It is easy to gloat at this smallest of victories – UK rock band Coldplay posts on their Facebook fan page a one-line endorsement of the extraordinary single released by their friends, ‘Freedom for Palestine – OneWorld’. Within a few hours the post has attracted close to 2,000 comments, many congratulatory, others furious; in the Israel apologists’ threats and tantrums there is nothing new, but for the first time I found them pitiful, and I recalled the words of a Palestinian friend who insisted that he felt sorry for his Israeli oppressors, and how incredulous I was at the time.
Their desperation is almost painful to watch: ‘you just prove how COLD you can be!! shame on you and the whole anti jewish people!! freedon for palesitne equals freedom for rape, murder, terror and disturbed people. i hope all the israelis we join together and ban you as well as roger waters. AM ISRAEL HAI!!! LONG LIVE ISRAEL!!! THE ONLY VOICE OF PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST!!’ and ‘this is a very very bad decision you maid to support teror groups in gaza and thinking that in throwing jews to the sea youll achive peace to the palestinians that are bombing busses killing babys’ (sic) – typical examples of the histrionic talkback, alternated with the odd pathetic attempt to patch it all up with a piece of frayed Israeli propaganda: ‘Israel is the only country in the middle east where arabs live with democratic rights.’
Our humanity rests on our ability to feel empathy for every victim of injustice, or fate – be they family or strangers; those who feel no pity in the presence of grotesque suffering are deserving of pity themselves. Here is a young generation of Coldplay fans whose confused and angry responses reveal them to be psychologically damaged by an aggressive ideology. Their wretched ignorance of the historical facts and present realities of Israel – of the dispossession, violence and apartheid that are the origins and consequences of decades of brutal military occupation and settlement of an indigenous people’s land – exposes them to ridicule and leaves many clinging to a flimsy, fictional narrative of ongoing Jewish victimization in ‘Eretz Yisrael’.
