Johnny Lydon is being “used as [a] propaganda tool by an apartheid state” because he's planning to bring Public Image Limited on tour to Israel later this month, it was claimed yesterday.

Irish classical composer Raymond Deane was speaking at an Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign event, where Damien Dempsey, Kíla’s Eoin Dillon and trad legend Dónal Lunny also lined out to support a “cultural boycott” of Israel.

Around 140 Irish musicians, writers and artists have declared their intention not to work in Israel and not to accept funding from any organisation associated with that country.

Raymond Deane said the aim of the campaign is “to bring about a change in circumstances which will make this kind of unpalatable action unnecessary in the future. We do not want to be manipulated. We do not want to play along with an apartheid regime.
"Some people say culture, art can’t be about politics and to them we quote what the Israeli Foreign Ministry said. They said, ‘We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank'. So any artist who performs in Israel, regardless of the content of their work, is going to be exploited by the Israeli government for normalisation of their abnormal state.”

Sex Pistols and PiL front man Lydon has stood by his decision to play Tel Aviv on August 31, less than a week before he hits Electric Picnic, in the face of online abuse and hate mail. Last month he told the BBC, “You cannot separate yourself from your audience because of political powers that be. I mean, I’m anti-government, I have been all my life, no matter where I go, and I shall be making that loud and clearly proud once I’m in Israel.”

In the same interview, Lydon said there will be another PiL album on the horizon if the band can “raise the cash.”

“We get no record company support. All of this is off our own backs and courtesy of British butter.”

At the IPSC event in Temple Bar, Eoin Dillon performed a new tune, ‘The Rachel Corrie’, which he wrote while his brother, Shane, was travelling to Gaza on the aid flotilla last May.

* John Lydon explains why he's taking PiL to Israel in the next issue of Hot Press. He also has plenty to say about Shane MacGowan, U2, Bob Geldof, the IRA, Malcolm McLaren, those butter ads and, er, the joys of Hawkwind.