Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #703, 6/22/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subcribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #703, 6/22/14

This Fall at the Met: “Death [not exactly] of Klinghoffer” Echoes Mainstream Media Distortion of History

Mr. Peter Gelb
General Manager
The Metropolitan Opera
Lincoln Center
New York NY 10023
pgelb@metroopera.org

Dear Mr. Gelb:

I don’t know much about opera, so my “Death of Klinghoffer” complaint isn’t about the extent to which it may constitute opera, but the considerable extent to which it does not.

I read in the Met’s Klinghoffer-complaint response letter that the Met “is not endorsing any political views expressed in the libretto.” There’s a difference between staging a performance that expresses political views (i.e., opinions on who should lead or what should be done now by a government) and distortion of history. If you put on “Death of Klinghoffer,” as you plan to this fall, you’ll be putting the Met’s hecksher on that.

Perhaps your knowledge of Jewish homeland history is comparable to mine about opera. My understanding is that your opera opens, under the caption “May 15, 1948, The Day After Israel’s Creation,” with an Arab chorus wailing “My father’s house was razed in 1948.” Israel was not “created” in 1948, as though artificially and out of the blue. It declared its independence, as the land’s next native state after Rome’s defeat of Jewish Judaea, in the Jewish homeland that Jews had never abandoned, physically, spiritually or otherwise, and whose right to it was recognized by the San Remo treaty and Palestine Mandate. And the historical event of May 15, 1948, the day after Israel declared independence, is not that Jews evicted Arabs from their homes, but that the armies of seven U.N.-partition-rejecting Arab states instantly invaded to destroy Israel and annihilate its Jews. The “nakba” that Arab choruses do wail about is that Israel’s homeland Jewish army threw back that invasion (not bad for a country “created” the day before a 7-nation invasion).

I understand further that a later “Death of Klinghoffer” scene is captioned “1985: 3.7 Million Palestinians in Exile.” The British themselves estimated Palestine’s 1947 population as 1.2 million Arabs (a figure the Jews claim as too high – see Katz in “Battleground”) and 600,000 Jews. Not all of the Arabs lived in the part that became Israel, and not all of them left. So the Arab refugee count upon which you’re putting your hecksher approaches ten times too high. But a greater number of indigenously Middle-eastern Jews, some with roots going back millennia, left vast Muslim lands in the wake of the war started by that Arab invasion than Arabs left tiny Israel. Most fled to Israel, where they were absorbed by their fellow Jews, and ceased to be refugees but not an equal part of the Arab-Israeli conflict’s refugee issue.

And I object, of course, to the euphemism “Death of Klinghoffer” for the murder of a disabled old cruise ship passenger in a wheelchair and the dumping of him and his chair into the sea. But my concern here runs deeper than euphemisms. Your response letter quotes the director that “the opera’s most important contribution is in providing an opportunity for the audience to wrestle with the almost unanswerable questions that arise from this seemingly endless conflict.” What was Mr. Klinghoffer’s connection to the Arab-Israeli Palestine conflict other than that he was a Jew?

For the past 13 years, Mr. Gelb, I’ve written a weekly media watch pleading to the Jewish community that we must stop averting our eyes from the mainstream Western media’s persistent denigrations of the Jewish homeland of Israel. Among the Western media’s favored expressions is “Palestinians’ displacement by Israel’s creation” or “war that followed Israel’s creation,” without the Arab states whose invasion started that war so much as named.

My sense is that the community is increasingly recognizing that we must cease averting our eyes. The Metropolitan Opera’s performance of “Death of Klinghoffer,” not least its opening scene depicting Jews razing Arabs’ houses commencing “May 15, 1948, The Day After Israel’s Creation,” will sear this vastly distorted misimpression of history into the minds of many educated, cultured Americans. My hope is that this Passion Play masquerading as Opera will be met with substantial protest.

Jerome R. Verlin
Philadelphia