Beer will change the World

Pause 11 Aberporth UAV event cancelled / An expensive Folly!

http://www.bepj.org.uk/

 The Aberporth UAV event planned for July 2011 has been cancelled. The Pause 11 website states.

West Wales Airport Ltd regrets to announce that due to circumstances beyond their control the PUSE 11 exhibition and UAS demonstation planned for 6 and 7 of July will no longer be taking place.

Every effort will be made to convene an annual unmanned systems event at West Wales Airport from 2012 when it is hoped the UAS market will be better placed to both participate and gain benefit.

The organisers extend their sincere thanks and apologies to all who have expressed interest thus far and hope they will look forward to participating in next year's event.

Judging by previous events held in Europe, Pause 11 was expected to be dominated by the military and was already gaining the attention of peace and anti-militaisation groups from Wales and the Uk. Protests and events by these groups seemed likely.

With one of the empty office units at Parc Aberporth already being put on the open market for rent the dream of a UAV "centre of excellence" seems to have turned into an expensive nightmare.

The Welsh Assemby Government reveals £17 million pounds has already been spent on the project, not including money spent by Ceredigion County Council on the roundabout at the entrance to Parc Aberporth, and the realignment of the B4333 road.

There are currently 37 people employed in the units at Parc Aberporth, but the WAG cannot provide information on whether they are full or part-time jobs or whether the jobs are taken by people  with local addresses.

Thanks again to Bro Emlyn Peace and Justice Group for the above information.Link to their site at top of article.

http://wales.gov.uk/publications/accessinfo/disclosurelogs/dlbus2010/2011/dl86/?lang=en

Right I'm off for a little drinky to celebrate.

Octavia Paz (31/3/14 -19/4/98) - Poetry and History

Octavia Paz was born Octavio Paz Lozano in Mixcoac, Mexico, then a small town, but today part of Mexico City on this day 31 March 1914. His parents were Octavio Paz Solorzano and Josefina Lozano. His maternal grandparents immigrated to Mexico from Spain.

The Paz family was a prominent family and part of the Mexican elite. His father and grandfather were active supporters of the Emilio Zapata revolution against President Porfirio Diaz's regime. His father was instrumental in the agrarian uprisings against the Mexican government and so was not around much during Paz's youth. 

Paz was raised by his mother, aunt and paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz, a liberal, intellectual novelist and publisher.

His grandfather was noted for having written the first Mexican novel with an indigenous Indian theme. Both his father and grandfather were part of the progressive / leftist intelligensia of Mexico at the time.

When Zapata was assassinated, the family fled to Los Angeles, California for about a year until the situation cooled off when Paz was five years old.

Growing up, Paz was introduced to literature early in life through his grandfathers immense library filled with classic Mexican and European literature. He read from a young age and these books influenced his later poems and essays. His formal education was at Colegio Williams that he attended until graduation.

During the 1920s, Paz was mostly influenced by Spanish poets, Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramon Jimenez and Antonio Machado in his readings and writings of poetry. 

He first published poems as a teenager in 1931 and was greatly influenced by D. H. Lawrence. Two years later, at nineteen years of age, he published Luna Silvestre (Wild Moon) a collection of his poetry. He went on to publish many more collections of poetry, including “Piedra de sol” (Sunstone), which is considered one of his greatest works.

In 1932, he founded his first literary review magazine, Barandal.

After graduating from the Colegio Williams went on to study law, but abandoned his law studies in 1937 because as a young Marxist  he preferred to teach the sons of peasants and workers in the city of Merida in the Yucatan Peninsula. He was following in the progressive and leftist influences of his father and grandfather.

It was here in Merida that he began working on the first of his long, ambitious poems, Entre la piedra y la flor (Between the Stone and the Flower) which was published in 1941. These poems described the situation of the Mexican peasant under the thumb of the greedy landlords of the day. These poems were greatly influenced by poet, T.S. Eliot.

At the invitation of Pablo Neruda, Paz traveled to Valencia, Spain in 1937 to join the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers during that country's brutal civil war. Here Paz's writings and sympathies were with the Republican side of the war and against Franco and fascism. He spent a year there before going to Paris, where he advocated for the Spanish Republic. He met poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Antonio Machado, Tristan Tzara, and of course Neruda. The civil war steered his poetry into a short-lived social realist mode, perhaps his first attempt to join words and action. “Elegy for a Friend Dead at the Front in Aragon” and “Ode to Spain” stand out as examples of this effort; the former addresses Paz’s “comrade” and finds brief moments of felicity in the psychology of grief and loss, asking, “What fields will grow that you won’t harvest? / What blood will run without your heirs? / What word will we say that doesn’t say / your name, your silence, / the quiet pain of not having you?” Paz also became known for “No Pasaran,” or “They Will Not Pass,” a call to arms in verse that caused a minor sensation. 

When he returned to Mexico in 1938, Paz co-founded another literary journal, Taller (Workshop) and wrote for this journal until 1941. This journal highlighted the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico along with a new literary sensibility.

Then, Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in the U.S. at the University of California at Berkley. Here he became immersed in Anglo-American modernist poetry.

When he returned to Mexico two years later, he joined the Mexican diplomatic service, working in New York City for a while. He remained in diplomatic service for Mexico for the next twenty years as he wrote his poetry and essays. 

In 1945 he was sent to Paris to work as a diplomat and here wrote his definitive and great book length essay, El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) (1950) This book was an intense look and analysis of modern Mexico and the Mexican personality.

In addition to his poetry, Paz was a prolific essayist, writing on a wide range of topics including politics, culture, and art. His essays are known for their insight and originality, and he was a leading intellectual in Mexico and the Spanish-speaking world. 

Paz’s work was deeply influenced by his experiences as a diplomat. He served as Mexico’s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968, and his time in India had a profound impact on his writing, inspiring many of his most famous works. 

He made contrary marks on history. Acting against the excesses of his own government in 1968, at the time of the Olympic Massacre in Mexico City, he renounced his ambassadorship in New Delhi and became a focus of opposition. Twenty years before, he published and analysed news of the Soviet labour camps, turning left-leaning Latin American writers virulently against him. Although his critics described him as a neoliberal or conservative thinker, Paz's roots were on the left, and he maintained a strong attachment to socialist ideals until the very end of his life.

When Octavio Paz died on 19 April 1998 in Mexico City, Mexico of cancer of the spine in 1998 his passing was mourned as the end of an era in Mexico. Paz's literary career helped to define modern poetry and the Mexican personality. When Octavio Paz died  Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was many poets, from  being the surrealist disciple of André Breton to the admiring imitator of Alexander Pope, alongside being an autobiographer and confessional writer. A social critic, a philosopher, translator, essayist and a brilliant editor, urgently alive in and to his time. 

Octavio Paz’s literary contributions have earned him numerous awards and honors, as well as a lasting legacy. In addition to the Nobel Prize  in Literature, which he was awarded in 1990 Paz received many other awards and honors throughout his career. He was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest literary honor in the Spanish-speaking world, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among others.

Paz’s legacy as a writer, poet, and intellectual is marked by his profound influence on Mexican and Spanish-language literature, as well as his impact on global literary culture. His  writing celebrated for its beauty, complexity, and depth continues to inspire writers and readers around the world, and his ideas and insights into culture, politics, and the human condition remain relevant and important today. He is important because his writings appeal to readers of diverse backgrounds.

Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet. He lived during an era where his early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism and HInduism. His later poetry dealt with love, eroticism, the nature of time and Buddhism.

As a poet, Paz was of the belief that poetry constituted "the secret religion of the modern age" and for Paz it was "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body . . . "

His poetry has been collected in two great collections: Poemas 1935-1975 (1980) and Collected Poems 1957-1987 (1987). I will end this post with the following brilliant essay by him.

Poetry and History - Octavia Paz

Every poem is an attempt to reconcile history and poetry for the benefit of poetry. The poet always seeks to elude the tyranny of history even when he identifies himself with the society in which he lives, and when he participates in what is called ' the current of the age' - an extreme case which is becoming less and less imaginable in the modern world. All great poetic experiments - from the magic formula and the epic poem to automatic writing - claim to use the poem as a melting-pot for history and poetry, fact and myth, colloquialism and imagery, the date which can never be repeated and the festivity, a date which is alive and endowed with a secret fertility, ever returning to inaugurate a new period. The nature of a poem is analogous to that of a Fiesta which, besides being a date in the calender, is also a break in the sequence of time and the irruption of a present which periodically returns without yesterday or tomorrow. Every poem is a Fiesta, a precipitate of pure time.
The relationship between men and history is one of slavery and dependence. For if we are the only protaganists of history, we are also its raw material and its victims: it can only be fulfilled at our expense. Poetry radically transforms this relationship; it can only find fulfilment at the expense pf history. All its products - the hero, the assassin, the lover,the allegory, the fragmentary inscription, the refrain, the other; the involuntarily exclamation on the lips of the child at play, the condemned criminal, the girl making love for the first time; the phrase borne of the wind, the shred of a cry - all these, together with archaism, neologism, and quotation, will never resign themselves to dying, or to be battered against the wall. They are bent on attaining to the end, on existing on the utmost. They extricate themselves from cause and effect. They wait for the poem which will rescue them and make them what they are. There can be no poetry without history, but poetry has no other mission than to transmute history. And therefore the only true revolutionary poetry is apocalyptic poetry.
Poetry is made of the very substance of history and society - language. But it seeks to re-create language in accordance with laws other than those which govern conversation and logical discourse. This poetic transmutation occurs in the innermost recesses of the language. The phrase- and not the isolated world- is the cell, the simplest element of  language. A word cannot exist without there words, a phrase without other phrases.
That is to say, every sentence always contains an implicit reference to another, and is susceptible of explanation by another. Every phrase constitutes a 'wish to say' something, referring explicitly to something beyond it. Language is a combination of mobile and interchangeable symbols, each indicating 'towards' what it is going. In this way both meaning and communication are based on the 'intentionality' of words. But no sooner does poetry touch them that they are changed into rhythmic units or into images; they stand on their own and are sufficient unto themselves. Words suddenly lose their mobility, there are various ways of saying a thing in prose, there is only one in poetry. The poetical word has no substitute. It is not a wish to say something, but is something irrevocably said. Or alternatively, it is not a 'going towards' something, nor a 'speaking' of this or tat. The poet does not speak of horror or of love: he shows them. Irrevocable and irreplaceable, the words of poetry become inexplicable except in tears of themselves. Their meaning is no longer beyond, but within tem; the image is 'in' the meaning.
The proper function of the poetic image is to resolve into a unity realities which appear to us conflicting and irreducible. And this operation takes pace without removing or sacrificing the conflicts and antagonisms between the entities which it evokes and re-creates. That is why the poetic image is inexplicable in the strict sense of the term. Now poetic language partakes of the ambiguity with which reality reveals itself to us. In transmuting the language, the image not only opens the door to realty, it also, as it were, strips realty bare and shows it to us in its final unity. The phrase becomes an image. The poem is is a single image, or an indivisible constellaion of images. The void left by the dissapearance of what we call reality is peopled with a crowd of heteroeneous or conflicting visions, inevitably seeking to resolve their discord into a solar system of allusions - the poem: a universe of opaque, corruptible words which can yet light up and burn whenever their are lis to touch them. At certain times, in the mouths of some speakers, the phrase-mill becomes a source of evident truths requiring no demonstration. Then we are transported into the fullness of time. By exploiting language to the utmost the poet transcends it. By emphasising history, he lays it bare and shows it for what it is - time.
When history allows us to suspect that it is perhaps no more than  ghostly procession, without meaning or end, ambiguity of language becomes more marked and prevents any genuine dialogue. Words lose their meaning,and thereby their powers to communicate. The degradation of histpry into a mere sequence of events involve the degradation of language, too, into a collection of lifeless symbols. All men use the same words, but they do not understand one another. And it is useless for men to try to 'reach an agreement' on the meanings of words. Language is not convention, but a dimension from which man cannot be seperated. Every verbal adventure is total; a man stakes his whole self and life on a single word. The poet is a man whose very being becomes one with his words. Therefore, nly the poet can make possible a new dialoque. The destiny of the poet, particularly in a period such as ours, is 'donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.' This implies that words are rooted out of the common language and brought to birth in a poem. What is called hermeticiism of modern poetry spins from that fact. But works as inseperable from men. Consequently, poetic activity cannot take place outside the poet, in the magic object represented by the poem; rather does it take man himself, not in the poem alone. The two are inseperable. The poems of Rimbaud are Rimbaud himself, the adolescent fencing with shining blasphemies, despite all attempts to convert him into a kind of brute upon whom the word descended. No, poet and his word are one. Such has been, during the past hundred years the motto of the greatest movement of the century - surrealism - been any different. The grandeur of these attempts - to which no poet worthy of the name can be indifferent - lies in their endeavour to destroy once and for all, and in desperation, the dualism which tears us asunder. Poetry leaps into the unknown, or it is nothing.
In present circumstances, it may seem ludicrous to the extravagent claims of poetry. Never has the domination of history been greater than now, never has the pressure of events' become so suffocating. In proportion as the tyranny of 'what to do next' becomes more and more intolerable - since our consent has not been asked for the doing, and since it is almost always directed towards man's destruction- so does poetic activity become more secret, isolated, and rare. Only yesterday, to write a poem or to fall in love were subversive activities, compromising the social order by exposing its double character. Today, the very notion of order has disappeared, and its place has been taken by a combination of forces, masses, and resistances. Reality has cast disguises and contemporary society is seen for what it is: a hetegeneous collection of things 'homogenized' by the whip or by propaganda, directed by groups distinguishable from one another only by their degrees of brutality. In these circumstances, poetic creation goes into hiding. If a poem is a Fiesta, it is one held out of season, in unfrequented places - an underground festivity.
But poetic activity is rediscovering all its ancient subversive powers by this very secrecy, impregnated with eroticism and the occult, a challenge to an interdict not less condemnatory for not being explicitly formulated..
Poetry, which yesterday was required to breath the free air of universal communion, continues to be an exorcism for preserving us from the sorcery of force and its numbers. It has been said that poetry is one of the means by which modern man can say No  to all those powers which, not content with disposing of our lives, also want to rule our consciences. But this negation carries within it a Yes which is greater than itself.

Reprinted from
Anthology of Mexican Poetry
Grove Press 1994

originally published , in an edition
by Thames and Hudson, 1959.

FREEDOM - Pat Arrowsmith ( b.3/3/30)

Here at least, I thought,
I shall find freedom.
Here in prison all encumbrances
will be removed.
I shall be left without the burden of
possessions, responsibilities, relationships.
Alone and naked I shall feel
a fresh wind over my uncluttered body
blow each pore clear,
cooling and cleaning every crevice.

At last I shall know the relief of
simply obeying orders,
owning nothing,
caring for no-one.
being uncared for.

I shall sit content for hours on end
in a bare cell,
glad to be cut off from
things, people, commitments and the
confusing world outside.

But I was wrong.
There is no freedom here-
prison is the world in microcosm.

In my locker is a cache of valuables:
needle, cotton, nail-file, pencil.
My wages buy me fruit and biscuits which
I hoard and hide,
fearing they'll get stolen.

Meticulously I arrange the flowers that
outside friends send in:
with difficulty acquire a tin of shoe polish:
carefully decorate my cell with cut out pictures:
get flustered if I lose my mug or bucket.

I am no hermit from the outside world,
but strain through busy days to read
each item in the newspapers.
International problems follow me inside;
a prisoner is picked on - she is coloured.

Every evening I am forced to choose
betwen a range of recreations:
I may read or dance or take a bath,
go to class, play darts or
watch the news.

I am seldom on my own:
a geometry of love, hate, friendship
forms about me.
Someone calls my name,
enters my cell,
asks a favour,
makes some claim upon me.

And I marvel
as I lie alone at night
that this world is as complex as the other:
that even here in jail I am not free to
lose my freedom.


Holloway Prison, London, 1969

FROM:-

BREAKOUT

POEMS & DRAWINGS

FROM PRISON

BY PAT ARROSMITH

Published by Edinburgh Univesity Student Publications Board 1975_

Edward Hirsch (20/1/50) - In Spite of Everything, the Stars.

Like a stunned piano, like a bucket
of fresh milk flung into the air
or a dozen fists of confetti
thrown hard at a bride
stepping down from the altar,
the stars surprise the sky.
Think of dazed stones
floating overhead, or an ocean
of starfish hung up to dry. Yes,
like a conductor's expectant arm
about to lift toward the chorus,
or a juggler's plates defying gravity'
or a hundred fastballs fired at once
and freezing the sky over the city.

And that's why drunks leaning up
against abandoned buildings, women
hurrying home on deserted side streets,
policemen turning blind corners, and
even thieves stepping from alleys
all stare up at once. Why else do
sleepwalkers move toward the windows,
or old men drag fllimsy lawn chairs
onto fire escapes, or hardened criminals
press sad foreheads to steel bars?
Because the night is alive with lamps!
That's why in dark houses all over the city
dreams stir in the pillows, a million
plumes of breath rise into the sky.

At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire
of stars flaming on the other side of the sky,
but the body stares into an empty night sheen,
a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels,
feverish old loves: don't seperate yet.
Let what rises live with what descends.

FROM -Wild Gratitude
Knopf,New York, 1986....


Had too much too think earlier, so now I rest in Wood Green,  at sisters ,still looking out, tomorrow  will have a look  at river.. sweet dreams... back soon.

March for the Alternative ( Saturday March 26th ) Why I'm marching.

This coming Saturday I will join thousands of protestors marching to protest against David Cameron's Tory led coalitions plans to divide Britain. Millions of workers, pensioners, students and benefit claimants are currently being kicked in the teeth by this government. A coaltion need I not remind you that the majority of the people of this country did not vote for.
Driven by right wing ideolgy hellbent on destruction, Margeret Thatcher herself did not dare to do to the N.H.S what Cameron and his cronies is about to try and do. He and his partner in crime Nick Clegg has unleashed a wreacking ball to the ethos of the welfare state and must be resisted. They seem intent on rolling back the years with mass privatisation and sweeping cuts that are based simply on ideological reasons, one based on capitalism and greed. The money supply which capitalism breathes with and the conservatives allies the bankers are sucking the life out of society while ordinary people suffer.
These are some of my reasons for joining the protestsors on the T.U.C March for the Alternative this Saturday.
The dismanting of years of progress by the wreckless antics of a priveleged few must be oppossed. The cuts about to be implemented will effect the lives of every person in the land, apart from a small elite. Ordinary citizens will be hit the hardest while the Tory's friends the bankers, who incidentally caused our current financial crises get away scot free.
Nick Clegg himself said last May that Ministers "would put fairness at the heart of everthing we do". He was obviously telling lies, because it would be hard person to find any fairness in any of the policies this coalition has pursued.
I would urge everyone who can, to try and join the demo on Saturday, we have nothing to lose and so much to gain, we must show this government that the people are united against them, we have the power to challeng them and ghange their direction.We must at every opportunity say no to their lies, their distortion of reality.
They want to crush us, and divide us, but we have the power to beat them, remember in recent times history has proven that their is no greater force than the will and the power of the people.
The Con-dem reality is a simple class driven policy of stealing from the poor and giving it back to the rich.Their vicious onslaught will continue unabated , with their dangerous policies impacting on us well into the future. It is time to fight back, time to march, time to tell them with one voice.No. For tomorrow's sake and for justice's sake.

When the Government - Adrian Mitchell (24/10/32 - 20/12/ 08)

When the government whips
when the government whips
it's a special kind of gangster
bashing out its brutal will
with a mouthful of morality
heartfelt of cruel thrill

When the government kills
when the government kills
it's a special kind of murderer
srangling with a hypocrite's sigh
mouthful of deterrence
heartful of hang shhot and fry

When the government tortures
when the government tortures
it's a special kind of thug
who's trained to be a terrorcop
mouthful of security
heart full of poison to the top

When the government bombs
when the government bombs
it's a special mass murderer
crazy with its own success
mouthful of democracy
worldful of emptiness.


Originally Published in Blue Coffee, Poems 1985-1986.
Bloodaxe Books

still very apt
I feel.

...Nothing is Random - Luna Auriga Serena

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be,
whether a long string of perfectly blue day ,
that begin and end in golden dimness,
the most seemingly chaotic political acts,
the rise of a great city,
the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light,
the distributions of fortune,
what time the milman gets up,
the position of the electron,
or the occurrence of one astonshingly frigig winter after another.

Enen electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability,
are tame and obsequious little creature that rush at the speed of light,
going precisely where they are supposed to go.
They make faint whistling sounds that when apprhended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying throuh a forest,
and they do as exactly as they are told.
Of this, one can be certain.

And yet there is
a wonderful anarchy,
in that the milkman chooses when to arise,
the rat picks the tunnell into which he will dive
when the subway comes rushing down the track,
and the snowflake will fall, as it will.

How can this be?
If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined,
how can there be free will?
The answer to that is simple.

Nothing is predetermined;
it is determined,
or was determined,
or will be determined.
No matter, it all happened at once,
in lesss than an instant,
and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance
the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given-
so we, track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece.

Time, howver, can be easily overcome;
not by chasing light, but by standing back
far enough to see it all at once.

The universe is still and complete.
Everything that ever was,
is;
everything that ever will be, is,
and so on,
in all possible combinations.
Though in percieving it we imagine that it is in motion,
and unfinished,
it is quite finished and astonishingly beautiful.

In the end, or rather, as things really are,
any event, no matter how small,
is intimately and sensibly tied to all others.
All rivers run to the sea;
those who are apart are brought together,
the lost ones are redeemed;
the dead come back to life;
the perfectly blue days that have begun
and
ended in golden dimness continue,
immobile and accessible;
and when all is percieved in such a way to obviate time,
justice becomes apparent not as
something that will be, but as something that is...

(Miyagi, March 14th 2011)

This is my random thought which I've been thinking since this morning. So many thoughts running on my mind. The sudden earthquake, the sudden  blast of nuke plants and Nothing is Random.

Roger Waters - Tear down this Apartheid Wall.

K

In 1980, a song I wrote, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, was banned by the government of South Africa because it was being used by black South African children to advocate their right to equal education. That apartheid government imposed a cultural blockade, so to speak, on certain songs, including mine.
Twenty-five years later, in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival used the song to protest against Israel's wall around the West Bank. They sang: "We don't need no occupation! We don't need no racist wall!" At the time, I hadn't seen first hand what they were singing about.
A year later I was contacted to perform in Tel Aviv. Palestinians from a movement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israel urged me to reconsider. I had already spoken out against the wall, but I was unsure whether a cultural boycott was the right way to go.
The Palestinian advocates of a boycott asked that I visit the occupied territory to see the wall for myself before I made up my mind. I agreed.
Under the protection of the United Nations I visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw that day. The wall is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression.
If it culd be like that for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like for the Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knew then my conscience would not allow me to walk away from that wall, from the fate of the Palestinians I met: people whose lives are crushed daily by Israel's occupation. In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that day: We don't need no thought control."
Realising at that point that my presence on a Tel Aviv stage would legitimise the oppression I had seen, I cancelled my gig at the stadium in Tel Aviv and moved into Neve Shalom, an agricultural community devoted to growing chick peas and also, admirably, to co-operation between different faiths, where Muslim, Christian and Jew work side by side in harmony.
Against all expectations it was to become the biggest music event in the short history of Israel. Some 60,000 fans battled traffic jams to attend. It was extraordinarily moving for us, and at the end of the gig I was moved to exhort the young people there to demand of their government that they attempt to make peace with their neighbours and respect the civil rights of Palestinians living in Israel.
Sadly in the intervening years the Israeli government has made no attempt to implement legislation that would grant rights to Israeli Arabs equal to those enjoyed by Israeli Jews, and the wall has grown, inexorably annexing more and more of the West Bank.
For the people of Gaza, locked in a virtual prison behind the wall of Israel's illegal blockade, it means another set of injustices. It means that children go to sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished. It means that fathers and mothers unable to work in a decimated economy, have no means to support their families. It means that university students with scholarships to study abroad must watch the opportunity of a lifetime slip away because they are allowed to travel.
In my view, the abhorent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), coupled with its denials of the rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.
Where governments refuse to act people must, with whatever peaceful means at their disposal. For me this means declaring an intention to stand in solidarity, not only with the people of Palestine but also with the many thousands of Israelis who disagree with their government's policies, by joining the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.
My conviction is born in the idea that all people deserve basic human rights. This is not an attack on the people of Israel. This is, however, a plea to my colleagues in the music industry, and also to artists in other disciplines, to join this cultural boycott.
Artists were right to refuse to play in South Africa's Sun City resort until apartheid fell and white people and black people enjoyed equal rights. And we are right to refuse to play in Israel until the day comes - and it surely will come - when the wall of occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis in the peace, freedom, justice and dignity that they all deserve."

This article originally appeared in the Guardian and The Morning Star.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/11/cultural-boycott-west-bank-wall

Obviously a successful boycott requires a general consensus. Can any boycott be described completely as just, is their perhaps room for compromise. Their inevitably will always be casualties on either side. Yet it is fact Israeli artists have freedom and thought to express themselves freely around the world, wheras this is not the case for the Palestinians who are prisoners in their own land. Daily Palestinian land is being stolen, their houses demolished and crops destroyed.Though recently Ian McEwan recently visited Israel and openly critisised actions goin on in Israel's name, standing in solidarity so to speak, I personally find that generally cultural visits normalise and legitimise Israel's actions.
Anyway a growing roster of international performers have declined to whitewash Israel's policies, these include Pete Seeger, Gil-Scot-Heron, Devendra Benhardt, Elvis Costello, Gorillaz and the Pixies. Another argument for some performers playing is that music can have a healing force. Not when your on the wrong side of a prison wall it doesn't.

R.S Thomas - Here

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow,
You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?

I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.

Ist is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.