This story may be ho-hum, but yawn along with it for a minute anyway. The Clare College Choir, from Cambridge University, plans to do a Christmas tour of Israel. Their itinerary includes a Christmas Eve performance at the Church of the Nativity (Bethlehem, natch). And they are catching hell from swaths of the British elite. One sentence from the linked-to article: “Signatories of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign include several notable figures, including the historian William Dalrymple, playwright Caryl Churchill, Oxford academic Karma Nabulsi, and Garth Hewitt, Honorary Canon of the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr in Jerusalem.”

Have another sentence, too. The article quotes an “Irish composer and political activist,” Dr. Raymond Deane: “Those of us involved in culture can’t stand back and pretend that we inhabit some ethereal realm remote from the real world. Tours by artists such as the Choir of Clare College will be exploited by the lavishly funded Israeli propaganda machine as proof of the ‘normality’ and ‘acceptability’ of the Israeli rogue state — which is neither normal nor acceptable.”

Yes, this story is ho-hum, because the vilification and ostracism of Israel are de rigueur. But the vilification and ostracism are not without danger: because, when you delegitimize a people — make that people a pariah, unfit to be sung to — you leave them especially vulnerable to attack or destruction. Imagine what Israel’s enemies must think: “What do we have to lose? The whole world’s against them. No one will weep.” This was one reason that so many of us were horrified by the Durban conference, held just before 9/11. (And remember that President Obama awarded the czarina of that conference, Mary Robinson, the Medal of Freedom.)

I hope that Clare College’s choir sticks to its guns, and proceeds with that tour of Israel. A final word: The linked-to news article comes from Varsity, “The Independent Cambridge Student Newspaper since 1947.” The article states that, in the Israeli operation carried out in Gaza last winter, “1,400 Palestinian people were massacred.”

These student journalists will be just perfect for the BBC.