Palestinians boycott Arab World Festival because of "normalization" - but no one else (so far)

The Festival Arabofolies (Arab World Festival) is a thrice-yearly cultural event sponsored by the Arab World Institute in Paris. This week the winter version will take place.

The Arab World Institute has been admirably showing exhibitions featuring Jews of the East recently. Last week, to much fanfare, French President Macron inaugurated an exhibit titled "Jews of the Orient." It is now featuring an exhibit on how the six-pointed star is a recurring motif in Islamic and Jewish art. 

And one of the performers at the Festival Arabofolies is Neta Elkayam, an Israeli who sings Jewish-Moroccan tunes.

When the BDS movement found out that an Israeli was performing, they put out a call for Arabs to boycott a festival that was curated and organized by Arabs. They then discovered that the Israel Museum and the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem donated some artwork for the "Jews of the Orient" exhibit. 

How scandalous that Arabs should be exposed to Arab art that was lent by Israeli institutions to an Arab festival!

BDS apparently missed other Israeli performers. There will be a tribute to a Tunisian violin player, Maurice Meimoun, and vocals and percussion are coming from Shalom and Yoav Bouhnik. Presumably the other band members, who are all Arab, know that the Bouhniks are from Israel.

So far, the only people to publicly announce they are pulling out of the festival are four Palestinian performers.

It is clear that the Arab World Institute has no problem with Jews or Israelis. They want to educate people about Arab culture and if that includes people from the large Mizrahi community in Israel, why not?

We will be seeing a major Arab cultural festival, with tens of thousands of attendees, with Israelis fully participating next to Algerians, Tunisians and Iraqis - as they should.

If the only performers to drop out of the festival are Palestinians, this would be a great defeat for the BDS movement. It means that the Arab world is ignoring BDS and prefers sanity over childish boycotts. And if their fellow Arabs publicly ignore the call to boycott cultural activities with Israelis, then Western performers will start to wake up to the fact that they have been gaslighted by the BDS movement into thinking that it is much bigger than it really is.

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