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.

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 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.

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.

June 22, 2010

Dear members of the dock workers union in Sweden,

We have heard of your decision to initiate a blockade against all Israeli transfers to and from Swedish harbors between the 23^rd-29^th of June, 2010. As Israeli citizens and residents, we are aware of the message these actions send to the Israeli society. Israelis who have so far lived in a bubble disassociated from the way they are perceived by the world outside will not be able to ignore this protest. For too long Israel has been treated by the outside world in a way that has allowed it to ignore international law in a most dangerous way, to both the Palestinians, to itself and citizens, and to the area as a whole. This continuous failure of the outside world to question Israeli policies has allowed Israelis to view the practices of its government as legitimate. Hopefully, actions such as yours, which profile Israel together with other non-democracies with fascist and racist agendas, will function as a wake-up call. Facts reported by a recent article in the Israeli paper Maariv give us hope that we are getting close to achieving just that. 

June 6, 2010

Boycott! praises The Pixies for their decision to cancel their concert in Tel-Aviv, Israel, following Israel's brutal raid on the recent Freedom Flotilla and its massacre on the Mavi Marmara ship. This attack and its maintaining of the life-costing and illegal siege on Gaza has demonstrated once more what we've stated in our appeal to the Pixies three months ago - that an attitude of “business as usual” to Israel is indeed lethal.

Open letter, various undersigned, 7 May 2010
The following letter was issued by a coalition of organizations calling on author Amitav Ghosh to decline the Dan David prize administered by Tel Aviv University, to be awarded on 9 May:
 
Boycott Israel? Amitav Ghosh & the Dan David Prize
Dear Amitav Ghosh,

Dear Gil Scott-Heron,

The undersigned artists and organizations would like to commend your principled stance on Israeli apartheid.

By announcing the cancellation of your scheduled performance in Israel, you join the growing ranks of artists of conscience in solidarity with Palestinian civil society. As you recognized in your iconic anti-Apartheid anthem “Johannesburg,” when “brothers over there are defyin’ the man…they need to know we’re on their side.”