Riddled With Holes

The bandwagon keeps rolling into town.

Over a month since Madonna pinned up the soiled bed sheet of her dwindling pop career in Tel Aviv, another 1980s musician – of a more diametric persuasion to Madge – has done the same.

However this isn’t any old queen crooning to the house lights: this is Morrissey. This is the man who subverted the downtrodden into rallying against the monarchy, the government, meat-eaters, and cultural banality with a crashing ease.

He has of course flirted with disaster since The Smiths broke up. He courted controversy in The Smiths too, however it was done with a purpose as the period where they were at their most virile was a divisive one for the UK. Union Jacks have been draped, immigration has been mooted and the Chinese – a population in its millions – has been homogeneously singled out as being “subhuman”.

When you look at the semantics of what he has said and done then you can almost make out the subtleties of his argument. Some of the time you may find yourself in agreement. What isn’t agreeable is his almost dense flirtation with Zionism, seen in all of its technicolour dubiousness yesterday in Tel Aviv.

Morrissey, in a week where Netanyahu has found his raisons d'etre for a blood feud with Iran, has apparently had a whale of a time performing to whatwas probably an all-Israeli audience. He got the keys of the city; he also managed to convey some platitudes to the crowd in Hebrew.

Tel Aviv is a city far removed from the brutal, indiscriminate and intransigent environment of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both in terms of distance and culture. Since al-Nakba in 1948, Tel Aviv has been constructed to represent a predominantly Zionist city. Its obvious transcendental appeal – lying so close to the Mediterranean – would appeal to such hopeless romantics such as Morrissey. With over ninety percent of the city’s population Jewish it shimmers for Israel’s tourist industry and how the Zionists would like Israel to be viewed by the tourists flying into Tel Aviv airport.

So, if this were the case, is Morrissey completely oblivious to the near-apartheid military regime the government inflicts on the Palestinians in the occupied territories? Instinctively you would think not, as his myopic eye for history, politics and society seep throughout the lyrics he writes. But these words are usually written about British history, where on the mainstream of British pop music, he has provided an alternative discourse.

My first guess as to why Morrissey has performed twice in Israel and courted their affections is due to his own parochialism. Earlier this year, another curmudgeonly and revered Mancunian legend, Mark E Smith, took his band to play in Israel. Again, this course of action was met with protest and shock at such a bonfire of alternative voice vanities. Is this place somewhere nice to play on your holidays, but leave your grasp of the geopolitical at the door?

At worst, could the reason for hot-stepping over the civil rights of Arabs and playing to a mostly white, westernised audience once again be due to his predilection for the controversial? In 2010 John Lydon somewhat cack-handedly spewed out this nonsense when he was justifying PiL’s presence in Tel Aviv:

“If Elvis fucking Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he’s suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then good on him. But I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, Muslim country, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have a problem with how they’re treated.”

Revered pop stars, who have earned respect because of the compassion they have shown, can fall easily into the Julie Burchill route of logic, whereby they can often implode their credibility by being occasionally venal and blinkered.

Firstly, what was repugnant about Lydon’s statement was that he attempted to justify democracy in Israel. The Knesset is in a majority of Jewish members; since Israel formed as a state they have denied political autonomy to the Palestinians; they have literally bulldozed territory that they have no legal right to; and checkpoints, walls and separate roads perpetuate a militarised existence that inflict caustic misery on everyday lives.

Lydon, like Morrissey, has Irish roots, and in the past they have expressed their distaste at oppression because undoubtedly they spiritually at least feel this oppression. Lydon’s heritage is based on immigration and diaspora, therefore what have displaced Palestinians been forced to do throughout the last sixty four years? That’s right, immigrate. Should there not be a blatant acceptance of solidarity here? 

Morrissey has never stated on record if he follows this Lydon pattern of thought. He is a complex individual, and would like you to be reminded of this way. But one of the first songs The Smiths wrote was “Suffer Little Children”. Does a man of such intelligence not see that children, often the ages of the ones killed by Hindley and Brady, are routinely taken by the IDF and tortured just for throwing stones? His entire body of work has highlighted the routine cruelties we face, be it physical or mental. The West Bank and Gaza are rife with this.

One of The Smith’s most potent songs was “The Queen Is Dead”. Morrissey is a staunch anti-monarchist. If he read his history books a little more clinically then he would have noted that, under the auspices of the King of England, the British army obliged themselves in Palestine between the end of WW1 and the end of WW2. It was the gradual collapse of allegiance that the British had with the native Palestinians – who owned the land for thousands of years prior to interference – that lead to al-Nakba and subsequent persecution in 1948. All in the name of Zionism.  

So with history bearing itself against him why has he built himself up to bring his reputation crashing down so cheaply? Was it the money? The glare off the Mediterranean? A further glistening of his ego?

When a voice that echoes meaning into your life wavers, you get pushed back into the hopelessness of the world. It is of course overly precious of a fan to expect a musician to yield to all your moralistic whims, but the Israeli-Palestine mess is a sacrosanct issue to flirt with. An outside observer has to pin their sails to a side and forever ingrain themselves to it, because one side idly promotes oppression and the other side is a victim to it.

Morrissey, to be worth any kind of salt, should have not boarded that plane to Tel Aviv.