Costello posted an announcement on his Web site over the weekend explaining his decision to join the boycott of Israel. “There are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent,” he wrote.

Saying he couldn’t imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel, Costello wrote that since the conflict was “actually too grave and complex to be addressed in a concert, then it is also quite impossible to simply look the other way… sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static.”