These days, victories in the cultural boycott of Israel have been piling up and it’s easy to become blasé at what we’re achieving. But a new and important milestone has been reached in Ireland – yesterday was the day that cultural boycott moved from being a reactive to a pro-active campaign. Yesterday, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) in association with PACBI launched their cultural boycott pledge. Over 150 Irish artists signed the pledge which stated:
"In response to the call from Palestinian civil society for a cultural boycott of Israel, we pledge not to avail of any invitation to perform or exhibit in Israel, nor to accept any funding from any institution linked to the government of Israel, until such time as Israel complies with international law and universal principles of human rights."
Reports on the launch are here and (with photos) here. There’s the IPSC statement, with the list of artists who signed updated regularly, here. I’ve also blogged before on this, at the Jews Sans Frontieres site. In that blog I couldn’t contain my delight about the event. It was a celebration. A coming together of musicians and writers and artists and political activists. Many of the actions we do are grim and serious, focusing on massacres and injustice – it was lovely being at something so joy-filled and positive. The event was less about what we were against than what we were for – plain solidarity with Palestine.
There’s other reason for satisfaction. Partly it is the status of many of the artists. People like Donal Lunny, Damien Dempsey, Robert Ballagh, Seamus Deane, Sinead Cusack and so on – these are household names in Ireland. Getting respected well-established artists to sign this pledge is a real achievement. At the same time, as Raymond Deane, the man who organised the pledge, said, it was the less well-established artists who showed real courage in signing – these are people trying to make their careers and yet they still went out on a limb and signed the pledge. Political activists like myself often despair at artists not displaying in the real world the talents and yes, bravery that they show in their works. These artists did display this bravery – they gave me hope.
But there’s another even deeper reason for satisfaction – this pledge has moved the cultural boycott campaign onto a new level. PACBI were right when they labelled this a ‘ground-breaking initiative’. To date, most of our cultural boycott work has been reactive – desperately chasing after artists who have already agreed to play Israel and pleading with them to reconsider. This is often demeaning and depressing work – it feels like pleading with power. More importantly, it’s not that effective – performers that have already agreed to play in Israel are, let’s face it, the hardest group of artists to affect. It’s far far easier to reach artists before they’ve made that decision. This way the approach won’t be seen as threatening or disruptive to their lives. It’s a way of getting to artists before Israel does. This is what we mean by moving the boycott campaign from a reactive to a pro-active stance.
More, a pledge like this will affect all artists, including those that don’t sign. It makes the political nature of performing to Israel much more overt and creates a community of ethical artists, a concrete thing that artists who are considering breaking the boycott have to consciously reject – something they’d find difficult to do. Easier not to get involved in politics, not to go to Israel. The pledge then is a tool to ensure that boycotting Israel becomes the default position among performers and artists.
It was easier than we expected to get people to sign up (though it did still take a fair amount of work and planning), since we were asking them to do something positive and join a growing global movement. We want to get more Irish artists to sign this pledge, but more important than this, we’re trying to encourage other countries to adopt this tactic. Ireland is a small country and a pledge like this would have so much greater effect if signed by US artists.
The same pledge could happen in the US. While Americans mightn’t be able to get as many signatures proportionally as we did – 140 Irish signatures translates into some 10,000 US ones – even getting a tenth that number or even less – getting five hundred artists to sign this pledge would be a huge step. And once the pledge is there, others can sign up. It’s a process of building up solidarity.
There’s historical precedent for this. Omar Barghouti reminded us of it when we were working on the campaign. In 1964, 28 Irish playwrights pledged not to allow their work to be performed before segregated audiences in apartheid South Africa; a year later this action was followed by the first declaration of boycott from US artists. Hopefully we can ensure the same sequence of events again in this, the new anti-apartheid campaign.
David Landy is the national organiser of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campagin. He is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology in Trinity College Dublin, and currently writing a book on diaspora Jewish opposition to Israel.
