In 1980, a song I wrote, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, was prohibited by the administration of South Africa because it was being exploited by black South African children to preach their right to equal education.
That apartheid government imposed a cultural blockade, so to speak, on certain songs, including mine.
Twenty-five days later, in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival used the call to resist against Israel's wall round the West Bank. They sang: "We don't need no occupation! We don't ask no racist wall!" At the time, I hadn't seen firsthand what they were telling about.
A twelvemonth after I was contracted to do in Tel Aviv. Palestinians from a movement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israel urged me to reconsider. I had already spoken out against the wall, but I was uncertain whether a cultural boycott was the proper way to go.
The Palestinian advocates of a boycott asked that I see the occupied Palestinian territory to see the rampart for myself before I made up my mind. I agreed.
Under the security of the United Nations I visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have inclined me for what I saw that day. The fence is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression.
If it could be like that for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be similar for the Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knew then that my conscience would not grant me to pass away from that wall, from the circumstances of the Palestinians I met: people whose lives are crushed daily by Israel's occupation. In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that day: "We don't want no thought control."
Realising at that period that my presence on a Tel Aviv stage would inadvertently legitimise the oppression I had seen, I cancelled my gig at the arena in Tel Aviv and touched it to Neve Shalom, an agrarian community devoted to growing chick peas and also, admirably, to co-operation between different faiths, where Muslim, Christian and Jew work side by side in harmony.
Against all expectations it was to get the biggest music event in the little account of Israel. Some 60,000 fans battled traffic jams to attend. It was extraordinarily moving for us, and at the end of the gig I was stirred to inspire the new people gathered there to require of their authorities that they try to have peace with their neighbours and honor the civic rights of Palestinians living in Israel.
Sadly, in the intervening years the Israeli government has made no effort to implement legislation that would grant rights to Israeli Arabs equal to those enjoyed by Israeli Jews, and the wall has grown, inexorably, illegally annexing more and more of the West Bank.
For the mass of Gaza, locked in a virtual prison behind the fence of Israel's illegal blockade, it means another set of injustices. It means that children go to sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished. It means that fathers and mothers, unable to act in a decimated economy, have no way to confirm their families. It means that university students with scholarships to work abroad must follow the chance of a lifetime slip by because they are not allowed to travel.
In my view, the repulsive and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), coupled with its defense of the rights of refugees to fall to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people about the public supporting the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.
Where governments refuse to act people must, with whatever peaceful means are at their disposal. For me this means declaring an aim to abide in solidarity, not merely with the people of Palestine but also with the many thousands of Israelis who differ with their government's policies, by joining the movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.
My sentence is innate in the thought that all people deserve basic human rights. This is not an onslaught on the multitude of Israel. This is, however, a supplication to my colleagues in the music industry, and likewise to artists in other disciplines, to connect this cultural boycott.
Artists were good to decline to work in South Africa's Sun City resort until apartheid fell and bloodless people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are proper to deny to play in Israel until the day comes - and it certainly will come - when the bulwark of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice and dignity that they all deserve.Source: Guardian
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