Desmond Tutu has urged the Cape Town Opera to call off its tour of Israel "until both Israeli and Palestinian opera lovers have equal opportunity and unfettered access to performances".

The Cape Town Opera is scheduled to perform at the Tel Aviv Opera House next month.

The work to be performed is Porgy and Bess, an opera based on DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy and the play of the same name, which Heyward wrote with his wife, Dorothy.

It deals with African-American life in fictitious Catfish Row, in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s.

Tutu, the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his peaceful resistance to apartheid, said "it would be wrong" for the group to perform in Israel "just like it was inappropriate for international artists to perform in South Africa in a society founded on discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity".

The visit would the first for the Cape Town Opera to Israel, where it is to give 14 performances at Tel Aviv Opera House from November 12 to 27.

Tutu accused the state-sponsored Tel Aviv Opera of furthering Israel's "fallacious claim to being a civilised democracy".

"Yet, every day, millions of citizens are denied the right to educational and cultural opportunities in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies," said Tutu.

"Please, fine singers of the Cape Town Opera, much as it offers you opportunities to travel abroad and show the world what we can do, listen to your conscience. God loves Jews and Muslims equally," he pleaded. "To perform Porgy and Bess, with its universal message of non-discrimination, in the present state of Israel, is unconscionable."

Michael Williams, communications manager of the Cape Town Opera, was not available for comment yesterday.