A call by actress Vanessa Redgrave and a group of 38 supporters for a cultural boycott of Israel was defeated at the annual meeting of the British actors union, Equity, which broke up in chaos in a London theater Monday.
The motion was read to the some 300 union members by Redgrave’s brother, Colin. The proposal demanded a ban on performing in Israel and an end to sales there of television and film material involving Equity members. It referred to Israel as “occupied Palestine” and to its law as “fundamentally racist.”
But Colin Redgrave’s reading of the proposal was greeted with a barrage of shouts of “anti-Semite” and “Hitler” from angry opponents. The motion was subsequently overwhelmingly defeated by a show of hands of those in attendance.
Pamela Manson, a Jewish actress, described the motion as “Marxist and racist” and said that the union would be “disgraced forever” if it supported it. “This creed of anti-Zionism not being anti-Semitism is a ploy,” she said. “It is as hard to separate them as to separate the book of Exodus from the Bible.”
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