10:02 p.m.
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
<https://www.palfest.org/refusing-complicity> - a web page that is now
public and open for publication
*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. Cultural
institutions can end their complicity by meeting two requirements:
1.
Denounce and distance themselves from Israel’s genocidal apartheid
regime.
2.
Affirm the full protected rights of the Palestinian people under
international law, including the right of return.
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.
https://www.palfest.org/press-release-refusing-complicity
Kommer Svensk biblioteksförening ta ställning eller vänder man bort blicken?
Jan
--
Jan Szczepański
F.d Förste bibliotekarie och chef för f.d Avdelningen för humaniora,
vid f.d. Centralbiblioteket, Göteborgs universitetsbibliotek
E-post: Jan.Szczepanski63(a)gmail.com