Illustrative of the inaccessibility of the complexity of Middle Eastern affairs to non-specialists are the recent posturings of veteran orchestra conductor Zubin Mehta and the maunderings of the General Synod of the Church of England. In an interview with Helena De Bertodano of the London Times on July 10, Mehta referred to his cancellation of all engagements in Israel because of the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister (a position he has held for a total of 19 years).
The interview was featured as an attack on the policy of the government of Israel and implicitly the United States also, but was really a series of reminiscences by Mehta on his 90th birthday. The entire political summary of the shortcomings of Netanyahu, and also of Donald Trump, consisted of Mehta’s assertion that: “Those two swine deserve each other.” On the basis of this profound analysis, the Times headlined “Mehta: Why I am Boycotting Israel”. And this drastic step was explained by the statement that Mehta disapproved of the Israeli Government’s treatment of the Palestinians. I suppose nonagenarians can be excused such outbursts of vapid megalomania.
The Church of England was somewhat less flippant in its approach to the same subject and invited its adherents to acquaint themselves with A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, a document produced by Palestinian Christian clergy and laity that accuses Israel of genocide. This naturally offended the Jewish leadership of the UK, including chief rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who urged the Synod to reject the document, which they said (correctly) contained “so much falsehood” and risked “undermining decades of careful relationship-building”. Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally acknowledged the concerns of the Jewish community but told the Synod that as a pastor she heard “the cry” of Palestinian Christians and that the church remained opposed to anti-Semitism. In this case, that would require an incurable state of schizophrenia.
The document was co-written by Fadi Diab, rector of St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Ramallah. While Mullally stated that “engagement” with the Diab paper did not imply entire agreement with it, it effectively legitimised as worthy of serious consideration the paper’s description of Israel as “a colonial enterprise built on racism” that has inflicted “genocidal war on Gaza”. It demands “dismantling settler colonialism and the apartheid system built on Jewish supremacy as codified in Israel’s racist Nation-State Law.”
The law in question incorporates the United Nations’ creation of the State of Israel from the League of Nations Palestine Mandate in 1948 as a “Jewish state”. The detailed objections in the paper allege a great many unnecessary inconveniences and trespasses inflicted upon the Palestinian population of the West Bank but specifically focus on the claimed attempt at genocide in Gaza. In the state of friction that exists between Jewish citizens of Israel and non-Jewish occupants of the West Bank and Gaza, there is an endless mass of recriminations and provocations on both sides. But it is an outrage to describe what has gone on in Gaza as possessing any character of genocide. The current hostilities were initiated by a barbarous invasion by Hamas of Israel in which over a thousand Israelis were massacred including many children, women and elderly people with gratuitous savagery, and approximately 250 hostages were taken. The initiative was an outright and monstrous crime on the scale that historically deprives its authors of any plausible case for becoming overly self-righteous about the nature of reprisals. These points have been eloquently made by, inter alia, the president of the world’s most populous Muslim country, President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia.
A number of other Protestant churches, including the Methodists, Presbyterians and the United Church of Canada, had taken up the same document before the Anglicans did. Everyone, specifically including all Christians, should pay more attention to the world’s premier ecclesiastical figure, Pope Leo XIV, who has warned against bandying charges of genocide about too loosely. Genocide is a determined attempt to exterminate an entire people by a party that has some capacity to do so. In fact, civilian casualties in Gaza, by the standards of urban counter-guerrilla war, are relatively moderate, especially given Hamas’ habit of using hospitals, schools and mosques as shelters for its own trigger-pullers with the publicly announced intent of producing as many civilian casualties as possible to scandalise gullible world opinion, personified by the naïve and bigoted busybodies of the General Synod of the Church of England. Their conduct dishonours the gentle and humanitarian founder of their church, King Henry VIII.
As for Zubin Mehta, he’s an amiable and talented and flamboyant conductor but demonstrates, like so many other celebrities, the inadvisability of paying any attention to the uninformed asseverations of such people on terribly complicated issues. As one who knows all three of the individuals, I reckon that Zubin Mehta’s ego is even more colossal than those of the leaders he is denouncing as “swine”; one of them the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, and the other the only person who has received more than 200 million votes for president of the United States. And the London Times has no business billing a self-serving muddle of personal reveries by an aged orchestra leader as a serious political statement.
