“Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and artwashing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades.”
More than 4,000 writers, publishers, and literary professionals, including prominent authors, Arundhati Roy, Sally Rooney and Naomi Klein, have signed a pledge to boycott “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”
Announced by the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) on Monday, the declaration amounts to “the largest cultural boycott of Israeli institutions in history.”
“We, as writers, publishers, literary festival workers, and other book workers, publish this letter as we face the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century. The overwhelming injustice faced by the Palestinians cannot be denied,” the pledge states.
Since launching 24 hours ago this has risen to a total of 4,500 writers and publishing professionals pledging to boycott all complicit Israeli institutions.
Names are coming in faster than we can process them. https://t.co/xApqo8wMne
— Palestine Festival of Literature (@PalFest) October 29, 2024
“Culture has played an integral role in normalizing these injustices. Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and artwashing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades,” the letter adds.
“We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” it continues.
‘Whitewashing Genocide’
The letter points out that this was the position “taken by countless authors against South Africa; it was their contribution to the struggle against apartheid there.”
The signatories pledge to “not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”
Join the mass boycott of Israeli publishers. Thank you to @pubforpalestine @PalFest and all the writers, editors and publishers for this extraordinary effort.
“This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months. Israeli officials speak… https://t.co/4mleUKBAkD
— Radical Books Collective 🇵🇸🍉 (@WARSCAPES) October 28, 2024
They refuse to cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that are either “complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide, or have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.”
“To work with these institutions is to harm Palestinians,” the letter states.
The signatories “call on our fellow writers, translators, illustrators and book workers to join us in this pledge” and also calll on “our publishers, editors and agents to join us in taking a stand, in recognising our own involvement, our own moral responsibility and to stop engaging with the Israeli state and with complicit Israeli institutions.”
Palestinian Civil Society’s Call
PalFest said authors have joined a campaign launched over twenty years ago by the absolute majority of Palestinian civil society including writers unions, trade unions, academics, and intellectuals, which have called for those working in cultural industries to refuse working with Israeli academic and cultural institutions that are complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses against the Palestinian people and upholding apartheid and genocide.
Among the signatories to the campaign are winners of the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award.
Read an open letter signed by hundreds of authors pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions.https://t.co/bH21mmdWQo
— Literary Hub (@lithub) October 28, 2024
“This is a collective refusal to support institutions that are compliant with or benefit from genocide. This is a call to all authors and workers in the book industry everywhere to refuse silence,” said Maaza Mengiste, the Ethiopian-American writer shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
“We are pushing against systems of oppression. We call on all concerned individuals in the book industry to join us,” Mengiste stated.
‘Beating Heart of Colonial Empire’
Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, said “The weight of the West—that is, the still beating heart of colonial and global empire—is with Israel. For any of us opposed to that injustice, we should see that silence is not innocent.”
The campaign is supported by groups such as Books Against Genocide (BAG), a campaign to pressure the the US Big Five publishers to end their relationships with the Zionist entity” as well as Fossil Free Books, which calls for divestment across the books industry from fossil fuels and Israeli genocide, occupation and apartheid.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
