Over 1000 writers, including Normal People author Salley Rooney, Naomi Klein and Rachel Kushner have signed a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli literary institutions amid the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict.
The signatories said they will not take part in “artwashing” by Israeli cultural institutions to protest the impact on Palestinians as the Israel–Hamas war continues over a year after a terrorist attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. “We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” the petition organized by the Palestinian Festival of Literature, among other groups, stated.
Other writers and publishing professionals to sign the Israeli literary boycott petition include Arundhati Roy, Annie Ernaux, Percival Everett, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Mohsin Hamid and Gillian Slovo. The boycott will be aimed at institutions that fail to recognize “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law,” according to petition signers.
Their boycott campaign sparked a counter-petition organized by the Creative Community For Peace that argued “the instincts and motivations behind cultural boycotts, in practice and throughout history, are directly in opposition to the liberal values most writers hold sacred.”
“Regardless of one’s views on the current conflict, boycotts of creatives and creative institutions simply create more divisiveness and foment further hatred. We call on our friends and colleagues worldwide to join us in expressing their support for Israeli and Jewish publishers, authors, and all book festivals, publishers, and literary agencies that refuse to capitulate to censorship based on identity or litmus tests,” the anti-boycott petition stated.
Signatories to the counter-petition include Jack Reacher creator Lee Child, authors Howard Jacobson, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Adam Gopnik and David Mamet and actors Mayim Bialik and Debra Messing.
THR shares a copy of the Petition from Palestinian Festival of Literature group below.
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 current war has entered our homes and pierced our hearts. The emergency is here: Israel has made Gaza unlivable. It is not possible to know exactly how many Palestinians Israel has killed since October, because Israel has destroyed all infrastructure, including the ability to count and bury the dead. We do know that Israel has killed, at the very least, 43,362 Palestinians in Gaza since October and that this is the biggest war on children this century.
This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months. Israeli officials speak plainly of their motivations to eliminate the population of Gaza, to make Palestinian statehood impossible, and to seize Palestinian land. This follows 75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. 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.
We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement. This was the position taken by countless authors against South Africa; it was their contribution to the struggle against apartheid there. Therefore: we will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians. We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:
- Are 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, and so we call on our fellow writers, translators, illustrators and book workers to join us in this pledge. We call 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.
A copy of the counter-petition from the Creative Community For Peace follows:
We, the undersigned writers, authors, and entertainment industry professionals reject the calls to boycott Israeli and Jewish writers, publishers, authors, book festivals and literary agencies, along with those who support, work with, or platform them. We continue to be shocked and disappointed to see members of the literary community harass and ostracize their colleagues because they don’t share a one-sided narrative in response to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Israel is fighting existential wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, both US, UK, and European Union designated terrorist groups.
The exclusion of anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality. History is full of examples of self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed, who made lists of people with ‘bad’ views, who burned ‘sinful’ books (and sometimes ‘sinful’ people). Over the past year, planned bookstore appearances by Jewish authors have been canceled, ads for books about Israel have been rejected, book readings have been shut down, literary groups have been targeted and activists have publicized lists of “Zionist” authors to harass.
The instincts and motivations behind cultural boycotts, in practice and throughout history, are directly in opposition to the liberal values most writers hold sacred. Boycotts against authors and those who work with them is illiberal and dangerous. In fact, we believe that writers, authors, and books — along with the festivals that showcase them — bring people together, transcend boundaries, broaden awareness, open dialogue, and can affect positive change.
We believe that anyone who works to subvert this spirit merely adds yet another roadblock to freedom, justice, equality, and peace that we all desperately desire. Regardless of one’s views on the current conflict, boycotts of creatives and creative institutions simply create more divisiveness and foment further hatred. We call on our friends and colleagues worldwide to join us in expressing their support for Israeli and Jewish publishers, authors, and all book festivals, publishers, and literary agencies that refuse to capitulate to censorship based on identity or litmus tests.
English (US) ·