Roger Waters’ support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel shows just how much of an anomaly he is at this week’s Desert Trip festival — not to mention in the wider artistic community.
Roger Waters expends a great deal of energy attempting to convince artists to embrace the cultural boycott of Israel and refrain from performing there. He is one of the most vocal supporters of the movement and by far the most celebrated musician to have embraced it.
Four out of the other five acts at Desert Trip, however — The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Neil Young — have been victimized by — and explicitly rejected — BDS pressure, including personal appeals from Roger himself.
Any artist who schedules a performance in Israel is subjected to a constant flow of false and inflammatory pressure by supporters of the cultural boycott who attempt to manipulate them into canceling their show. They accuse Israel of apartheid and genocide — accusations which can be proven false with even a modicum of research — using and abusing the struggles of others, and the emotional responses they trigger, in their battle against the Jewish state.
Though it often presents itself as a movement working to achieve Palestinian rights, to the founders and the leaders of the BDS movement, it is merely a tool to end the existence of the State of Israel. This violent aim is sometimes reflected in the tactics of boycott supporters.
Paul McCartney last performed in Israel in 2008. Though he received intense pressure to cancel his show — including death threats — he went ahead and performed. He is not alone in receiving violent threats from BDS supporters.
English rocker Eric Burdon and Malian musician Salif Keita reported the same. Though Mr. Burdon performed despite the threats, Mr. Keita’s management decided to cancel the show in order “to protect the artist from being harmed personally and professionally” by “a group named BDS, who also threatened to keep increasing an anti-Salif Keita campaign…and to work diligently at ruining the reputation and career that Mr. Keita has worked 40 years to achieve not only professionally, but for human rights and albinism,” according to a statement he released.
In 2014, the Rolling Stones performed for more than 50,000 Israelis — after they stood up to boycott pressure, including a personal appeal from Roger Waters. What is less known is that the seed that led the Stones to perform in Israel was planted by Bob Dylan shortly before his own show in Tel Aviv in 2011.
“Bob Dylan was coming off stage,” Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood said, “and I asked him – ‘where you going?’ and he said, ‘Israel – we’re going to Tel Aviv! He had a big smile on his face, because he loves it. And I said to him, ‘well, we’ve never done it.’ That planted a seed that I’d like to play it one day. So, here we go…”
Recent Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan even wrote a song about Israel and its struggle to survive in a tough neighborhood in 1983, criticizing the fact that some characterize the country as the neighborhood bully. “The neighborhood bully just lives to survive / He’s criticized and condemned for being alive / He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin / He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in / He’s the neighborhood bully.”
Neil Young was scheduled to perform only a month after the Stones, in July, 2014. For months, he was subjected to an intense barrage of pressure from BDS supporters — perhaps more intense than the other three combined — also including direct outreach from Roger Waters. To get to Neil, BDS activists manipulated the cause of the First Nations in Canada (a cause close to Neil’s heart), falsely comparing their history to that of the Palestinians and completely ignoring any Jewish connection to the land. The use of emotional triggers to the detriment of fact is a common BDS tactic.
In the end, the choice was not his. Shortly before his scheduled performance, it was canceled by the Israeli security services “in order not to put people in Gaza rocket range at unnecessary risk,” as thousands and thousands of rockets were fired toward Israeli population centers by the terrorist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“It is with heavy hearts and deep sadness that we must cancel our one and only Israeli concert due to tensions which have rendered the event unsafe at this time,” a spokesman for Neil Young said. “We’ll miss the opportunity to play for our fans and look forward to playing in Israel and Palestine in peace.”
We at Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), an organization comprised of prominent members of the entertainment industry devoted to promoting the arts as a means to peace and to countering the cultural boycott of Israel, applaud The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Neil Young for their willingness to stand up to boycott pressure and perform for their fans in Israel.
Hundreds of artists do the same every year, creating spaces for Arabs and Jews, religious and secular, left and right to come together, sing together, dance together, and perhaps just lay down one more brick on the path to peace.
Roger Waters, on the other hand, continues to lend his voice to a movement dedicated to keeping Jews and Arabs apart and ultimately to dismantling the State of Israel. He compares Israel to Nazis and Nazi collaborators, an ugly and libelous attack, describes the country as a “systematic racist apartheid regime,” and talks about classic anti-Semitic tropes such as the “Jewish Lobby.”
We hope that Roger will be positively influenced by his colleagues, cease spreading untruths and misinformation that only fan the flames of conflict, and rather use his considerable voice to unite.
Billboard ran a story earlier in the week about the first ever Palestine music expo with many factual inaccuracies, including referring to Ramallah, Haifa and Jerusalem as “three Palestinian cities,” and referring to the “sovereign state” of Palestine. A few of our board members wrote to Billboard calling for a correction, which the website did make. See our letter to the editor & the original article below.
Lettor to the editor:
In Billboard’s 10/3 story, ‘Palestine Music Expo, with Cooking Vinyl and Glastonbury Co-Sign, Looks to Draw Attention to a Burgeoning Industry,’ writer Richard Smirke refers to Palestine as a ‘sovereign state’ and further cites the ‘…Palestinian cities Ramallah, Haifa and Jerusalem.’ While the current situation in Israel can often be complex and impassioned, these two statements are blatantly false and incendiary. To casually drop such confrontational terminology into a soft-news piece is not only politically insensitive but also journalistically irresponsible.
As a Co-founder of Creative Community For Peace, we applaud and support any arts festival in Israel that brings artists and audiences together in music, creativity and constructive dialog. However, we find the use of such antagonistic terms to be disturbing. We may not all share the same politics or the same opinion on the best path to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, but we do agree that cultural boycotts (advocated by many Palestinians against Israel) and combative semantics will not advance hopes for diplomatic co-existence.
Furthermore, the article neglects to explore – or even mention – the Palestinians well-documented policy of ‘anti-normalization,’ whereby Palestinians are encouraged and/or threatened not to play with Israelis, and international acts that play in Israel are not welcomed to Palestinian territories. “Anti-normalization,” explains Haaretz, “seeks to police all interactions between Israelis and Palestinians, and, as such, disrupts programs that it perceives as being unaligned with its agenda. This makes life particularly hard for those of us in the ‘people-to-people’ community – who bring Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians together in school, agricultural, high-tech and advocacy programs.”
Independent artists including Madonna, Elton John, Santana, Alicia Keys, One Republic, Robbie Williams, Rihanna, Alanis Morissette, Alicia Keys, Macy Gray, Paul McCartney, Baaba Maal, Black Eyed Peas, Missy Elliot, Metallica, Linkin Park, Lady Gaga, Seal, Erykah Badu and many others have refused to bow to pressure from such organizations, and have enthusiastically performed – to audiences of every nationality – in Israel. We also don’t see any inclusion of Israeli artists who have collaborated with Muslim and Arab musicians and promote co-existence, such as David Broza or Idan Raichel. CCFP would welcome the opportunity to discuss our ongoing efforts to support and encourage these artists, promote the arts as a means to resolution, and correct the aggressive misinformation of movements like BDS (the boycott Israel movement).
We respectfully request that Billboard correct the misstatements described above and allow us to present the other side of this discussion – one of which you were apparently not aware – in the interests of fair journalism, freedom of artistic expression, and promoting positive dialogue that can continue to build bridges.
Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) is an organization dedicated to promoting the arts as a bridge to peace and to countering the cultural boycott of Israel. CCFP is comprised of people from a cross-section of the cultural world who represent a broad range of opinions on politics and on the best path to resolving the conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis. But we all agree that singling out Israel as a target of cultural boycotts will not further peace.
