Leonard Cohen to play Soweto as well as Johannesburg

Woops, silly me. According to Ha'aretz, thanks to pressure from principled and consistent anti-racists, Leonard Cohen is now going to play a gig in the West Bank as well as one in Tel Aviv.

International music legend Leonard Cohen will perform in the West Bank city of Ramallah two days after his upcoming performance in Israel, Haaretz has learned.

The concert in Ramallah is set to be held on September 26, in the Palestinian city's Cultural Palace; about 1,000 fans are expected to attend.

Cohen's decision came after pro-Palestinian activists attempted to dissuade the singer from performing in Israel.

Actually I got the headline analogy from Deborah Fink on the Just Peace UK list. And the analogy is a good one. It's a disgrace that Cohen is passing Israel off as a normal country and equally disgraceful that he thinks adding Ramallah as an afterthought to his visit to Tel Aviv somehow rectifies his wrong. It doesn't and he knows it doesn't.

Leonard Cohen has shown himself to be tolerant and even supportive of the most explicitly racist regime on the planet and he thinks he can cover that up by playing to the victims of the ideology to which he subscribes. Hopefully, he will have another afterthought and cancel all gigs in occupied Palestine.