On a Wednesday night in Singapore, the British electronic band Massive Attack closed their concert by raising the Palestinian flag — a gesture that, within two days, resulted in two members being permanently barred from the country. Singapore, a multicultural city-state that governs social cohesion with unusual deliberateness, treats the public display of foreign flags as a legal matter, not merely a political one. The incident places an old and unresolved tension at center stage: whether art that speaks to the world's suffering can ever be truly welcome in a nation that has decided its own ha