A London promoter has cancelled a set by Roi Perez, a queer Israeli DJ of considerable talent and reputation. The stated reason is not his music—one of the few realms where merit can still, occasionally, prevail—but his nationality and his unforgivable sin of hosting a gathering for survivors of the Nova massacre. Among those survivors were Bedouins and Arab Israelis, people whom the professional empathisers profess to champion until the moment their existence becomes politically inconvenient. Thus, the city that prides itself on pluralism and nightlife—a city that once took pride in resisting censorship and sectarianism—has found a new inquisition, complete with doctrinal tests and ritual humiliations, all performed to the rhythm of an empty dancefloor.

Let’s try to be clear. If you believe, as I do, that boycott is at times a legitimate instrument of moral and political suasion, you still have to ask the first question of ethics and law alike: what is the target? A state? Its rulers? A company complicit in atrocity? Or an individual who neither directs policy nor commands battalions but plays records and, in this case, convened a wake with a beat for the murdered and bereaved—Jews, Bedouins, and Arabs alike? To take aim at a private citizen for the passport he carries or the grief he tends is not “solidarity.” It is the oldest bigotry in a fashionable costume: collective punishment, the illusion of virtue at someone else’s expense.

The promoter’s decision is defended—always by the brave from behind a locked door—on the grounds that “culture is political.” A banality, and something worse than a banality. If everything is political, then nothing is private; every book, gig, joke, and embrace becomes a loyalty oath to the party of the hour. Culture ceases to be a zone of encounter and becomes an arena for denunciation. That, you may recall, is the method of the people who blow up festivals and kidnap concert-goers. If one wishes to be their mirror image, by all means proceed. But spare us the self-flattery that you are “centering survivors” when you are busy slapping the hands of those who actually invited survivors into the light.

About those survivors: the Nova dead and maimed include Arab Israelis, Bedouins, Druze, foreign students, migrant workers, and queer kids who believed (not unreasonably) that a dance floor was a place........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)