Ella Yelich-O’Connor aka Lorde has cancelled her Tel Aviv concert. Concert organiser organiser Ryan Arieli said “She doesn’t deserve all this shit. The last thing she needs on her comeback tour is the army of globalists and anti-semites weighing down on her.” – Facebook
Justin Bieber, Radiohead, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Morrissey, and Kanye were fine with doing shows.
Lorde’s covering statement says she prides herself on being “an informed young citizen.” Shades of “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City”, back in the day.
By default she is also siding with the 128 countries who last week voted to declare the US recognition of Jerusalem as “null and void.”
Make no mistake this will cost Lorde massively in the US market. It’s no mere ideological finger-wag.
Of the tiny moments of resistance in 2017’s cascading cataclysm against civility, tolerance, and decency in Europe, US, and most of the Middle East, this is the largest tiny moment from a New Zealander in a very, very long time.
The next electoral chance to shift Netanyahu is not until November 2019 – he’s stale but very hard to shift. And he’s Trump’s dwarf binary star in the Middle East. It’s a very long tactical battle to propose anything different and win government there. You have to go back to Perez and Rabin to see alternative futures to the current track.
But as we have seen in 2017, most effective progressive leadership is now in the hands of fresh leaders. It needs strong cultural signals to wake people up. Lorde is sending a strong signal.
As with South Africa in the 1980s, foreign pressure from small countries really works internally as a cultural shift.
Lorde will get major blowback, but this is a very powerful symbolic stand to make.
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