Because Jon Bon Jovi's Soul Foundation focuses on “combating issues that force families and individuals into economic despair”. For example, a recent United Nations report states the infant mortality rate in the occupied Gaza Strip has risen for the first time in 50 years. “The number of babies dying before the age of 1 has consistently gone down over the last decades in Gaza, from 127 per 1,000 live births in 1960 to 20.2 in 2008,” the study by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees, states. In 2013, it had risen to 22.4 per 1,000 live births. The number of babies in Gaza dying before they turn four weeks old soared by 70 percent, from 12 per 1,000 live births in 2008 to 20.3 in 2013. “Progress in combatting infant mortality doesn’t usually reverse. This seems to be the first time we have seen an increase like this,” said Dr. Akihiro Seita, director of UNRWA’s health program, in a press release. “The only other examples I can think of are in some African countries which experienced HIV epidemics.” The agency points to Israel’s blockade, now in its eighth year, as the likely factor behind this latest indicator of the de-development of the Gaza Strip. Belal Dabour, a medical doctor in Gaza, says that the infant mortality rate “is affected by a multitude of factors, and those are in play before the birth of the infant, before the mother is even pregnant.” The rise of the infant mortality rate is “the effect of a decade of blockade, including the infamous calorie count, restrictions on movement, poverty, dependence on food aid, power crises, the sewage flooding the streets, and the wars bringing down homes and bringing instead unstable and unhealthy shelters,” Dabour told The Electronic Intifada. All these factors lead to “mothers having unhealthy childhoods and consequently unhealthy pregnancies, and to infants’ chances of survival, in the case that anything happens to them, plummeting,” he added. We hope to illustrate to Jon and the rest of the band, the economic policies which their concert will serve to whitewash, so that they may reconsider this performance- in light of Palestinian civil society call for international solidarity- to boycott Israel. We also hope to encourage you to sign and share the petition with your family, friends, and networks.