Parading round the racist spoils,
white settler man groomed
to ignore bantustans,
compassion erased by genocide,
each word sung an arrow of malice
shot by the oppressor into
the hearts of the oppressed,
here is a cave wherein
light does not reach.
November 2017
Shallow Cave decides to play apartheid because he doesn’t like lists, and it’s all about him and his feelings of being silenced and bullied, never mind the cries of oppressed Palestinian people for justice and rights and several generations of colonial bullying by their zionist oppressors. With bitter irony, Cave will now be added by the Israeli hasbara machine to its list of artists which it uses as ammunition to continue its brutalisation and deprivation of Palestinians.
In his press conference statement, Cave complained about feeling cowardly for not playing Israel sooner, yet it is truly the coward’s path to side with power against those who are being crushed by it. Cave exposes his own white settler ideological origins.
“It’s no secret that Israel systematically uses performances by artists to normalise its racist, discriminatory system that oppresses me, my loved ones and every Palestinian.” Palestinian musician Rima Nasir calls on Nick Cave to support the boycott of apartheid Israel, or he’ll be used as a stick by the Israeli regime to beat the oppressed.
Dear @nickcave Are you seeing the refugee camps? The apartheid wall? The illegal colonies stealing land? Can you see besieged Gaza? Why won’t you hear #Palestinians?
https://twitter.com/DPAI1/status/931869972854341632
Is @nickcave taking a guided tour with a key ‘Brand Israel’ tourism agency, with a guide who just happens to have been a paratrooper on “the front lines” of major military assaults?
https://twitter.com/BFW_IL/status/931853247299678208
Israel’s cynical tactic of using culture as propaganda was promoted in 2005 by Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry:
“We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.” (Ha’aretz; 21/09/05)
Related Links
Nick Cave – Don’t Play Apartheid Israel
Open letter to singer Nick Cave from the Gaza war protesters he once supported
Nick Cave: A Journey from an Anglican God to the Creative Christ
Apartheid Israel demonizes and pathologizes Palestinians whom it cages in the Gaza bantustan to “justify” its persecution of them. This is how genocidal settler colonialism propagandizes to obscure its criminality.
From Boycott from Within to Nick Cave:
“Your claim that somehow we have the ability, or the will to silence you is fallacious, and it rings careless in the face of the fact that Palestinian culture and heritage, along with its people, has been undergoing Israel’s erasure for the past seven decades. So successful was this erasure, that you neglected to mention Palestinians in your own statement, as if they aren’t the reason you felt you had to make the statement in the first place. As if they don’t exist.”
Nick Cave’s arrogant colonial stance is highlighted in the music press, sure to increase self-indulgent white supremacist shame, guilt and victimhood :
In response, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (a founding organization in the BDS Movement) has released a new statement. “Nick Cave’s performances in Tel Aviv and recent statement are a propaganda gift to Israeli apartheid,” they write. “We thank Nick Cave for making one thing abundantly clear—playing Tel Aviv is never simply about music. It is a political and moral decision to stand with the oppressor against the oppressed.” The independent initiative Artists for Palestine UK also issued a statement to Pitchfork, saying, “Artists for Palestine UK thinks it is Palestinians who are daily humiliated and silenced. It regrets that in a land of injustice, Nick Cave is giving comfort to the unjust.”