OCCUPIED RAMALLAH, 9 October 2010 – The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is deeply disturbed by news reports that your company plans to participate, later this month, in the fourth annual Tel Aviv Dance Festival, an initiative sponsored by the Tel Aviv Municipality and cultural institutions that are complicit in maintaining Israel's system of colonial oppression.[2] PACBI, supported by an overwhelming majority in Palestinian civil society and, in particular, by almost the entire community of Palestinian dance artists and other cultural workers,[3] views the participation of any international cultural group in this, or any similarly objectionable festival, as a form of complicity in whitewashing Israel's occupation, apartheid and war crimes. We ask you to cancel your participation and to join the growing ranks of prominent international artists and arts groups who have refused to cross our boycott picket line [4] and have thus evoked the most noble traditions of international solidarity that was manifest in the South African anti-apartheid struggle.
Palestinian artists and boycott activists were particularly disheartened by Alvin Ailey's plans to partake in this festival, given your group's record of standing up for human rights and against racist oppression.
In 2008, when you first ignored our pleas and participated in Israel's "re-branding" propaganda efforts by performing in Tel Aviv, you yourself fell target to Israel's institutionalized and prevailing racism. Israeli security officers at Tel-Aviv's Airport forced Alvin Ailey dancer, Abdur-Rahim Jackson, your only African-American member with a Muslim/Arab sounding name, to perform twice for them in order to prove he was a dancer before letting him enter the country with the rest of the company, as reported by the Associated Press then.[5] While still officially illegal in the U.S., ethnic profiling, considered racist by human rights groups, is widespread in Israel. It is seen in such places as entrances to malls, public and private buildings, airports, etc. Israeli citizens and permanent residents with Arab names -- or often just "Arab accents" -- are commonly singled out for rough, intrusive and glaringly humiliating "security" checks.[6] Even after Mr. Jackson had complied, one of the Israeli officers suggested that he change his name, leaving him humiliated and "deeply saddened," as your own spokesperson confirmed at the time. In response to your humiliation, you did nothing.
At a time when the Israeli state is besieging and denying basic rights and needs to 1.5 million Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and committing a gradual ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and the Naqab (Negev), dancing in Tel Aviv is all that more morally repulsive. You shall be dancing at a festival primarily sponsored by the Tel Aviv Municipality, an official Israeli body notorious for its apartheid policies against the indigenous Palestinians. As the seat of Israel's political and economic power, Tel Aviv houses the institutions that mastermind and oversee the implementation of Israel’s longstanding policies of ethnic cleansing, racial discrimination and military subjugation. It is hence more emblematic of apartheid and colonial rule than any other Israeli city. Tel Aviv is a city in colonial denial. Its very existence and expansion are products of the Zionist project of erasing the physical presence of the Palestinians, their culture, heritage and memory. The adjacent Palestinian city of Jaffa and numerous villages were emptied of their indigenous inhabitants to make way for the "White City." Performing in Tel Aviv today is therefore equivalent to, if not worse than, performing in Sun City under apartheid South Africa, in violation of the call for boycott supported by the oppressed black majority then.
