Tag: BDS

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WOMADelaide, Please Respect the Boycott of Apartheid Israel

From March 8 to 11, 2013, Adelaide is the venue of one of the most well-known music and culture festivals – WOMADelaide – the World of Music, Arts & Dance in Australia. This year, along with featuring legends like Jimmy Cliff and Hugh Masekela, prominent in their opposition to apartheid in South Africa, and Tuba Skinny, who respected the boycott of Israel, WOMADelaide is giving venue to the Alaev family, who are sponsored by the Israeli government through its embassy in Australia.

Israel’s international cultural exports who receive governement sponsorship are contractually obligated to promote the state as a condition of their sponsorship.

If they receive funding by the state, Israeli artists who play internationally are expected to be political ambassadors and must sign contracts which declare their cooperation with state marketing aims. The standard Israeli sponsorship contract states:

“The service provider [or in English, the artist] is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel.

The Israeli regime has long used all culture as propaganda unashamedly. In 2005, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry emphasised:

“We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.”

Artists Against Apartheid Australia has published an open letter to WOMADelaide, emailed to WOMADelaide on February 3rd:

To the organisers of the WOMADelaide festival

We, Artists Against Apartheid Australia, members of an international movement of artists, noticed with disappointment that WOMADelaide, which we respect greatly as one of the worlds most exciting world music festivals, has received sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy in Australia to support the performance of the Alaev Family. We believe that this support should be rejected.

Many of us have visited Palestine and have seen first hand the way Palestinians in the west bank are treated by Israeli authorities. Israel restricts Palestinian freedom of movement and of speech; and imprisons without charge or trial Palestinian human rights defenders. Israeli authorities, on a daily basis, inflict humiliation and violence at the more than 600 military checkpoints and roadblocks. All the while, Israel continues to build its illegal wall on Palestinian land and to support the ever-expanding network of illegal, Jewish-only settlements that divide the West Bank into Bantustans. In Gaza, Palestinians are subject to a brutal siege and Israeli military assaults. As part of Israel’s siege, various types of medicines, candles, books, crayons, clothing, shoes, blankets, pasta, tea, coffee and chocolate are prevented from entering Gaza, but also musical instruments.

The treatment of Palestinians by Israel has been likened to the former apartheid regime in South Africa by respected former activists who were involved in the South African anti-apartheidmovement (including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela).

The policy of using culture to whitewash Israeli violations of international law was openly confirmed by the Israeli government with the launch of a global ‘Brand Israel’ campaign. According to an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson, the objective of this rebranding campaign, which “could include organizing film festivals,” is to convey the message that “a better image for Israel and a better performance of that image is part and parcel [of] Israel’s national security. Contrary to popular belief, national security is not just based on military power, it’s also a strong economy and a strong image” [1]. This language reveals – as did similar endeavours by the South African Apartheid regime – a cynical and systematic attempt at manipulating world opinion. It aims to obfuscate the real nature of Israel’s military occupation and apartheid and to divert attention from its ongoing war crimes by portraying it as a vibrant, cultural and artistic hub.

We have noted that many of the performers who are a part of the program have a history of taking a stand against racism and apartheid and we eagerly await your response before we contact these artists to let them know your festival has received sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy. We particularly note the presence on the bill of a number of South African performers whose countries history is blighted by the stain of Apartheid and whose country is now a leading supporter of the Palestinian struggle against Apartheid Israel.

Increasingly performers around the world are heading the boycott and refusing to perform in Israel. Many have cancelled their shows after requests from their fans. The boycott has been supported by many prominent artists from the film director Ken Loach to former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters and the author Alice Walker. Many more musicians such as Carlos Santana and Elvis Costello have also cancelled and in recent years; Coldplay, U2 and Bruce Springsteen have declined invitations to play in Israel without supporting the boycott publicly. Just recently Stanley Jordan, the headline performer at the Red Sea Jazz Festival cancelled his performance in Israel. A number of other renowned performers due to perform at this festival also cancelled their shows. A full round up of the growing International Boycott in 2012 can be found at http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=2094 .

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the State of Israel is a growing world movement in support of the Palestinian people and the Cultural and Academic boycott is a very important part of this campaign. http://www.bdsmovement.net/

The boycott call was issued on July 9th in 2005 by over 171 Palestinian civil-society organisations, who called on the international community to implement the BDS campaign against Israel. Inspired by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian-initiated BDS campaign is conducted in a similar framework of international solidarity and resistance to injustice and oppression and calls for popular resistance through the BDS campaign until Israel complies with international law and meets its obligations towards the Palestinian people.

We therefore respectfully ask you to reject all support for WOMAdelaide from the Apartheid State of Israel.

Yours sincerely

Artists Against Apartheid Australia

http://artistsagainstapartheid.org.au/

A response to this letter from the WOMADelaide organisers, which to date has not been forthcoming, would be welcome.

People can let WOMADelaide know about the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions and persuade them not to accept Israeli government funding by tweeting @WOMADelaide, contacting them on their facebook group, or emailing

Don’t Play Apartheid Israel
We are a group, of over 1000 members, representing many nations around the globe, who believe that it is essential for musicians & other artists to heed the call of the PACBI, and join in the boycott of Israel. This is essential in order to work towards justice for the Palestinian people under occupation, and also in refugee camps and in the diaspora throughout the world.

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On Potter’s Field

Over at the Tenured Radical blog, I entered into a slippery tangle.

Writhing with counter-factual assertions, fallacious assumptions and revealing an obvious lack of familiarity with the PACBI academic boycott guidelines, the following passage from Professor Claire Potter’s initial post on BDS required challenge.

This receives too little attention in my view, and Butler’s wise remarks about academic freedom raise new questions about a political strategy that violates longstanding principles of scholarly exchange across national and political lines. I have never understood why I should embrace an undemocratic response to the Israeli state’s horrendous failure of democracy; or why an ideologically rigid, if secular, strategy is a morally appropriate counterweight to enforcing a conservative theocratic interpretation of history on the Palestinian people. I also don’t think that there is any good historical evidence that silencing intellectual, academic and cultural workers on a comprehensive basis, and preventing any exchange of ideas between the Israel and the United States, will have any effect on Israeli politics whatsoever beyond isolating progressive intellectuals in Israel. I cannot imagine it would do anything but promote further ignorance and polarization, giving the political organizations on the ground in Israel and the Occupied Territories the upper hand in fashioning information and arguments to promote their own positions.

Question: am I supposed to boycott the Israeli colleagues and friends I already have too? Or just the ones I don’t know yet? Enquiring minds want to know.

I also do not think that BDS, despite its commitment to nonviolence, adequately addresses the question of existing and past violence in the anti-colonial struggle. US intellectuals give the movement to end the occupation a pass on this too easily, in my view, betraying a romance with revolutionary politics that has a long and troubling intellectual history among American intellectuals. For example, on this page I see calls for a military embargo of Israel, but not a military embargo of the region or an embargo of arms to all militant groups in the Occupied Territories. This might lead to a discussion about why Israel and its many antagonists mutually refuse to renounce violence and negotiate; about the international arms trade that flourishes in the Middle East; and about whether BDS supports ongoing paramilitary and terrorist attacks in the region by non-Israeli forces despite its own commitment to nonviolent action.

Ali Abunimah’s response provides a concise overall view of Potter’s blog post:

One would have hoped that the “Tenured Radical” would have bothered to learn something about the BDS movement before pronouncing on it with such ill-informed gusto. There’s so much that is breathtakingly wrong with this, but I will focus on only one little example. Potter writes

Question: am I supposed to boycott the Israeli colleagues and friends I already have too? Or just the ones I don’t know yet? Enquiring minds want to know.

If she had bothered to learn about the movement or its principles, she would know that the guidelines published by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (http://pacbi.org), absolutely do not call for a boycott of individuals of any nationality. It calls for a boycott of institutions.

It would take too long to refute the amateur and ad hoc arguments Potter makes, so I will simply recommend that people bamboozled by this post read Omar Barghouti’s book “BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights” (Haymarket, 2011), which addresses every one of these claims, and does much more to explain what BDS is and stands for.

I put the following to Potter:

Dear Professor Potter

I acknowledge your unfamiliarity with the substance and logic of the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions and hope you will rectify this through the excellent material which has been offered. I have a few questions for you to consider.

Would you have supported a continuance of Jim Crow in the US in order to preserve the privilege of the white majority in order to avoid ‘the question of existing and past violence in the anti-colonial struggle’? would you have instructed Martin Luther King to cease his effective civil disobedience campaign on those grounds? are you making an exception for the non-violent tactic of BDS which is also a form of civil disobedience? are Palestinians less deserving human beings who should not avail themselves of civilised persuasive protest to achieve their rights, to end the systematic crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated against them for so long?

You say, ‘protest, engage and discuss’.

Do you understand the function of dialogue in the context of co-resistance to a noxious system of tyranny, compared to a chorus of sweet yet ineffectual noises framed duplicitously as ‘peace and dialogue’ convenient to well-meaning liberals who thereby can avoid the choice to stand with the oppressed against their oppressor, and which drowns out deepening insistence for justice, rights and freedom of oppressed Palestinians? Do you understand what Martin Luther King meant when he talked of a ‘negative peace’?

Potter replied:

I think that instead of acknowledge you should be more honest and say that this is your judgement/view/position. I get it that the idea that I *could* be familiar with BDS and be skeptical of it is unimaginable to the crowd here, which has responded by calling me ignorant, racist, “liberal” (horrors!), adn whatever is worse than liberal. You have all had your say.

I answered:

Claire,

Recognising your unfamiliarity with BDS as amply demonstrated in your post and highlighted by numerous posters on this thread is a polite kindness to you. One would not like to think you had deliberately misrepresented the BDS call in bad faith.

I am hoping that you can engage with and discuss the questions I have put to you in the spirit that they were offered.

No response.

Elsewhere Potter posted:

I don’t think I am unideological, and would have clarified this had anyone asked in such a straightforward and civil way in the first 117 comments before yours. It’s that I reject the four positions that are offered, and that this debate in the comments quickly evolved into: pro/anti Palestinian; pro/anti Israel. I think the claim that the BDS academic/cultural boycott is capable of that is at best unproven, and at worst a romance about what it means to do effective political work. That said, I think it is possible to create effective transnational projects that do ethical and humanitarian work, serve as centers for discussion and exchange, and transformation, projects that evade the four political choices: there’s a summer children’s camp, for example, that has for several decades brought Israeli and Palestinian children together on neutral ground. But other, more explicitly political projects could do that too. I find the assertion that there is *nothing* outside politics both familiar and something we might want to experiment with resisting. Politics doesn’t seem to be doing very well nowadays, does it? And the idea that sanctions against Israel will be effective (Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria) I find puzzling.

I queried:

Would you accept a guest lecture at a university that was fully complicit with a war criminal genocidal state, where you knew in advance that your presentation there was going to assist and be used as whitewash by the state in order to commit and cover up further atrocities, Claire?

‘summer children’s camp, for example, that has for several decades
brought Israeli and Palestinian children together on neutral ground’

And there’s that ‘chorus of sweet yet ineffectual noises framed duplicitously as ‘peace and dialogue” to which I referred earlier, where it is imagined that under a system of apartheid and colonialism, that there is ‘neutral ground’.

Again, no response.

Potter then closed that blog post for comments.

Potter’s ‘old friend and colleague’, Dr. David Shorter, had his response published as a new blog post.

Potter posted a comment:

My principles are a commitment to free speech, freedom and democracy. I think that is perfectly clear in the post if it is read in a straightforward way. Censorship doesn’t forward that project, not even as a temporary strategy. Nor does mockery, charges of racism, vilification, or twisting my words to argue that I am forwarding a secret agenda or am too ignorant of the “facts” and cannot read/understand the document I have linked to and quoted. Peace out.

In response, I rephrased my questions, hoping again to receive a reasoned reply.

May I explore your embrace of free speech, freedom and democracy?

If you are asked by people who are not free to deny your speech requested by a state institution which intends to use your oration to demonstrate falsely that all is normal with state deprivation of liberty and democracy from those it oppresses and thereby oppress them further, which do you choose – to indulge the state and enjoy your ‘free speech’ at the expense of those who are without rights, or to respect the request for non-cooperation from those whom the state denies rights?

Is the latter option a form of boycott which you would support?

No reply.

Further down I observed in regard to the top-mentioned Potter problematic passage:

I am surprised that Potter is not owning her fallacies and assumptions which you have quoted above, Rima. Perhaps she is reconsidering her position in light of her acquainting herself with the actual substance of the cultural and academic boycott at http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate…

Briefly, here are her unsupported assumptions and fallacious understanding of the PACBI guidelines and their implementation which Potter needs to
correct:

“undemocratic response”
“ideologically rigid”
“conservative theocratic interpretation of history”
“silencing intellectual, academic and cultural workers on a comprehensive basis, and preventing any exchange of ideas etc”
“I cannot imagine etc …”

Can Potter answer her rhetorical question about boycotting individuals yet?

Why does Potter conflate non-violent BDS with violence? what is going on here in her dishonest representation?

A spatter of tweets ensued wherein I attempted to elicit a response to my ethics hypothetical.

Potter banned me on her blog – a first for me – and blocked me on twitter. She complained in her latest hyperbolic tirade:

‘I also want to reiterate the comments policy:

There will be no purely personal attacks, no using the comments section to tease someone else relentlessly, and no derailing the comments thread into personal hobbyhorses. Violators will be dealt with politely and swiftly. Too many people at AHA told me that they were avid readers, but never commented, because the atmosphere in the comments section is so ugly. Let’s make it a group project in 2013 to change that.

Clearly my many detractors of the last few days didn’t get the memo, although I suspect many of them wouldn’t care if they had. I promised I would put this policy in the sidebar, and now I will. Five hard-core commenters who cannot, and will not, agree to disagree have been banned.’ .

I shall leave the reader to judge whether my contributions constitute ‘hard-core’ commenting that transgressed Potter’s comments policy. Folks might also note that Potter consistently rode roughshod over her own policy.

And here I languish in what one recent commenter has identified as “Potter’s Field” ….

Readers who wish to familiarise themselves with the actual content of the academic boycott guidelines to avoid misrepresentation can do so here and may also read the excellent contributions on the two blog posts on Potter’s blog from Professor Rima Najjar, Matt Graber, Ali Abunimah, Elise Hendrick, Lisa Duggan and others here and here.

UPDATE 16/2/13

Potter’s handwringing over-dramatisation continues on Storify, where she likens being in Potter’s Field to death, falsely attributing this lurid characterisation to me. If chronicling Potter’s misrepresentations is ‘obsessive’, then how should one describe her own commentary? The lengths to which Potter has gone to obscure the fact she has avoided answering my hypothetical is extraordinary.

RELATED LINKS

When Radical Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

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African National Congress Supports Palestinian BDS

From the Resolutions of the 53rd Conference of the ANC held in December 2012:

35. Palestine:
a. The ANC re-affirms the resolution of its 52nd National Conference in Polokwane on the on Palestinian question.

b. The ANC supports the application of Palestine for statehood and full membership to the UN and, therefore, supports the UN General Assembly Resolution granting Palestine a nonmember observer state as an important step towards that goal.

c. The ANC is unequivocal in its support for the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination, and unapologetic in its view that the Palestinians are the victims and the oppressed in the conflict with Israel.

d. The ANC will continue its solidarity efforts supporting a just solution including the strengthening of a sovereign independent state of Palestine, which will help to bring peace to the region and end conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

e. The ANC calls on the Israeli government to release all political prisoners, to immediately cease the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and to stop the wanton and consistent attacks on Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

f. The ANC calls on all organisations in support of the people of Palestine to form a united solidarity campaign in a view of strengthening the South African solidarity forum.

g. The ANC calls on all South Africans to support the programmes and campaigns of the Palestinian civil society which seek to put pressure on Israel to engage with the Palestinian people to reach a just solution.

h. The ANC calls upon all Palestinian political formations to put aside their differences and continue to work together for unity.

i. In support of the Non-Aligned Movement’s call, the ANC-led government will continue to insist on the labelling of imported goods indicating their areas of origin.

j. The ANC abhors the recent Israeli state-sponsored xenophobic attacks and deportation of people of African origin and request that this matter should be escalated to the AU.

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Please Join the Boycott of Apartheid Israel, Above and Beyond

Above and BeyondDear Above and Beyond members Paavo Siljamäki, Jono Grant, and Tony McGuinness,

We are writing to ask you to seriously consider cancelling your gig planned for February 21 in Tel Aviv. Your cancellation would send an effective, truthful message to young people in Israel: Apartheid is unacceptable.

For change to occur, the status quo cannot be supported. One part of the current routine is for trance artists such as yourselves to fly quietly to Tel Aviv, perform for throngs of Israelis and, at times, even for a few Palestinians with Israeli identification cards.

The other part of the present routine is to ignore Israel’s crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel’s medieval siege upon the over 1.6 million people of Gaza is a crime of collective punishment, defying international law, and violating the most basic human rights. Like it or not your audience in Tel Aviv, liberal as they may seem when they are dancing late into the night, largely support that unconscionable siege. Your gigs in Israel only help to reassure them that all is well, that any discomforting awareness can be suppressed in dance and they should continue not to question their state despite its crimes against humanity.

Yet can music really be completely separate from politics? In the case of Israel, it cannot. The act of performing in Israel is interpreted and broadcast as support and propaganda for the state through a willingness to violate the boycott call made in 2005 by Palestinian Civil Society. On the other hand, simply refraining from playing in Israel is a quiet, neutral stand to take. Lastly, speaking out in support of the boycott is a clear stand against apartheid. Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, for example, has taken the latter route, asking his colleagues in the music industry to support the boycott. [1] Portico Quartet also chose to vocally support the boycott, after cancelling their gig planned for this month.[2]

We are asking you to at least take a neutral stand and quietly refrain from playing in Israel. Better yet, we are asking you to appraise the information about the reasons for boycott, and vocally support it. Dave Randall is an example of one of several artists who worked in a collaborative effort to create amazing musical support for Palestine, as well as vocal encouragement for the boycott.[3]

Plans for Lollapalooza Israel were recently scrapped because organizers could not recruit international artists who would agree to perform in Israel, the number of artists willing to play there is dwindling.[4]

Why should trance artists be any different? Trance musicians are also afforded a great opportunity to take a stand for justice. Paavo Siljamäki, Jono Grant, and Tony McGuinness, this is your choice, your opportunity, and now is the time, make your trance music group go way above and beyond, support justice and call out against apartheid, don’t return for a third time to Israel.

Warm Regards,

Don’t Play Apartheid Israel
We are a group, of over 1000 members, representing many nations around the globe, who believe that it is essential for musicians & other artists to heed the call of the PACBI, and join in the boycott of Israel. This is essential in order to work towards justice for the Palestinian people under occupation, and also in refugee camps and in the diaspora throughout the world.

Trance Addicts Against Israeli Apartheid
We are a newly formed group dedicated to the advocacy and promotion of a trance music boycott of Israel.

[1] Tear down this Israeli wall: I want the music industry to support Palestinians’ rights and oppose this inhumane barrier by Roger Waters
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/11/cultural-boycott-west-bank-wall

[2] Portico Quartet Respects the Boycott of Israel
http://refrainplayingisrael.blogspot.com/2012/12/portico-quartet-respects-boycott-of.html

[3] Dave Randall interviewed about ‘Freedom for Palestine’ single
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=25100

[4] Party’s over for Perry Farrell: Lollapalooza Israel collapses as artists said to stay away http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/partys-over-perry-farrell-lollapalooza-israel-collapses-artists-said-stay-away

SOURCE

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Lollapartheid Off the Menu of Lollapalooza Festival!

Great news of another early 2013 victory for boycott, divestment and sanctions of apartheid Israel! Lollapalooza Israel 2013 has been removed from the official Lollapalooza site and apparently cancelled according to this Ynet report:

‘… plans to hold the American Lollapalooza music festival in Israel in the summer have apparently been cancelled.

Although the Israeli producers denied the report, all Israel-related content has been removed from the festival’s official website.’

The Ynet Hebrew report gives a bit more detail:

“there were many difficulties in recruiting famous artists to take part in the festival..”

Thanks to the courageous bands and musicians who have refused to breach the boycott, following efforts to make them aware of the necessity to respect the Palestinian-led boycott by Lollapartheid Israel: Artists of Conscience, Respect the Boycott and Boycott from Within!

Official news of the cancellation of the Israeli Lollapartheid festival is now awaited.