Ziggy Marley resists pressure to boycott Israel

“People say, don’t disgrace your father’s name by going to Israel and all these type of things,” the eldest son of the late musical icon Bob Marley said at a press conference Tuesday at the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv, referring to the negative responses he saw on Facebook and other sites upon publication of his Israel tour dates.   “What I tell them is that, listen, I follow nature, I follow the universe, I follow God. I’m not a part of the segregation that people put on each other … I’m a part of nature and God, and God made the sun shine for everybody.”

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University of Johannesburg is not boycotting Ben-Gurion University

This letter, by David Hirsh, is from the South African Jewish report.

The boycott campaign wants to make people feel that Israel is a unique evil and it makes progress towards this goal whenever its arguments are treated as a legitimate side of a public debate.

Even when the campaign loses, therefore, it also wins, when, unlike other antisemitic campaigns, it is treated with respect.

There is a sense in which the (mis)educative function of the campaign is more important than actually excluding Israelis from the cultural, academic and sporting life of humanity.

This can lead the boycotters into the realm of the absurd.  When celebrated intellectual Slavoj Zizek recently spoke in Tel Aviv, the campaign tried to spin his visit as a boycott because he spoke in an independent bookshop.

When Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, played a gig in Israel, the campaign tried to portray this as a boycott because he played in a mixed Arab/Jewish village.

Now, scientists from UJ and BGU are quietly resuming their important work together, both institutions have ratified the agreement, and UJ has, ostensibly anyway, re-doubled its commitment to academic freedom.

The antizionists are pretending that there is a boycott while the scientists and their universities carry on doing what they do, scientific collaboration.

The boycott of BGU has taken a dent but there remains enough mirage of the boycott for the campaign to carry on its work, which is to portray Israel as the pariah of humankind.

David Hirsh

Goldsmiths, University of London