What’s Music Got To Do With IT
Maya Mikdashi
The arguments have become familiar. We want to enjoy life; music is not political; dancing should unify us, not divide us. We can’t keep being the sacrificial lamb of the Palestinian cause. Aren’t you Lebanese? Are you an Islamist? Don’t you like rock and roll music, coca-cola, and dancing under the stars at open-air raves? Aren’t you for the freedom of expression? Are you (gasp) intolerant?
The questions that the debate whether we, in Lebanon, should join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel engenders have nothing to do with liking music, being fanatical, or censorship. The issue is not a band that played a concert in Tel Aviv, had a stopover in Cyprus, and continued on to Beirut. It is not that this same band performed the week the Israeli state attacked a flotilla of peace activists trying to break the criminal blockade of Gaza, an area of land that is home to over 1.3 million Palestinians and has been placed under siege for over three years. The question is not whether or not we can, or should, empathize with Palestinians living within a settler colony. The question is not if we have to be political. The question is: Can we afford not to be political? Can we absolve ourselves of responsibility towards each other as citizens and residents of Lebanon, as Arabs, or as human beings in the name of music and a good time? And if and when we do absolve ourselves of responsibility, what kind of politics are we engaging in? When we surrender politics to the politicians, what are we doing?
The political permeates every aspect of our lives. From the moment we wake up in particular neighborhoods in, for example, Beirut to the moment that our maid brings us our evening snack and puts our children to sleep, we are engaged in politics. This engagement continues as each of us drives in his or her car to locations that are close by, when we pass by the myriad unkempt children and disabled adults standing in highways selling their sadness, maneuver through a security checkpoint in a politician’s neighborhood, and as we sweat in long pants during the hot summer in a failed attempt to avert the unwanted verbal and physical advances of men on the Manara who know they are not accountable to anyone. Politics is about the struggle over life, how we live it, where we live it, who gets to live a livable life, and who gets to live. We are political because we are alive. Depoliticization is a political process, it is a tactic of a power that aims to separate the messiness of shared life into compartments such as “culture,” “government,” “economy,” “personal life,” “government,” and, my personal favorite, “civil society.” Once segregated into neat, independent packages, we are told that our “political” involvement begins, and ends, at the level of government. Depoliticization comes with neoliberalism, an ideology that masks its praxis being claims to be a “way of life.” The idea that Liberalism is a way of life or that it is simply “good values” has historically fuelled capitalist expansion, colonialism, and the imperial notion that western history is at once the telos and the unfolding of world history. More recently, neoliberalism has been the ideology driving the perversion of human rights discourse to justify the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the banning of the headscarf in France, and the reinvigoration of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world.
One does not have to engage in an ideological analysis to see that art, and in this case, music, is anything but apolitical. When U2 announced that it would not play any concerts in apartheid South Africa, they were making a statement. When Elton John refused to heed to the boycott of South Africa and played concerts in that country, he was also making a statement. Playing a concert in an apartheid state is a statement. When international artists perform in Israel after a BDS campaign has been launched and after they have been asked to join it in solidarity with the oppressed, their performance lends legitimacy to a political regime that openly calls for the continued occupation of Palestinian lands, legal and infrastructural apartheid, and the expulsion of indigenous populations outside the state’s borders. Perhaps musicians who play venues in Israel today are ignorant about the political situation. But is ignorance an excuse? Today, people with access to information have to consistently choose to remain ignorant of current events. Furthermore, ignorance about structural oppression, ongoing settler colonialism, and apartheid, is a luxury of power that contributes to violence against those that are not powerful. Neutrality in the face of gross inequality and oppression is the most insidious form of partisanship towards the powerful. Every act of boycott is a statement against the status quo.
Lebanese event organizers who invite artists that perform in Israel are not breaking any laws. But they are making a statement as to the normalization of ties with Israel and they are not supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions initiative. People who want to attend these events are entitled to spend their leisure time however they want. But they too are making a statement as to the normalization of Lebanese ties with Israel and they, too, are choosing to not support the BDS campaign. If the choice for artists is between profiting monetarily from apartheid oppression and making a statement by not performing in Israel, for patrons, the choice is between allowing those who profit monetarily from apartheid to continue to profit monetarily from your own money. The calculations are simple. If enough people decide that they will not patronize performances by artists who also perform in apartheid Israel, either the event organizers will need to cater to this new reality or, imagine, we could actually force international artists to choose to either play in Lebanon or in Israel. Imagine Lebanon being “happening” enough to be a rival of Israel in terms of what is known as the “cultural scene” or the “summer circuit.” Imagine us being more effective than the hollow regimes that rule the Arab Middle East.
When I engage in an act of boycott against DJ Tiesto, I am also making a statement that I refuse to entrust the entire arena of politics, and the question of Lebanon’s relationship with Israel, to politicians that I know are corrupt, sectarian, and inefficient. I am making a statement that I refuse to normalize ties with a state that has invaded my country three times in the years that I have been alive, displaced over a million of my fellow citizens and destroyed tens of thousands of their homes as recently as 2006, and denies the right of return to over 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. I do not have a gun. I do not have a political party. I have a choice; to allow artists who break the boycott to profit from me or not. I make that choice because I cannot accept the logic that my life, or a Palestinian life, is worth less than an Israeli life. I make that choice because I refuse racism and the violence that it licenses.
My decision to boycott musicians who do not adhere to the BDS campaign is not because I am anti- Israel or because I am pro-Palestine. You can blame Palestinians for all of Lebanon’s problems and still take a stance against apartheid. If you are against the logic of racism and its articulation as settler colonialism, then you are also against apartheid. Apartheid is a technology of rule that has been operationalized in many different countries in different historical contexts, and will continue to be operationalized as long as it continues to be normalized. We should be demanding that artists refuse to be complicit in this system. Boycotts work. Today, sixteen years after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, we should not expect less of the world. And we definitely should not expect less of ourselves.
Category: activism, hereandthere من هنا وهناك, opinions رأي
Great article!!! thanks for speaking up!
I bow to you and this
on the issue of opposing the fact that israel is going Pilgrim on Palestine’s natives, putting them in reserves and ethnically cleansing them, as was done to native Americans, I agree. On boycotting musicians that ignore that, I agree as well. However, it’s important for us not to be self-sacrificial or show a complex of inferiority as we try to stand by Palestinians. Turning Lebanon into a no-man’s land, over stretching its non-existent resources (like jobs) by adding 400,000 more to our country, this I don’t agree with. Lebanon should have self-respect, and accept incoming immigrants the way Canada or the US does: on individual basis, based on whether they can offer the country, and whether they unfairly compete with the Lebanese workforce. If you think Lebanon doesn’t have the same prerogative as Canada or the US, then you’re allowing an Arabic brand of colonialism to crush Lebanon. Isreal is a remnant of 1950′s racism against Arabs, but Arabs themselves also have a colonial self-righteous streak they need to address, even if it’s not as harmful as the Israel kind of colonialism. I have witnessed Arabic colonialism when we used to be shut down, for 15 years, by every Arab, upon denouncing the past Syrian occupation. Now the same ex-Syrian puppets are illegitimately allowing unlimited sales of land to non-Lebanese, and reject the opposition-proposed reforms to retain the Lebanese identity of Lebanese land. All countries have laws that impose on foreign investors to have a local business partners, local employees… not Lebanon! In Lebanon our arabic-colonial government is always treating Lebanon as a doormat, to the Arabic empire. How being being a civilized alternative to Israel’s aggression, and replacing Arabic colonialism to mutual respect among Arabs?
It’s a given that Palestinians in Lebanon should get better living conditions, and also in the case of some, be educated to not serve as a shield for the likes of Fatah el Islam. However, Arabs with no colonial streak should not expect Lebanon to carry a debilitating economic burden by taking on 10% of its population in additional citizens. This is a rate of immigrants that not even well off countries accept.
this is indeed an excellent article, maya. Very engaging, mentally and emotionally. I hope it gets tranlsted into arabic and published in aladab or alakhbar.
Hi hala,
I am confused by your post on many levels, mostly by your assertion that by granting Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon their civil rights that we are “showing a complex of inferiority as we try to stand by the Palestinians”. First of all, the question of boycott and the question of granting civil rights to Palestinian refugees are separate, although intertwined, issues. Secondly, both of these are separate from the issue of the naturalization of Palestinian refugees by granting them Lebanese citizenship, a prospect you seem to be worried about, although you never mention it explicitly.
Some clarifications are in order. Refugees are not immigrants. Refugees do not choose to move to a different country in pursuit of better economic prospects or a better quality of life. Immigrants, on the other hand, are not covered under international humanitarian law. Comparing Lebanon’s responsibility towards the 400,000 Palestinians who were forcibly removed from their land by an occupying army in 1948 and have since been housed in seemingly permanent refugee camps, and the immigration policies of the United States and Canada, is both ludicrous and offensive.
Yes, Lebanon is suffering. Yes, we need adjustments to our free-for all high rollers economy. Yes, we need to encourage the creation of jobs in all fields. Yes, we have been saying the same thing since the end of the civil war in 1990. There is not enough work, and definitely not enough good work, for the population, and we are withering under the tutelage of a bickering, corrupt, and inefficient political class. I find it odd that many of these same leaders, who are directly implicated for the economic state the country is in, are now crying foul at the prospect of allowing Palestinians to work and to own property, to name but a few of the rights that are denied to them. I find it odder that many Lebanese citizens who say they are for an economically healthy Lebanon regurgitate many of the arguments made by these politicians without questioning the role these politicians play in the production of economic inequality and their investment in continuing Lebanon’s discriminatory policies against Palestinians.