Cordoba and Current Affairs

Earlier today, I came across a livestreamed discussion panel from the Teatro Colón in Argentina. Normally, of course, the theatre would play host to classical music concerts, and this evening Daniel Barenboim was discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alongside four others. There were Daniel Goldman, Guillermo Marco and Omar Abboud — religious leaders in Argentina as per Barenboim's Facebook page; and the fourth was Felipe González Márquez, former president of Spain. The moderator was Hugo Sigman, who (says an online encyclopaedia) is the CEO of pharmaceutical and chemical companies in Argentina.

González approached the Israel-Palestinian issue by referring to the caliphate of Córdoba in the 12th century and drawing comparisons to the present. He offered that tolerance is less than perfect if it means arrogantly ignoring the Other and failing to understand him. He talked of the risk that the decline of Córdoba could recur in the present day, but I couldn't understand who would be the Isabella in this new scenario. Historically of course the multiculturalism of Moorish Spain ended in the Reconquista* by a fanatical contingent of Catholics. The allusions to Averroës, Aristotle, Maimonides, etc. went a little beyond my frame of reference.

I was wary that he would start talking about how bleeding-heart liberalism bares us to the risk of underestimating the true fanatical darkness of Muslims. This pessimism is perhaps a severe side-effect of hearing the American political debate too much. Maybe if I understood the finer shadings of his comparison of the past with the present, without the barriers of language, I wouldn't have been so worried.

Next Sigman asked Daniel Barenboim a question, which was if I remember correctly about the key moment as a child or a young man that made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so important to him. He quickly despatched that with a description of himself as an apolitical child largely interested by 1) music and 2) soccer. Then he argued that the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a political conflict, whether over water rights or land or borders or any such cause. Instead it is a failure of human interaction, in which neither party is ready at all to try to understand (even without needing to agree with the thoughts of) the other. Nor do they feel the first curiosity to do so.**

If I understood correctly, he added that ideas like Pope Francis's were needed. I.e. that of asking leaders from both sides to the Vatican City to pray together, as the Pope did when he visited the Middle East recently. The leaders would meet as persons and at least in that sphere practice coexistence (convivencia; but maybe 'conviviality' is too agreeable a translation). Abstract in a way the gesture might be, too. But other ways to address the problem haven't worked beautifully well; and using the spiritual or the human element might be an effective novel approach.

The other three panellists, I'm afraid, I mostly ignored. (I was playing a computer game at the time.)

(Therefore I'm not sure how great a documentary value this blog post will have. But I thought that at least it might contain a few references to worthwhile things.)


*I once read an article in the New Yorker which describes quite well that all was not fine in Andalusian Spain before Felipe and Isabella arrived on the scene, which also explains the gap between the 12th century and the 15th in this narrative. It is a review of a book by Bernard Lewis, against whose post-2001 leanings I had a grudge whose reasons I have repressed. So at any rate I'll offer a warning that maybe the article isn't completely as nice as I remember it. ("A Better Place," by Joan Acocella.(?) February 4, 2008 issue.)

** Daniel Barenboim's ideas, verbatim, are also replicated in this article in the Guardian from 2008: "Bridging the Gap, part two," by Ed Vulliamy.