Morrissey,

Today, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed your video message to the Israeli public, confirming your performance in Tel Aviv on 29 July 2008. You end your message with the words “God bless Israel, stay nice!” This message and your planned Israel gig are indicators of either a serious lack of understanding of what Israel is or a conscious bias towards Israel, despite its colonial and apartheid reality. Celebrating Israel, as you plan to do, at a time when it is persistently committing war crimes and other grave breaches of international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), particularly in Gaza, is an act of complicity in maintaining Israel’s illegal occupation and regime of racial discrimination against the people of Palestine.

It is ironic that your persistent affection for outsiders and misfits has often driven you to write in their voices. Someone hated, rejected and violently attacked by a racist, nationalistic society has her point of view expressed in these lyrics, which you wrote:

We’re old news
All’s well
Say BBC scum
One child shot, but so what?

Laid my son
In a box, three feet long
And I still don’t know why

A short walk home becomes a run
And I’m scared
In my own country

Singing in Tel Aviv despite the fact that more than 800 Palestinian children have been killed — many in a willful manner — by the Israeli occupation army and settlers in the past seven years alone would effectively tell us, in our faces: “One Palestinian child shot, but so what?”

This year, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its establishment over the ruins of another country, Palestine. With the creation of this state 60 years ago, three quarters of a million Palestinians were dispossessed and uprooted from their homes and lands, condemned to a life of exile and destitution.

Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are “non-Jews.” It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. In the OPT, Israel is continuing the construction of its colonies and massive wall in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of July 2004. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.

In 2006, virtually all leading Palestinian artists and cultural figures have called for an international cultural boycott of Israel. [1] To date, many leading international cultural figures, including Ken Loach and John Berger, and some artists’ unions, like the Irish Aosdana, have heeded the Palestinian Call and shunned Israel, just as they boycotted apartheid South Africa.

On 3 December 2007, you said: “I abhor racism and oppression or cruelty of any kind and will not let this pass without being absolutely clear and emphatic with regard to what my position is. Racism is beyond common sense and I believe it has no place in our society.”

It is “absolutely clear” that your performance in Israel would betray a regrettable double standard, if not a categorical negation of those noble ideals.

Related Links

• The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
• BY TOPIC: Boycott, divestment and sanctions

Endnotes
[1] http://www.pacbi.org/press_releases_more.php?id=333_0_4_0_C