Failed test of morality: Festival excludes Israeli conductor Lahav Shani

The Flanders Festival Ghent, a festival featuring classical and world music, 50,000 visitors, and around 1,500 artists, begins on Friday. However, one artist previously on the program, whose performance was even considered one of the highlights, has now been dropped. It is Israeli conductor Lahav Shani, who was scheduled to perform with the Munich Philharmonic, whose chief conductor he will become from 2026 .

The statement published on the festival website states that although Lahav Shani has spoken out in favor of peace and reconciliation on several occasions in the past, given his role as chief conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the festival “cannot gain sufficient clarity about his position toward the genocidal regime.”

These are sentences that take your breath away. Lahav Shani was disinvited because he is chief conductor of an orchestra considered a representative of Israel in the cultural sphere. It was probably enough in Ghent that this orchestra had the word "Israel" in its name. And there, Israel is reduced to the country that commits genocide. The disinvitation follows the logic of the boycott, which allows no differentiation or allows itself to ignore it.

It begins with the history of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It was founded in 1936 by violinist Bronislaw Hubermann; at the time, it was called the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. Its musicians were primarily German; in 1935, the last "non-Aryan" musicians had been dismissed by Nazi Germany. What a powerful reminder of what Israel is—the country built by Jews who fled the Holocaust to Palestine.

Sure, the cancellation stems from justified outrage and despair over what's happening in Gaza, the crimes the Israeli government is committing there. It's still wrong, though. In Ghent, they want to be on the right side of history, but the friend-enemy mentality has apparently become so prevalent that Israelis, as people with different attitudes, are no longer even present, or at least they no longer play a role. This is essentially also evident from the festival's statement.

Wolfram Weimer calls the exclusion of Lahav Shani a disgrace for Europe

The decision was made "based on our deepest conviction that music should be a source of connection and reconciliation," they say. And that's exactly how Lahav Shani understands his art. He's a bridge-builder; otherwise, he would never have conducted the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Daniel Barenboim as a reconciliation project, featuring Arab and Jewish musicians who work for a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict.

There were outraged reactions in Germany: Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer called Lahav Shani's disinvitation a "disgrace for Europe," and the Bavarian anti-Semitism commissioner described it as antisemitic. A spokeswoman for the festival told the Berliner Zeitung that the issue was neither about the conductor himself nor about his being Jewish or from Israel, but solely about his role with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which the spokeswoman described as Israel's national orchestra. The festival management had spoken with Lahav Shani several times and had not received any clear information from him about his political stance – conversations one would not want to imagine.

This attitude check is reminiscent of Germany's treatment of Russian artists, especially Anna Netrebko , who were expected to clearly distance themselves from Putin and condemn the invasion of Ukraine after February 2022 in order to continue to be employed there. However, Lahav Shani, who has lived in Berlin for several years, has never shown himself to be on Netanyahu 's side in this way.

Shani's concert would likely have been disrupted, and in Ghent, they could have said, "We can handle it." But with the support of the city council and the Belgian Minister of Culture, they decided to hold Lahav Shani collectively liable.