Newsclick Report | 30 Oct 2024
The signatories to a public statement announcing the boycott include Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning authors.
Over 8,610 Palestinians have been killed and over 23,000 have been wounded in the Israeli attacks on Gaza and other occupied territories since October 7 (Photo: UNRWA)
New Delhi: In what is being termed as “the largest cultural boycott against Israeli institutions in history”, over 1,000 writers, including Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize winners, have endorsed a statement calling for “mass boycott” of Israeli publishers “complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
The signatories include authors, such as 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, Pankaj Mishra, Kamila Shamsie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mohsin Hamid and many others, according to a press statement released by Palestine Festival of Literature.
The authors have joined a campaign launched over 20 years ago by the Palestinian civil society, including writers unions, trade unions, academics, and intellectuals, that 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”, read the statement.
“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, silent on Israel’s now widely-known practice of scholasticide, even as it continues to destroy Palestinian schools, universities, libraries, and archives. In several cases there was not only silence, but support for the Israeli military’s actions,” said the signatories.
Terming themselves as “a coalition of solidarity groups”, the statement said it had 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.”
“An ethical and non-complicit position is possible,” read the statement.
Read the full letter and list of signatories here.
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