Palestinians call on all international music industry professionals to boycott the Israel Music Showcase Festival. bdsmovement.net/news/israel-mu…
Israel Music Showcase Festival is an attempt by Israel’s apartheid regime to whitewash its colonial oppression against Palestinians and should be avoided by all progressives.
Its main sponsor is the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is directly involved in war crimes.
In May 2021 alone, Israeli occupation forces killed at least 240 Palestinians, including 66 children, in the besieged Gaza Strip, where the majority are refugees from previous rounds of Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing.
Israel's brutal May 2021 massacre led more than 1500 musicians, among other artists, to endorse our peaceful calls for boycotting Israel’s complicit cultural sector. #MusiciansForPalestinemusiciansforpalestine.com
The Israeli foreign ministry openly confesses to artwashing Israel's crimes. A former deputy director general, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit, admitted: “We are seeing culture as a hasbara [propaganda] tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between hasbara and culture”.
Another Israeli foreign ministry official stated: “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, exhibits. This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war”.
Key Israel Music Showcase Festival partners include the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sports, which has long pushed to make all cultural funding conditional on ‘loyalty’ to the Israeli regime’s particular brand of far-right Zionism.
The Israeli culture ministry regards culture as crucial in whitewashing Israel’s apartheid regime, and has threatened to freeze funds for arts organisations criticising Israeli policies.
Another Israel Music Showcase Festival partner is the Jerusalem municipality, complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians from the occupied city, which Israel calls “Judaization”.
The main venue, Yellow Submarine, is sponsored by the Jerusalem Foundation, which has partnered with the fanatic, illegal settler group Elad to appropriate or erase Palestinian cultural heritage in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, the so-called ‘City of David’.
The Israel Music Showcase Festival is proud of its collaboration with Israel’s apartheid regime. Unlike a similar event, Tune In Tel Aviv, it does not even pretend to be ‘independent’. bdsmovement.net/news/boycott-t…
Joining the growing international consensus that Israel is an apartheid regime and should not be subject to business-as-usual, Amnesty International has called on international enterprises to ...
... “ensure that your own activities in Israel and the OPT are not contributing to or benefiting from the system of apartheid” and “cease relevant activities if it cannot be prevented”. amnesty.org/en/latest/news…
Israel’s leading human rights organisation, too, has designated Israel as an apartheid state. btselem.org/publications/f…
We doubt that most participants in the apartheid Israel Music Showcase Festival would have attended an event in South Africa sponsored by the apartheid regime there. Apartheid Israel should be no exception.
If you cannot contribute to our peaceful struggle for freedom, justice and equality, at least do no harm. bdsmovement.net/news/israel-mu…
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Palestinians are calling to boycott #JerusalemFilmFestival, which is partnered with Israel’s far-right apartheid regime and agencies involved in ethnic cleansing against Indigenous Palestinians.
We urge all participating filmmakers and jury members to withdraw.
Here’s why. 🧵
Jerusalem Film Festival is sponsored by apartheid Israel’s ministry of culture, which sees film and culture as propaganda tools to whitewash human rights violations.
The Israeli government is so far-right that one senior minister describes himself as “a fascist homophobe”.
The festival is also partnered with the Jerusalem Development Authority, which illegally expropriates Palestinian land in occupied East Jerusalem, displacing Palestinians.
It has been instrumental in the expansion of illegal settlements, a war crime under international law.
Harvard’s @Kennedy_School has dishonored its own human rights center and made a mockery of academic freedom by denying a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, because he and @HRW have determined that Israel is guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid.
Like HRW, Amnesty International, UN Special Rapporteurs, and major Palestinian and South African human rights organizations have reached the conclusion that Israel imposes a system of apartheid against Indigenous Palestinians.
The Red Sea Jazz Festival, like all Israeli cultural institutions, benefits directly from Israel’s decades-old regime of apartheid, military occupation and settler-colonialism.
Since its founding it has failed to distance itself from this system of oppression against the Palestinian people or to uphold comprehensive Palestinian rights under international law.
Inspired by the international boycott movement that helped bring down apartheid in South Africa, Palestinian civil society, including almost its entire arts and culture community, has called for a cultural boycott of Israel since 2004.
In 2010, reacting to the Cape Town Opera’s plan to ignore the boycott and perform in Tel Aviv, South African anti-apartheid leader, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said ...
“Just as we said during apartheid that it was inappropriate for international artists to perform in South Africa in a society founded on discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity, so it would be wrong for Cape Town Opera to perform in Israel”.
Palestinians call on @Rawayana to refuse to artwash apartheid Israel.
Rawayana plan a concert at Barby in Tel Aviv, a club that celebrates Israeli occupation forces massacring Palestinians.
On the day Israel murdered 16 Palestinians sheltering in an UN school in besieged Gaza, Barby handed out t-shirts with the club’s logo and the words “F— you, we’re from Israel” to armed colonial forces.
More than 1,500 artists including Arca, Lido Pimienta and Ana Tijoux have joined the fast-growing Musicians for Palestine initiative, “refusing to perform at Israel’s complicit cultural institutions.”
Ahead of the #WorldCup, we're co-hosting an expert panel w/ @PSCupdates to discuss #sportswashing by human rights abusing states, including apartheid Israel, & how to support those resisting repression.
The #sportswashing panel will be chaired by Shireen Ahmed, a multi-platform sports journalist, a TEDx speaker, mentor, and an award-winning sports activist who focuses on the intersections of racism and misogyny in sports.
Speakers include: Abdullah Al-Arian, a professor of modern Middle East history and editor of the recently published Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game. He is also editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page on the Jadaliyya e-zine.