Selective Empathy

When it comes to the Middle East, people regress into totalitarian positions and tribal logics with sobering speed. Where do you stand? Are you “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine”? Do you say “genocide,” or don’t you? 

In some parts of the Free Palestine movement, activism against the Netanyahu government goes hand-in-hand with the glorification of Hamas as a “liberation movement” (even after the attacks of October 7) and the denial of Israel’s right to exist.

In Germany, it was long assumed that the country’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust and current Staatsräson precluded any criticism of the state of Israel. 

As the war in Gaza continues, the latter is slowly changing, at least among politicians (even if they take little decisive action) and in the German media (if you look past the Axel Springer publications and right-wing outlets). Many Germans now recognize that Israel’s conduct in the war—the starvation, the indiscriminate killing, the step-by-step implementation of forced migration—is neither ethical nor legal. There is clear evidence that the Israel Defense Forces have committed serious war crimes in Gaza, whether you describe those crimes as genocide or not. (An independent UN commission of inquiry, and many Israelis, do.) Since the outbreak of the war, according to UNICEF, more than 50,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza. The number will likely rise in the current offensive, which Defense Minister Israel Katz announced with the slogan “Gaza is burning.” According to a recent survey, more than 70% of Israelis now demand an end to the war.

But all that seems to be news to German classical music institutions and in German arts coverage—a fact that became particularly obvious last week, when the conductor Lahav Shani and the Munich Philharmonic were disinvited from a performance at the Flanders Festival in Ghent, Belgium. 

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As the debate about that decision raged, classical music institutions could have taken the opportunity to face the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. They could have shown solidarity both with Shani and with the starving people in Gaza. It wouldn’t have been a particularly difficult needle to thread: We are aware that the Israeli government is violating international law and human rights in Gaza. We’ve seen the unbearable images. Still, we consider it dangerous and nonsensical to make concerts contingent on public statements and ideological tests, especially in the case of Shani, who is (unlike, say, Valery Gergiev) no propagandist. Blanket cultural boycotts benefit no one. Instead, they lead to more division and polarization—and, in the case of Israel, often have the absurd effect of punishing the opposition. 

Among the institutions that issued statements on the Flanders Festival’s decision, none acknowledged the horror in Gaza. They didn’t express empathy for civilians. They didn’t show awareness of the injustice or of the outrage and helplessness many feel in its face. In German art sections, too, acknowledgements of the situation were rare. A commentator in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung deflected by nitpicking about the term genocide as used by the Flanders Festival, writing “that’s for the courts to decide”—as if one needs legal approval to express sorrow at human suffering. What resulted was a disturbing mismatch: an intense uproar about the cancellation of Shani’s concert, and seemingly complete indifference toward the suffering of Palestinians. 

By acknowledging the Israeli government’s crimes against Palestinians, the German classical music world would not have been guilty of whataboutism. Rather, it would have given more weight to their criticism of the Flanders Festival for disinviting Shani, showing that these institutions are capable of thinking outside the usual partisan grooves. Criticizing Israel would not make these institutions “pro-Palestinian,” if that’s what they fear, but “pro-humanity,” “pro-human rights,” “pro-international law.” 

Instead, the debate focused exclusively on the accusation of antisemitism. The German media, the Chancellor of Germany, the Minister of Culture (“bald antisemitism”), and the Israel Ambassador to Germany (“pure antisemitism”) all seemed to agree that that was the reason Ghent cancelled Shani’s concert. (Here, Wolfram Weimer, the Minister of Culture, showed an especially galling incompetence on the subject of antisemitism with his—genuinely problematic—conflation of Israelis and Jews.)

But the Flanders Festival explicitly said that it had disinvited the conductor not because of his nationality or religion, but because he is the chief conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. “We are unable to provide sufficient clarity about his attitude to the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv,” its statement read. Without speculating about “real” reasons—whether that decision is actually an “antisemitic scandal” is at the very least debatable. For Shani himself, the “regrettable decision” was more likely the result of political pressure. Meron Mendel, the director of the Anne Frank Education Center in Frankfurt, said on a podcast that the cancellation was “extremely nonsensical, but not antisemitic.” He added that reflexive calls of antisemitism play right into the hands of the Netanyahu government, which had “perfected” the method of accusing all its opponents of antisemitism long before October 7. 

It is striking how rarely the views of Israelis and Jews who are critical of Israel feature in such debates in Germany. Last week, the Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov addressed the audience following a Proms concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony with a moving and distressing speech. “In my heart there is great pain now… I come from Israel and live there. I love it. It’s my home,” Volkov said. “But what’s happening is atrocious and horrific in a scale that’s unimaginable. I know that many of us feel completely helpless in front of it. Innocent Palestinians being killed in thousands, displaced again and again, without hospitals and schools, not knowing when’s the next meal. Israeli hostages are kept in terrible conditions for almost two years and political prisoners are languishing in Israeli jails. Israelis, Jews and Palestinians won’t be able to stop this alone. I ask you, I beg you all to do whatever is in your power to stop this madness.”

The statement went viral on social media and attracted attention internationally. In Germany, it was only picked up by the Bavarian State Radio. 

Barrie Kosky, who was the artistic director of the Komische Oper Berlin for a decade, told VAN in 2022, “What successive Israeli governments are doing in the West Bank and Gaza is wrong, full stop. That should be a fact, whether you’re a Zionist or nationalist Israeli or Orthodox Jew or whatever. A fact. It’s wrong. Something has to be done to stop it.” He added, “And it doesn’t help when the attitude from most German and Jewish organizations in Germany is that Israel can do no wrong and any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”

In June, the violinist Michael Barenboim, the concertmaster of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and former dean of the Barenboim-Said Academy, told VAN, “You have [former Israeli Defense Minister] Yoav Gallant talking about ‘human animals’ and cutting off food, electricity, water and fuel. And at the same time, the Brandenburg Gate going blue and white, and German officials saying, the only place for Germany is at the side of Israel. To have these two things happen simultaneously: the promise of genocide and the promise of support for genocide—that kicked off my thinking about how to talk about this in an effective way in the German discourse.”

In the past, both Kosky and Barenboim have criticized the tendency in Germany to give the floor to only one kind of Jewish voice. “The first person quoted in the article is the Antisemitismusbeauftragter [an official, usually from the state, tasked with the prevention of anti-Semitism], who is likely not Jewish, and very likely has a specific political agenda,” Kosky said. “And the second quote is from the Zentralrat [the Central Council of Jews in Germany], which shares that agenda. And I think: No one called me!” As Michael Barenboim put it in an interview from July 2024: “In the fight against antisemitism, it’s not helpful to repress Jewish voices.”  

You might add that in the fight against antisemitism, it’s not helpful to create the appearance of selective outrage and selective empathy. It is not productive to handle cancellation and cultural boycotts completely differently depending on whether you agree with the beliefs of the person in question. It’s not surprising that the Israeli government, with its far-right alliances, does so, as with Omri Boehm. But when the same German classical music institutions that disinvited the Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis for not taking a public position against the Russian invasion of Ukraine turn around and complain that Shani is being forced to take a public position against the Netanyahu government, it is an astounding hypocrisy. 

The demands from both sides for boycotts in culture have taken on dimensions fearful, childish (“You started it”), attention-seeking and identity-confirming (“I cancel, therefore I am”). Considering the profound helplessness many feel in the face of such injustice and suffering, it is reasonable to want to take some kind of action—even if it’s just a symbolic statement. But what do these cultural boycotts actually mean? What can they really change? It sometimes seems like they are more about cementing the feeling of us vs. them than they are about real political or social change.

That change requires us to leave our echo chambers, to reconsider our perspectives, to talk to one another instead of about one another. These were all things that Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was meant to encourage. They are things that those in culture and the arts always say they make space for. But in the last week, the German classical music world at least has failed to live up to those stated values. Instead, it has come across as morally self-righteous, lacking in empathy, behind the times and detached from the real world. Its self-adulation about inviting Shani and the Munich Philharmonic to perform after the cancellation in Ghent is a perfect example of this. 

In the end, it was Shani, the Barenboim protégé, who showed the empathy and nuance of which his German supporters seemed incapable. “Israeli society continues to mourn the consequences of Hamas’s inhumane attack and longing for the return of 48 civilians who are still held hostage in unbearable conditions,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “Yet, I, like many Israelis, have not abandoned my human values. The images and testimonies coming out of Gaza are deeply distressing, and it is impossible to remain indifferent to the suffering of civilians in Gaza amidst the catastrophe this war has brought upon them. Everything must be done to end the war as soon as possible and begin the long process of healing and rebuilding for both societies.” ¶