1,000 signatories in largest boycott of Israeli publishing industry

Over 1,000 authors have launched a mass boycott of Israeli publishers as a declaration against the state’s dispossession of the Palestinian people.

The letter, published 28 October, details how the publishing industry faces “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.”

Organised by the Palestine festival of literature alongside other campaign groups such as Books Against Genocide and Fossil Free Books, the letter continues to detail the situation in Gaza.

Fossil Free Books is the same pressure group that has demanded the boycott of multiple literary festivals over their funding ties to companies related to the war alongside causes including climate change.

“Israel has made Gaza unlivable. It is not possible to know exactly how many Palestinians Israel has killed since October, because Israel has destroyed all infrastructure, including the ability to count and bury the dead. We do know that Israel has killed, at the very least, 43,362 Palestinians in Gaza since October and that this is the biggest war on children this century,” it reads.

In response, the letter calls on its signatories to recognise the important role of culture. “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.”

“We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” the letter reads, noting the impact of similar literary boycotts of the South African regime during the apartheid era.

The number of signatories of the letter has grown far beyond 1,000 with the initiating signatories including some of the biggest names in contemporary literature.

Bestselling authors are represented including ‘Intermezzo’ writer Sally Rooney, who has been a longstanding vocal critic of the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinian people. Rooney received widespread media coverage when she refused an offer for an Israeli publisher to translate her third novel ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You?’ into Hebrew in 2021.

Nobel Prize winning writers Abdulrazak Gurnah and Annie Ernaux are also present as initiating signatories, while Pulitzer Prize winners on the list include Viet Thanh Nguyen and Junot Díaz.

This year’s Booker Prize nominees Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner also feature in the list, alongside Jewish-heritage authors Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, and Miriam Margolyes.

In response to the campaign, UK Lawyers for Israel, a volunteer organisation, has written to the Publishers Association warning of “legal consequences that may follow” for authors endorsing the boycott.

Jonathan Turner, the legal organisation’s CEO, claims the boycott letter “makes false allegations against Israel and concludes with commitments by its authors to engage in a discriminatory and illegal boycott of Israeli cultural institutions.” Furthermore, the UK Lawyers for Israel’s letter claims that the boycott would be “plainly discriminatory against Israelis” invoking the UK’s anti-discrimination law, the Equality Act 2010.

A counter-letter has also been created by the Creative Community for Peace, a non-profit pro-Israel organisation, criticises incidents where “any Israeli and/or Jewish author or festival that didn’t disavow Israel [was] being harassed and targeted for condemnation, with book readings being shut down, and authors being excluded from festivals.”

Authors Mayim Bialik, Sir Simon Schama, and Simon Sebag-Montefiore have signed this counter-letter alongside another Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek.