I’m a traveller, one of those humans who roam the world on planes and trains. I don’t usually talk much, and I write even less, because my word is music. So, dear reader, why are you reading me today?
Because music is no longer enough to make me heard, because music, while it says the unspeakable, does not say everything, because it must not cover the silence and the cries that only the word can and must fight.
One morning, a lady in fancy dress forbade my three-century-old companion to fly with me. She ordered me to put him in the hold. So he and I stayed on the ground. My Stradivarius and I meet people, we look at the world, we dream of a planet where the definition of a human being would be: «a being who loves life and beauty». We haven’t found that place, but we’re working towards it, and we hope for it every time the bow touches the string. We’re not just tightrope walkers balancing on a rope; we’re also citizens of the world, sensitive to the world of the living and the world of the dead. The destination of flight TO3450 was not neutral, and we couldn’t bear not being able to take that plane for the first time in all the years we’ve been travelling together. We wanted to share our surprise and our sorrow. You’ll forgive me for letting my thoughts wander from experiences in the day-to-day life of History in Motion. I wanted to put words to the silences and lies, to the «banality of evil» so well described by Hannah Arendt, and which so easily takes hold of humanity once again. I’ve tried to follow Edgar Morin’s advice and extract myself from the «prehistory of thought», by bringing together several dimensions to question the inexplicable, without seeking to justify the unjustifiable. Since I wrote this text, history has accelerated. In the words of Laurent Fabius, speaking in the silence of his office one sunny morning: «It’s sinking in like butter, there’s no intellectual resistance left, France is about to go under without any reaction». It was a few days before the European elections, a few days before Jupiter sent the people of his country back to face their demons. This fable has no moral, and makes no claim to anything in a desperately old story. For the sake of my children, I couldn’t keep it to myself.
It’s 4am on Sunday 5 May 2024. I haven’t slept all night, as I always do when I have to catch an early plane, no doubt due to the anxiety of the alarm clock not ringing. After a shower, my suitcase and my violin, I headed for Orly airport, terminal 3, for Transavia flight TO3450, bound for Tel Aviv.
Today is Sunday 5 May 2024. For almost 7 months, to the day, the world has once again been ablaze over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since 7 October 2023, Israelis and Jews have once again found themselves alone before world opinion. Since 7 October 2023, an abyss has opened that cannot be closed.
I should have been in Israel a few days earlier for a session of the Lumières d’Europe festival, which should have been held at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. There should have been around twenty-five of us, artists and scholars from all over Europe, thinking and playing around the theme of «Beethoven and the Revolutions». The ambition of Lumières d’Europe is to spread the humanist values of the Europe of the Enlightenment throughout the world, values that are particularly endangered today. Since 7 October, we have tried to keep the festival going at all costs, made all the more necessary by the whirlwinds of hatred and violence unleashed from all sides. Unfortunately, the massive bombardment of Israel on 13 April, by hundreds of missiles and drones launched by Iran, killed the project.
We had just left the stage at the Philharmonie de Paris for what was the penultimate programme of Les Dissonances: «Notre Sacre», Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, shared with Abd al Malik and the choreographer Blanca Li.
I’ll never forget the expression of my Israeli friends who were playing in the orchestra, as we prepared to drink a toast just after the concert:
«They are bombing Israel, Iran has attacked!»
Ironically, a violist friend of mine had come to the concert with one of her friends, an Iranian, exiled from the Mollahs’ regime. While no one yet knew the full extent of the attack, while some of us had family and friends in the shelters, humour had already taken over, the only weapon we had to carry on living. In one of his lyrics, a few minutes earlier on stage, Abd al Malik evoked the «folie des grandeur» of mankind, which always pushes us into the abyss. A few weeks before the show, I called him up:
«Malik, you see what’s happening in the world, you’re a Muslim, I’m a Jew and we’re going to go on stage together. We’re going on stage as brothers, you understand? Do you agree that we should say a few words?
After conferring with Blanca, we agreed that Malik should say: «My name is David and I’m Jewish», and that I should say: «My name is Malik and I’m Muslim», and Blanca concluded: «Tonight, we’re all brothers and sisters».
Just after this show of harmony, a deluge of fire fell on Israel.
At the heart of the now cancelled festival was a concert scheduled for 6 May, Holocaust Remembrance Day. I decided to go ahead with this concert, against all odds, because I absolutely wanted to be there, and to commune with the country in remembrance and peace. It was for this concert that the alarm went off at 4am this morning.
I was in the taxi and we were driving through Paris in the middle of the night. It was 4.45am, the sun hadn’t yet risen and my driver, who was just finishing his night, wasn’t tired and was talking non-stop. After copiously insulting a VTC driver, he explained to me how these poor buggers were being exploited by the platforms. A few days earlier, he had been accompanied by a LFI MP, who explained that she was going to propose a law to the European Commission to protect them.
«They have no life, no protection, they work like slaves».
He himself was a taxi driver, I had ordered him on Uber, for the price of an Uber, but in reality he was subsidised by Uber who paid him the real price of the taxi.
«They take the money to pay me, to the slaves who no longer want to go to airports, can you believe it?»
This courageous MP was none other than Mathilde Panot, a pillar and fervent supporter of the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrations now infesting our universities. This young woman, a 35-year-old provincial, was convinced, like most of the young demonstrators, that she was supporting Hamas, in the name of the same justice as that of defending Uber slaves. In the end, the only variable that differentiated the two struggles was the right of Israelis to live in Israel without being massacred, taken hostage or bombed. How was it that this young woman, so full of good feelings, equated the State of Israel and the Jews with the archetype of the most savage capitalism against which she had defined herself as a human being, and yet fought them with the firm conviction that she was working for the right cause?
I let my thoughts carry me away, already exhausted by my sleepless night, as we approached Orly. Suddenly, the night was lit up by a string of lights from the hundreds of cars stuck at the entrance to the ramp leading to the terminals. Thanks to my Uber-subsidised taxi, we avoided the fatal traffic jam and I arrived perfectly on time. Barely had I passed through the entrance to the immense hall of terminal 3 when I was caught by a stream of people more reminiscent of the Exodus than a weekend away. I managed to squeeze through and quickly found the Transavia counter for Tel Aviv. It must have been 5.15am, and the flight was still scheduled for 7.15am.
I was floating in the hubbub, surrounded by thousands of silhouettes barely out of their sleep, concentrating on my breathing to stay on my feet, when I saw the smiling, haggard face of my pianist friend Itamar Golan approaching in the distance. I beckoned him to join me and we quickly found ourselves in front of the counter to check in our luggage. Right next to us was a flight to Morocco. The Transavia staff looking after us were of North African origin, and the passengers going to Tel Aviv were clearly, and without doubt, mostly Jewish. Were we in a free zone, outside history?
We were greeted by a well-coiffed, clean-shaven young man who took our passports. He immediately cast a suspicious eye over the violin case I was carrying on my back.
«Can you tell me what this is, please, sir?»
«It’s a musical instrument, it’s a violin»
«You won’t be able to take it on board, you’ll have to pay extra and put it in the hold, please, sir.
I felt a slight surge of adrenaline, but I’m used to this kind of situation, which can happen from time to time when the staff are young and don’t necessarily know that there’s flexibility for musical instruments.
«Dear Sir, I’ve been travelling for over thirty years with my violin at all times, and I assure you it’s not a problem, in fact, just last week I was with my violin on Transavia, don’t worry.»
Usually that’s enough to calm things down, but obviously not this time, not with him.
«I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to check your violin in the hold.»
I tried to explain to him that putting a Stradivarius in the hold wasn’t an option, but it wasn’t his problem. He probably didn’t even know what a violin was, let alone a Stradivarius. I asked him to call his supervisor. A young woman, obviously in a bad mood, arrived and gave me the same speech. I asked her to speak to a company manager, which was curtly refused. The Transavia staff that morning were clearly on edge.
All the same, I managed to explain that I was leaving to give a concert, and that putting the violin in the hold was strictly impossible.
«You put a tag on it and let it go through, and they’ll see what happens when they board…».
It was with this last sentence, uttered in a voice without appeal, accompanied by a slight sneer, echoing in my head that I passed through the security checks and the border. Caught in an ever-rising tide, I was worried about whether my friends Claudine and Serge Haroche had managed to make their way through.
«We arrived one minute after the counter closed and they refused to check us in».
Serge was there, as Honorary President of Lumières d’Europe, which we had founded together a few years earlier. Serge Haroche, as administrator of the Weizmann Institute and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, had opened the doors of the Institute to us. The war, the massacres, the incessant bombings and the wave of anti-Jewish sentiment had taken their toll on the festival (I decided to create this neologism, the particular ugliness of which I love. It’s ugly to read, ugly to pronounce and perfectly expresses this visceral feeling of hatred for Jews. Anti-Semitism is a misuse of language, since Semites, particularly in the current episode, are fighting on all sides: to be anti-Semitic would therefore mean to be anti-Palestinian, among other things). All that was left was this concert, and the Transavia staff were just finishing the job.
«See if you can do something,» Serge told me, «I’m trying to call Air France.»
«I’ll let you know,» I told him as I sped towards the boarding gate, through the ever-growing crowd.
Anti-Judaism has a far too specific cultural and religious component, and anti-Zionism fails to encompass all the hatred or to explain it in all its virulence. Zionism being the design of a progressive society where women and men were treated as equals long before our suffragettes, we cannot explain why our feminists and left-wing progressives can be so clearly and openly only anti-Zionist. Anti-Jewishness is quite simply hatred of the Jew in its very essence, in all its splendour. It’s a strange feeling to create a neologism to describe a logic that is so old, and so clear.
After another 15 minutes on the bus, I finally arrived at the door. Serge and Claudine’s fate was sealed and mine would soon be too. I handed my boarding pass to a charming young woman, who scanned it on the machine, which emitted a very unpleasant noise, reminiscent of the telephone ringing in the first scene of the film Brazil. The tag was the famous tag that had just rung.
«Please step to the side, sir, there’s a problem with your hand luggage.»
«Yes, I know, let me explain, it’s a violin, I’ll give…»
«Step to the side, Sir please»
I complied willingly, telling myself that it would all work out in the end. Once all the passengers had boarded, it was my turn.
«Sir, you have to pay an extra 64 euros and we’ll put your instrument in the hold» I explained that it was impossible, that it would come out in a million pieces. There was nothing we could do.
«Sir, please put your box in the template.»
«It’s a violin, I’ve been travelling for over thirty years, almost every week by plane with it, believe me, it’s not a problem!»
I asked to speak to the person in charge of the flight. A young woman of Indian or Pakistani origin looked at me with contempt and didn’t want to hear anything:
«Sir, you pay the supplement, your violin goes in the hold, or you don’t take this plane».
«Dear Madam, this is ridiculous, do you realise? I’m going to give a very important concert, the French Embassy is involved, it’s the commemoration of the Shoah, I’m going to a country at war, maybe the ten centimetres out of gauge should be put into perspective, don’t you think?»
«That’s not my problem» she tells me with sadistic flames in her eyes and not without a certain amount of pleasure.»
«I want to speak to the pilot, to one of your superiors,» I demanded.
So she had just denied me boarding, in defiance of all my rights and, after a word spoken into a walkie-talkie, my suitcase was taken off the plane. It was 7am and I was heading towards the empty bus that would take me back to the terminal. Everything had happened so quickly that I hardly realised it. Once on the bus, I called Serge. They were recovering from their emotions over a coffee in terminal 3.
I said, «I’ll catch up with you!»
The young man responsible for the fatal tag accompanied me back to the bus without a word, clearly satisfied that justice had been done. Had he and his colleagues succeeded in sending a Jew home, or was it just ordinary stupidity? The fact that I could ask myself this question for the first time in my life sent a chill down my spine. When he had decided to abandon me at passport control, I pointed out that I didn’t know where I was supposed to pick up my suitcase, and he kindly condescended to accompany me to the border, where a lady on the ground staff told me the number of the carpet I was supposed to walk to.
As I approached mat no. 4, I was overcome by a sudden anxiety: I’d forgotten my computer on the bus! The sleepless night, the noise, the crowds, the stress – it was all starting to take its toll, and I panicked. Fortunately, at the end of the carpet were some Air France hostesses.
I called out to them, and one of them took pity on me and came to my aid. She turned to a young woman in a red vest, seated at a small round plastic table just before customs.
«Is it possible to have the number of the bus regulation, please?»
The young «red vest» woman, who was part of the staff responsible for helping passengers find their way around the airport, was totally overwhelmed and didn’t know what she was talking about. I was already beginning to mourn the loss of my computer, but that was without counting on the sense of duty and humanity of this charming hostess, whose name I would later learn was Jeanne.
«It’s a shame what happened to you, sir» she said, hearing my story. Apart from the fact that she considered it illegal, she was ashamed of the inhuman behavior of the staff at Transavia, Air France’s low-cost subsidiary. This story was a strange echo of my morning cab journey. After Uber, Transavia in «La Guerre des Humains contre les Humains»! Fortunately, in the end, there are humans who save humans, and Jeanne had every intention of finding my computer and reporting this scandal to her superiors, even though :
«We can’t do anything with Transavia, it’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is.»
Air France is a company whose service is one of the best in the world, and Jeanne was a worthy representative. Behind the flag of a company lies a political philosophy of the world, a history of human relations that is only possible in an economy where staff training exists, where passengers are not dehumanized at every stage of their treatment. Indeed, human beings can quickly cease to be human, as soon as they cross the airport gate. He becomes a statistic, a number under control until he leaves this test tube, which can quickly turn into a perfect totalitarian regime of surveillance, police state and disenfranchisement against a backdrop of compulsory consumerism. If Air France was the standard-bearer of social democracy, Transavia was the symbol of the degradation of the world, and therefore of human beings.
Is this also France’s new-found attractiveness, with so many of its territories and citizens on the verge of third-worldization, and de facto profitable once again for those for whom human beings are no more than an adjustment variable? France, country of the world’s luxury champions and, «at the same time», country of sick hospitals and schools as well as lawless zones, in the hands of drug mafias and the Muslim Brotherhood. France, the country of human rights and, «at the same time», of blunders: how can I forget the feeling of ex-territorialization I experienced during a weekend spent in St Tropez, in front of yachts registered in fical paradises, wallowing in more or less transparent waters, while the country was set ablaze by a wave of unprecedented violence, triggered by the death of young Nahel Merzouk? France, the country of freedom and, «at the same time», of censorship, even self-censorship in the major media and publishing houses, belonging to an oligarchy for whom the democratic system will soon be obsolete. Hitler did not come to power alone, and how can we fail to look with concern at our France, whose greatness now seems to be held together only by the painting of the Republic’s golds and the meals served in the Hall of Mirrors for the King and his court? Perhaps we should have abdicated this grandeur to give ourselves the chance to rekindle a flame other than that of the Olympic Games, to draw the horizon of a common destiny, in our country broken by too many fractures?
I’d just experienced a fine example of the consequences of the progressive fascization of the world, of the methodical creation of disempowered, dehumanized humans, who could once again take pride in doing their job without questioning the consequences of their efficiency. Food for thought for Mathilde Panot, even if I doubt that Air France’s social democracy is her cup of tea.
Just before leaving, I took the liberty of pointing out to the woman in charge of flight TO3450 and her team that, thanks to people like them who were «just doing their job», millions of Jews had been able to take trains in complete safety 80 years earlier. I don’t know if she knew what I was talking about. The only thing in her eyes was a strange light, a mixture of rage and absolute pleasure. She had done justice, and thanks to her, the world was once again in balance during that ataraxic moment. I thought that the feeling of full power she seemed to feel, was what every artist seeks and very rarely encounters: the weightlessness of the eternity of the moment.
Jeanne and I went back out to meet Serge and Claudine outside Paul’s house. Soon, once again, the humor had returned, and we joked about the last beaches of freedom south of Crete over coffee, while I bought the last available ticket for the next flight to El Al for an astronomical sum, before taking a cab to Roissy.
No sooner had I got into the cab than I received a call from Jeanne, who had taken matters into her own hands and tracked down my computer in no-man’s-land, which was still escaping the efficiency of men and machines, since it seemed very difficult to find someone to take it back to the free zone. Adriana, my wife, had taken over from Jeanne, whom I once again thanked warmly for her help. I had just published a post on social networks
«#transaviahatesmusicians» to alert the world of musicians to the danger of taking on this company. The web began to stir, and numerous testimonials corroborated mine. Would the scandal force Transavia to react?
«What destination and terminal are you flying to?» my new cab driver asked me courteously.
«Tel Aviv».
Radio silence until arrival at terminal 2B, 45 minutes later. I was starting to get paranoid, probably because I was so tired. My mother’s side of the family is of Jewish origin and, by law, as my mother was her mother’s daughter who was her mother’s daughter, I am Jewish. I was raised by parents who, at the time, were left-wing anti-clerical and secular. The question of my origins never really arose and, apart from a cousin who became Orthodox Jewish around the age of 30 and the Weil cousins, the sound of my violin and my first name, David, I had never felt any call to identity. Traumatized by the Shoah of course, like any human being, I undoubtedly had an invisible link with Jewish history through my musical education and my encounters, but the history of Israel was the history of Israel and I had never taken sides in the eternal Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even less on the Israeli side: my childhood in Egypt and my father an Egyptologist, and therefore linked to the Arab Middle East, made me sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians. Of course, I was aware of the excesses of Islam, of fanatics of all kinds, of the madness of the region, but I was also aware that the assassination of Rabin in 1995 by the Isarelian far-right had opened a disastrous period that gave birth to October 7th.
But October 7, 2023 had opened a chasm in me. Since then, I’d been tumbling down the slopes of this abyss, unable to regain my equilibrium. I couldn’t find my footing in the world again. The massacre had been terrifying, but it had only been the trigger that released the toxic gas of anti-Jewishness. It was as if everything that had been compressed for 80 years was about to come out and take everything in its path. More than a thousand innocent Jews massacred, babies dismembered in front of their mothers who were being raped at the same time, hundreds of hostages, all filmed on mobile phones, all of this had no value in the eyes of the world. A world that had become blind and deaf to everything, a denialist world that denied the State of Israel, a few weeks after the massacre, the very right to defend itself and its people, and to guarantee its sovereignty and its citizens’ right to security. Once again, the world was about to turn against the Jews.
The world would once again turn against the Jews, once again «killable», but without the right to defend themselves, an eternally illegitimate people who, having been deicides, had now become, in the collective imagination, child-killers.
In the cab, the events of the last few months flashed before my eyes again, through the fine rain that fell behind the dirty car window: the column I had written and published in Le Figaro (column here) at the end of October in reaction to the UN vote banning Israel from exercising its right to self-defense, my trip there in February for a concert tour of the country’s safe havens, the permanent electronic cloud that carried the black rain of anti-Jewishness. The day before my departure, far-left student groups were taking Sciences-Po hostage, and the Sorbonne was beginning to heat up, following the pro-Palestinian protest movements orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood around the world. All these fine young people, united behind the Palestinian flag, are convinced that the Israelis are killers and settlers of a land that doesn’t belong to them. All these brave people are convinced that Hamas is the symbol of liberation for oppressed peoples, a movement for social and human justice against the Zionist bastards. You should see them dance, the feminists, the LGBTs, the wokists, the bearers of New Humanism who set themselves up as saviors of the world. They’ve found their gods in the liberating heroes of Hamas, the very ones who love their wives so much they encourage them to live out their lives behind a fence and at home, the very ones who encourage their children to become shahids so they can go to paradise – because paradise is better for children, it’s well known – the very ones who would take care of their LGBT fans by rewarding them with a public and painful death, the very ones who call for the murder of the kouffars (the godless), every last one of them. Of course, they’re going to start with the Jews, which isn’t such a bad thing after all, but the recent history of attacks on our soil shows that they’re not averse to watering our furrows with the impure blood of French people, whatever their origins or beliefs. So yes, on October 7th I became fully Jewish, from the very depths of my being: my blood just turned. Since October 7th, I’ve expressed myself as I do again today.
«You were still very angry last October», a friend said to me after a concert on Fraternity that I had just given with my friends Abd Al Malik and the Brazilian pianist and conductor Ricardo Castro, in a church in the heart of Paris, as part of l’Autre Saison, which I organize to benefit the homeless. We were seated at the «Père tranquille», near Les Halles.
«Yes, when even you were upset, you don’t realize». She was referring to the article published in La Figaro. And they started talking about the genocide committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians and the one that was about to fall on the Lebanese. Obviously, I must still have been angry, because I preferred to flee. So I pretended that the children were tired, and we left before beautiful friendships suffered from perceptions of the world that had become impossible to reconcile.
My phone’s vibrating alert brought me out of my reverie. I answered, meeting my driver’s suspicious gaze in the rear-view mirror: it was Jeanne, she had taken my computer!
«Do you eat kosher, sir?» asked a charming stewardess as she read my boarding pass. After check-in and security formalities, I found myself in the lounge of Roissy’s Terminal 2B. On my second attempt, my journey to Tel Aviv, unlike the Trojan War, was about to take place. Having abandoned Serge and Claudine and lost my computer, I was groggy and orphaned, and still had three hours to wait before boarding. At Relay, I bought Philip Kerr’s Berlin Trilogy, a crime novel set in Berlin during the early years of Nazism. Why this one rather than another, you might ask? As I pumped myself up with hot and cold caffeine, alternating espressos and Coke, I immersed myself in the atmosphere of the 1930s, in the heart of the Third Reich. I couldn’t concentrate or stop my thoughts from wandering. I remembered my last trip to Israel, which had taken place a few months earlier, in the dead of winter.
It was Saturday February 17, 2024, and it was 4.50pm when the plane touched down in Israel. Twenty minutes before approach, we had been asked to open the window blinds, fasten our seatbelts and raise our seatbacks: we had just entered Israeli airspace. In other words, our Swiss airliner had just entered a war zone. I tried to peer through the thick clouds to the south, expecting to see missiles.
It was raining under a black light and we were alone on the runways, the only plane to land, the only plane in the parking lot. As we exited, I was reminded of the atmosphere at airports during the Covid epidemic: no shadows, no security, a heavy, silent atmosphere. On my way to baggage claim, photos of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 were the only living, human presence. Every one of those faces scanned me: «Bring them home». Combined with the color yellow, these words were to punctuate my stay.
Slava, the orchestra driver, was waiting for me peacefully at the exit. The road to Tel Aviv was empty, and we’d soon arrived at the hotel, between dog and wolf, at the end of Shabbat. The elevator to reception had broken down and we had to use a fire escape. Next to reception, families with strangely calm children occupied the restaurant.
«Refugees from the south, we are mainly hosting families who had to leave their homes».
Refugees of all colors, just like the Noah’s Ark that is Israel: Yemenis, Indians, Russians, Romanians, Sudanese of Sudanese origin, all welcomed here, in this hotel and in all the others in the country that also hosted refugees from the north driven out by the fighting against Hezbollah.
After putting down my suitcase and violin in my room on the 7th floor, I opened the window onto the Tel Aviv skyline, which lit up in the last light of a leaden sky. Exhausted by the long journey, I soon fell asleep.
Slava was waiting for me at 9am the next morning, downstairs at the hotel, to take me to the rehearsal. I was going to meet my friends from the Israel Camerata. The faces, the glances, the whole silent language had darkened since the last time. I could feel the oppression that had gripped me for months, ever since the unbearable anguish unleashed by the events of October 7. We weren’t there to complain, we were together to share the beauty, lift our heads and keep believing. To keep on believing that human beings should triumph, to keep on believing that hatred, violence, corruption and mediocrity were not our destiny.
In front of me, a mosaic of musicians, each with their own history on their backs, each with their roots planted in what had always been a desert in enemy territory for centuries and centuries. In this cenacle that welcomed me, some of the stones were mismatched, but the cement was old, albeit sometimes recently laid. It was this cement that we had been working on: music, the art of conversation between humans before and after all else. We didn’t need many words to understand each other and open up a space for sharing that would grow until the last concert.
It took me a few days to regain my equilibrium. Little by little, I had managed to regain a more positive energy and free myself from my anxiety. After the sinister arrival, the sun had reappeared, restaurants and cafés were full, concert halls were open. I had the opportunity to meet many friends in Tel Aviv, where life had returned to normal. We were rehearsing at the museum: an extremely moving place, which owes its existence solely to the donations of benefactors from all over the world. In front of the entrance to this beating cultural heart of the city, surrounded by the opera house and not far from the Philharmonic Orchestra Hall, the families of the hostages, set up in tents, were receiving all day long the support of the population. A huge table was set for them, in the hope of their release.
In addition to the portraits of the hostages posted on street corners and avenues, my gaze occasionally crossed the photo of one of the children killed on October 7, nailed to a bench next to a bloody teddy bear. All around me, the sound of life going on, people passing by.
Playing music, when there were 150 survivors still hostages, with babies and children trapped under the bombs intended to free them, was strange. Playing music in Israel, ostracized by the nations for daring to defend itself after a massacre of such violence: it felt right. I felt that being there was the right thing to do, despite the cries of protest from Western opinion, blinded by an anti-Jewish sentiment of which they were not even aware. All they had to do was come to Israel and try to understand that the eight-year-old son of Matan, the orchestra’s concertmaster, who had undergone surgery for a tumor and was undergoing long-term treatment, also had a right to a country and a future.
Everyone feared for the country’s survival: if Hezbollah decided to attack, there would be an all-out war, and if Iran joined in, what if Egypt followed?
In conversations with musicians, scholars and journalists, everyone agreed on the complexity of the situation, and all were grateful to the Americans for sending two aircraft carriers, without which the country would probably not be here today. While the United States has always been the only outspoken supporter of Israel, Europe, once again, has had a more ambiguous attitude, apart from Germany and Great Britain. While it’s true that the presence of Islamism raises fears of externalizing the conflict, Europe’s problem today is that it’s afraid of its own shadow.
All recognized that Israeli society was going through a major political crisis from which the current crisis draws part of its source, even if hatred plunges into subterranean aquifers whose depths escape comprehension. The words of Serge Haroche, recounting a trip to the Golan Heights a few days after its capture by Israeli forces in 1967, are edifying in this respect: «We arrived in the Golan Heights, just a few days after the end of the war. School books were still lying around on the tables. Among them were textbooks explaining to children the hatred of Jews and giving them methods of killing them.» Everyone remembers the famous phrase attributed to Golda Meir: «We won’t have peace with the Arabs, we’ll only have it when they love their children more than they hate us». What can be done with the hatred of the Jews that today’s Islam has inherited from Christianity?
This legacy of Christianity has left an anti-Jewish undercurrent that is becoming less and less muted in the West: an undercurrent that has not really been dealt with since the Holocaust. For while the perpetrators are known and have been condemned, the complicity of silence has allowed them to do so. It’s this same silence, which enveloped the article I wrote at the beginning of last November, this silence which always explains everything: that of the masses who think no less and always let the agitating minorities suck up hatred and rancor for their own benefit. This silence, which allows Mathilde Panot sans frontières to don their vigilante capes, as in the heyday of La Commune, new Mariannes standing on the barricades erected for universal freedom and justice. Symbols of the aspiration for a better world, they are the new banners of good against evil, behind which the heart of hope and despair of an idealistic, uneducated youth beats wildly.
Unfortunately, it’s not the romantic fantasy of La Commune that awaits us. In response to the failure of the top of the class, who will have blindly and methodically applied outdated software, all we can hear are the cries of the bottom of the class, who will delight in seeding our sweet France in their accumulated rancor and hatred. At last, we’ll be able to take justice into our own hands in this class that no longer exists, and that’s the problem. The program is obsolete (as Yasser Arafat might have said): that of the trickle-down of wealth as a remedy for all demons, an elixir with magical virtues, supposed to unite human beings towards a horizon of prosperity. But alas! Over the past 40 years, the trickle-down effect has been progressively reversed, from the bottom to the top, thanks to the ransacking of the rules that presided over the birth of social democracy, invented by Roosevelt in the aftermath of the 1929 crisis. This social democracy is now in the doldrums, as are the finances of most developed countries. It was founded on social progress and public services, the cement of community life, education, health and the advancement of knowledge, as sacred rights and duties. But this quest for equity wasn’t good enough for profits, so we moved on to other things, and we can’t avoid asking the question of the world’s conflagration, in the light of the political and economic choices made in the 1980s, their consequences for current generations, and the lines of force that now link human beings. It’s impossible not to link the collapse of public services to the failure of schools, unless this failure is so strong that we can’t even see it anymore. As a result, the software that was supposed to spell the end of history is suddenly taking us back to chapters we imagined had been closed forever. Nationalism was dead, religious obscurantism relegated to medieval oblivion, and we no longer dared to imagine the return match of the Saracens against the Crusaders, the Russians against the West, the Chinese at the prow of the Damned of the Earth against the rest of the world, all against a backdrop of ecological imbalances, epidemics and inequalities as in the heyday of the Ancien Régime. But what has happened to make the humans of 2024 so poorly represented in the world at large? How is it that Palestinians and Israelis are held hostage by the wrong leaders, that Russians, Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Argentinians and Americans and so many others are enslaved to such a political class, and that Europe itself is falling back into its demons? It’s like waking up in a nightmare. Is he born of the consequences of the war waged and won by Warren Buffet and his friends: that of the rich against the poor? «It’s my class, the class of the rich, who are waging this war against the poor, and who are winning it», that was in 2005. Twenty years on, as Pierre Desproges might have said, the statistics are clear: the rich are so rich that they live above the law, and it’s hard to imagine any government representing anything other than their interests. States are in ruins, but stock market indices continue to break records: so all’s well. And finally, what if it was our modern world that was living under the rule of the Mullahs? Our Mullahs being the economists who created this system in which God has descended on banknotes, in God we trust! It’s there in front of us, this unifying God, this God of the horizon of all possibilities, this God who heals, this God who guarantees peace, security, well-being, happiness, and we believe it! Except that a whole other part of the world is starting to play it backwards, not in a very positive way, but is it really backwards, or just the other side of the same coin? The world is teetering, the planet is burning, and the gas pedal is being stepped on.
And, as if by chance, all of a sudden, who finds themselves once again at the center of the cyclone, on the tectonic fault line that threatens to break under the blows of history? This is the people who, from the outset, have refused to be converted or exterminated, this «proud and dominating» people who stubbornly refuse to die out. It is this people that bears all the sins of the world: this people that has become (thanks to a new massacre against it), Nazi and genocidal, and that would pass off Putin and his allies as humanists, since it already manages to pass off terrorists as militants in the fight for freedom against the great Satan. What a gift to have «allowed» Jews to return to their land after the Shoah!» Welcome to the Holly shit!» said Menachem Zur, an Israeli composer friend, to me after a concert in the brand-new hall of the National Library of Israel. A piece of inhospitable desert, inhabited by people who have wanted nothing more than to throw them into the sea from the start. Add to this the ancestral hatreds between Shiites, Sunnis, Wahhabis and other local persecutors of anyone who doesn’t think like you, against a backdrop of wars for control of fossil fuels. And now that they’ve built a modern country, the bridgehead of our democratic world (imperfect by nature, like life, I might add for idealists who love the perfection of dictatorship), in the midst of the worst regimes on the planet that oppress their populations, our opinions cry out for a Palestine «Judenfrei» from the river to the sea! Because anti-Jewishness, after a few months of warming up, is «from the river to the sea», in other words, questioning the very existence of the State of Israel, and in this respect it cannot be said that the supporters of Palestine and Hamas are unaware of the Hamas charter, which has the merit of being as clear as Mein Kampf, published in 1925.
The ultimate manipulation is the recuperation of all this confusion by the extreme right, historically anti-Jewish and negationist. For us, they will be the remedy against evil, they who have their roots in anti-Jewishness, racism and the adoration of fascist regimes, they will be the ones protecting us from now on! They are going to restore order to the chaos: it makes you wonder whether they haven’t subsidized the extreme left, whose outrages have warmed their beds. The Europe of the blind, deaf and amnesiac masses is about to vote for the very people who are going to enslave it, the very people who are going to sound the death knell once again. Is it only ignorance that invariably leads to ignominy, or does it go deeper than that? The Nazi executioner listened to Bach and told stories to his children in the evenings, before embracing them with love. How
How can we think of the evil wind that is sweeping through our collective soul, of the death drive that is once again making the arms factories run at full speed, of the call to the sound of boots, to the hypnotic rhythm that will pound the pavement before our soon-to-be atonic eyes?
Today, in Israel, on both sides of the borders, the stage for hatred is set straight and deep, by minorities built on obscurantism and rejection of the other: they are brothers, tearing each other apart and will tear the world apart for their medieval beliefs. The ultra-religious, with their long beards, whatever their headgear, promise us nothing but apocalypse. In the name of freedom of religion, we hold out to them the blade that will slit our throats. Remove the bearded men on all sides, you’ll remove the barbed wire and allow the spirits to resume the only battle worth fighting, that of trust and peace. The majority of human beings in the region aspire only to peaceful coexistence, but hatred thunders and love is inaudible. Should we hope for the appearance of a new savior, a naked man who will walk in the midst of devastation, in a spirituality washed clean of hatred and intolerance? This time, which cross will be big enough to carry his sacrifice?
Israel is caught in a vice, between the bearded ones on the outside and the bearded ones on the inside. On my first trip to Israel in 1994, I was disturbed by the sight of children, almost blinded by their study of the texts behind their thick glasses, whom I met on the bus in Mea Shearim, the Orthodox quarter of Jerusalem. I was staying with one of the country’s founding heroes, in the center of Tel Aviv. On my return that evening, I expressed my discomfort to him, and he couldn’t suppress his anger:
«You have nothing to say! These people have suffered enough to live in their own country, in complete freedom, their beliefs, without being judged by you!»
David L., who had just lost his temper, was a retired IDF general. He had trained Haganah soldiers in 1947, having himself survived the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War and participated in the liberation of concentration camps. What did I, a petit bourgeois Parisian, have to say? And yet, with hindsight, I wasn’t completely wrong: the cohabitation of a state embodying the project of a modern open society with medieval ultra-Orthodoxy will eventually pose the same problem for Israel as the Mullah revolution did for Iran. The State of Israel is not only plunged into an existential war with its neighbors, but above all into an existential questioning. The miracle and curse of Israel is that it brings to a head the fracture between progress, the imbalances it generates, a lack of adequate political response, and the abyss posed by a mortifying spirituality in crisis: it’s vertiginous.
«We are all here, that’s what makes us human, Humans…».
That’s what I said to the audience, on stage before performing, and I still believe it. Humans talking to each other, in the silence of the music, humans looking for oxygen, together. In Israel as elsewhere, the men and women who made society, who built their country, their land, are faced with increasingly difficult living conditions for the majority of the population, excluded from the considerable wealth accumulated over the last twenty years in the new technologies sector. Housing, too expensive, has become inaccessible to many. A country at war, Israel has not escaped the disaster of rising inequality. Without redistribution, or at the very least a return to national control in the name of the common good, will its young people still be willing to fight on the front lines for their land?
On February 27, ten days later, sitting next to me on the plane home was a father whose son had spent two months in Gaza as a tanker, before being repatriated to hospital with injuries. This man was French. He had left France the day after the Charlie and hyper-casher attacks. Everything that had hitherto seemed excessive about the perception of anti-Jewishness in France was now becoming a reality I could no longer deny.
He explained that Israel is a country built around children. Children are safe everywhere. «It’s not like in France. Here, children can be left alone in the streets at night, anywhere in the country, at any time: they’re safe. For this is the promise of Israel! When they grow up, it will be up to them to ensure this safety for us all. Today, it’s my son who protects me; he’s the man now.» After three months in hospital, her 22-year-old son wanted to get married right away; life went on, even stronger. «His body is better, but in his head it’s harder. When I see his eyes, I see a 70-year-old man looking at me», says the father, «The violence over there is unimaginable».
As unimaginable as the images of the October 7 massacres. My friend James Inverne, former editor-in-chief of Gramophone magazine in London, who had moved to Israel eight years earlier, told me that his sister-in-law, a senior reporter for foreign newspapers, had seen the images of the massacres. She had been in therapy ever since. These images were never broadcast outside these circles, as they were too unbearable. And yet our right-thinking crowds support those who filmed them, when they were committing these same exactions.
The whole country was directly affected by this war. I looked up at the blue sky above Tel Aviv’s white beaches, wondering from which direction the rockets would fall next. The fear of a big war with Hezbollah was present, but everyone told themselves that the army would hold out. The fate of the country was in the hands of Tsahal, and we were waiting for the end of the conflict to finally change government: a government held responsible for this disaster by a large part of the population.
My impression of this winter sojourn in the war was one of resilience against all odds, of a people admirable for their diversity, courage and modesty. If one day we stopped giving them lessons, we could perhaps take a few that would do a lot of good to our French society, which is so sick of itself.
When we landed in Paris, the El Al hostess thanked us for flying with them and added with sobs in her voice: «El Al wants to thank all of us who are still defending our country in the name of Israel. We hope to see you soon, and we hope for better times».
Is this the life force of a country and a people of survivors that so many would like to see disappear?
Since that first trip, three months earlier, how many hostages were still alive?
My thoughts kept wandering between Philipp Kerr’s book and current events. I was waiting for my flight, which was due to take off around 1:30 p.m., in the Berlin atmosphere of the 1930s, evoking the systematic exclusion of Jews from German social life, and resonating strangely with the current events of blockades of Jewish students in American universities, anti-Jewish demonstrations all over Europe, and verbal and physical violence against Jews around the world. How many of our new vigilantes took to the streets and blockaded these same universities during the bombing of Aleppo by Bashar El Assad’s regime and the Russians, during the vitrification of Chechnya by the Russians, against the massacres of the Uighurs by Xi Jinping’s regime, during the genocide of the Tutsis (this time it was the case) in Rwanda, and the list goes on. Yet the death toll was much higher, and how many innocent children died? To a friend who spoke to me of genocide in Gaza, I tried to explain that genocide would have taken the Israeli army the time to press a button, that the children in the statistics could be up to 18 years old and have a Kalchnikov, that the statistics that made the headlines were those of Hamas, that Gaza was not a colony, but an independent territory since 2005 and administered since 2007 by Hamas alone, who had diverted European and American aid intended to develop the country and help their own people, to build tunnels and buy weapons, that the only closed border in what the world called «an open-air prison», was the Egyptian border. Before October 7, many Gazans came to work in Israel, particularly in the villages where the massacres took place, thanks to information given by these same people, who knew that the inhabitants of these villages were mostly pacifist Israelis. To another friend who, on reading this text, deplored my lack of compassion for the Gazans, and who couldn’t find words harsh enough to condemn Israel, I couldn’t even manage to say that Israel was at war with Hamas, and that a war was not something simple, with no deaths to trouble our conscience. I was trying to bring the hundreds of hostages still held prisoner out of their tunnels, and I wanted to make him aware that Israel was under rocket fire every day, that if the Gazans were, indeed, under the Israeli army’s fire, either they supported Hamas and were therefore themselves at war, or they were the victims, and so the eradication of a terrorist movement that was taking them hostage would be a good thing in the long run for the construction of a modern, uncorrupted Palestinian state, in which children could grow up in something other than hatred and injustice, a state in which women and men would be free. And yes, war is the last of the solutions, when there are none left, and it’s horrible, it’s despairing, this one like all the others, past or future. So my compassion matches my infinite sadness, which knows no borders, especially when those borders separate brothers and cousins from ancient families. Whether it’s the temples, mosques or churches of Jerusalem, the Orthodox churches of Kiev or Moscow: these rifts cause nothing but intolerable suffering to any human being worthy of the name, and they are almost always the fruit of manipulation and hostage-taking of consciences, just as the world is hypnotized by what is happening today in Israel.
My aim was not to judge the war or the violence, but rather the blindness in the face of a manipulation so ancient and profound that it touches the roots of the unconscious. Nothing could be done, the trap of compassion for the innocent victims killed by the indiscriminate bombardments of
«Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Benny Ganz, soon to be put in the dock by the International Criminal Court, alongside the liberating heroes Yahya Sinwar (leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, (commander-in-chief of the armed wing of Hamas, «the Al-Qassam Brigades») and Ismail Haniyeh (leader of the political wing of Hamas), the trap of compassion was stronger than reason. And yet, my friends are not anti-Jewish, not that they know it anyway. But then, why do they believe that the truth always comes out of Hamas’s mouth and that, on the other side, it’s just propaganda? When the images of the bombardment of the Ahli-Arab hospital in Gaza were seen, the whole world saw that the rockets had been fired by Hamas, which immediately cried out that the Zionist enemy was massacring innocent people; this did not sow the slightest doubt in the minds of journalists from the world’s leading newspapers, who continue to publish Hamas statistics, without questioning them, even though they serve as a backdrop for general indignation. How can we explain this embarrassment, this impossibility of dialogue, this total irrationality? How can we explain the fact that this minor conflict involving two peoples of a few million people, on a territory the size of a postage stamp, is tearing the whole of humanity apart? It’s not just compassion for every Palestinian «victim» that makes the headlines, but hatred of the Jews. I know that writing this condemns me in the eyes of my readers, who won’t be able to accept or acknowledge it, and that’s the root of the problem. What has been self-evident for centuries remains an unspeakable truth: «presumed guilty», the Jews will have no other way out than victimization (for which they will inevitably be reproached), since violence, legitimate for others, is morally forbidden to them.
As departure time approached, I made my way to the boarding gate.
After a very comfortable journey in a restorative doze, I was greeted by a charming young woman as I exited the plane: «Did you have a nice trip?» I laughed with her about my flying misadventures of the day and the strange feeling of having been caught up in the anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish whirlwind that had taken hold of Europe: «They just don’t understand, that they are next…», she told me simply.
The Weizmann Institute had given me a VIP welcome, and we made our way smoothly to the car, which glided swiftly along the freeway into the sunset gardens of the campus, some twenty minutes from the airport. The Weizmann Institute of Science was founded in 1934 by Chaim Weizmann. The elegant Art Deco house of the man who was to become the first President of the State of Israel, dominates the campus, now the 6th largest scientific research center in the world. It’s an oasis of humanity and intelligence, planted right in the middle of a region held hostage by violence and obscurantism. A few years ago, I gave a concert in the Institute’s auditorium and was struck by the beauty of the gardens linking the various buildings dedicated to every conceivable field of scientific research. As we leave the concert hall, giant trees call us back to order, the order of time and harmony.
The Weizmann Institute is the fruit of the best of social democracy as it has existed and still exists despite the extreme difficulties in Israel today. Roee Ozeri, a physicist and one of the Institute’s leading figures, deplored the fact that more and more researchers in universities and research centers around the world, under pressure from violent minorities, were turning their backs on them.
«They don’t only turn their back to us now. The way they express themselves makes it very difficult for us to think that there will be any future relationships, even when things will eventually calm down.» Often, we might think that it’s lack of education, or ignorance that could explain the blindness, but apparently, even great scholars get caught up in the headlights of the blinding good conscience demanded by the media dictatorship of political correctness. If only all the do-gooders, specialists in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who spend their time giving moral lessons, were at my side to discover this country they hate and condemn without knowing it, they would see what has been built in less than a century, by the survivors of the worst massacre organized by humanity, and who continue to be killed and attacked constantly by neighboring regimes, quite happy to have this outlet to conceal their own ignominy in their hatred of the Jews. They would see a country that has always welcomed its own, whatever their origins, all those who have had in common to have had to leave their countries because of persecution: from Central Europe, Yemen, Ethiopia, all the Arab countries, Russia and its distant republics, not forgetting survivors of the Shoah and the founders. Millions of men and women united in one project: their country. Perhaps that’s what we don’t forgive them for? To succeed where others fail? To have a common project so strong that it allows society to absorb so many destinies, to receive and welcome so many pieces of history torn from their lands. Is this the fertility we love to hate?
I heard the warning siren go off. It wasn’t a bombing this time, but a siren inviting each and every one of us to a nationwide minute’s silence in remembrance of the Holocaust.
It was May 6, 2024, and I was heading for the Auditorium to meet Itamar Golan to rehearse our program for the evening’s concert. After a brief rehearsal and a good nap to recover from the previous day’s emotions, we found ourselves on the Sela Auditorium stage in front of a large audience. We were about to break the silence of this very special day, at this very special moment in the history of Israel and the Jewish people. This was no ordinary concert.
From the very first notes of Bach’s sonata in E major, we were all united in the sunlight, in the celebration of life that only Bach can express with such incandescence. We were walking in the light. We moved on to Dvoràk’s four Romantic pieces, which unfurled their tender Central European colors. After all, Israel and the Weizmann are only the best of what Europe had not totally destroyed, the best that had managed to survive or escape. The sculptures and plaques in front of each building remind passers-by that it was men and women from all over the world who made the campus possible. «May Science enable mankind to build a better world». Such is the motto of this temple of knowledge built even before the creation of the State of Israel, symbolizing a country built on knowledge in a land torn apart by beliefs. Knowledge and reason versus belief and violence – this should be the universal struggle of all societies that have renounced the governance of God and made their aggiornamento with the Enlightenment. In the 1980s, Koranic schools financed by Saudi Wahhabis invaded the Near and Middle East, filling the void left by corrupt states that abandoned their children unprotected and uneducated. The Muslim Brotherhood, or the conspiracy brothers, all fraternities with irrational beliefs slip into the cracks of the world’s abandoned consciences.
Dvoràk reminded us of the origins of part of tonight’s audience. Janacek went even further, evoking the violence of the First World War. I felt that Janacek’s sonata had never sounded so right and true as it did in front of this audience whose roots had been burned, yet were still so alive. Bach would make the link with the world of Arvo Pärt’s «Tintinnabulism». Fratres, a series of variations on the same chords, an impossible brotherhood between piano and violin, an impossible brotherhood between brothers, enamelled with light, darkness, violence, tenderness, hope, despair, life and death. Images flashed through my mind: those of the children of Gaza, abandoned to their fate, child martyrs, bearers of future hatreds, innocent souls caught up in the violence of the heirs of violence, those of the young Israeli soldiers, those of the victims of October 7th, those of the hostages buried in the basements of hatred, those of the millions of dead in the camps. All these dead in the light of heaven: how can we get out of these infernal circles, how can we find ourselves anywhere but in the memory of the dead?
After the interval, Bach again and Beethoven’s last sonata, a path of tenderness and metaphysical hope. Hope before and after all else, the hope of universal love and joy, but when and how? Once again, musical time saved us from the gravity of humanity’s inability to love one another. These notes, coming from the greatest minds of our civilization, embodied what we are at our deepest core, creatures of clay contemplating the light of a transcendence whose magic is as fragile as the flame of a candle.
Words weren’t necessary, but a few people from the audience came up to greet us.
«Fifty years ago, almost to the day, an ammunition warehouse exploded in Eilat, and a large part of my family perished in the blast. That same evening, David Oistrach had performed Beethoven’s concerto with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. I was at the concert. A few years ago, I heard you in Eilat in the same concerto with Les Dissonances, and tonight you’re here. You don’t realize what happiness and hope you give to people, thank you!»
Waiting patiently behind the man who spoke to me was a Japanese woman, whom I seemed to know, though I couldn’t put a name to her face.
«We met thirty years ago at the Mozart Academy in Prague, I’m Tami!»
Thirty years had passed, Tami had married an Israeli pianist and they had settled in Neve Shalom, Wahat as Salam (Oasis of Peace), a village in the countryside between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. This village is unique in that Arabs and Jews live together peacefully, and their children receive the same education in the same school. Tami, a Japanese pianist, was therefore a star of peace in the midst of a cauldron of ancestral hatreds. That evening, our paths crossed again for the first time. She had built her life, so far from Japan, for the only cause worth having: absolute and total love, without looking back. You probably had to come from so far away to see it so clearly. Peace, of course, is the only prospect: peace without the rulers of war. But for that, oases will have to cover the desert.
Itamar quickly left for Tel Aviv, with members of his family who had come to hear the concert, and I found myself alone in the balmy evening, in the scents of the Weizmann Institute park.
The next day, another experience awaited me: a meeting with the Institute’s orchestra of amateur musicians. During my last visit in February, I had lunch with a young woman researcher and amateur cellist, who had fled France a few years earlier to settle in Israel and pursue her scientific studies at the Weizmann. She was in the company of a young flautist. Both were passionate about their work, and I promised them I’d do my best to imagine something with the orchestra during Lumières d’Europe. In the end, the festival’s program was too intense for my involvement, but the event’s cancellation opened up a window of opportunity once again, so to speak. This is how bad news can be good news, and how I was able to free up a day for them. In the end, it was another way for Lumières d’Europe to exist: I was going to build the bridge between our worlds with them.
We met again in the auditorium of the previous day’s concert. A motley crew was on stage. Beyond the mix of generations and nationalities, there was a bit of every instrument, the principle being: whatever you play, however you play it, join us! And so the merry band began to play Bizet. The flutes played the oboe, the tuba the double bass, there was a mandolin in the middle of the violins, and a drum replaced the timpani! The orchestra was conducted by a young Israeli woman, a flautist by training, whose job it was to take everyone somewhere.
The atmosphere was wonderfully tender and gentle, but nobody was listening to anybody and the first reading was catastrophic. All these brilliant minds sounded as if their intellectual capacities were not up to scratch, and I had the strange sensation of being in front of adults, playing like stiff children, as if a part of themselves had remained frozen in time. With their instruments in hand, they were no longer the great teachers or brilliant young researchers they were.
A striking example was the young man holding the drum-timbal. He couldn’t have been more than 20 years old. His role was to tap his drum once in a while. It was a four-beat measure, and I could see him counting to four with a lot of tension, tapping almost every time. This young man with a full head of curly hair was only looking at his feet, well aware that he was off the mark and didn’t know where to hide.
«I am sure you can count up to 4,» I said, «but don’t do it, stop counting, start breathing and listen to your friends, you will see how simple it will be.
No sooner said than done, no more drumming outside the box, and a new smile. At the break I went to see this young man. He was working on Artificial Intelligence.
«What do you think of AI?» I asked him curiously.
«AI is extremely stupid» he said.
«When is it going to get rid of us?
«I don’t know when and if, but if and when it will, it will be for very stupid reasons…»
I had before me specimens bathed in a humanistic environment focused entirely on excellence, in a country under siege from all sides, vilified by the whole world, and I felt strongly that this exemplary place was so necessary.
I shared with them the experience of collective intelligence that I had developed over more than 20 years with Les Dissonances and numerous professional orchestras, trying to make our worlds resonate. It was thrilling to see them play a thousand times better, ten minutes later, without the help of their conductor, who had willingly stepped aside. Spirits were awakening and another community was coming to life. They couldn’t believe their ears, and it was a real joy to see them smile and open up in this way.
«Music is what happens between human beings, it’s what’s between the notes, it’s everything that goes beyond the will to do well, to dominate.» Once again, all this was crystal clear.
After this moment of grace, I had dinner with Benny Geiger, Director of the Institute’s Immunology and Biology Laboratory. Benny had been my contact for Lumières d’Europe, and we had worked together for many months, with his team and mine, to bring about this sad cancellation. We talked about the future and deplored the ignorance that was at the root of the violence. Faced with a black picture of Europe and the United States in the grip of Holocaust denial, he had this to say:
«We have to educate our children, that’s all».
Which compass should we use to educate our children? The UN, the ICJ and the ICC, the countries of the North, South, East and West? According to whose values? Those of the West, which is guilty of everything; those of China, where there will soon be no danger of being guilty of anything; those of Russia and its affiliates, who promise to set the record straight; those of medieval Islam, which is the final solution to all our problems; those of the Church, which has sunk into the #metoo of children, those of the conspiracists who have understood everything, those of the left condemned to being nothing more than a grimace of itself, those of the Greens who want to repaint us orange, those of the right who only know how to walk with boots, those of the extreme center which is nothing but a black hole? What kind of education for what kind of people, for what kind of people, for what kind of education? What kind of education for what kind of people, for what kind of humanity? The survival of the Jewish people’s identity has been achieved through transmission, through education: an idea of the human being, an idea of culture, of knowledge, because elevation has always been the only possible path. To resolve the complexities of the modern world, and the very issues at stake in the survival of humanity, we need to educate human beings in a renewed spirituality (by which I mean the forces of the spirit), which can only flourish in societies that know how to combine modernity and its tools, with the blossoming of the individual, and his or her ability to develop a critical and sensitive mind, in a balanced community. Education is a weapon of mass construction, the only one capable of protecting us from ourselves and from all forms of manipulation. Knowledge must take its place before beliefs. Humanity can only survive by sharing knowledge, which is the only way out of the trap of violence. To achieve this, states must regain their sovereignty and independence and get out of the debt trap in order to build a humane and just society once again. How can we ignore the damage inflicted by social networks on minds and democratic systems? No scientific study has yet been carried out on the neurological consequences of exposing human brains to the bombardment of information and images, and no one has measured the real or supposed dangers. And yet, if advertising has its roots in the practical application of Nazi propaganda, we know just how manipulable individuals and masses can be, and just what sensitive points need to be pressed (the latest illustration is an «Eyes on Rafah» image published a few weeks after this text was written and taken up by tens of millions of people on the networks. This image, intended to raise awareness of the «genocide» perpetrated by the Israelis, was in fact an image created by the AI according to very specific criteria. So we’re just at the beginning of the general blindness). So what is the name of this hypocrisy? Is it even possible to make the best use of these new modes of communication? Why can’t we imagine a new software program in which life and freedom are at the center? We could call it «L’Chaim», «À la vie»? If the tools of mass information distribution continue to serve the domination of men and women in power, and their «Folie des Grandeurs»: the only response will be the violence of the sword, which will plunge its rusty blade into the moral misery of peoples.
The next day I was already due to return to France. Around 1pm, a limousine picked me up downstairs from the Guest House. The driver began to confide in me. He had converted to Catholicism, been blessed by an Egyptian priest in the waters of the Jordan, married a Chinese chemist and divorced her a few years later. At the end of his story he asked me:
«I have a question for you as you are a musician. How should I do with my voice, not to show my emotions while I am talking?»
I replied that I had no idea, but that I could advise him to accept his emotions, and then perhaps his voice (or voice) would no longer fail him.
As I got out of the car, an energetic young woman grabbed my suitcase and hurried me into the terminal. Her name was Katarina, she worked for Laufer Service, a VIP escort company, and she was going to escort me to the gate. I asked her where she was from.
«Zaporijia», she said.»
She had arrived six years earlier from Ukraine, just before the Covid epidemic. Her parents and the rest of her family had been stranded there. The ban on men leaving the country had been raised to 65 because of the war, and her parents weren’t about to join her.
«You should come to live in Israel,» she said, as I confided that I had no desire to leave. She slipped in with grace and speed, and we were already on the other side. As I waved good-bye and headed for the living room, she said with a big smile that radiated from her lit-up face:
«I will tell you a secret: it is my last week here, I am going to work in Los Angeles!»
Positive energy, that’s what had filled my lungs in the three days following the gloomy look on the face of the woman in charge of flight TO3450. I flew home with my violin on an Air France plane without any difficulty. After landing in Paris, I turned my phone back on. I mechanically checked the news to see that a certain Juls had carried the Olympic flame. A quick look on the web told me, through indignant messages, that he was a rapper who advocated rape and violence. A little below, the Philharmonie de Paris proudly announced its latest concerts: rap, metal and bal musette. Meanwhile, our president received Xi Jinping in the company of his usual oligarch friends, before taking him on a tour of his grandmother’s Pyrenees. Mathilde Panot was still on the barricades, shouting «Free Palestine». A few days later, the UN Security Council observed a minute’s silence following the accidental death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raissi, nicknamed «The Butcher» because of the number of men and women he had had executed.
«The only thing we have to do, is to educate our children…to make us human again.»
David Grimal, May 2024