“Israel laid all to waste!” “Israel laid all to waste!” “Israel laid all to waste!” “Israel laid all to waste!”
Powerful stuff.
And then for the answering chorus, the one of the “Exiled Jews,” the story starts in the mid-1940’s. That’s right. This is a story that embraces as truth the narrative of the Palestinian Arabs. Their claim is that they are the innocent victims, dispossessed of their land because the world felt bad for the Jews – a brutalized, but also brutal people, who were nearly extinguished by Europeans (not Arabs!) during World War II. And that is the behind-the-story story of this opera.
Supporters of the “Death” opera will say (we know this because they have said it) that the whole point of this political “work of art,” is that it comes at a point in the fight between Arabs and Israelis where it can be used to stand for the whole conflict. The Los Angeles Times said it offered “a rare insight into the most troubling and destructive political and cultural divisions of our age.”
In other words, it turns the Jewish truth into a lie, and transforms the mendacious Palestinian Arab narrative, that they were in Israel first, that they were the indigenous people, that they were sweet, warm, welcoming people who were turned out of their homes by the bedraggled and the brutal Jews who were permitted passage (ultimately) to “Palestine,” in order to assuage the guilt of the Europeans.
In fact, the moment chosen by “Death” ignores what is for Adams and Goodman an inconvenient historical truth. The historical connection, and the centuries long relationship, between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.
The Klinghoffer opera transforms the Palestinian Arabs’ false, lethal narrative into truth, while wresting away the truth of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. A relationship which predates even Christianity and Islam, let alone the Palestinian Arabs, by centuries.
So to choose falsely, as did John Adams, the composer, and Alice Goodman, the librettist, and Peter Sellars, the artiste provocateur who came up with the idea for this opera, is to embroider and embellish the lie. The point of choosing to begin the drama in the mid-1940’s was precisely because it serves their political position, and it allows them to feign objectivity and humanity.
The telling of the story by using this snippet of history does not simply glorify the terrorism. It justifies the terrorism, by pretending to equalize the suffering of Arabs and Jews. The Jews suffered in the Holocaust, so they were given land that belonged to the Arabs, thereby dispossessing the Arabs and creating, in turn, the Arabs’ suffering. Except that in this “narrative,” the Jews are both victims and wrongdoers: only the Arabs are completely innocent, having been minding their own business in “their own” country; then the Jews showed up in need of a home, so the Arabs were driven into the street.
Indeed, this past spring the Long Beach Opera presented two performances of the “Death” opera. In the notes for those performances, there is this:
“This opera is a work of art, and the story, dialogue and dramatic effects it contains are not intended to be an historical accounting of the events that transpired on the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985.”
How nice to be absolved of responsibility for miscasting history and promoting hatred by calling a false narrative a “work of art.”
DRY LAUNDRY LISTS FOR THE JEWS, IMPASSIONED ORATORIOS FOR THE ARABS
Never mind, well, not never mind, but of less importance is that the swells of music, the lyrical phrases and melancholy yearnings nearly all trill from the throats of the Arabs, and the stilted words and phrases (in particular, the words sung in the first song by Mrs. Klinghoffer are practically a recitation from a medical textbook) come from the Jews.