Nada Elia

As international stars face widespread criticism for having earned huge fees entertaining Libya’s Gaddafi family, Nada Elia and Laurie King ask why artists who entertain apartheid Israel should not be held to exactly the same standard.

This weekend at the eighth annual US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation national organizers’ conference held in Chicago, delegates from the approximately 300 member groups that make up the US Campaign voted in favor of an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The vote, and the deep collective breath of relief that followed, will go down in history as the moment US-based Palestine solidarity activists overcame tactical differences that had long hindered us, to finally come together to confront Israeli apartheid. Nada Elia comments for The Electronic Intifada.

Today, more than any other day in my life, I am proud to be Palestinian. Let me explain. Nation-states mean little to me. They represent artificial boundaries, legal restrictions, “No Entry” signs, and collective brainwashing into the “uniqueness” of cultures that only humans acknowledge. What fish has ever stopped swimming as it approached that most invisible “water line” separating one country from another? Nada Elia writes from the US.