Conway, who has had a successful solo (and duo) career since her days as lead singer of 1980s band Do Re Mi, has become a target of pro-Palestinian activists since an interview with Patricia Karvelas on Radio National last December, in which she declared herself a Zionist and said, “I don’t believe the figures [of dead on the Palestinian side] are accurate”, and insisted Israel’s military “don’t want to commit war crimes” and “do a knock on buildings before they bomb and warn them to get out”.
But it was her response to Karvelas’ observation that a lot of really young people are dying in Gaza as a result of Israel’s military action that has most inflamed pro-Palestinian sentiment.
Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier have been life partners and collaborators since the early 1990s.Credit: Jason Lau
“Well, depends on what you call kids,” she said. “You see young people — 16-, 17-year-old young boys — toting rifles.”
Conway added “I believe the responsibility for that lies pretty squarely with Hamas” on account of what she claimed was its refusal to allow citizens to leave targeted areas.
In March, she gave an interview to The Jewish Independent in which she attempted to clarify what she had meant by her comments about children.
“I was trying to tell listeners, in the cut and thrust of a live interview situation, that when Hamas put guns in the hands of their adolescent sons to point at the enemy, Hamas steals their childhood, turns them into fighters and then turns them into casualty figures,” she said.
“It’s unbearably cruel. I wasn’t talking about babies or little children, nor was I defining what I think to be a child. It goes without saying that the deaths of innocents are always tragic.”
Conway’s original comments to Karvelas led to calls for her appearance at the Perth Writers’ Festival in February – where she was appearing as the author of a memoir, Book of Life – to be cancelled.
An open letter, which was signed by opponents claimed “the programming of Deborah Conway risks the safety of the festival and platforms beliefs that should be comprehensively rejected”.
Nonetheless, Conway’s appearance went ahead as scheduled, with X-Press Magazine reporting that protesters outside the venue “quietly handed out pamphlets” on the night.
The latest turn of events suggests that was only the beginning as far as protests are concerned.
Asked for comment by this masthead, Conway said: “People aggressively disrupting a Melbourne singer performing a theatre show in Hobart is not legitimate protest, it is intimidation of an audience and has less than zero chance of affecting the course of a war in the Middle East.”
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