Culture wars

More than a thousand writers, including Naomi Klein and Jhumpa Lahiri, have signed an open letter published today pledging not to work with "Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians".

On the face of it, this sounds like a selective boycott, since there are Israeli writers and publishers who are critical of Israel and its actions. However, the press release, supported by the Palestine Festival of Literature and Fossil Free Books among others, states that their research reveals that only one out of 98 publishers met their demands "to denounce and distance themselves from Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime" and "affirm the full protected rights of the Palestinian people under international law, including the right of return". Such a prescriptive definition of what is required to "end complicity" means that institutions who choose alternative expression in their criticism of Israel’s actions may not meet the criteria or are likely to baulk at the narrow demands.

The letter claims that "culture has played an integral role in normalising these injustices". I would argue that Israeli culture has in fact been critical in raising awareness of these injustices. I’m thinking for example of David Grossman’s Sleeping on a Wire, which deeply investigated the injustice suffered by Palestinian citizens of Israel. Or A B Yehoshua’s "Facing the Forests", which confronted the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948. In his Poems of Jerusalem, Yehuda Amichai captured the oppression of history that repeats in the divisions today. Or, going even further back, S Yizhar’s astonishing story Khirbet Khizeh, published in 1949, in which an Israeli soldier sees the eviction of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 as a replay of the persecution of Jews in the Holocaust.

We need to find out more about Israeli culture and history in order to have insight and find solutions.

I’m currently reading Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, in which a distinguished Israeli journalist interrogates the foundations of Zionism. I don’t agree with all of his views, but it’s helping me to understand, from an insider, the journey that Israel has taken and how Israelis from all parts of society perceive or participate in the conflict.

We need to find out more about Israeli culture and history in order to have insight and find solutions. That means reading Israeli writers (even those you don’t agree with), engaging with agents and publishers and not closing down dialogue. At the same time, we need to read and support the Palestinian writers who have equally contributed to illuminating the conflict, from Mahmoud Darwish and Anton Shammas to Adania Shibli—and urgently, right now, writers from Gaza and the West Bank.

The signatories of the letter are perhaps exercising the only power they have by calling for action in the cultural world, but it will make no difference to the Israeli government’s ceaseless, ruthless bombardment of Gaza and now Lebanon. 

As a former charity director and editor championing the right to freedom of expression, I frequently came up against the call to boycott literary events and festivals, including in the UAE which has a dismal record defending free speech. On each occasion, it seemed clear to me that cultural boycotts undermine the right to freedom of expression, which is absolutely essential for all societies and particularly for societies where minorities and dissident views are oppressed.

The letter is a retrograde action that is actually a form of self-harm, cutting off the part of Israeli society where creative thinking happens. Israel is not a monolithic culture, and it is the writers and publishers in any society who will think outside the box and offer an alternative vision.