Barenboim's speech about the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Last Friday (27 July) Daniel Barenboim, after conducting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra through Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Choral) at the London Proms, gave an impassioned speech. Here is my transcription of its final and most important stretch:

'As to the Middle East which I suppose you expect me to give you a last minute analysis of the latest few minutes. I shan’t do that, but I want to tell you maybe two things. We were going to go – we play in Berlin on Sunday, and we were going to go on Monday to play a concert in solidarity with civic society in East Jerusalem, in solidarity with Palestinian civic society in East Jerusalem, and there were factions, Palestinian factions who protested about this concert and we are not going there. [Disappointed noise from audience] Never mind the concert: much worse is the reasoning. The reasoning behind it is that we represent for them “an instrument of normalization” – in other words of accepting the present status quo with the occupation, the settlements and all that that means. And I want to tell you one thing: we are *not* a political project – we don’t have a political programme, but we have a certain amount of social conscience, and solidarity with civic societies who suffer. [From audience: ‘Bravo!’] Wait, I haven’t finished! And what makes this orchestra what it is, besides the individual talent and the musicianship and the hard work, the dedication of each one of its members, is that they play together with this homogeneity because here in our little society of the West-Eastern Divan they are all equals. [Applause] And so I want to tell you that there are many people in the Middle East from all sides who have all kinds of different agendas. We know perfectly well that we will not be able to change the Middle East; but I can assure you, we are not going to let the people who are now in power in the Middle East change us. [Applause] And outside of the music we have only one agenda and one hope for everybody, and that is total justice for all the inhabitants of the region and equality of rights for everybody, so we can start thinking about how we can approach each other. And this is our mission; this was the mission of Edward Said who founded this orchestra with me, and I thought this was the appropriate moment to tell you, who have shown us such loyalty over the years, not to speak of this week, that you know what our feelings are. Thank you for listening to me, thank you for listening to this orchestra, thank you for listening to this wonderful chorus and the soloists, and thank you for listening so quietly to all the works of Pierre Boulez. [Audience laughter] Thank you!'

Here is the url to the video of that entire speech:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wnhkl