Matisyahu is an anti-Palestinian affront to reggae music

Matisyahu is a phony.

Flying in the face of reggae’s anti-colonial and liberatory spirit, the Jewish-American reggae artist is siding with Israel over Palestine while it continues to massacre innocent civilians, including entire families, in Gaza.

This involves him peddling falsehoods about the dire predicament of Palestinians, reflecting more broadly the dishonest Israeli narrative that Israel is not oppressing Palestinians.

“At all times Israel gives access to medical services to Arabs from…Gaza” says Matisyahu on his official artist Facebook page, “and provides humanitarian aid and basic necessities to Gaza”.

The reality, however, is that Israel has maintained an illegal blockade on Gaza – often dubbed an “open-air prison” – for 17 years. This, as observed by internationally respected human rights organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International, has both blocked Palestinians in Gaza from accessing medical services and from receiving adequate levels of humanitarian aid and basic necessities, such as water, food and fuel.

This has been further compounded by the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza.

“Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands [of Palestinians] could die,” recently reported the Associated Press, “as hospitals packed with wounded people ran desperately low on fuel and basic supplies.

Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave struggled to find food, water and safety ahead of an expected Israeli ground offensive”.

In Matisyahu’s bizarre view, “this is NOT [caps in original] apartheid”, even though Palestinians are forced to experience this at the hands of Israel but not Israeli themselves have been forced to experience this for years though not Israelis, living adjacent to Gaza.

Matisyahu is certainly not like his more progressive-minded reggae predecessors like Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Unlike the two legendary Jamaican artists, Matisyahu uses his celebrity platform to advance colonial narratives, in this case Israel’s and that are meant to further entrench its illegal presence in the Palestinian territories: Gaza and West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Daniel Arbino, scholar at the University of Texas Austin, well observes that historically “[reggae] musicians constructed a particular self in opposition to a colonial other and fostered notions of ‘Jamaican-ness’ as diasporic, socio-politically conscious, and above all, anti-colonial.

Specifically, they call into question Eurocentric models of knowledge by according primacy to informal knowledge, imagination, and invention, thereby refusing European-derived categories of thought as absolute truth”.

Matisyahu on the other hand publicly endorses the “absolute truth” or dogmatic viewpoint, which Israel seeks to impress on the world, that Palestinians are ultimately the cause of their suffering. Such victim-blaming doesn’t get any lower. It attempts to free the oppressor from being accountable for their wrongdoing while falsely ascribing the source of such wrongdoing to the oppressed themselves.

In this vein Matisyahu, also part of his Facebook post, states: “Instead of using the billions of dollars poured into them by the international community to create a prosperous nation alongside Israel. They [Hamas] turned Gaza into an oppressive murderous regime that kills its own people and indoctrinates children to kill the Jews and all infidels. It’s a religious war”.

Not substantiating this with any proof, the statement is made to – aligned with Israel – further stoke anti-Palestinian sentiment. And it’s intended no doubt by Matisyahu on a large scale, given his sizable following: over one million followers on Facebook alone.

Like the state he sides with Matisyahu’s trying to change public opinion in a way that disadvantages Palestinians, villainizing them to his audience so they are inclined to dislike rather than be drawn – as thankfully much of the world is doing at the moment – to fighting against their long-standing oppression.

Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Matisyahu has a history of being antagonistic towards Palestine, denying its very existence in a 2012 interview: “There was never a country called Palestine. There was the British occupation, but there was never a government. Palestine was a creation that was created within Israel, as Israel had already come about”.

Such distortions and outright historical falsehoods are reminiscent of organisations such as Regavim, an Israeli lobby group that petitions the Knesset to expedite the clearance of Palestinians from the West Bank, ultimately to continue the illegal expansion of Israeli settlements in the territory (there are presently over 200).

Like the group, which claims – in a perverse attempt to invert the historical record – that Palestinians are “illegally occupying” the West Bank and have displaced Israeli Jews who are indigenous to the land, Matisyahu promotes Palestinian erasure, namely there was never a place where Palestinians themselves were a sovereign people – free of colonial interference, theft and violence. From this follows the outrageous idea that Palestinians should have no grievance with Israel.

There is of course nothing wrong with Matisyahu being part of reggae music in virtue of his religion, in this case Judaism. However it is a major affront to the countless reggae artists, from the Caribbean and beyond, who’ve developed the music into an anti-colonial force, fundamentally opposed to any form of oppression that denies people – Palestinian and non-Palestinians alike – their basic human rights.

Matisyahu’s music might sound nice. But it’s not real reggae.