More than 1,000 figures from the literary and entertainment industry – including several Nobel laureates, Pulitzer prize, and Booker prize winners – have signed an open letter against “illiberal and dangerous” cultural boycotts.
The letter was released by the nonprofit body Creative Community For Peace [CCFP], which campaigns against cultural boycotts of Israel, after more than 1,000 book industry figures pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians”.
Among the signatories of the CCFP letter are Lee Child (creator of the Jack Reacher novels), Booker winner Howard Jacobson, Pulitzer winner David Mamet, Nobel winners Herta Müller and Elfriede Jelinek, historians Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore, and entertainers Gene Simmons, Ozzy Osbourne and Debra Messing.
The letter states: “We reject the calls to boycott Israeli and Jewish writers, publishers, authors, book festivals and literary agencies, along with those who support, work with, or platform them.
“We continue to be shocked and disappointed to see members of the literary community harass and ostracise their colleagues because they don’t share a one-sided narrative in response to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
“Israel is fighting existential wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, both US, UK, and European Union-designated terrorist groups. The exclusion of anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality.”
The signatories said history was “full of examples of self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed, who made lists of people with ‘bad’ views, who burned ‘sinful’ books (and sometimes ‘sinful’ people).”
They pointed to various incidents over the past year, including the cancellation of “planned bookstore appearances by Jewish authors” and the publication of “lists of ‘Zionist’ authors to harass” as being “directly in opposition to the liberal values most writers hold sacred. Boycotts against authors and those who work with them is [sic] illiberal and dangerous.”
They said they believed writers, books and festivals “bring people together, transcend boundaries, broaden awareness, open dialogue, and can affect positive change … Regardless of one’s views on the current conflict, boycotts of creatives and creative institutions simply create more divisiveness and foment further hatred.”
Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy, Rachel Kushner and Percival Everett were among the authors who this week said they would not work with any institution “complicit in violating Palestinian rights”, including operating “discriminatory policies and practices” or “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide”.
They said: “We publish this letter as we face the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century”, adding that Israel had killed “at the very least 43,362” Palestinians in Gaza since last October, and that this followed “75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”.
The signatories added that culture “has played an integral role in normalising these injustices” and that Israeli cultural institutions, “often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades”.
