What Is 'Divisive'?

He is:-

Much as Mr Barenboim is feted by the Palestinians, he is a divisive figure in Israel for his outspoken opposition to Israel's policy in the occupied territories, accusing Israel of "a moral abomination" at the height of the Second Intifada, the mass Palestinian uprising.  The conductor and musical director at the Berlin Staatskapelle...has also courted controversy with his efforts to perform works in Israel by Richard Wagner, Hitler's favourite composer, much to the revulsion of Holocaust survivors and their families.

Actually, if his behavior regarding the Wagner music is of any indication, it is not so much his "diviseness" as his 'spit-in-your-face' attitude he possesses.
So, he is not quite divisive as he is petulant and provocative.


Oh, and this at BBC:-

The impoverished [Gazan] coastal strip has been subjected to a crippling Israeli blockade since 2006.

Not "crippling" at all.  See here.

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Daniel Barenboim Has an Incisive Moment (or Two)

After 1967 Israel turned very much toward the US - not necessarily to its own advantage. The traditionalists said: "We will not give up the newly occupied territories." The religious Jews said: "These are not occupied but liberated, biblical territories." And with that the end of socialism in Israel was sealed

and

Militant Zionism, on the other hand, did not develop any further in its thinking. Even today, it is still based on a lie: that the land that the Jews settled was empty.

Source

Wagner and Barenboim

A year or so ago, I became embroiled with Daniel Barenboim (see here and here). I even appeared on a BBC program with him.

My argument at the time was with his pro-Pal ideology but he is also infamous for promoting Wagner's music which is for all intents and purposes publicly banned in Israel.

And now I found this bit:-

Whether or not there is any Jew-baiting subtext to be found in Wagner’s operas is much disputed by scholars, but there is no argument about his personal anti-Semitism, or Cosima’s. The Bayreuth circle was breeding mephitic ultranationalist ideology well before Hitler, notably through the “scientific” racist theories of another English immigrant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Siegfried’s sister Eva.

Under the Third Reich, Bayreuth became a temple of National Socialist art, although the regime was not monolithic in this respect.

Barenboim's so cosy with Dick and Cosima; makes you want to pluck his strings.