In 2010, Macy Gray, recorded her fifth album, The Sellout . On 17 January 2010, she wrote:
"I'm booked for 2 shows in TelAviv. I'm getting alot of letters from activists urging/begging me to boycott by NOT performing in protest of Apartheid against the Palestinians. What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians is disgusting, but I wana go. I gotta lotta fans there I dont want to cancel on and I dont know how my NOT going changes anything. What do you think? Stay or go?" [1]
So far Macy has received over 8,735 responses on Facebook's Macy Gray, Official Wall and because she wants "to be as famous as midnight, as powerful as a gun, as loved as a pizza" I offer her the way because ignorance is our greatest enemy and the truth is more powerful than bullets!
In 2010, Elvis Costello canceled both of his scheduled performances in Israel, as "a matter of instinct and conscience [when he came] to the following conclusions...Sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static and so an end to it. I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel, which is a matter of regret but I can imagine a better time when I would not be writing this. With the hope for peace and understanding."
In 1985 Bono joined forces with a group of artists concerned about Apartheid in South Africa. Inspired by his meetings with several of them, he wrote "Silver and Gold."
Yep, silver and gold.
This song was written in a hotel room in New York City.
'Round about the time a friend or ours, little Steven,
was putting together a record of artists against apartheid.
This is a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg.
A man who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa.
A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his
oppressor.
A man who has lost faith in the peacemakers of the west while
they argue and while they fail to support a man like bishop Tutu
and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa.
Am I buggin' you?
I hope to "bug you' Macy, because in 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that The Wall is a violation of International Law because it cuts through the West Bank appropriating Palestinian land and destroying Palestinian villages and economy to make way for further Israeli settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.
"Financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile, the Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families' sole livelihood for generations." [2]
Over six years ago, the International Court of Justice released its Advisory Opinion on the "Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" which detailed the court's findings that the Wall violated Israel's obligations under international law, that the Wall should be removed, and that Israel ought to lift its travel restrictions on Palestinians.
Today construction of the Wall continues, Israel's restrictions on Palestinians have intensified and over one million food-bearing trees have been destroyed to build The Wall, which for many Palestinians are the last resource to provide food for their children.
The Palestinian aspiration for a viable independent state is also negated by the Wall, for it isolates villages from their mother cities and divides the West Bank into disconnected cantons: which in Afrikaans is spelled Bantustans and universally understood as ghettos!
According to a UN report, Haaretz columnist Danny Rubinstein admitted that "Israel today was an apartheid State with four different Palestinian groups: those in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, each of which had a different status...even if the wall followed strictly the line of the pre-1967 border, it would still not be justified. The two peoples needed cooperation rather than walls because they must be neighbors." [3]
"An apartheid society is much more than just a 'settler colony'. It involves specific forms of oppression that actively strip the original inhabitants of any rights at all, whereas civilian members of the invader caste are given all kinds of sumptuous privileges. " [4]
On May 14, 1948, The Declaration of the establishment of Israel affirmed that, "The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations."
On December 20, 2006, Israeli Minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni was quoted in the popular Israeli newspaper, Yediot Acharonot: "The truth which is known to all; through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp."
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