Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

“Artists Who Boycott Israel Are Wimps”

Published May 13, 2011

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard any of their songs, but I’ve just become a Deep Purple fan. You have to respect any rock band that can achieve such moral clarity on the anti-Israel cultural boycott. Artists who boycott Israel, declared drummer Ian Paice this week, are “real wimps.”

Paice, who was speaking ahead of the group’s third Israel tour, is exactly right. None of the artists who have canceled performances in Israel in recent years in response to pressure from pro-Palestinian activists actually thinks the boycott is justified as a matter of principle. If they did, they wouldn’t have booked engagements in Israel to begin with. They simply couldn’t withstand the pressure from their left-wing cultural milieu.

Rather, it’s the artists who don’t cancel Israel engagements who actually have the courage of their convictions. Often, these convictions have nothing to do with Israel: Deep Purple, for instance, simply believes strongly that “artists should not take sides in political conflicts.” But that makes them no less valid.

So perhaps it’s time for pro-Israel activists to try a new tack in combating the cultural boycott. Arguments about why Israel doesn’t deserve to be boycotted–its thriving democracy, its decades of striving for peace–are perfectly valid, but are likely of little interest to the average Israel-bound performer besieged by pro-Palestinian activists. Most such performers are far more concerned with their art (and their revenues) than with the rights and wrongs of the conflict.

Moreover, conducting the argument on those terms allows both the boycotting artist and the Palestinians to claim the moral high ground: The artist has concluded that boycotting Israel is the “right thing to do.”

Thus it might be more effective to simply confront such artists with the Deep Purple test: Do you actually have the courage of your convictions about the artist’s proper role in the world–the convictions that led you to book your Israel engagement in the first place? Or do you want to be just another “real wimp”?

For a wimp who lacks the courage of his convictions can’t claim anything but the moral low ground. And that is exactly where Israel boycotters belong.

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/13/deep-purple-defends-israel-tour/
Posted in Uncategorized
Originally Published in:

Original Link:

Subscribe to Evelyn’s Mailing List

Featured Post

Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

Read more
Archives