The Death of Klinghoffer: More confusion despite good intentions
When John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer was premiered in New York in 1991, it elicited a storm of protest, and even death threats. No fewer than six opera houses agreed to mount the initial production by Peter Sellars. But after the premiere in Brussels, the Glyndebourne Festival backed out, as did the Los Angeles Opera, where the sets were destroyed under mysterious circumstances.
It's quite surprising that John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer
aroused such heated passions when it had its premiere in the early 1990s. No
one who looks at the Middle East with the slightest objectivity would blame
the opera for partiality. For such a stand, one has to be a fanatic oneself.
In the Western world, it's probably more common to see the Palestinian side,
and especially the Islamist forces among them, as bloodthirsty revengers. Such
groups and individuals surely exist among the Palestinians, who, in any case,
have been the main victims in the longdrawn out conflict. But equally blind
fanatics are quite easy to meet in the circles of so called "friends of
Israel."
In the tragic history of the Palestinians, the hijacking of Achille Lauro
took place between two experiences, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982,
and the first intifada, popular uprising, in the occupied territories of the
West Bank and Gaza. Israel had expelled the Palestine Liberation
Organisation and other Palestinian groups from Lebanon by its invasion in the
summer 1982. The most terrible event during that campaign was the massacre of
hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps at the
outskirts of Beirut in September. The Israeli army, under the highest command
of the then defense minister, the present Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon,
let Christian Lebanese militia-men into the camps, where they unleashed an unrestrained
reign of terror, killing women, children, and men for the simple reason that
they were Palestinians. In Alice Goodman's libretto, the hijackers are made
to refer to this horrendous event.
The immediate reason for the hijacking — that's not mentioned in the libretto
— was the attack by fighter planes of the Israeli air force against the
new PLO headquarters in Tunis. More than 70 people were killed in that bombing,
in which rockets shreaded their victims beyond recognition, as witnessed by
the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliuk, who was in Tunis at the time. The bombing
was a revenge for the killing of three Israelis in Cyprus, an act that
originated, not in Tunisia, but in Syria. Tunisia was only a less dangerous
target to bomb!
The message of The Death of Klinghoffer is undoubtedly good: Jews and
Palestinians are on board the same ship, and they must learn to live together.
Despite this and despite the beautiful music and fine performance I had an uneasy
feeling watching the opera. I think that the way the problem is depicted only
strengthens existing stereotypes, namely identifying each individual by his/her
tribe, group, community or whatever. In a simplified operatic setting this might
be understandable. Much worse, I think, is the underlying view of the whole
opera that the conflict is essentially a religious war. The Middle East crisis
is, however, first of all, a national conflict with religious overtones. Religion
is one ingredient in the poisonous cocktail, an important element of it, but
not the only one, not even the most important of its various aspects. It was,
first of all, a conflict between Zionism, a nationalist and colonisatory political
movement, and the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. And now it is a conflict
between a new nation-state Israel and Palestinian Arabs. Although the majority
of Palestinians, like the majority of all the Arabs, are Moslems, there is a
significant Christian minority among them; surely there are even some courageous
individuals among them who are non-religious. And Israeli Jews are not
a religious community, but a Hebrew speaking new nationality in the Middle East,
mostly secular and not very religious outside the community of Orthodox Jews
and the circles of right-wing zealots.
A conflict between two nationalities — Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs
— is at the heart of the troubles in the Middle East, and a solution to
it must be sought from co-existence between these two national groups, not from
some myths of a common Biblical Abrahamic ancestry between Jews and Arabs, as
the libretto of the opera suggests. It is precisely these religious mystifications
and misunderstandings based on them that The Death of Klinghoffer strengthens
despite its undoubted artistic value.
Hannu Reime is an award-winning broadcaster and journalist. He works as
a foreign news commentator at the Radio News of the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
He is currently writing a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.