R’n’B singer Alicia Keys has been urged to boycott her own appearance at the Nokia Arena in Tel Aviv, Israel, next month, after a high profile plea from a number of celebrities and artists led by author Alice Walker.
69-year-old Walker, best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ‘The Color Purple’ and her work as a veteran civil rights activist, published an open letter to Keys this week in which she compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the racial injustices of twentieth-century America.
“You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people”, she wrote. “We changed our country fundamentally, and the various boycotts of Israeli institutions and products will do the same there. It is our only nonviolent option and, as we learned from our own struggle in America, nonviolence is the only path to a peaceful future”
Keys, whose “Girl on Fire” tour hit London’s O2 earlier this week, is already a prominent HIV/ AIDS campaigner, seeking to raise awareness of the disease in the US, where it hits African-American families disproportionately. She remains yet to comment, however, on this latest call for activism.
