A number of Maltese organisations wrote a letter to Rebecca Buttigieg, Parliamentary Secretary for Reforms and Equality, and to Allied Rainbow Communities, the organisers of the EuroPride, to express their disappointment and anger at the invitation that has been extended to Netta Barzilai to participate in the Malta EuroPride concert. This is because, they argued, this invitation goes against all the values that the Pride stands for.
The organisations, in a statement Friday, said they do not want Netta Barzilai to come to Malta for this occasion because she is a supporter of the Israeli Apartheid state. Barzilai has regularly participated in the efforts of the Israeli state to cover the oppression, the killings, and the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their own land, and to project itself as a “free” and “democratic” state – all pinkwashing initiatives, the organisations said.
They claimed that the fact that Netta Barzilai happens to be an Israeli citizen is not the reason why she should not have been invited for this concert. Nobody should be penalised because one is a citizen of one country or other. However, Netta Barzilai has regularly participated in initiatives organised by the Israeli state outside Israel, in initiatives that celebrate the banishment of Palestinians from their homeland, and in concerts of the far right. According to her, the bad reputation of the Israeli state on the international scene is simply a question of “bad PR” and not because of its politics of terror.
Since its inception in 1948, the Israeli state has done everything in its power to push Palestinians away from their land, the statement said. Palestinians have been massacred in their thousands, and thousands have been evicted from their homes. They saw their fields and their water being stolen, their olive trees burned, the torture in Israeli prisons and the continuous cruelty of occupation that seeks to humiliate them with every step they take. Today, Palestinians are confined to live in less than 20% of the land where they used to live – partly on the Gaza strip, which is bombarded regularly by the Israeli army, and partly in the West Bank, where Israeli illegal settlements continue to spread at a fast pace through the terrorisation of Palestinian villages and the violent seizure of Palestinian land, they argued.
Furthermore, the organisations claimed that it is not the first time that the Israeli state has blackmailed Palestinian LGBTIQ+ persons into forced collaboration to provide information about other Palestinians, under threat that their status will be revealed.
Israel uses all the means at its disposal to choke Palestinians, including cultural tools such as Netta Barzilai to wash away its bloodied image on the international stage, according to the organisations.
Consequently, Netta Barzilai is one of those persons who is targeted by the campaign, “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” called by the Palestinian civil society. In the same way that in the nineties, the Apartheid regime in South Africa came to an end following international boycotts and sanctions, Palestinian civil society wants the world to put pressure on the Apartheid state of Israel by means of boycotts and sanctions against all those that in one way or another are accomplices in its actions.
The organisations asked for Netta Barzilai’s invitation to participate in the EuroPride concert to be revoked since the principles of equality and freedom are not a menu from which one chooses at will. It is a huge contradiction that a manifestation such as the Pride, that is supposed to celebrate love and equality, embraces personalities who are accomplices in the racism, killings and ethnic cleansing of the Apartheid state of Israel, they concluded.