Guardian legitimises 'apartheid' Israel trope
20 May 2010
On Saturday 15 May the English singer-songwriter Elvis Costello announced that he was cancelling two scheduled performances in Israel. In yesterday’s coverage (Wednesday 19 May) The Guardian used the cancellations– explicitly motivated to avoid politicising the musician’s visit to the region –to draw a comparison between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
In ‘Elvis Costello boycotts two concerts in Israel’, Vikram Dodd and Rory McCarthy stated that Costello had cancelled ‘in protest at [Israel's] treatment of Palestinians’, which would support the ‘boycott’ claim of the title. However, in Costello’s official statement on his website, he does not mention boycotting Israel, and offers criticism of both sides of the conflict.
Costello noted his belief that ‘the audience for the coming concerts would have contained many people who question the policies of their government on settlements and deplore conditions that visit intimidation, humiliation or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security’, which shows that while he is critical of Israeli policies, the singer could distinguish between the Israeli people and their government.
He then went on to add that he was ‘keenly aware of the sensitivity of these themes in the wake of so many despicable acts of violence perpetrated in the name of liberation.’ While The Independent’s article on the story, ‘Elvis Costello pulls out of ‘political’ gigs’, noted that this ‘appeared to be an oblique reference to suicide and other attacks on Israeli citizens’, The Guardian included the quote but did not comment on it.
Instead, the article pushed the apartheid analogy, with quotes from Palestinian activists who advocate singling out Israel for boycotts. Sarah Colborne, from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was quoted as saying: ‘We are increasingly seeing artists taking a stand against allowing themselves to be used by the Israeli state to normalise their occupation and apartheid policies against Palestinians. Principled artists understood it was unacceptable to play under the apartheid South African regime in Sun City’, while the Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti stated that ‘This is not boycotting the Jewish people, or the Israeli people, it is boycotting the occupation’.
This comparison continued when the writers describe how other artists have responded to the calls for a boycott. When noting that Gil Scott-Heron had also recently cancelled a tour in Israel, the article stated that he ‘was also active in the anti-apartheid movement’, as if to suggest that the boycott campaign against Israel is comparable. The article then described how Leonard Cohen ‘played in Israel last year, despite a similar campaign asking him to stay away.’ The suggestion appears to be that some artists acknowledge the similarity between Israel and apartheid South Africa, and act accordingly, while others fail to do so.
The Independent, on the other hand, described how some artists had played the region without giving partisan support for one side or the other. Cohen, for example, ‘offered to play in Ramallah’ (an offer that was rejected), and ‘donated the proceeds of his Tel Aviv gig to co-existence projects’, while Paul McCartney ‘made a point of visiting the West Bank during his trip.’ Indeed, Costello’s cancellation also seems to have been partly motivated by a desire to avoid showing support to one side over the other in a complex conflict, since he stated that ‘I hope it is possible to understand that I am not taking this decision lightly or so I may stand beneath any banner, nor is it one in which I imagine myself to possess any unique or eternal truth.’
The Guardian’s focus on Costello’s criticisms of Israeli policy, coupled with the emphasis it places on those who believe that the country should be singled out for boycotting, suggests that it believes that artists either acknowledge the similarity between Israel and apartheid South Africa and refuse to play there, or ignore the calls and give political support to the Israeli government. No other option or opinion is given for artists who wish to play in this highly politicized region.