Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Death threats forced Sinéad O’Connor to call off a peace concert in Jerusalem in the summer of 1997.

At the time, a young man named Itamar Ben-Gvir took credit for the campaign against her.

Today, he is Israel’s national security minister.

apnews.com/article/sinead…

The transformation of Ben-Gvir from a fringe Israeli extremist trying to take down O’Connor’s coexistence-themed concert to a powerful minster overseeing the Israeli police force reflects the dramatic rise of Israel’s far-right.

Many Israelis remember Sinéad's open letter she wrote castigating Ben-Gvir.

Incensed after hearing Ben-Gvir, who was then 21, boast in a radio interview that he had succeeded in scaring her away from Jerusalem, she sent the letter to various news organizations.

On June 16, 1997, O’Connor — worried for her safety & her children — backed out of the concert organized by Israeli & Palestinian women’s groups that had sought to promote Jerusalem as a capital for both people.

Named “Sharing Jerusalem: Two Capitals for Two States,” the event was set to take place just a few years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, which created the foundation for the Mideast peace process.

Hard-liners like Ben-Gvir oppose any division of Jerusalem.

Ahead of her concert, British & Irish embassies in Tel Aviv reported receiving death threats against O’Connor. After her cancellation, fans & fellow peace activists expressed anger & dismay — some sealing their lips with black tape & protesting in the streets against Ben-Gvir.

In 1997, Ben-Gvir was an activist in the Ideological Front, an offshoot of the racist Kahanist movement. Rabbi Meir Kahane’s violent anti-Arab ideology was considered so repugnant in the 1980s that Israel banned him from parliament & the US listed his party as a terrorist group.

While Ben-Gvir did not take responsibility for the death threats against O’Connor, he told Israeli radio that his efforts had compelled her to drop out.

“Due to us she is not arriving,″ he said at the time. ″We are calling the pressure we put on her not to arrive a success.”

Following Sinéad's death, as Israeli media remembered Ben-Gvir’s campaign against her, his office denied he had ever threatened her. “Ben-Gvir said he would protest against the show,” his office acknowledged. “The show was cancelled due to the work of thousands of demonstrators.”

Ben-Gvir, now 47, was convicted in his youth of inciting racism against Arabs and barred from serving in the Israeli army because he was considered too extremist. Until recently, he hung a portrait in his home of an Israeli gunman who killed 29 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque.

As national security minister, Ben-Gvir has repeatedly sparked backlash. He has pushed for the creation of a national guard that critics fear could endanger Israel’s Palestinian minority, toughened measures against Palestinian prisoners & ramped up Palestinian home demolitions.

Sinéad's relationship to Israel only become more fraught following the botched concert. She became a supporter of the Palestinian-led campaign that calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli businesses, cultural institutions and universities.

After the Gaza war, O’Connor heeded the campaign’s calls to pull out of a concert near Tel Aviv.

But the cancellation of her 1997 Jerusalem concert was remembered the most in Israel — a country in turmoil as Netanyahu & Ben-Gvir press ahead with their divisive, far-right agenda.

In her open letter to Ben-Gvir, O’Connor described being haunted by images of Israelis & Palestinians fighting in the streets of Jerusalem.

“I felt saddened & frightened. I asked God then ‘How can there be peace anywhere on earth if there is not peace in Jerusalem?’”

“I ask you that question now Mr. Ben Gvir.”

“God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world. So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”

The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as their capital.

Even before the incident in 1997, Sinéad was a backer of the Palestinian cause, & has been known to fly the Palestinian flag at her concerts.

She played two gigs at the Israeli resort city of Caesarea in 1995.

During the visit she attracted controversy by getting in a scuffle with photographers near Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

In 2014, she stopped planning another concert in Caesarea after heeding calls from the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement.

Sinéad had been negotiating to play the gig, demanding Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the occupied territories were able to attend and perform alongside her.

“That was a bit of a hot potato and not settled, when someone who had no business doing so sneakily released the information saying it was confirmed, which it never was,” she told Irish music & politics magazine Hot Press in 2014.

hotpress.com/music/sinead-o…

“At the same time, musicians are notoriously stupid/ignorant people & I didn’t realise - nor was I told by my booking agent or anyone else - that if I stepped foot there I would in fact be breaking this cultural boycott & may as well be shitting all over the Palestinian people.”

“They were well aware of the situation but they didn’t fill me in when they were trying to convince me for a year to do the gig... next thing I’m the subject of abuse from everybody left, right & centre because I’m somehow sanctioning what’s happening to the Palestinian people.”

“I’m not going to go there because it’s a shithole, but in a way I feel sorry for the young people on each side of the situation who, because of a conflict that they did not cause, cannot have any type of normal life including music & musicians.”

Sinéad said that she has previously been accused of being a supporter of the Israeli authorities, but “nothing could be further from the truth”.

“Let’s just say that, on a human level, nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the fuck the Israeli authorities are doing,” she told Hot Press in 2014.

Speaking about the 1995 Caesarea concerts, Sinéad said: “There wasn’t a boycott & it wasn’t what you might call ‘a big deal’ & you weren’t fucking anyone over if you went. I actually hated the place so fucking much. I found it one of the most aggressive places I’ve ever been.”

“For the last 25 years whenever anything about Israel came on the news, I’d literally turn it off. As far as I was concerned Israel did not exist. So I didn’t keep up at all with anything that was going on there. It’s just a bad word to me, ‘Israel’.”

RIP Sinéad.