[This is an important article and I'm quoting it in full.]
by Joanna Blythman
IS IT racist to criticise Israel ? Before we address that question, let’s flashback to last year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The scene is a concert in The Queens Hall attended by those solidly middle-class, older-than-average citizens who support live classical music, people of comfortable means who, though they complain about the cost, nevertheless stump up the hefty ticket price for an official Festival event. Douce and respectable, the audience settles down to a relaxing evening of Haydn, Smetana and Brahms, only to have the recital interrupted by middle-aged men and women, dotted among them, protesting about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians shouting things like “End the Siege of Gaza”, and “Boycott Israel”.
Members of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, these protesters have targeted this performance because it is being given by the Jerusalem Quartet. Before the concert, Marion Woolfson, the Jewish chair of the campaign group, had written to festival organisers asking them to rescind the invitation.
These musicians are not ingenues who have blundered into that awkward moral territory where culture meet politics, but musical ambassadors for the state of Israel. As soldiers who saw active service in the Israeli Defence Forces before being talent-spotted, their international appearances are sponsored financially by Israel’s foreign ministry. When not performing abroad, their role has been to entertain the troops and generally boost the morale of the Israeli military, the self-same force that delivered the latest Gaza death toll of 1200 Palestinians.
As one Jewish news service puts it, by “carrying a rifle in one hand and a violin in the other” the Jerusalem Quartet makes “the ultimate Zionist statement”.
Some audience members are curious about what the protesters are saying. “Our intention,” says Sofiah MacLeod, one of the protesters, somewhat prophetically “was to highlight and therefore help prevent the atrocities being committed by the sponsors of the Jerusalem Quartet - the state of Israel”.
However, this overwhelmingly conventional audience is largely fizzing and delighted to see the demonstrators escorted outside by the police and the concert continue. Subsequently, the protesters are charged with breach of the peace and told to appear in court at a later date. This is only to be expected and they won’t be too bothered. It gives them a public platform for raising awareness of their cause, a familiar scenario in the honourable tradition of peaceful civil disobedience that stretches back from the Suffragettes, past the Holy Loch to the Greenpeace activists who scale the towers of power stations.
So far, so normal, but then comes a departure from the established script. Last week, the original breach of the peace charge was dropped, but the procurator fiscal indicated an intention to charge the protesters with a more serious one of “racially motivated conduct”.
So there we have it, raise the issue of Israel’s behaviour in Palestine and you become a racist. This charge is, of course, absurd. It’s like saying that all those who criticised and boycotted apartheid South Africa were “anti-white”, or branding those who want to see Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir indicted for war crimes as “anti-black” or “Islamophobes”. It displays no appreciation of history, current affairs, or even irony. Accusations of racist motivation might more aptly be directed to the Israeli governments that have remorselessly pursued a policy of displacing native Palestinian people with waves of Jewish immigrants from around the world.
After watching recent television footage of Israeli soldiers “smirking” over the corpse of a dead Palestinian, Gerald Kaufman, the veteran Jewish MP who counts himself proud to be both a Jew and a Zionist, was moved to call time on those who try to quash criticism of Israel with off-the-peg labels like anti-Semite or racist. “It is quite easy to excuse attacks on the Israelis, or rather to explain them away, by saying this is anti-Semitism.”
How right he is. In the context of Palestine, labels like these are akin to gagging writs whose purpose is, as Kaufman says, to “ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians”.
But where does all this leave the typical apolitical concert-goer who looks forward to a soothing night out, only to end up on a sudden crash course on Middle Eastern politics?
Many were annoyed by the disruption of their sacred pursuit, classical music, which they believe is above politics. This is like the argument used by defenders of the controversial South African Springbok tour to New Zealand in 1981 that politics and sport (or in this case, the arts) don’t mix.
But it’s a cop-out. Fond though I am of classical concerts, I would have boycotted this one and put Haydn and co on hold for another evening. Noisy interruptions may have been a major irritant to the good burghers who turned up on the night, but it scarcely registers on the radar of human suffering when compared to the inconvenience of having your home flattened, with most of your family in it, or the stomach-churning whine and the explosion of Israeli shells flattening your children’s school. - LINK [via Media Lens]
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