Portside

    Dear Alicia Keys,

 

    I have learned today that you are due to perform in Israel very soon. We have never met, though I believe we are mutually respectful of each other's path and work. It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists.

 

    You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel's against the Palestinian people. Google Montgomery Bus Boycott, if you don't know about this civil rights history already. We changed our country fundamentally, and the various boycotts of Israeli institutions and products will do the same there. It is our only nonviolent option and, as we learned from our own struggle in America, nonviolence is the only path to a peaceful future.

    If you go to my website and blog alicewalkersgarden.com http://alicewalkersgarden.com/  you can quickly find many articles I have written over the years that explain why a cultural boycott of Israel and Israeli institutions (not individuals) is the only option left to artists who cannot bear the unconscionable harm Israel inflicts every day on the people of Palestine, whose major "crime" is that they exist in their own land, land that Israel wants to control as its own.

 

    Under a campaign named `Brand Israel,' Israeli officials have stated specifically their intent to downplay the Palestinian conflict by using culture and arts to showcase Israel as a modern, welcoming place.

 

    This is actually a wonderful opportunity for you to learn about something sorrowful, and amazing: that our government (Obama in particular) supports a system that is cruel, unjust, and unbelievably evil. You can spend months, and years, as I have, pondering this situation. Layer upon layer of lies, misinformation, fear, cowardice and complicity. Greed. It is a vast eye-opener into the causes of much of the affliction in our suffering world.

 

    I have kept you in my awareness as someone of conscience and caring, especially about the children of the world. Please, if you can manage it, go to visit the children in Gaza, and sing to them of our mutual love of all children, and of their right not to be harmed simply because they exist.

 

    With love, younger sister, beloved daughter and friend, Alice Walker

    I read today Alice Walker's eloquent and moving entreaty to you in her open letter. It is hard to add anything except to implore you to follow all the links she has directed you to.

 

    ... I had reason last December to write a letter to Stevie Wonder http://electronicintifada.net/tags/stevie-wonder  to encourage him to withdraw from an engagement in LA. It was a Gala to raise funds for the Israeli Defense Force. I wasn't the only one to write, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the great advocate of peace and reconciliation, was among many, many others who wrote as well. To Stevie's great credit he withdrew.

 

    We are all part of the same old story, nothing has changed since the bad old days of apartheid South Africa and Segregated America. We must stand united with all our brothers and sisters against racism, colonialism, segregation and apartheid.

 

    Please, Alicia, do not lend your name to give legitimacy to the Israeli government policies of illegal, apartheid, occupation of the homelands of the indigenous people of Palestine.

 

    Others may try to persuade you that by playing in Israel you may magically effect some change; we know that this is not true, appeasement didn't work with South Africa and it has not worked in Israel. I know I tried it ten years ago, things have only got worse.

 

    I appeal to you to join the rising tide of resistance. Join the many millions of us in global civil society who stand together on the side of justice and peace for all humanity. "We shall overcome one day."