson, from Sweden, teaches Naor Zadickario, who is from Israel.Credit…Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times
“There is this undeniable and evident and visceral pain in response to horrors,” said Roni Mann, who taught the philosophy class and also serves as the academy’s founding director of humanities. “They are in this together. They cry on each other’s shoulders, and they hold each other up.”
The war has posed one of the biggest challenges to Mr. Barenboim’s vision since the founding of the Divan orchestra, which many of the academy’s students will eventually join.
The Divan has survived previous periods of strife, including the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, which caused stark divisions within the orchestra and led some Arab musicians to drop out.
The Israel-Hamas war has already tested friendships in the Divan orchestra and led some members to question whether they will take part when it reconvenes for its concert season next summer.
Samir Obaido, a Palestinian violinist in the Divan, said he was uncertain about the role of music in this moment. In recent days, he has posted a flood of comments on Instagram defending the Palestinian cause. Some of his Israeli colleagues in the orchestra have said they respect his right to speak out, while others have accused him of spreading lies, he said.
“I can’t imagine how I will feel onstage,” he said.