(JTA) — Left-wing parties from the Spanish autonomous region of Galicia are demanding their local government launch a boycott of Israel by canceling a concert by Israeli singer and peace activist Noa.
In a statement published Saturday on Facebook, the education and culture council of the Galician Left Alternative –- a coalition of parties that united last year to form the Galician parliament’s third largest bloc — “condemned the employment of the Israeli singer Noa, whose sympathies to military Zionism are notorious.”
The coalition, known by its Galician acronym AGE, urged the Xunta de Galicia – the decision-making body of the government of the autonomous community of Galicia – to cancel Noa’s May 21 concert because it “lends support and justification for the colonization of Palestine and violence that the Israeli state exercises against the Palestinian People.”
Noa, the stage name of Achinoam Nini, defines herself as a peace activist and is a supporter of J Street, which calls itself a “pro-peace, pro-Israel” group. Last year she faced criticism in Israel for performing at a Memorial Day concert in Tel Aviv that commemorated Palestinian terrorists along with Israeli soldiers.
The Galician Association for Friendship with Israel, or AGAI, condemned the AGE coalition for “seeking the sad honor of putting Galicia on the European map of Holocaust denial and xenophobia” with its “campaign of discrimination” against Israel.
In January, AGE vetoed a draft resolution commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, preventing it from going to a vote, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain. It prevented the Galician parliament from commemorating the Holocaust this year as it had done the previous two years.
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