Ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter
(16:12) “Listening to Yaron at the very beginning, I was saying to myself that if we had partners with different interests, seating around the table and needing to reach an agreement, we would just need Yaron to come in and play a bit. And everything will be resolved I suppose.”
(16:53) “We also need keys. A Diplomat can prepare very well for a negotiation and think that he knows the other side very well. But when he comes to the table, he finds out that there are a lot of surprises there. That also the other side prepared very well, and he is surprising him with a different skim or a different mind-set. And of course we are talking about parties that do not necessarily share the same values, concept, culture, mind-sets, so very many differences.
(17:38) So the first thing, I think, is really to create at least some music between the sides, between the parties. To find the right path in order to reach this same goal, whether it is peace, or something close to that, or a compromise. And this is certainly a long effort, a tiring one, this is maybe something that does defer between us, diplomat, to musicians.
(18:46) And in this regard, I believe that if diplomats would have been good musicians, they could have done much better.
Yaron Herman
(12:21) “When you are a diplomat you are necessarily representing a country. Music has this power of bypassing identities. It’s kind of a global, more basic human need. It goes beyond social backgrounds, beyond the country where you were born. It allows you to use your culture to connect with other people.”
(12:52) “In a way I believe that musician do have a role to play in the sense that by making music with other people from different cultures, you kind of enrich your own culture and create dialogue. That’s what music is all about. Sharing something that is really common to the human experience.”