OPEN LETTER TO ELTON JOHN
06. Feb, 2010
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Dear Elton John:
Elton John
Like much of the world, we think you’re a good bloke. You came out when it was
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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Greetings and aloha, Mr. John, from Hawaii, where just weeks ago you presented a concert.
I didn’t go to it, but the reviews were of the rave variety; my son-in-law reported that it was vintage(-plus) Elton John.
I am horrified, and saddened, and angered, by the brutal colonial occupation of the Palestinians’ rightful homeland by Israel.
This occupation is decades long and continues before our very eyes, with no prospect for near-term surcease for the Christian
and Muslim Palestinians.
I have learned that you plan to present a concert in Tel Aviv in June. Mr. John, that would be the wrong signal, in a place of centrality to the continuation of the sadistic occupation, at a time when principled opposition to Israel’s reign of state terror and racist exclusivity is building across the globe.
I ask that you respond, with equal principle and the humanity I know you possess, to the need to let Israel know that “not now, not tomorrow, not ever again” applies most particularly and urgently to the land of Palestine and its suffering children, women, and men.
Please reflect deeply and make the right decision:
cancel the planned concert in Israel!
Thank you, Sir Elton, for your time and attention;
I am
Robert H. Stiver
Hawai, USA
[Reply]
Mr. Elton John,
cancel your concert in israel!
do the right thing! go to gaza
claudia karas, frankfurt, germany
[Reply]