Politics

February 24, 2013December 11, 2020

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.

February 16, 2013August 24, 2022

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.

@translator_eli yes, I found that most contradictory @TenuredRadical

— Jinjirrie ??? (@Jinjirrie) February 13, 2013

Still waiting for a response to my ethical hypothetical @TenuredRadical http://t.co/lhlrOQge

— Jinjirrie ??? (@Jinjirrie) February 13, 2013

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.

January 28, 2013December 11, 2020

Please Join the Boycott of Apartheid Israel, Above and Beyond

Dear 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,

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

January 18, 2013December 11, 2020

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.

January 7, 2013December 11, 2020

On Educating Stanley : Analysis of the First 2013 BDS Victory

Educating Stanley Jordan: Facebook Showdown Produces BDS Victory to Ring in the New Year

by Rima Merriman
(this piece is a sequel to Rima’s first article on Stanley Jordan and BDS)

On January 5th, to everyone’s surprise, noted American jazz/jazz fusion guitarist and pianist Stanley Jordan posted this news that was music to the ears of BDS activists everywhere: “My performance at the Red Sea Jazz Festival has been cancelled. I apologize for any inconvenience to anyone.” Those who had been tracking the debacle will know that this is a reversal of his earlier decision, one in which he had announced he would go forward with his gig. Although he did not say why, or even attribute his own agency in his new announcement, the backlog on Facebook is telling.

On Dec. 24th, Jordan posted this update on his Facebook page explaining that he had “received several messages from people requesting that I cancel my performance at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Israel,” for which he was billed as the headlining artist for the Israeli festival (his image was used to create publicity posters in Hebrew for the state-funded event). In that initial post, he wrote:

I’ve received several messages from people requesting that I cancel my performance at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Israel. I promised a detailed response, so here it is. I would like to start a dialog right here to discuss this topic. Next to global warming the Middle East conflict is the biggest issue of our time, and it’s too important for black-and-white responses that ignore the nuances. And we truly need an open dialog with a spirit of mutual compassion for everyone involved. For my part, I want to use my talents and energies in the best possible way for the cause of peace. This purpose is deeply ingrained in my soul’s code, and I’ve known it since childhood. So the only remaining question is: How can I best accomplish this goal? I invite you all to weigh in. I’d like to start the discussion by recommending a wonderful book called, “Embracing Israel/Palestine: A Strategy to Heal and Transform the Middle East,” by Rabbi Michael Lerner. I’ve been reading a lot on this topic but this book stands out for me because it resonates with my own feelings. I encourage everyone to read it as background for our discussion. And please keep your comments clean and respectful. Let’s model the type of dialog that will eventually lead to a solution.

His invitation came on the heels of an unsuccessful attempt to secure the compliance of the academic and cultural boycott by another jazz musician, Native American poet Joy Harjo who rejected the call and went ahead with her performance at Tel Aviv University. In that case, the “dialogue” was derailed from the get go by both her obvious disingenuous claims to solidarity with the Palestinian people and the persistent efforts of Zionist trolls that ended up colonizing her Facebook timeline. As such, Jordan’s announcement posed a challenge for all BDS supporters, especially those who work in concert with the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Like Harjo, Jordan – as his subsequent Facebook comments revealed – had cited the spirit of his art and higher consciousness as a major reason for not honoring the international boycott.

The ensuing discussion on Jordan’s Facebook page was a remarkable drama for two reasons. For one thing, the hasbara trolls, who had plagued the discussion with Harjo, were nowhere to be found
until after (indeed, immediately after) Jordan announced his decision to cross the picket line. That announcement came on January 1st in a status update that read:

Our discussion revealed a crisis whose depth was even far greater than I had known, and I felt compelled to help. Like many others, I am deeply dedicated to the cause of world peace, and this situation goes against everything anyone with a heart could ever condone. However, after much consideration I concluded that the best way I could
serve the cause would be to do my performance as scheduled, but separately organize an event in a major city in the United States to raise funds and awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people.

Only after close to 600 comments (out of over 800 on that one thread) were posted by activists seeking to educate Jordan on all aspects of the plight of the Palestinians and the nature and objectives of the BDS appeal did the artist reveal that individuals from the Zionist contingent were in fact pressing their case with Jordan via private messages, out of the sight of the BDS activists.

Second, the absence of (overt) trolling allowed for an exemplary demonstration of what well-informed, dedicated BDS advocates can do with a thread if they are not constantly fending off accounts spouting Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs talking points. The result was passionate well-reasoned and forceful advocacy for the Palestinian cause from a diverse group of people on several continents, many of whom were unconnected with one another or had just become Facebook friends as a result of the virtual encounter. Palestinians, Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, Israelis, European-American settlers, Australians, Native Americans, and many others took part in the discussion which continued throughout New Year ’s Eve across various time zones on the globe.

It is worth asking why Jordan, who once publicly endorsed the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa, was ultimately not convinced by the extensive discussion in which he actively participated, and what, if anything, it tells us about the efforts of PACBI supporters. One also wonders what it was that made Jordan reconsider. It would be really useful if he were to make a full clear statement of support for BDS in the future.

The ebb and flow of the discussion [highlights on key issues can be found here, in what eventually turned out to be a long thread of over 800 posts, shows how well the activists’ comments elaborated on and complemented one another. One person would drop an idea out there, and someone else would pick up on it. Great care was taken to remain respectful, as people tried to understand Jordan’s frame of reference and engage him meaningfully within it without patronizing him. One turning point in the discussion was an explanation of what constitutes being “in solidarity” in the human and civil rights movements. “Being in solidarity,” wrote Adrian Boutureira Sansberro, “entails being able to take direction from those one claims to be in solidarity with. Learning how to take direction, as to what is it that those we are in solidarity with wish us to do, is a huge aspect of shifting the relationships of power between the oppressed and the oppressor. It is also a way to really come face to face with our own true commitment and power issues.”

One of the many things on which Jordan was called up is the claim that he had no prior political involvement as a musician. It became apparent, however, that he had, in fact, made very clear, public, and political statements on the subject of playing Sun City with fellow artists in 1987. At the time, Jordan had supported the spirit of the boycott but was never put to the test. But in the discussion thread, he waived off the contradiction between the principled stand he took then (and his position in support of various other human rights causes) on the one hand, and his reluctance to take a comparable stand on the boycott calls on the other. At that point in time, he appeared to want to have it both ways.

After Jordan made his January 1st decision not to support the boycott, some suggested that the entire dialogue was intended to provide cover to a decision Jordan never intended reconsidering. Others have pointed to the difficulty of responding to arguments one cannot see. I believed that, although he did come to see the justice of the Palestinian cause and even to sympathize with it, Jordan simply did not wish to let go of his gig for financial reasons (what he described as “the reality of my situation”). At one point in the discussion Jordan asked Israeli boycott supporters, “why should we outsiders bare [sic] the economic brunt of the boycotts? You want me to quit my job, so then shouldn’t you be quitting yours too? After all, any economic activity aids Israel and can be seen as de facto normalization.” In answer to that, people, of course, pointed out that being asked to cancel a gig is not the same as quitting a job.

Anyone who studies the thread can easily see that, throughout the discussion, Jordan and his publicist (who eventually jumped into the discussion in his stead) were searching for a line that would validate his strong desire to keep the gig but that would also allow Jordan to sympathize or “ally” himself (as opposed to being in solidarity) with the Palestinian people (hence, the charity concert that would follow in the United States). At that time, Jordan kept insisting that, as a musician he had no political role to play (even as it was made crystal clear to him that he himself was, in fact, being played by Israel’s politicians). He was just a guitar player. He felt his music went “to the heart of the subjective, interior dimension, and the world of all things spiritual” and had the power to “influence humans to be more humane”, so he just wanted to perform and to leave it up to his Israeli audience to “decide for themselves how to use the inspiration”.

Once his first frame of reference as represented by Lerner’s book was summarily critiqued, Jordan kept introducing into the discussion therapeutic frameworks, such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the study of the structure of subjective experience. He ultimately turned away from Ali Abunimah’s vision in One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, which posits that a principled and sustained campaign to impose a cost for Israeli government abuses of Palestinians would, in fact, ease tensions. As Abunimah puts it, once “freed from the hardships of occupation, discrimination, and exile, and engaged by Israeli counterparts genuinely interested in building a tolerant, multicultural, multireligious society, the Palestinian majority would gladly, forgivingly, and open-mindedly choose the same course.” To Jordan, it seemed that would never happen, unless people were “getting along first” – a catch 22.

Jordan’s initial inability to grasp even rudimentary facts about the campaign turned his statement, “You’re also educating me so that I can hopefully someday speak intelligently on this matter” into a farcical proposition. The Palestine Chronicle published an article I wrote after the January 1st announcement he would play, “Stanley Jordan: You Don’t Get to Peace without Real Solidarity”, in which this point was made: “Jordan is now trying to justify his decision by expressing inchoate beliefs about the power of his art to achieve “world peace” by “changing consciousness” while propounding the notion that the boycott undermines the freedom of the artist and limits the transformative power he possesses over his audience.

Now, in light of Jordan’s January 5th announcement that he will not play, he has demonstrated his decision to stand on the right side of history. Still, it would be ideal if he would issue a statement that explains what finally lead him to respect the boycott. But regardless, BDS activists who worked tirelessly to educate Jordan can claim this a victory – and we can all surmise that it was his conscience that prompted him to do the right thing.

Tag: Politics