[News] Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/bob-dylans-embrace-israels-war-crimes 



  Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes

Michael F. Brown <https://electronicintifada.net/people/michael-f-brown> 
18 October 2016

Controversially, musical genius Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for 
literature last week.

Even some critics who acknowledged his musical brilliance have argued 
that awarding a musician was a step that too dramatically expanded the 
definition of literature. What few dispute is that his music inspired 
millions in the midst of the anti-war and civil rights movements.

But there is also a less pleasant, less known side to the artist, 
particularly his views on Israel, Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League.

In 1983, in /The New York Times/, Stephen Holden described 
<http://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/13/arts/bob-dylan-mingles-exhilaration-and-misanthropy.html> 
Dylan’s album /Infidels/ as “a disturbing artistic semirecovery by a 
rock legend who seemed in recent years to have lost his ability to 
engage the Zeitgeist.”

Holden asserted that a “stomping, hollering rhetorical tone infuses the 
two most specifically political songs, ‘Neighborhood Bully,’ an 
outspoken defense of Israel, and ‘Union Sundown,’ a gospel-blues 
indictment of American labor unions.”

“The lyrics suggest an angry crackpot throwing wild punches and hoping 
that one or two will land,” Holden added.

With its opening lyrics <http://bobdylan.com/songs/neighborhood-bully/> 
parroting Israel’s own narrative of being the blameless, perpetual 
victim of Arab violence, “Neighborhood Bully” came just a year after 
Israel’s bloody invasion of Lebanon that would claim tens of thousands 
of lives:

    Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
    His enemies say he’s on their land
    They got him outnumbered about a million to one
    He got no place to escape to, no place to run
    He’s the neighborhood bully

The invasion of Lebanon was a calamitous war, widely opposed 
<http://www.csmonitor.com/1997/1230/123097.intl.intl.6.html> even in 
Israel where it was likened to the US quagmire in Vietnam.

Yet Dylan sang these words exonerating Israel even after the world had 
witnessed the horrifying massacres 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sabra-and-shatila-massacre> of 
Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by an 
Israeli-allied militia during the occupation of Beirut.

Today, the lyrics read like a prelude to the racist nationalism embodied 
in the politics of today’s Israeli leaders, including Benjamin 
Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett.

Deeper into the tune, Dylan betrays an ignorance of the enormous support 
given by the US government to Israel, notably the huge influx 
<http://www.merip.org/mer/mer164-165/us-aid-israel> of military support 
provided by the administration of President Jimmy Carter shortly before 
the release of the album.

That funding continues to this day with the record-breaking $38 billion 
in military aid 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/obama-hands-israel-largest-military-aid-deal-history> 
over 10 years recently negotiated by the Obama administration.

Yet Dylan sings:

    He got no allies to really speak of
    What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love
    He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied


    Kahane

The equal rights backed by Dylan in the US seemingly have no place in 
his politics regarding Israel and its neighbors.

Dylan’s challenge to power in the US is transmuted into an embrace of 
Israeli militancy because of a flawed sense of reality, perhaps one 
learned from Meir Kahane 
<http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/06/obituaries/meir-kahane-58-israeli-militant-and-founder-of-the-jewish-defense-league.html>, 
founder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) and later of the racist Kach 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/kach> party in Israel.

Dylan’s relationship to Kahane and the JDL is not entirely clear, but 
was explored 
<http://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/28/archives/-wont-you-listen-to-the-lambs-bob-dylan-wont-you-listen-to-the.html> 
by Anthony Scaduto in /The New York Times/ in 1971.

“Dylan’s interest in Israel and Judaism led him, over a year ago, into 
an unexpected relationship with Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense 
League,” Scaduto wrote.

The singer reportedly attended several JDL meetings and may have given 
money to the organization.

Already in 1971, Scaduto wrote, “Dylan’s enthusiasm for the militant 
Jewish organization has brought down the wrath of some in the radical 
movement.”

Scaduto detailed this just four years after the Israeli occupation of 
the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai had 
begun: “To many young radicals, including Jewish kids, Israel is simply 
another one of those fascist states propped up by a fascist American 
Government, and Dylan’s fervent support of Israel and his 
over-publicized contacts with the JDL are to them a further indication 
that he has sold out to the political right he condemned.”


    Rejecting Palestinian struggle

Dylan’s drift away from the anti-war movement over the course of the 
next 45 years – and his clear embrace of Israel after its invasion of 
Lebanon – led to no surprise 
<http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/no-surprise-dylan-is-visiting-the-neighborhood-bully/> 
when he rejected the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement’s 
call for him not to play Israel in 2011.

The right of return for refugees, the end of the occupation and equal 
rights for all Palestinians – the BDS movement’s key demands – would not 
have resonated with the man who wrote “Neighborhood Bully.”

Ironically, both Dylan and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters performed 
<http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/10/10/arts/ap-us-music-desert-trip.html> 
at the Desert Trip musical festival this month.

Today, however, it is Waters who is politically relevant, with his 
support of the BDS movement and Black Lives Matter, his blasting of 
Donald Trump’s racism 
<http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/music-festivals/7534335/roger-waters-trump-israel-desert-trip> 
and his love and support for children wearing “Derriba el muro 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/music/live-reviews/roger-waters-the-who-get-political-at-desert-trip-night-3-w444087>” 
T-shirts – Spanish for “take down the wall.”

In front of an audience of tens of thousands of festival-goers in Indio, 
California, Waters gave a shout-out to Students for Justice in Palestine:

    Roger Waters shouts out California chapters of Students for Justice
    in Palestine before 85k+ at #DesertTrip
    <https://twitter.com/hashtag/DesertTrip?src=hash>
    pic.twitter.com/zhqn3x6YxO <https://t.co/zhqn3x6YxO>

    — Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) October 17, 2016
    <https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/787913881591033856>

Both Waters and Dylan are now in their 70s; one has grown over the last 
50 years in his willingness to embrace urgent contemporary struggles for 
freedom and equal rights. The other has stepped back from vital 
political engagements and yet been rewarded with a Nobel Prize.

Today it is no longer Dylan who best embodies the spirit of one of his 
best known lyrics <http://bobdylan.com/songs/blowin-wind/>:

    Yes, and how many years can some people exist
    Before they’re allowed to be free?


-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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