Over 1,100 authors including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Judith Butler, Amit Chaudhury, Nick Estes, Owen Jones, Naomi Klein, China Miéville, Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy, Miriam Toews, and MG Vassanji have signed a letter calling on writers to refuse complicity in Israel's literary institutions. Among them are winners of the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award.
It is said to be the biggest cultural boycott against Israeli institutions in history.
Saying that they "cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement" they are saying that theirs is like the "position taken by countless authors against South Africa; it was their contribution to the struggle against apartheid there."
Saying that:
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.
The letter's signatories say that 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.
For the full letter and all signatories see: Refusing Complicity — The Palestine Festival of Literature
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