Palestina. OPEN LETTER TO ELTON JOHN. Please don’t go playing in Tel Aviv. Sign by clicking
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editor@eltonjohn.com
Dear Elton John:
Elton John
difficult; you admitted your addictions were stronger than you were; you’ve
poured money into AIDS research. Oh, and then there’s the music – not bad at all.
But we’re struggling to understand why you’re playing in Israel on June 17. You
may say you’re not a political person, but does an army dropping white
phosphorus on a school building full of children demand a political response?
Does walling a million and a half people up in a ghetto and then pounding that
ghetto to rubble require a political response from us, or a human one?
We think it needs a human response, and we think that by choosing to play in Tel
Aviv you’re denying this. You’re behaving as if playing in Israel is morally
neutral – but how can it be? How can the cruelties Israel practises against the
Palestinians – fundamentally because the Palestinians are there, on Palestinian
land, and Israel wants them to go – be morally neutral?
Okay, you turn up in Ramat Gan, and it gets to that ‘Candle in the Wind’ moment,
and thousands of lighters flicker – but there won’t be any Palestinians from the
Occupied Territories swaying along with the Israelis – the army won’t let them
leave their ghettoes. Please read what Judge Goldstone said about the onslaught
on Gaza; what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been saying
for decades about the crimes committed against the Palestinians. Of course the
Israeli state denies it has a case to answer, though it’s knee-deep in ethnic
cleansing and land-theft and the endless daily suffocating of Palestinian lives and hopes.
Political or not political, when you stand up on that stage in Tel Aviv, you line
yourself up with a racist state. Do you want to give them the satisfaction?
Please don’t go.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Haim Bresheeth
Mike Cushman
Professor Steven Rose
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
London, February 2010
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