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href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/bob-dylans-embrace-israels-war-crimes">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/bob-dylans-embrace-israels-war-crimes</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes</h1>
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<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/michael-f-brown"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label
skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael F. Brown</a></span>
<span class="field field-blog"></span><span class="field
field-publication-date"><span class="date-display-single"
property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2016-10-18T20:38:04+00:00">18 October 2016</span></span>
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<p>Controversially, musical genius Bob Dylan received the
Nobel Prize for literature last week.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In 1983, in <em>The New York Times</em>, Stephen
Holden <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/13/arts/bob-dylan-mingles-exhilaration-and-misanthropy.html">described</a>
Dylan’s album <em>Infidels</em> as “a disturbing
artistic semirecovery by a rock legend who seemed in
recent years to have lost his ability to engage the
Zeitgeist.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“The lyrics suggest an angry crackpot throwing wild
punches and hoping that one or two will land,” Holden
added.</p>
<p>With its opening <a
href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/neighborhood-bully/">lyrics</a>
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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man<br>
His enemies say he’s on their land<br>
They got him outnumbered about a million to one<br>
He got no place to escape to, no place to run<br>
He’s the neighborhood bully</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The invasion of Lebanon was a calamitous war, <a
href="http://www.csmonitor.com/1997/1230/123097.intl.intl.6.html">widely
opposed</a> even in Israel where it was likened to the
US quagmire in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Yet Dylan sang these words exonerating Israel even
after the world had witnessed the horrifying <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sabra-and-shatila-massacre">massacres</a>
of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee
camps by an Israeli-allied militia during the occupation
of Beirut.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Deeper into the tune, Dylan betrays an ignorance of the
enormous support given by the US government to Israel,
notably the <a
href="http://www.merip.org/mer/mer164-165/us-aid-israel">huge
influx</a> of military support provided by the
administration of President Jimmy Carter shortly before
the release of the album.</p>
<p>That funding continues to this day with the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/obama-hands-israel-largest-military-aid-deal-history">record-breaking
$38 billion in military aid</a> over 10 years recently
negotiated by the Obama administration.</p>
<p>Yet Dylan sings:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He got no allies to really speak of<br>
What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of
love<br>
He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Kahane</h2>
<p>The equal rights backed by Dylan in the US seemingly
have no place in his politics regarding Israel and its
neighbors.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/06/obituaries/meir-kahane-58-israeli-militant-and-founder-of-the-jewish-defense-league.html">Meir
Kahane</a>, founder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL)
and later of the racist <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/kach">Kach</a>
party in Israel.</p>
<p>Dylan’s relationship to Kahane and the JDL is not
entirely clear, but was <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/28/archives/-wont-you-listen-to-the-lambs-bob-dylan-wont-you-listen-to-the.html">explored</a>
by Anthony Scaduto in <em>The New York Times</em> in
1971.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>The singer reportedly attended several JDL meetings and
may have given money to the organization.</p>
<p>Already in 1971, Scaduto wrote, “Dylan’s enthusiasm for
the militant Jewish organization has brought down the
wrath of some in the radical movement.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h2>Rejecting Palestinian struggle</h2>
<p>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 <a
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/no-surprise-dylan-is-visiting-the-neighborhood-bully/">no
surprise</a> when he rejected the boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) movement’s call for him not to play
Israel in 2011.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Ironically, both Dylan and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/10/10/arts/ap-us-music-desert-trip.html">performed</a>
at the Desert Trip musical festival this month.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/music-festivals/7534335/roger-waters-trump-israel-desert-trip">racism</a>
and his love and support for children wearing “<a
href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/live-reviews/roger-waters-the-who-get-political-at-desert-trip-night-3-w444087">Derriba
el muro</a>” T-shirts – Spanish for “take down the
wall.”</p>
<p>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:
</p>
<div id="file-42096" class="file file-document
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Roger Waters shouts out
California chapters of Students for Justice in
Palestine before 85k+ at <a
href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DesertTrip?src=hash">#DesertTrip</a>
<a href="https://t.co/zhqn3x6YxO">pic.twitter.com/zhqn3x6YxO</a></p>
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) <a
href="https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/787913881591033856">October
17, 2016</a></blockquote>
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</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Today it is no longer Dylan who best embodies the
spirit of one of his <a
href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/blowin-wind/">best
known lyrics</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, and how many years can some people exist<br>
Before they’re allowed to be free?</p>
</blockquote>
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