Singer Alicia Keys has scheduled a stop in Tel Aviv, Israel for her world tour.

The show, which is set for July 4, has garnered Keys a lot of criticism, given the state of Israel-Palestine relations.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Alice Walker has written Keys an open letter, requesting that she reconsider having a concert in Israel.

It reads, in part:

 

I have learned today that you are due to perform in Israel very soon. We have never met, though I believe we are mutually respectful of each other’s path and work. It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists. You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people. Google Montgomery Bus Boycott, if you don’t know about this civil rights history already. We changed our country fundamentally and the various boycotts of Israeli institutions and products will do the same there. It is our only nonviolent option and, as we learned from our own struggle in America, nonviolence is the only path to a peaceful future. […]

 

This is actually a wonderful opportunity for you to learn about something sorrowful, and amazing: that our government (Obama in particular) supports a system that is cruel, unjust, and unbelievably evil. You can spend months, and years, as I have, pondering this situation. Layer upon layer of lies, misinformation, fear, cowardice and complicity. Greed. It is a vast eye-opener into the causes of much of the affliction in our suffering world.

Read more at Rolling Out.

 

 

Should Alicia Keys respond to the mounting pressure? Should she perform?

Should we demand that artists we support reflect politics we support?

Sound off below!!!!