Thousands of authors, publishers pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions : Valley Vision
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More than 2000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians”.
In the letter, Signatories to the pledge say they will not work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies, and publications that fail to recognize the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law”.
The campaign was organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature, which runs an annual festival with free public events in cities across Palestine, alongside campaign groups Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books.
“This declaration amounts to the largest cultural boycott of Israeli institutes in history”, Palfest wrote on X.
The letter acknowledges “75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid” in Palestine.
The letter observes that culture “has played an integral role in normalizing these injustices” and it acknowledge that the role of the Israeli cultural institutions, who often work in alliance with the state, in obfuscating, disguising, and “artwashing” the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades.
Therefore they declared that “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.”
The letter ends with a call on fellow writers, publishers, editors, translators, illustrators, and agents to join the pledge, “in recognizing our own involvement, our own moral responsibility and to stop engaging with the Israeli state and with complicit Israeli institutions.”
The letter has been signed by multiple winners of, and finalists for, almost every major literary award in the world—from the Booker to the Pulitzer, the National Book Award to the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
In response to the letter, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) has written to the Publishers Association, the Independent Publishers Guild, the Society of Authors and leading UK publishers, alleging the boycott was “discriminatory” against Israelis “on grounds of nationality”.
The letter represents perhaps the most powerful statement of condemnation—and largest commitment to cultural boycott—ever made by the global literary community about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
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