More articles by

Vaisakh E Hari
Vaisakh E Hari

SPLIT IN THE MIDDLE

Artists with borders: Should musicians boycott Israel?

ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-MUSIC-RADIOHEAD Fans waiting for Radiohead concert in Israel | AFP

Their performance at the Glastonbury fest in UK in June this year was vintage Radiohead, through and through. Lead singer Thom Yorke, who was unusually chatty, opened with an emotive tinkle of Daydreaming (A Moon Shaped Pool) on piano. Then came the heavier stuff—their signature brand of understated despair delivered in a million varying magnitudes of guitar wails, prog-rock chatter, static, and hypnotic visuals. It was only fitting that the set be dominated by numbers from Ok Computer, the band's epoch-defining album, which is currently celebrating 20 years of conception.

The most entertaining part of the concert (excuse me, Radio-heads) was a deliciously believable fake news, that went viral, claiming that concert-goers applauding to a three-minute guitar tuning by the band members, mistaking it for a new song. The report cited one of the fans as claiming that the “new song” was “minimalistic, but also complex, emotionally raw, but still able to push boundaries of what music can be”. The report was later negated by outlets like Newsweek, but not before gleeful social media users, who viewed Radiohead fans as the stereotypical douchebag in an art gallery, loudly proclaiming the artistic merit of a speck of dirt on a white wall or a spectacle that someone left on the ground, had their fun on Twitter. (You are pretentious, Radiohead fans. Get over it.)

The music was interspersed with political commentary; just after No Surprises came to close, Thom Yorke mouthed out something along the lines of “Theresa[May], shut the door on the way out”, to the delight of the audience. However, not all of the predominantly left-leaning audience were mere Tory-bashers. Much to the displeasure of Yorke (who would later cuss and flip the birdie), a group of pro-Palestine protesters raised slogans against the band's scheduled performance at Tel Aviv in July.

Speaking to NME, Michael Daes, one of the protesters, said that when big-name bands performed, it helped the the country whitewash its crimes against Palestinians.

Artists for Palestine, a collective which includes the likes of historian William Dalrymple, author Hari Kunzru, Pink Floyd vocalist Roger Waters and director Ken Loach implored the band to cancel their performance, in a sharply-worded open letter:

Dear Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway,

You’re listed to play Tel Aviv in July this year.

We’d like to ask you to think again – because by playing in Israel you’ll be playing in a state where, UN rapporteurs say, ‘a system of apartheid has been imposed on the Palestinian people’.

We understand you’ve been approached already by Palestinian campaigners. They’ve asked you to respect their call for a cultural boycott of Israel, and you’ve turned them down. Since Radiohead campaigns for freedom for the Tibetans, we’re wondering why you’d turn down a request to stand up for another people under foreign occupation. And since Radiohead fronted a gig for the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we’re wondering why you’d ignore a call to stand against the denial of those rights when it comes to the Palestinians.

Radiohead once issued a statement saying: ‘Without the work of organisations like Amnesty International, the Universal Declaration would be mere rhetoric’. You’ve clearly read Amnesty’s reports, so you’ll know that Israel denies freedom to the Palestinians under occupation, who can’t live where they want, can’t travel as they please, who get detained (and often tortured) without charge or trial, and can’t even use Facebook without surveillance, censorship and arrest.

In asking you not to perform in Israel, Palestinians have appealed to you to take one small step to help pressure Israel to end its violation of basic rights and international law. Surely if making a stand against the politics of division, of discrimination and of hate means anything at all, it means standing against it everywhere – and that has to include what happens to Palestinians every day. Otherwise the rest is, to use your words, ‘mere rhetoric’.

You may think that sharing the bill with Israeli musicians Dudu Tassa & the Kuwaitis, who play Jewish-Arabic music, will make everything OK. It won’t, any more than ‘mixed’ performances in South Africa brought closer the end of the apartheid regime. Please do what artists did in South Africa’s era of oppression: stay away, until apartheid is over.

In spite of appeals from all sides, Radiohead would go on to perform in Tel Aviv on July 19 ( notably their biggest set ever, with 27 songs and two encores), releasing their own rebuttal on Twitter. "Playing in a country isn't the same as endorsing its government. We've played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others. As we have in America. Music, art and academia is about crossing borders not building them, about open minds and not closed ones, about shared humanity, dialogue and freedom of expression ." It is also worth noting that Radiohead, with its single Creep, first found commercial success in Israel (at a time when it was universally panned and critically reviled) in the early 1990s.

Unsurprisingly, the war of words spilled on to a very ugly (and public) spat between Roger Waters, formerly of the Pink Floyd, and Thom Yorke. In a Facebook Live conversation, Water hit out at “whining” Yorke and his lack of interest in conversing with director Loach.

In a conversation with Rolling Stone, Yorke had described the situation as “offensive” and extremely upsetting that the critics did not personally engage with him. REM's Michael Stipe was one of the notable names that came out in support of Radiohead's decision to perform in Israel.

Radiohead is not the first band to be put in such an unenviable position. In 2010, Elton John, despite sustained pressure from anti-Israel groups, performed in Tel Aviv. Interestingly, he performed right on the heels of musician Elvis Costello cancelling his concert to protest against the treatment of Palestinians. In 2012, Madonna toured the country, ignoring similar boycott calls.

What sparks such a dichotomy in the art world? Wasn't art supposed to be a healing bridge between different worlds? Or, by performing in an authoritarian state, were artists, wittingly or not, lending legitimacy to an occupying force? Can such an issue be condensed into monochrome?

Take the case of Thom Yorke. He is indeed an active proponent for Tibetan independence, penning songs for the Free Tibet movement. Radiohead has collaborated with Amnesty International, the same organisation which has reported that “Israeli forces have unlawfully killed Palestinian civilians, including children, in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)” and that the “Israeli forces continue to blockade the Gaza Strip, subjecting its population of 1.9 million to collective punishment”.

On the other hand, it is important to distinguish between the acts of a regime and its people. If there were no demarcating factor, what stops the same artists, who call for boycott of Israel, to use the same scale and weigh the acts of nations like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, or even India?

Israeli supporters claim anti-Semitism as the main agenda of such lobbies. Roger Waters is a part of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS), an extreme anti-Israel movement, that eschews even the moderate two-state solution for the issue. In a 2010 concert, as reported by Fox News, Waters used imagery of planes dropping bombs in the shape of stars of David (Jewish religious imagery), followed by dollar signs. In 2013, according to a Jerusalem Post report, Waters used a balloon, shaped like a pig and emblazoned with a star of David, in one of his concerts. Waters is facing some trouble of his own now; his upcoming concert in Long Island faces the threat of cancellation.

And it does not seem like the feud between artists would end any time soon. Thom Yorke, with a tongue-in-cheek response on July 15, posted a link to a Guardian article which accused director Ken Loach of exempting himself from the Israel boycott and allowing his films to be distributed in the country.

Grab your popcorns, people. It is not over, not by a long shot. 

This browser settings will not support to add bookmarks programmatically. Please press Ctrl+D or change settings to bookmark this page.
Topics : #Israel

Related Reading