Don’t praise Iceland’s Hatari for violating Eurovision boycott


May 22, 2019
JFJFP
Waving a Palestinian flag does not make up for crossing a picket line

Icelandic group Hatari at Eurovision

Ali Abunimah writes in The Electronic Intifada

They won ecstatic praise on social media, but this should not obscure the reality: that Hatari crossed the picket line called for by Palestinian civil society.

In fact, what they did was an act of anti-solidarity that ultimately harms Palestinian efforts to end Israel’s increasingly violent and brazen regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.

The point is not difficult: if a trade union calls a strike and some workers decide to cross the picket line, but to flash union badges at the strikers as an “act of solidarity,” everyone would understand that the strike-breakers are still scabs.  Their use of union symbols to cover their betrayal would rightly be seen as rubbing salt into the wound and earn the scorn of striking workers.

The point of a collective action like a strike or a boycott is to raise the cost to the oppressor of violating the rights of the oppressed, so that the oppressor is forced to stop their oppression.

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