When I was 17, I saw a live symphony performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor in a hall on the Via della Conciliazione in Rome. It was thrilling, more so when I learned that the piece was in fact unfinished: Mozart died while composing it. The musical prodigy had — presciently, inadvertently — written his own requiem. It premiered at his funeral.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current prime minister, recently came under fire for claiming that the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s — Haj Amin al-Husseini — was to blame for the Holocaust, and “was instrumental in the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe.” His statement was delivered at the 37th Zionist Congress on Oct. 22, at a time when the Israeli public had suffered over 50 stabbing attacks and multiple shootings and car rammings by lone wolf terrorists, mostly of Palestinian descent, according to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The majority of the attacks have occurred in or near Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and the West Bank, and have resulted in 12 Israeli casualties and the death of most of the assailants on the scene.
The antagonism that exists between Palestinians and the Israeli government is but a symptom of the conflict at the fulcrum of the current Israeli reality, that between the country’s founding Zionist ethos and its desire to be a democratic state that participates in a global network of internationally maintained ethical norms. The latter is manifest in Israel’s enthusiastic contributions to the global marketplace — particularly in the fields of technology, agricultural innovation and medicine — as well as its ratification of the 1949 Geneva Convention (though it has, admittedly, been in a state of emergency since 1948, which allows it to legally circumvent certain protocols on civil liberties).
The current Israeli administration — and, arguably, every administration since Yitzhak Rabin’s prematurely curtailed administration in the mid-1990s — advocates on behalf of the former, i.e., the preeminence of Israel’s Jewish character above all other things. There are manifold reasons behind the increasing emphasis on Judaism: it is a response to a growing and radicalizing contingent of Muslim Palestinians whose aggression towards the Israeli government and its citizens is as violent as it is fruitless; it is a means for (partial and exclusionary) civic unity; it is a justification for territorial sovereignty that, like religion, does not necessarily have to be proven or thoroughly defended. Ben Dror Yemeni, an Israeli journalist, recently wrote that “The State of Israel is characterized by paradoxes.” These paradoxes include but are not limited to: the fomentation of Jewish religious fundamentalism as a response to Muslim religious fundamentalism; stated preeminence thousand-year-old doctrine (and the granting of special rights to those who strictly abide by that doctrine) while ranking first in the world in investment in research and development for innovation; and, finally, being the supposed realization of political Zionism — the Herzlian dream of “a secure haven… for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel” — while serving as host to perpetual conflict that continuously endangers Jewish people.
This is the dream to which a requiem is being written, and — in an act of paradoxical complicity — it is a joint composition by Netanyahu, President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh (the leader of Hamas); by the Orthodox Jews who insist on the razing of Palestinian homes in the West Bank to make room for more of their expansive and idle families and the Palestinians who ram their cars into pedestrian trains and hack at passersby with knives, screwdrivers and meat cleavers, among other things; by European governments and international agencies that condone Hamas’ terrorism and reckless endangerment of Gazan civilians, and Republican interest groups that support the conservative Israeli regime and, by extension, its intransigence and callousness toward its Palestinian minority.
The requiem is a long and complex work — when it will be finished, and whether it will get to be performed, is still up for debate.
Tamar Ziff is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at t.ziff@cavalierdaily.com.
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