----- Original Message -----
From: "mtg" <mtgb@...>
To: <skepticos@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 7:29 PM
Subject: [skepticos] Israel, pais de la intolerancia
August 1, 2004

Esta nota del New York Times explica, complementa y aclara la (im)precisión
del título citado del Haaretz, del articulo que envía Teresa. Es que con la
mejor buena voluntad, Gehry y el rabino Hier, están c.....onstruyendo fuera
del tarro.
Saludos, Ellen

Frank Gehry's Mideast Peace Plan
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

JERUSALEM

ON a brilliant afternoon last May, a constellation of political and artistic
luminaries from Israel and America gathered on the lumpy asphalt of a
parking lot in a dreary corner of this ancient, contested capital. There
stood the former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect Frank
Gehry and, at the podium, the movie star turned governor, Arnold
Schwarzenegger.

Wearing a Jewish skullcap, the son of an Austrian Nazi delivered the keynote
address as ground was broken for a $200 million Museum of Tolerance,
designed by Mr. Gehry. "In the darkness that pervades the Middle East," Mr.
Schwarzenegger told a crowd of several hundred, "this building will be a
candle to guide us."

The ceremony represented a particular triumph for one of the less
recognizable people in the front rank, a bespectacled rabbi named Marvin
Hier. As founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Mr. Hier had
overseen its transformation from an organization dedicated to hunting down
Nazi war criminals to one best known for its Museum of Tolerance in Los
Angeles, which has attracted four million visitors in its 11-year history
with its message of multicultural coexistence. Now Mr. Hier is betting that
his museum can help to heal one of the most divisive places on earth.

But the Wiesenthal Center's formula will be difficult to transfer here. In
the culminating segment of a film made for the Center's facilities in Los
Angeles and New York, for example, a middle-aged man says: "Tolerance is
based on a conviction there's room here for everybody." That definition is a
profoundly American one, reflecting the reality of a nation with vast space
and no existential threats. It sounds irrelevant, even ludicrous, in an
Israeli-Palestinian context. In this country, almost no one believes that
there is enough land or political power for everybody to share equitably.

Which may be why the proposed museum is already drawing withering and
widespread criticism, years before its opening. At the most hyperbolic edge
of the debate, the American architect and critic Michael Sorkin claimed in
Architectural Record that the Gehry design's use of large, irregular stone
blocks "uncomfortably evokes the `deconstruction' of Yasir Arafat's
headquarters in Ramallah into a pile of rubble by Israeli security forces."
The leftist Israeli politician Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of
Jerusalem, denounced the museum in the newspaper Ha'aretz as "so
hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so megalomaniac." Even mainstream
Israelis are dubious that a museum conceived, financed and designed by
Americans can possibly fathom, much less redress, the political and social
chasms here. Palestinians, who usually agree with Israelis on so little,
express similar skepticism.

The project is part of a new generation of cultural institutions that have
emerged over the past decade that - rather than displaying wondrous objects,
as was the traditional function of a museum - seek to inculcate values. The
proposed Museum of Freedom at ground zero falls into this category, as does
the Museum of Immigration in France. The Wiesenthal Center helped create the
form: the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, founded in 1993, uses the
Holocaust as its core exhibit, a kind of case study of what happens when
hatred goes unchallenged. Other exhibits look at the civil rights movement
and the activity of white-supremacist hate groups. Those topics offer easy
moral choices; few rational Americans disagree about, say, the repugnance of
the Ku Klux Klan. In its interactive exhibits, the museum does address a few
more complex issues, like racial profiling by the police or the line between
free speech and hate speech in talk radio.

To build a comparable museum in Jerusalem is to risk touchy-feely naïveté on
the one hand or polarizing candor on the other. On the very day Mr.
Schwarzenegger spoke of hopeful candles, Palestinian gunmen ambushed an
Israeli mother and four children, who also happened to be residents of one
of the controversial settlements in Gaza. In the months since, Israel's
Supreme Court ordered that the security barrier being erected partly within
Palestinian territory must be rerouted and the International Court of
Justice condemned it outright. A leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi has used the
same coded religious language once uttered against Yitzhak Rabin, the prime
minister who was subsequently assassinated, to imply that it is permissible
to kill Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. How is a museum supposed to reckon with
such passions?

Speaking by phone from Southern California recently, Mr. Gehry said the
project had awakened memories of his own upbringing - particularly the
grandfather who taught him about the Talmud and Zionism. "If you're raised a
Jewish kid, Israel's the most important place in the world where there's
some sense of belonging when all else fails," said Mr. Gehry, who as an
adult changed his name from Goldberg. But though the idea of Israel as a
Jewish homeland sounds fairly innocuous in America, in the Middle East, it
clashes with Palestinian claims to the very same land.

In recent years, Mr. Gehry has been celebrated for culture palaces like the
Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Disney concert hall in Los Angeles, but the
Jerusalem museum is meant to be more than just an architectural highlight or
a linchpin of urban planning. Perhaps as a result, he designed the museum to
be accessible in both literal and metaphorical ways. "I was trying to make a
building that had body language," he said. "People can come from all
directions, and all kinds of people can come." The Great Hall has entry
doors all along its 360-degree circumference. Every other structure in the
three-acre campus - theater, conference center, education building - faces
toward the museum so that, Mr. Gehry said, "families and children are
constantly in view, in your face, so that you never escape from the issue of
what this place is about."

The museum's content is still in the early stage of development, since the
institution is not expected to open until 2008. While Liebe Geft, director
of the Los Angeles museum, has held initial meetings to solicit ideas and
advice from some 200 Israelis, ranging from novelists to political
scientists to religious leaders, the central exhibit in Jerusalem is Mr.
Hier's brainchild. It will trace the journey of the Exodus, a ship that
carried hundreds of Holocaust survivors; denied entry to British-controlled
Palestine, the ship was turned away by European ports as well before
discharging its human cargo in Germany, of all places, where they were
hauled off to internment camps by railroad car. Mr. Hier said the saga of
the Exodus provides a vehicle for appreciating "the eternal search for
tolerance" and, more specifically, the Jewish experience of persecution and
oppression. Of course, the arrival of European Jews also forms part of the
Palestinian counternarrative of the nakba, or catastrophe, as the creation
of Israel is known.

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian writer and scholar who lives in East Jerusalem
and qualifies as a political moderate, cast doubt on the museum's
willingness to give equal weight to Palestinian experiences. "What we often
see is an attempt to give a superficial meaning to tolerance," he said in a
telephone interview. "What doesn't come through is genuine respect for
others, for their humanity and their right of self-determination.
Reconciliation requires the admission of mistakes. That starting point often
isn't reached. Instead, there is this attempt to give this fig leaf of
tolerance. It only sugarcoats the bad reality of suppression and control."

Mr. Hier maintains that, while the museum will not conspicuously avoid the
Palestinian situation, "It's not about the experience of the Palestinian
people. When they have a state, they'll have their own museum." Still, he
added, the museum will present a display on the flourishing Jewish life
under Islamic rulers in Moorish Spain. And a film being made for all the
Wiesenthal museums traces the friendship of a Palestinian pianist from Jenin
and her Israeli teacher in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood, which Palestinians
consider occupied territory.

Those good intentions aside, Palestinians who live in the West Bank must
cross multiple checkpoints and obtain permits to enter Israel. Even if many
want to visit the tolerance museum, which is doubtful enough, they will have
a formidable time getting there.

Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't the only one that divides
the country: Israel is also torn between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews,
and Jews from Ashkenazi and Sephardic origins. The twin phenomena of
Israel's internal politics over the last 20 years have been the Shas party,
which champions the ethnic solidarity and fervent Orthodoxy of Sephardic
immigrants, and the Shinui party, which assails ultra-Orthodox Jews for
feasting on government aid while enjoying draft deferments and imposing
religious law on secularists. Mr. Hier says flatly that, in exploring
intolerance within Israel, the museum is "addressing a problem that Israel
should have addressed itself."

To some Israeli critics, however, the design and the content are beside the
point; the museum, they argue, is flawed in its very conception, because
it's the product of an American rabbi and the object of American
philanthropy. The museum strikes many here as the latest version of what
Israelis tartly term "the American uncle" - that well-intended, well-endowed
know-it-all. In private conversation, one hears the museum disparaged as the
"Museum of Nice" or an example of "American Jewish cultural imperialism."

"Of course the challenge is difficult," Mr. Hier said during a recent
interview in New York. "Israel isn't America. But to be honest, I don't
think we should be held to the standard that in order to open the Jerusalem
museum we have to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. I wish we were that
important. Israel didn't start in 1948. Israel is part of the Jewish people.
The ideas of dignity and respect were Jewish ideas before Herzl or
Ben-Gurion." (He was referring to the founder of the Zionist movement and
the first prime minister of Israel.) "So it's a bogus argument to say
tolerance is an American concept. It's a Jewish concept."

Yet the Israeli concept of tolerance remains quite different from an
American Jewish one. The very word for tolerance in Hebrew - sovrenoot -
comes from a root meaning not respect or acceptance but grudgingly "putting
up with" someone or something irritating.

"In America, the highest value is to be nice, not to judge other people,"
said Noah Efron, a professor at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan and the
author of "Real Jews," about tension between secular and ultra-Orthodox
Israelis. "That won't work in Israel. There is something that's bracing and
exciting and good about the way people parse life here, the willingness to
argue with a fair amount of passion and fury. There's a willingness to be
coarse and crass. I love that about Israel, but it's also what got Yitzhak
Rabin shot. The danger, especially with this museum being imported, is to
trivialize those tensions."

Even Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who strongly backed the project as
mayor of Jerusalem in the 1990's, said: "If the programming decisions are
made outside of Israel, the museum will fail. It will be an empty place. A
coffee shop, a concert hall and so on. The content has to be relevant and
belong to the realities here and true to the emotions that characterize this
place."

At this point, the Wiesenthal Center has raised about $85 million of the
projected $200 million from 10 donors in the United States and Canada. Main
construction work on the museum will start in several months. For now, the
future site still belongs to the parking lot and a nearby plaza. In the
afternoon and evening, Israeli teenagers gather there for their own
experiments in tolerance - checking out the Arab water-pipes and flavored
tobacco peddled by Palestinian vendors, riffling through the Indian rugs and
bedspreads brought back by former soldiers who vacationed abroad after
finishing military service.

The plaza used to be a more vibrant locale, back before the second intifada
period. Since then, tourism has nosedived and Israelis have grown wary of
public spaces that might be attacked. In that respect, no site could be more
unwittingly appropriate for the Wiesenthal project. As the Jerusalem
architect Amir Kolker, a colleague of Mr. Gehry's on the project, put it,
"Everybody thinks there's so little tolerance in Israel you can fit it all
in one museum, and you need to keep it in a safe place."


Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the
author of "Jew vs. Jew."




> Eso dice él:
>
> Gehry afronta a Jerusalem el seu projecte més polèmic
>
> . L'arquitecte dissenya el Museu de la Tolerància entre crítiques
> d'israelians i palestins
>
> Foto: REUTERS / ROBERT GALBRAITH
>
>
>
>
> LES MAQUETES DEL COMPLEX A dalt, una vista exterior del futur Museu de la
> Tolerància de Jerusalem; a sota, una imatge interior. Foto: REUTERS /
ROBERT
> GALBRAITH
>
>
>
>
> Frank Gehry, davant el Walt Disney Concert Hall de Los Angeles. Foto:
> REUTERS / ROBERT GALBRAITH
>
>
>
> JOAN CAÑETE BAYLE
> JERUSALEM
>
> L'arquitecte canadenc Frank Gehry afronta a Jerusalem el que pot ser un
dels
> seus projectes més polèmics: el Museu de la Tolerància, un encàrrec del
> Centre Simon Wiesenthal que, tot i que encara no se n'ha col.locat ni la
> primera pedra, ja genera grans discrepàncies. A la controvèrsia que ja per
> si mateix acostuma a aixecar Gehry, aquesta vegada se n'hi uneixen altres
de
> tipus polític que es resumeixen en una pregunta que es feia un articulista
> del diari israelià Haaretz: "¿Pot construir-se un museu de la tolerància a
> la ciutat més intolerant del món?"
> El projecte, que està previst que s'acabi el 2007 o el 2008, compta amb un
> pressupost d'entre 150 i 200 milions de dòlars (de 125 a 166 milions
> d'euros), que serà finançat en la seva totalitat per donants privats.
Gehry
> ha dissenyat un complex fidel al seu estil, compost per set edificis en
una
> superfície de 21.600 metres quadrats en què es combinen la pedra de
> Jerusalem, el titani i el vidre per crear un efecte blanc i blau. El
complex
> inclourà el museu, un teatre, un centre de convencions i una biblioteca.
> El rabí Marvin Hier, degà del Centre Wiesenthal i ideòleg del projecte, ha
> anunciat que planeja que la història del vaixell Èxode sigui el fil
> conductor per explicar l'eterna recerca jueva de la tolerància amb
> l'objectiu de potenciar la pau. Segons Hier, el museu se centrarà en la
> dignitat humana i buscarà promoure el respecte entre els jueus i la resta
de
> creences.
> L'Ajuntament de Jerusalem ha rebut amb els braços oberts un projecte que
> revitalitzarà el centre de la part israeliana de la ciutat i en el qual es
> confia per promoure el turisme. Però Jerusalem no és una ciutat normal, i
el
> projecte afronta greus contradiccions que donen lloc a la polèmica. Hi ha
> qui en denuncia el disseny, ja sigui perquè és molt agressiu amb
> l'entorn --la muralla de la ciutat vella està molt a prop-- o per raons
més
> dubtoses, com el fet que recorda la Mukata de Iàssir Arafat, la residència
> del líder palestí destruïda per l'Exèrcit israelià.
>
> UBICACIÓ
> ESTRANYA
> Altres crítiques es refereixen al cost que suposarà mantenir el complex en
> una ciutat com Jerusalem, que està molt necessitada d'infraestructures.
Per
> no parlar de la precària situació en què es troba Jerusalem est, la part
> àrab, que compta amb uns serveis bàsics molt inferiors als de la part
> israeliana de la ciutat. Per afegir més llenya al foc, part del solar on
> s'aixecarà el museu és un antic cementiri musulmà.
> Com no podia ser d'una altra manera, els continguts també estan subjectes
a
> polèmica. L'Èxode com a símbol de la creació d'Israel és per als palestins
> el símbol de la Nakba, el desastre, la pèrdua del seu país. "El museu no
> tracta sobre l'experiència palestina. Quan tinguin un estat, tindran el
seu
> propi museu", despatxa Heir. En el cas que algun palestí vulgui anar al
> museu, ho tindrà molt difícil a causa de la restricció de moviments que
> pateixen. I a només 10 minuts en cotxe del Museu de la Tolerància s'alça
una
> altra mena de monument: el mur que el Tribunal Internacional de l'Haia va
> sentenciar que vulnera els drets humans dels palestins.
>
>
>
>
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