ISRAEL-PALESTINE: An Ageing Conflict Ready for Ignition?
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata did it for me!
Having been invited to engage Gillian Mosely in a discussion about The Tinderbox that she wrote and produced in 2020, I was struck by the fact that she had also included Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor as one of the musical themes accompanying her film documentary. Perhaps some readers are not aware that this piece was completed by Beethoven in 1801 as a dedication to one of his pupils, and the Berliner music poet Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab described it as The Moonlight Sonata (“Mondscheinsonate” in German) many years after the composer’s death due to the “moonlight shining effect in the first movement”. I love playing this piece: it has a mesmerising and almost contemplative effect on me, and the first time I dared play all three movements publicly was at a recital for my graduation from Law School!
So a documentary film with this piece in it gets my nod of approval. But so what, you the reader might justifiably ask me? Are you writing a blog on Beethoven’s musical prowess or on Gillian Mosely’s directorial one?
To answer this reasonable question, allow me to return to the musical piece one more time! Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist described the second movement of this three-movement piece as a little flower between two abysses. And this is pretty much where I also place Mosley’s The Tinderbox!
Having watched the film, and having engaged Gillian Mosley in a discussion on it that was moderated by Tim Livesey, Chief Executive Director of Embrace the Middle East, I think that Franz Liszt’s description suits it to a T! The two abysses or chasms (in some translations) are Israel and Palestine and the film is the flower that straddles both protagonists of this festering conflict.
What drew me to this film is not that it harked back to a conflict that has had its fair share of ebbs and flows. After all, who does not know of a conflict that started in the early days of the twentieth century, proceeded with controversial momentum into the middle of the century, and has been a source of prurient hostility between Israelis and Palestinians since then. So herein lies one of the strengths of this film. It is not judgmental and does not tell you what to think about the realities of the conflict. That is up to you, the viewer, to make your own mind up. However, it tells you how to think because Gillian speaks to many Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews as they express their own widely divergent - but at times also surprisingly convergent - viewpoints. The 90 minutes or so give you the space to draw your own conclusions.
Not being judgmental aside, the film also sews together the historical threads of the conflict. For many people today, the conflict started in the early 1940’s when European Jewry started settling in Palestine under the risible fallacy that this was “a land without people for a people without a land.” The fallacy might have been less risible had it not been for the fact that Palestine then was overwhelmingly peopled by Palestinian Arabs.
But the conflict started far earlier, and Gillian does not mask the fact that Britain carries a huge share of the responsibility for the way history turned out in Palestine. From Theodor Herzl, the Hungarian father of modern political Zionism, to Lord Arthur Balfour, a British Conservative statesman and prime minister from 1902 till 1905, the film unzips with knowing gentleness the serious - perhaps even existential - questions that should be asked of the successive British governments that provided not only a fig-leaf but also active support to the enactment and creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Once more, viewers can make up their own minds.
Over the decades, I have discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in multiple fora. I have been a second-track negotiator during the Oslo chapter on behalf of the 13 traditional churches of Jerusalem, and have advocated for long years the idea of a two-state solution. Israel and Palestine, two sovereign and contiguous states living in peace and security. However, what the obdurate nature of this conflict, with Jewish Zionism and Palestinian nationalism sparring over land, has taught me is that the answer no longer lies in this two-state anachronistic formula. As the Latin-rite Catholic patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop Michel Sabbah, has patiently reiterated almost mantra-like for decades, the Holy Land - a quaint euphemism for Israel-Palestine - is “a land of two peoples and three faiths”. This is why Gillian’s film reinforces in me the realisation that the world should now think outside the box - although politicians struggle with lateral thinking - and consider a rights-based outcome for this conflict. After all, this small parcel of land has alas forfeited its ability to host two independent and co-equal states.
Let me now turn full circle and come back to Beethoven’s sonata. The two abysses (or yawning chasms) are still very much there today. There is no peace because there is no justice. There is no accountability for how this conflict has been groomed by various powers and principalities over long decades. There is an illegal occupation that locks hands with illegal settlements to render the conflict fraught with many perils and much political mud-raking. So despite the two looming abysses, the ever-widening and dangerous chasms, this precious documentary serves as another timely pontoon bridge between two jarring narratives. Just as Liszt described Beethoven’s sonata, this documentary film is also the metaphorical flower that both sides should behold and mull over. To achieve this though, they must first pause for a few moments in order to take notice of the flower and understand its symbolism.
Otherwise, if we - you and I - refuse to hear the authentic voices coming out of this small biblical land, the conflict will no longer remain a tinderbox but will ignite anew - with calamitous consequences not only for Israelis and Palestinians alike, despite their asymmetry of power, but also for the region … and for us in Europe.
But this is all me, and perhaps not you! So what do you think? Do watch the film and make your own mind up.