In 1999, Columbia University professor Edward W. Said and symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim had an audacious idea. Said was a Palestinian and Barenboim was an Israeli Jew, but they had a long-term, close friendship. And they decided to found a similarly boundary-crossing symphony orchestra, composed of equal numbers of Palestinian and Israeli Jewish players. Further, the players would all be ones whose homes were in the Middle East, the site of the most turbulent conflicts between the two ethnicities.

It was a revolutionary idea.

But as Barenboim had commented, one of the things he knew to be profoundly true of symphony musicians was that they loved music more than anything else. And that great love could perhaps provide the base for building an understanding between groups of people in conflict.

And so was born the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Much of the current conflict in the Middle East is traceable to the 1948 founding of Israel. After the Jews suffered centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, the decision was made by world leaders to grant the Jewish people a nation state of their own.

The Jewish people had long felt a connection with Palestine. So the area chosen for a Jewish state was Palestine, considered then to be a “land without people, for a people without a land.”

But as Daniel Barenboim explained recently, in a 2023 op-ed article, the area of Palestine was not “a land without people.”

“In reality,” Barenboim states, “ the Jewish population of Palestine following the First World War was only 9%; 91% of the population was Palestinian. The country could hardly be called "a land without a people," and the Palestinian population saw no reason to give up their own land. Conflict was thus inevitable and hardened further over generations.”

“I am convinced,” continued Barenboim, “that the Israelis will have security when the Palestinians can feel hope and justice. Both sides must recognize their enemies as human beings, and try to empathize with their point of view, their pain, and their hardship. Israelis must also recognize that their occupation of Palestine is not humane or acceptable.”

So Palestinian Edward W. Said and Israeli Daniel Barenboim formed the West- Eastern Divan Orchestra to help create harmony between two opposing peoples. The orchestra does not exist without its peace-making message.

But the orchestra founded to promote peace is not without its stresses and conflicts. Arguments arise and disagreements boil over. But however frustrated the musicians may sometimes be, they are strongly committed to the vision of peace that the founding of the orchestra represents.

And the orchestra has gotten a tremendous response from the concert-going public.It has been hugely successful and has kept up a busy schedule of concerts all over the world.

So, for the question, Can Israelis and Palestinians make beautiful music together? the answer is, Yes!

But the bigger question is, can the Israelis and Palestinians make a beautiful Middle East together?

The world is waiting for an answer.