Over 1,000 authors and literary industry workers have signed a letter vowing to boycott any Israeli literary institutions that are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine, in an effort that organizers say is the largest cultural boycott of Israel in history.
In the open letter, signatories say they “cannot in good conscience” work with Israeli institutions that have contributed to the genocide and displacement, likening the campaign to the nearly three decade boycott of South African institutions that has been credited with helping to bring down the apartheid state.
“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 letter says. “The emergency is here: Israel has made Gaza unlivable.”
The authors say that they will not work with literary institutions like publishers and festivals that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or who “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.”
The letter was signed by prominent authors like influential left-wing writer Naomi Klein; Palestinian writers like Susan Abulhawa; Nobel Prize winners like Annie Ernaux; Pulitzer Prize winners like Viet Thanh Nguyen; scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Judith Butler; Booker Prize-recognized writers like Maaza Mengiste; and writers prominent in popular culture like Sally Rooney and Jia Tolentino.
“This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months,” the group says. “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 organized by six groups — 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.
The groups said that they have researched and found 98 total Israeli publishers, only one of whom met the demands put forth by the group: an independent publisher named November Books, which said in a statement that it “strongly oppose[s] any form of inequality and apartheid.”
Many Israeli publishers and literary institutions, on the other hand, are actively complicit in the occupation and apartheid, the groups found. Some of them, like Modan Publishing, publish “propaganda books” for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the letter organizers said. Bar-Ilan University Press, meanwhile, gives out a prize for books advancing thought on “the subject of land building and settlement,” along with the Jewish National Fund.
“Every writer wishes to be published everywhere. But I have told my Israeli publisher that if they will not support the basic principles expressed in this letter — an end to complicity with Israel’s apartheid and full rights for Palestinians — I cannot approve the forthcoming publication of my book, The Refugees,” said Nguyen in a statement.
“This pains me, but even the laudable impulse for translation, dialogue, and cultural exchange needs to be situated in the context of occupation, apartheid, and genocide,” he went on. “For any of us opposed to that injustice, we should see that silence is not innocent.”
Signing the letter is a risk given the repression that advocates for Palestinian rights face in the literary industry, as letter signatory Lisa Ko wrote for Truthout last week. Ko, a novelist and National Book Award finalist, noted that powerful literary and media institutions in the U.S. have been working in tandem to silence and even incite harassment against writers who have spoken out against Israel’s genocide.
“To pressure authors to remain silent about institutional response to war in order to be eligible for prestigious literary prizes is not only ironic … but sinister. A culture that demands certain political allegiances from its writers and artists at the risk of losing career opportunities is one that is antithetical to democratic values,” wrote Ko.