More than 2,000 authors and literary industry workers have signed a letter calling for a boycott of any Israeli literary institutions that are complicit in Israel's actions in Gaza and occupation of Palestine.
In the open letter, the signatories say they “cannot in good conscience” work with Israeli institutions that have contributed to the “genocide and displacement” of Palestinians. They liken the campaign to the nearly three-decade boycott of South African institutions that helped bring down apartheid.
Prominent authors are among the signatories, including Naomi Klein; Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa; Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux; Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen; scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Judith Butler; Booker Prize-recognised writer Maaza Mengiste; and writers prominent in popular culture like Sally Rooney and Jia Tolentino.
The authors say they will not work with literary institutions like publishers and festivals that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or who “have never publicly recognised the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.”
"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."
The letter was organised by six groups, who say they have found that most Israeli publishers and literary institutions are “actively complicit in the occupation and apartheid.” The groups are Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Fossil Free Books, The Palestine Festival of Literature, Publishers for Palestine, and Writers Against the War on Gaza.
Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen said he has told his Israeli publisher that if they do not support the principles in the letter, he cannot approve the publication of his book.
“For any of us opposed to that injustice, we should see that silence is not innocent,” Nguyen said.
The ongoing campaign letter can be found here
