Amid Cancellations, Editors Host Israeli Music Festival

By Alex Weisler June 10, 2010

Despite high-profile cancellations by the Pixies, Gorillaz and the Klaxons, the PiC.NiC music festival in Tel Aviv played host yesterday to Editors — and the band took to its online forum after the concert to call the performance “one of the most memorable shows of our career.”

Lead singer Tom Smith, writing for the band as a whole on its website, said Editors believes playing a concert in a country is not the same thing as endorsing its government.

“Right now there is no global concerted effort to change the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians as there was from the world’s media, sports stars and musicians etc. with apartheid era South Africa,” Smith wrote. “Sure, given the recent events and the way Israel and the whole of the middle east is discussed and viewed through the western media it would have been the easier thing to do for us to cancel, to forget about it and wait until Israel is out of the news again.”

Smith called the concert a “beautiful evening” and a performance that his band will remember for a long while.

“We live in complex times, there are terrible things that happen the world over, but a country’s people are not it’s government,” he wrote. “Tonight we played one of the most memorable shows of our career, 1,004 people singing their hearts out, 1,004 people who hope for peace and resolve wherever the troubles may be, be it on the door step or the other side of the world.”

Smith ended the post by expressing his hope that Editors will return to Tel Aviv soon — a sharp break from the canceled PiC.NiC acts and performers like Elvis Costello, all of whom have publicly and loudly canceled recent shows in Israel.

Alex Weisler is a former journalist and the senior video and digital content producer for JDC, the global Jewish humanitarian organization.

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