PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday October 28th:
1000+ Authors Refuse Collaboration with Complicit Israeli Publishers in Mass Declaration
BREAKING:
More than 1,000 authors, including winners of the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award are launching a mass boycott of Israeli publishers complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
● This mass declaration represents the biggest cultural boycott against Israeli cultural institutions in history.
● 1,000+ authors include Sally Rooney, Annie Ernaux, Arundhati Roy, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Max Porter, Ocean Vuong, Percival Everett, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Rupi Kaur, Michelle Alexander, Judith Butler, Rachel Kushner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Valeria Luiselli, and many more.
Signatories have stated that they cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.
See the full letter and list of signatories here.
UPDATE, Tuesday 29th October 11pm GMT: Over 5,000 authors and publishing professionals have now signed.
CONTEXT:
Authors have joined a campaign launched over twenty years ago by the absolute majority of Palestinian civil society including writers unions, trade unions, academics, and intellectuals, which have called for those working in cultural industries to refuse working with Israeli academic and cultural institutions that are complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses against the Palestinian people and upholding apartheid and genocide.
The refusal takes aim at institutional complicity, not identity. The question asked of cultural insitutions is whether they:
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.
The overwhelming majority of Israel’s publishing industry is silent on Israel’s pervasive practice of targeting Palestinian writers and scholars for death and persecution; silent on Israel’s destruction of Palestinian libraries, printers, and publishing houses;[1] silent on Israel’s now widely-known practice of scholasticide,[2] even as it continues to destroy Palestinian schools, universities, libraries, and archives.[3] In several cases there was not only silence, but support for the Israeli military’s actions.
We - a coalition of solidarity groups listed below - identified and researched 98 Israeli publishers and of all of them only one met the two basic demands outlined above: a small, independent publisher called November Books.
November Books wrote: “We are committed to the idea, in line with Palestinian and democratic voices in Israel, that Israel should not be a Jewish state but rather a state of all its citizens and recognize the right of return as it was accepted by the UN. We strongly oppose any form of inequality and apartheid. We do not have any contact or relations with Israeli entities in the Palestinian occupied territories: we don’t sell, print or distribute our books there.”
An ethical and non-complicit position is possible.
THE AUTHORS
Over 1,000 authors are the initiating signatories.
These include:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kaveh Akbar, Michelle Alexander, Dionne Brand, Jericho Brown, Simone Brown, Judith Butler, Amit Chaudhury, Anne Chisholm, Siddhartha Deb, Junot Díaz, Natalie Diaz, Brian Dillon, Ben Ehrenreich, Inua Ellams, Annie Ernaux, Nick Estes, Percival Everett, Eve L. Ewing, Shon Faye, Mary Gaitskill, Greg Grandin, Guy Gunaratne, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Marilyn Hacker, Isabella Hammad, Mohsin Hamid, Omar Robert Hamilton, Will Harris, Tobi Haslett, Afua Hirsch, Cathy Park Hong, Leslie Jamison, Ha Jin, Daisy Johnson, Owen Jones, Rupi Kaur, Naomi Klein, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Raven Leilani, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Layli Long Soldier, Valeria Luiselli, Carmen Maria Machado, Miriam Margolyes, Hisham Matar, Maaza Mengiste, China Miéville, Pankaj Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tea Obreht, Torrey Peters, Max Porter, Casey Plett, Derecka Purnell, Sally Rooney, Jacqueline Rose, Arundhati Roy, Sarah Schulman, Kamila Shamsie, Christina Sharpe, Nikesh Shukla, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gillian Slovo, Astra Taylor, Miriam Toews, Jia Tolentino, Justin Torres, MG Vassanji, Cecilia Vicuña, Ocean Vuong and Mirza Waheed.
The latest, fully updated list is available here.
Kamila Shamsie said:
“There is a genocide ongoing in Gaza; it is entirely straightforward to choose boycott over engagement when it comes to institutions that do harm to Palestinians.”
Molly Crabapple said:
“Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and spreading devastation across the Middle East. I can’t let my work be used by institutions complicit in the torture of people I love.”
China Miéville said:
“Apologists for the Israeli state’s genocidal actions repeatedly claim that writers who respect the cultural boycott ‘refuse to have their works translated into Hebrew’. This is a lie. I and others would be honoured to have our work translated into Hebrew by a publisher, such as the much-missed Andalus, which respects and champions the rights and humanity of Palestinians, and thus BDS. It is an ethical imperative to heed the call from the majority of Palestinians, including unions, artists and scholars inspired by the cultural boycott against apartheid South African, for solidarity from cultural workers and others around the world, in the face of the devastating oppression they face.”
Maaza Mengiste said:
“This is a collective refusal to support institutions that are compliant with or benefit from genocide. This is a call to all authors and workers in the book industry everywhere to refuse silence. We are pushing against systems of oppression. We call on all concerned individuals in the book industry to join us.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen said:
“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. 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.
BDS is nonviolent, and yet the Israeli government and its supporters have sought to shut down any protest of Israel, including nonviolent ones like BDS. Even literature and the arts from Palestinians or those sympathetic to them are being silenced. The weight of the West—that is, the still beating heart of colonial and global empire—is with Israel. For any of us opposed to that injustice, we should see that silence is not innocent. Especially when Israeli leaders turn to the rhetoric of colonial genocide: Palestinians as “human animals,” Israel waging a war of the civilized against the uncivilized. This fatal rhetoric and reality requires boycott.”
David Bergen said:
“To Israeli publishers: If you are complicit in imprisoning the people of Gaza and Palestine, in the bombing of their hospitals and schools, in the theft of their land, in their starvation, in their slaughter, I have no interest in talking books with you.”
EXAMPLES OF COMPLICITY:
Large Israeli trade and academic publishers publish propaganda on the Israeli military, contemporary strategy in the development of illegal settlements, colonial historical accounts of the creation of Israel that engage in the erasure and dehumanization of Palestinian people, and engage in direct collaboration with the Israeli state, including the Ministry of Defense.
Modan Publishing, one of the largest publishers, works in direct partnership with the Israeli government, producing and marketing propaganda books for the Ministry of Defence Publishing House.
Several university presses are complicit due to Israeli academic active research and development of colonial technologies and weapons systems.
Bar-Ilan University Press is the issuer of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) prize to “an original book of research and study on the subject of land building and settlement.”
Am Oved publishing, a major label, is owned by the Histadrut, or the New General Workers' Federation - which has been a key colonizing institution for 100 years. David Ben-Gurion was the secretary, it was at one time the second largest employer in all of Israel, it continues to own other key colonizing instruments - such as Bank Hapaolim, which finances settlements, and Zim shipping, which is blocked in ports around the world for weapons shipments. Even when speaking as trade unionists, they have issued international statements in support of Israeli operations in Gaza from the first such operation, Cast Lead, in 2008/9.
The two major Israeli book chains, Steimatzky and Tzomet Sefarim, operate as a near duopoly, with hundreds of branches, including in West Bank settlements. The vast majority of commercially published books are therefore automatically available for distribution into shops in settlements.
Am Oved publishing are in the process of being 25% acquired by Steimatzky. Modan publishing part-own its competitor, Tzomet Sefarim.
NOTES FOR EDITORS:
Books Against Genocide (BAG) is a campaign to pressure the US Big Five publishers to end their relationships with the Zionist entity. BAG is dedicated to exposing the ways that Big Five publishers manufacture consent for genocide and use books to normalize the apartheid state.
Book Workers for a Free Palestine (BWfFP) is a coalition of book workers – publishing workers, agents, booksellers, librarians, writers, translators, visual creatives – who have come together out of horror at the genocide taking place today in Gaza to call for an immediate ceasefire, to express solidarity with Palestinians, to organise for the academic and cultural boycott within the book industry of companies complicit in Israeli apartheid and to stand in solidarity with individuals targeted within our industry.
Fossil Free Books is a collective of 1,000 writers, translators, artists, booksellers, publishers and other book workers who believe that a fossil fuels free, genocide free books industry is possible. Through collective power, Fossil Free Books calls for divestment across the books industry from fossil fuels and Israeli genocide, occupation and apartheid. Fossil Free Books activities and direct action have been carried out and supported by workers from all sections of the books industry - from literary household names to individuals passionate about making a difference.
The Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) is a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for combating colonialism in the 21st century. The festival was created as an act of cultural solidarity with Palestine by a group of international cultural figures brought together by Founding Chair, Ahdaf Soueif, in 2008. Since then PalFest has run an annual festival in which international authors combine with their Palestinian counterparts for free, public events in cities across Palestine. During the daytimes, visiting authors are taken to sites of historical and political relevance and meet with artists, authors and activists.
Publishers for Palestine is a global collective of over 500 publishers, and others who work in publishing around the world in 50 countries, who stand for justice, freedom of expression, and the power of the written word.
Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is a coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers who are committed to the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people, and who organize against Zionism and American empire from within the imperial core.
PRESS ENQUIRIES CONTACT: refusingcomplicityletter@gmail.com
[1] https://imemc.org/article/israeli-forces-raid-palestinian-owned-publishing-house/
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza