January 2017
To: Members of Guns ‘n’ Roses – Please Boycott Apartheid Israel!
Dear Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler,
We are Israeli citizens, opposed to the Israeli government’s policies of oppression, occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinian people [1]. Many of us are veteran human rights activists who have long worked against these policies. It's our long years of anti-racism advocacy that brought us to the understanding that the most effective way to stop the apartheid system is to deny its economic fuel and political legitimacy. Therefore, we strongly support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), aimed at ending these actions [2]. We write to you to ask you to heed the Palestinian call for justice, and cancel your concert in Israel.
We are well aware that this is not your first concert in Israel and that you performed here in 1993, nonetheless we find it crucial to bring to your attention some of the ongoing human rights violations perpetrated by Israel in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, many of which amount to war crimes under international law that you may not be aware of.;
While Tel Aviv, in which you will perform , sits atop the Palestinian village of Al Mas’udyia, whose indigenous Palestinians were killed or expelled during the Nakba - the ethnic cleansing committed by Zionist militias in 1948 [3], the Israeli army’s military control center, as well as the Ministry of Defense, are located in the heart of the city, and have served as the headquarters for the oppressive population control in the West Bank, and the massacres and siege operations committed by Israel in Gaza. Despite all this, Tel Aviv is still being used as a tool for marketing Israel as a culturally contemporary democracy [4], while hiding a history of ethnic cleansing and a present of a military regime and apartheid policies against the surviving indigenous people.
Israel holds the Gaza Strip under impervious siege, in which it conducts vicious major bombing campaigns on a regular basis. The latest one, in 2014, resulted in over 2000 innocent Palestinians massacred, 500 of them were children [5]. The Palestinians in Gaza live in constant anxiety, knowing that the next massacre is just around the corner.
In the West Bank, Israel has massively escalated its home-demolition policies against Palestinians, while it continues to construct Jewish-only colonies on stolen Palestinian land. As of mid-2016, Israel is detaining and imprisoning around 6, 500 Palestinian political prisoners in prisons inside Israel, of whom several hundreds re under- aged.
Moreover, Israel holds 692 Palestinians under administrative detention preventing from them the most basic rights (6).
All prisoners are subject to systematic ill-treatment, medical neglect, beatings and torture [7].
Within Israel itself there are no less than 50 laws discriminating against the Palestinian citizens of the State [8], while Israeli parliament members compete for votes, by exhibiting who can make the most racist statement [8].
We know that in 2012 you hosted a charity show to support the hunger relief organization “Feeding America”, and that Slash supports plenty of AIDS foundations & organizations, as the struggle to end violence against children. Therefore we are certain that you will share our condemnation of Israel’s continuous campaign of arresting and detaining Palestinian children and a murderous rampage of extra judicial killings that have resulted in dozens of minors murdered by Israeli forces in 2016.
As Israeli Citizens and political activists who fight against this brutal reality, we believe that one of the ways we will be able to stop Israel’s policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing is through BDS.
We ask you to stand in solidarity with the indigenous Palestinian people, and say NO to the whitewashing of apartheid through music.
Please cancel your concert in apartheid Israel.
We will gladly address any questions or comments you may have.
Sincerely,
Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within
[1] http://boycottisrael.info/
[2] https://bdsmovement.net/call
[3]https://electronicintifada.net/content/jaffa-eminence-ethnic-cleansing/8088
[4] https://pulsemedia.org/2012/07/24/boycotting-the-white-city-good-for-tel-avivians/
[5] https://blackfriday.amnesty.org/
(6) http://www.btselem.org/hebrew/administrative_detention/statistics
[8]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gAVYptLTQA4J:www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.680706+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ps * https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes
[9]http://palestineun.org/30-march-2016-israeli-extrajudicial-killings-of-palestinians/