The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Violence, Not Violins
“Authorities in an impoverished Palestinian refugee camp have shut down a youth orchestra, boarded up its rehearsal studio and banned its conductor from the camp after she took 13 young musicians to perform for Holocaust survivors,” the Associated Press reports:
Conductor Wafa Younes took the children from her Strings of Freedom orchestra to sing songs of peace last week as part of an annual Good Deeds Day organized by Israel’s richest woman. But once parents and leaders back in West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp realized where the group had been, they shut down the program, saying Younes had dragged the children into a political issue. . . .
A community leader in the Jenin camp, Adnan Hindi, said the musicians’ parents had not known where Younes was taking their children and were angry when they learned of the performance from media reports.
“She exploited the children for a big political issue,” said Hindi, head of a camp committee responsible for municipal duties.
The Associated Press makes vague references to “authorities” and “a community leader,” but you have to go to Israel’s Arutz Sheva to learn that these leaders are affiliated with the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, the “moderate” faction of Mahmoud Abbas.
At one level, this is a comical story. As anti-Israel gestures go, it’s hard to imagine one more futile. The orchestra’s audience, after all, consisted of people who survived Nazi death camps. No doubt they will survive this indignity. (As for Younes, she lives in an Arab village within Israel, so her banishment isolates Jenin, not her.) Yet there are real victims in this incident–namely, the 13 youngsters who are being deprived of what one surmises is a rare opportunity to engage in a beautiful and elevating activity.
Hindi’s comment that Younes “exploited the children for a big political issue” is especially risible given the Palestinian political culture that glorifies so-called martyrdom–that literally sacrifices its children by using them as suicide bombers and human shields.
Yet while using children as instruments of war is far more depraved than forbidding them to play instruments for peace, in purely practical terms the latter is more senseless. Shutting down Younes’s orchestra terrorizes no Israeli and inspires no one’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause. It accomplishes nothing except to make the Palestinians look both malevolent and weak.
In foreign-policy circles, there is an idea–to which the Obama administration seems more sympathetic than the Bush administration was–that if the U.S. puts enough pressure on Jerusalem, it can bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This idea is often presented under the rubric of “realism.” The story of Wafa Younes and her youth orchestra is a timely reminder that Palestinian intransigence is the biggest obstacle to peace, and that this so-called realism is anything but.
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