Music has the capacity to create a greater reality. - Daniel Barenboim

considered the principle of equality and the pursuit of peace as the bedrock of the society they were building. What happened? ... I still believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, nothing has really changed since 2004. Instead, we now have a law that confirms the Arab population as . It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid. I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that. That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today.

I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through. And yet even they have differing positions … I respect that there are survivors who can't, and certainly don't want to, listen to this music. But I don't accept that the fact that an orchestra playing Wagner in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem would do any harm to someone sitting in an apartment in Haifa.

The thing about Wagner is we’re always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites … There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can’t represent both views on stage at once.