Hundreds of writers, editors and other publishing workers have signed a public letter saying they will not work with “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit in or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”
Authors such as Michelle Alexander, Fatima Bhutto, Judith Butler, Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Marilyn Hacker, Naomi Klein, Owen Jones, Valeria Luiselli, Carmen Maria Machado, Hisham Matar, China Miéville, Pankaj Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tea Obreht, Max Porter, Casey Plett, Derecka Purnell, Sally Rooney, Jacqueline Rose, Arundhati Roy, Cecilia Vicuña and many others have signed the document, in the face of “the deepest moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.”
In the face of this crisis, the authors believe they have a role to play: “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without questioning their relationship with apartheid and displacement,” they state in the letter, recalling that “that was the position adopted by countless authors against South Africa; It was his contribution to the fight against apartheid there.”
In the text they establish the following:
We will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit in 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 the violation of Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by covering up and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide.
- They have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people enshrined in international law.
Working with these institutions is a disservice to Palestinians, so we ask our fellow writers, translators, illustrators and book workers to join us in this commitment. We ask our editors, writers and agents to join us in taking a stand, recognizing our own involvement, our own moral responsibility and stopping collaborating with the Israeli state and complicit Israeli institutions.
The signatories justify the position taken by the Gaza war, in which “it is not possible to know exactly how many Palestinians Israel has killed since October 2023, because Israel has destroyed all infrastructure, including the ability to count and bury the dead.” . According to local authorities, more than 43,000 Palestinians have died in just over a year, of which more than 17,000 were children.
This is how they argue:
It is a genocide, as prominent experts and institutions have been stating for months. Israeli officials speak bluntly of their motivations for eliminating Gaza’s population, making the creation of a Palestinian state impossible, and seizing Palestinian land. All this after 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.
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