A group of more than 1,100 authors have launched an appeal to boycott Israeli publishers in light of the regime’s year-long campaign of death and destruction in Gaza.
The authors said in a joint declaration that writers should end their relations with companies that are “complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses against the Palestinian people and upholding apartheid and genocide.”
“Signatories have stated that they cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” reads the letter.
Signatories include winners of the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award.
According to the statement, the authors have joined the campaign launched more than two decades ago by Palestinian civil society which calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.
Heeding the call made by the absolute majority of Palestinian civil society, the signatories of this declaration are taking a collective, sector-wide stance for Palestinian liberation.
BREAKING: Today, more than 1000 authors are launching a mass boycott of Israeli publishers who are complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
This declaration amounts to the largest cultural boycott of Israeli institutions in history.https://t.co/SGewfi4DYn pic.twitter.com/YuSfhNQibL
— Palestine Festival of Literature (@PalFest) October 28, 2024
They said the Israeli genocidal campaign in the besieged Palestinian territory follows 75 years of “displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.”
“This is genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months. Israeli officials speak plainly of their motivations to eliminate the population of Gaza, to make Palestinian statehood impossible, and to seize Palestinian land.”
“Culture has played an integral role in normalizing these injustices. 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.”
Israel has destroyed all infrastructures, including the ability to count and bury the dead, the statement said.
“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.”
The declaration is the largest cultural boycott against Israeli institutions in history.
The Palestinian resistance groups have been seeking an end to the year-long Israeli aggression and withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
Backed by the United States to the hilt, Israel keeps massacring Palestinians in Gaza. Since October 2023, it has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians. Furthermore, over 100,000 are injured and in need of treatment which is tough to receive.
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