ANTWERP, Belgium -- From where I stood it seemed touch and go whether the Jewish businessman was actually going to slug the chief of the Flanders Opera, Aviel Cahn, a young Swiss-born Jew (a glass-jawed bantamweight, by the looks of him) in an ascot and important glasses.

The face-off started after a public round table at the opera house the other night about politics and art. Saint-Saëns's "Samson et Dalila," directed by an Israeli, Omri Nitzan, and a Palestinian, Amir Nizar Zuabi, was to have its premiere the next evening.

For the round table the two directors joined a Belgian director, Guy Cassiers; Annemie Neyts, a Flemish politician with the European Parliament; Jan Leyers, a local television host; and me, who somehow ended up stuck among the antagonists, desperate to get out of the way, like the referee during the boxing scene in Chaplin's "City Lights."

A handful of agitated Antwerp Jews, part of the round table audience, took umbrage, the businessman among them, at the production. They felt they had an inkling of what was in store (not altogether wrongly, as it turned out) from advertisements plastered around town showing a stone-throwing Palestinian boy...

...Finding parables for today's Middle East doesn't take much imagination. Savvy directors don't belabor the point. Mr. Nitzan and Mr. Zuabi, however, turn the Hebrews into Palestinians, the Philistines into Israelis, and Samson into a suicide bomber, donning a dynamite-loaded vest when the curtain falls.

That comes after Jews, in fancy dress, dance atop a shiny, black, two-tiered set, oblivious to the swarm of robed Palestinians under their feet. In another scene Dalila's Jewish handmaidens, in red underpants, sprawl on their backs, legs spread in the air, helping to seduce Samson. Samson and Dalila court by pointing a pistol at each other. Young Israeli soldiers clad in black humiliate blindfolded Palestinians and shoot a Palestinian child, who reappears as a kind of leitmotif during the opera like the holy spear in "Parsifal." Then, for the appalling bacchanal in the last act, a disaster in most productions, Israeli soldiers dance orgiastically with their phallic rifles.

That scene was too much even for the polite Belgian crowd on opening night. A smattering of boos sprinkled down on the dancers. Otherwise the performance, dully sung, received several rounds of generous applause. This is Western Europe...

...a panel discussion apropos of a 19th-century French opera devolved into a shouting match about life-and-death matters, with warnings from that irate businessman, who identified himself as a Jewish entrepreneur with family going back generations in Antwerp. When the round table ended, he made a beeline for Mr. Cahn, at the moment arguing gamely with me on behalf of the opera. I tried vainly to evaporate. Red faced, spewing insults and standing nose to nose with the Flanders Opera's general director, the businessman predicted the production would stir up anti-Semitism, which festers just below the surface here, he said, to which the flustered impresario blurted out that if the situation for Jews were really so precarious here, they should leave.

Oy.

He would have done better to thank the man for believing that opera matters so much.

And for not punching his lights out.