Monday, November 18, 2024

Why we boycott Israel: ‘One day everyone will have always been against this’

 

Giller Prize literary workers Israel boycott Gaza genocide activism campaign complicity oppression resistance Palestine solidarity

More than 6,000 literary workers have pledged to stop working with institutions that support the horrors in Gaza

Over the past year, the world has watched in horror as the first live-streamed genocide has unfolded before our eyes. 

For those of us who see life as precious, feelings of rage, pathos, overwhelm and powerlessness have been fixtures of witnessing. 

In this context, more than 6,000 literary workers have signed onto a campaign pledging to boycott “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” Signing onto this boycott is one small step we can take to help to stop the actions of a state which has, with arms and funding provided by the U.S. and Canada, turned Gaza into what UNICEF has called a “graveyard” for children.

In doing so, writers have joined a campaign launched over 20 years ago by the majority of Palestinian civil society, including writers, trade unions, artists, and intellectuals. They have called for those 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 are upholding apartheid and genocide.

The refusal takes aim at institutional complicity, not identity.  (more...)

Why we boycott Israel: ‘One day everyone will have always been against this’


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