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
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; 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.
We (the signatories) 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.
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.