Read the inspirational letter from singer Joss Stone on her performance in Tel Aviv, calling the very idea of BDS counterproductive and discriminatory.
“Dear music lovers !
I just want to make a quick comment on my gig in Israel…
Firstly, I LOVED the experience of playing in this place… Mainly because of the people. Because of their beautiful spirit. Because of their warmth and kindness, their ability to let go and feel. Music did that, not me.
And Secondly I’d like to say how pleased I am when I read comments from people who clearly understand the point of the world tour, and how sorry I am that so many of you had to enter into arguments on whether I should have visited Israel or not. Thank you for standing up for us and our mission at hand.
What we are trying to achieve whilst running from country to country on this literal total world tour is simply to spread love and joy through music. Excluding no one. I do not discriminate.
I’m not trying to make political statements I am just trying to spread good feeling to everyone I can. I do not blame millions of individuals for what their government has chosen. As I hope people don’t blame me and my family for what our government has done. I treat each person the same until given a direct reason not to.
If we want to discount the people of countries that have done dreadful things then we would only have the Antarctic left. ‘He who is with out sin cast the first stone’.
We can not live our lives speaking of hate and sadness and then expect things to become brighter and more peaceful. To condemn those you have never met in the hope for peace is quite simply counter productive. To put it as politely I can … It is a little bit silly. Some may even say foolish.
To dismiss our brothers and sisters of this world because you are angry at a creation of someone that lives on the same land as them is judgmental and actually quite nasty. You cannot feel justified in spreading bad feeling, ever. Maybe some people feel they are helping but please believe me when I tell you you are making it worse.
I understand the reasons people call for a boycott… I understand… But surely you want the boycott because you want peace, surely you want to spout anger because you want peace, surely you fight because you want peace… Well news flash…. Adding fire to fire just makes things hotter.
We are sad because we hear, see and live in amongst such terrible moments. Collectively we must try to hold on to our love for people. All people not just some but ALL! We become as bad as the ones we protest against when our words and decisions are coming from a place of hate.
I know sometimes it’s hard and can seem impossible but please use your love. It’s always there waiting to be tapped into. Don’t brush it to one side because you feel the need to make the world right and you think spreading hate, upset and destain will work… it will only add darkness to darkness. Useful? Nope.
Gandhi would probably word this much better than me but I guess in a nutshell… just be nice.
Don’t punish the general population. It is incorrect to do so and massively unkind.
So… bringing it back… I love my job. I love the people I meet through this musical connection. In every place I have been there has been a massive light and it is found in the people. Always.
X
Photos taken by Stokography using the Sony A7s”
Don’t Give BDS Undue Credit
By: Nick Lieber – Editorial Associate and Analyst, Creative Community For Peace
Pharrell Williams has canceled his show in Israel. That much is clear.
It is also clear that Pharrell, like virtually every international artist who has scheduled a performance in Israel, received pressure from supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. BDS activists use social media, petitions, open letters in the press, personal visits and confrontations, and sometimes even threats in an attempt to convince artists to boycott Israel and cancel their shows.
As overwhelming as this pressure can undoubtedly be, it has not stopped Bon Jovi, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, the Rolling Stones, Suzanne Vega, Dionne Warwick, the Backstreet Boys, Robbie Williams, Cyndi Lauper, Alan Parsons, or many hundreds of others from performing in Israel. And there’s no evidence that it stopped Pharrell either. In fact, Pharrell seemed quite excited about his upcoming concert.
There were conflicting reasons given by his representatives, who said the cancellation was due to scheduling issues, and Israeli music industry sources, who cited low ticket sales. What wasn’t cited by anyone involved in booking Pharrell’s performance in Israel? BDS. There is nothing that demonstrates a causative relationship between BDS pressure and the decision to cancel Pharrell’s show.
Yet this lack of evidence has not prevented BDS activists from claiming and/or implying that their pressure was the cause of Pharrell’s cancellation — as seen in the example above. Sadly, this is nothing new. When concerts are canceled in Israel, no matter the stated reason, BDS proponents are quick to turn them into false victories. Even more sadly, others – on both sides of the divide – are often inclined to follow suit.
It happened with Donovan, Henry Rollins, Primus, and, most famously, Santana. Each canceled a show in Israel for reasons completely unrelated to politics and the call to boycott. Each cancellation was quickly made political by BDS supporters and opponents on social media and in the press. (Strangely, despite the fact that Santana has scheduled a new show in Israel for later this month, clearly demonstrating that his 2010 cancellation had nothing to do with BDS, he is still inexplicably regarded as a victory by BDS supporters.)
Missing from these often hysterical conversations surrounding cancellations in Israel is the fact that concerts are canceled relatively often, all over the world, for the most mundane of reasons.
Just over the past week, cancellations were announced for a Public Enemy show in Orlando, Florida (“unforeseen circumstances”), an Aretha Franklin concert in Bethel Woods, New York (no reason given), and two of Ellie Goulding’s shows in Perth and Adelaide, Australia (“unforeseen scheduling conflicts”).
This isn’t the first show Pharrell has had to cancel. In 2014, he canceled concerts in Portugal and Spain due to “scheduling difficulties.” Last month, it was reported that he canceled a July show in Glasgow, Scotland, though the singer himself denied any show had been scheduled in the first place.
It happens. Musicians get sick. Family issues arise. Logistical mistakes are made. Agents and promoters fight. Tickets don’t sell. There’s nothing to do about it – some concerts will simply be canceled.
Only in Israel are such routine cancellations so often turned into political issues.
For proponents of BDS, this is expected. Out of the hundreds of musicians that book shows in Israel every year, they influence very few to cancel. As executives and artists become knowledgeable about the goals and tactics of the BDS movement, most artists are choosing to continue with their planned performances in the Holy Land and standing up for freedom of artistic expression. Supporters of the cultural boycott of Israel have been so unsuccessful at persuading or pressuring musicians to boycott Israel that they’re desperate to claim any victory they possibly can.
BDS’s true success has been at influencing the conversation. At convincing even opponents of the cultural boycott that all cancellations must have something to do with politics. At getting news outlets to mention BDS in articles about cancellations that have no connection to BDS at all, spreading their inflammatory message and politicizing art – to their gain and to the detriment of peace.
Anybody who opposes the BDS movement, who believes in bridges rather than boycotts, must categorically reject any and all efforts to hijack the voices of artists, to misrepresent their views and their intentions. If there’s no evidence that a cancellation was due to political pressure, we mustn’t assume that it was.
Otherwise, we are giving the boycott movement undue credit and handing them a victory they have not earned, dealing a devastating blow to truth and artistic freedom.
Creative Community for Peace (CCFPeace) is an entertainment industry organization that represents a cross-section of the creative world dedicated to promoting the arts as a means to peace and to countering the cultural boycott of Israel. 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 singling out Israel as a target of cultural boycotts will not further peace.
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BDS is at once immoral and a threat to peace. Immoral, because it perpetuates the lie that Israel is solely or even primarily to blame for the absence of a Palestinian state — rather than the repeated rejection by Palestinian leaders of peace plans presented over the decades. Immoral, too, because it ignores the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate education on which generations of Palestinians have been raised, an education that denies any place for a Jewish state in any borders.
The BDS movement not only places the entire onus for the conflict on Israel, it is counter-productive. The primary beneficiary of the attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state is the Israeli hard right. Far-right politicians have long argued that the world hates the Jewish state not because of what it does but because of what it is — and therefore Israel should dispense with the niceties of democratic norms in its war against Palestinian terrorism, end the illusion of a negotiated agreement and stake its maximalist claim to the entirety of its ancient homeland. In intensifying the Israeli public’s sense of siege and despair, while encouraging Palestinian intransigence, the international movement to isolate and punish Israel undermines a two-state solution.
Like a majority of Israelis, I recognize that the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people is a long-term threat to my country’s well-being. The occupation challenges the integrity of Israeli democracy and threatens its Jewish majority, which is demographically essential for maintaining the only corner of the planet where Jews are sovereign. For these reasons, a majority of Israelis, according to polls, supports a two-state solution.
But that same majority of moderate Israelis is deeply wary of the ultimate goal of the Palestinian leadership — both the nationalist Fatah party and the Islamist militant group Hamas. As the Palestinian media broadcast on a daily basis, the goal isn’t two states living in peace but a single Arab-majority state in which Jews would be at best a tolerated minority. And given the fate of minorities throughout the Middle East today, the likely scenario is far more nightmarish.
The Palestinian national movement as a whole intends to destroy Jewish sovereignty through the “right of return,” the demand that descendants of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war — a war of aggression initiated by Arab states against Israel’s creation — move to the Jewish state, rather than to a future Palestinian state. That would create an Arab majority in Israel, undermining the state’s Jewish identity from within. Israel would collapse.
Israelis across the political spectrum well understand the chilling implications of the right of return, even if much of the international community does not. The BDS movement — whose website endorses the right of return as one of its three core goals — promotes that vision of a world without Israel. BDS dupes those of its supporters who genuinely seek a two-state solution into believing that they are working for peace. Indeed the BDS website doesn’t even mention two states for two peoples among its goals. Even if Israel were to uproot every settlement, redivide Jerusalem, forfeit its claim to the holy places and return to the eight-mile-wide borders of the pre-1967 war, the BDS movement presumably would press on until Israel was erased from the map.
BDS activists brand Israel as an illegitimate colonialist state, a European transplant in the Middle East. This historical distortion erases 4,000 years of intimate connection between the Jewish people and the land. It ignores another factor of demography: A majority of Israel’s Jews don’t come from Europe, but from the Arab world, descendants of the nearly 1 million Jews effectively expelled from Arab countries where Jews lived for millenniums. Israelis call them the forgotten refugees.
As a means of applying economic pressure on Israel, BDS has failed. Despite the boycott, investments in Israel haven’t diminished. Israel is far too integrated into the global economy and the high-tech sector to be isolated.
The attempt to turn Israel into a version of the old, apartheid South Africa will also fail because there are too many people around the world who admire Israel. Israel-lovers are no less passionate in defending the Jewish state than Israel-haters are in seeking to harm it.
The real threat of BDS, though, is more subtle than economic pressure. BDS creates an atmosphere in which Israel is solely to blame for the failure of peace between Jews and Arabs, and it negates the very idea of a nation-state for the Jewish people. BDS takes one of the world’s most complex and heartbreaking conflicts — between two traumatized peoples — and turns it into a morality play between darkness and light. The movement to criminalize Israel is itself a crime. Rather than Israel, it is the BDS movement that must be exposed and ostracized for its bigotry and hatred.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His book “Like Dreamers” won the Jewish Book Council’s 2013 Book of the Year award. He is working on a book about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-halevi-bds-is-immoral-20160628-snap-story.html
