20.8.2010

Dear members of Faithless.

We are writing to express our appreciation and gratitude for your recently announced decision NOT to schedule any concerts in Israel in the foreseeable future.

Having heard that you are about to perform in a Jazz festival in the Israeli city of Eilat, we would like to ask you to cancel this show. It is particularly because of our love for your work that it would be sad for us to see how your music is appropriated and exploited in order to mask major human rights abuses.

LCD Soundsystem are a great band. Their song All My Friends was selected as 2007's song of the year on my favorite music show, Hakatze (broadcast on the Israeli military radio station, by the way...)
 
It will be great to have artists such as LCD Soundsystem perform here after Israel's policies of violent siege, land grab, apartheid and racism come to an end. Until that day, there is no reason why they should come here and entertain privileged Israelis in Tel-Aviv: The overwhelming majority of the audience will be people who do nothing against Israel's human rights violations, or worse than that, people who support these acts (more than 90% of Jewish Israeli citizens supported operation Cast Lead and the flotilla raid). 

BOYCOTT! endorses PSCABI's letter to Chick Corea:
 
Dear Mr. Corea,
 
We are a group of students from Gaza, and our only fault is being Palestinians. For that, Mr. Corea, we are imprisoned with our families and loved ones in what major Human Rights Organizations call the largest open air prison in modern history. The state you are planning to entertain, committed a process of ethnic cleansing against the indigenous people in 1948. And now it is engaged in, what the Israeli academic Ilan Pappe calls, "slow motion genocide" against the 1.5 million population of Gaza.

Boycott! would like to thank Leftfield and Neil Barnes in particular for cancelling Leftfield's scheduled performance in Israel and refusing to entertain apartheid. Leftfield have demonstrated courage and humanity in this decision, and we hope others will follow and respect the Palestinian Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until there's freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.

Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from within
http://boycottisrael.info

July 9th, 2010

Dear Jeff Beck,

We are a group of Israeli citizens who respect and promote human rights for all. We call on you to make a conscientious and politically important decision to cancel your performance in Israel, scheduled for October 5^th, 2010. We would like you to consider the following:

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are living for the last 43+ years under a cruel Israeli occupation. Their living and basic necessities for water, energy, housing, health and movement are being crushed by a system that either dispossess them or sees them as targets for obliteration by the Israeli army's prevalent violence. West Bank Palestinians' entitlement for equality is systematically denied by martial law, hundreds of checkpoints and blockades and the colonization and annexation of Palestinian lands and resources by the Israeli settlement enterprise, house demolitions and evictions and the separation wall.

July 18, 2010

Dear members of Π.Α.ΜΕ.

We are a group of Jews and Palestinians, citizens and residents of Israel, who are struggling to end the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. We are writing to you in order to express our enthusiastic support of your courageous civil protest against the blockade of Gaza and against Israel's oppressive policies by symbolically blocking five El-Al airline check-in counters at Athens International Airport (14.07.10). You have thus joined a long line of civilians who, unlike their own governments, express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and their dissociation from the oppressive polices of the Israel government.

"How many lives can they take, till we break?"
"How many homes set alight, till we fight?"

Dear Leftfield,

We, a group of Israeli citizens, are writing to you today, as your words of protest resonate with their relevance in light of the deadly raid on a flotilla attempting to break the illegal siege and packed with humanitarian aid, bound for the suffocating Gaza Strip. That same strip of land, overpopulated and besieged for the past 3 years, is the place which Israel chose to brutally attack during its December 2009 onslaught.

To Ireland's EU commissioner, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn,
 
We are a group of concerned Israeli citizens. In Israel much of our taxes are allocated to “security”. We choose to put the word in quotes, because what our hard earned money is actually used for is an inflation of our military power over a helpless population of civilians. But its not only our money that enables this horrific military reign over the Palestinians, in fact, that is only a small piece of the military expenditure pie. This inflation of military force is also and due to the billions of dollars of so-called “aid” from powerful entities around the world, such as the US and- as you very well know- the EU.

Rachel Giora

July 1st, 2010

 In the eyes of the world, the question is what can be done when the relevant institutions do not succeed in enforcing international law?

Tanya Reinhart

(May 5, 2005)¹

Despite the recent atrocities inflicted by Israelis on Palestinians and internationals, despite the deteriorating status of human rights experienced by Israeli citizens both Palestinian and non-Palestinian, despite the mounting despair of any chance for a change on the part of Israeli governments, Israel can no longer NOT look in the mirror the world is pushing up to its face. Israel is on the brink of change or collapse.