The betrayal of literature
Garlanded authors have revealed themselves to be totalitarian bigots
It’s a fair bet that the authors and publishing professionals who have called for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions didn’t anticipate the scale of revulsion and outrage they have caused.
After all, given the current tsunami of hatred and insanity directed at the Jewish people throughout the west, they may well have thought they were merely going along with the overwhelmingly accepted narrative in “progressive” circles — in other words, anyone whose opinion was worth bothering about — that Israel should be shunned as a pariah because of the war in Gaza.
Hundreds supporting a campaign organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature, alongside Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books, have signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions which they claim have been “obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades” and have thus been “complicit in genocide”.
“We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” they write.
Among the signatories are award-winning authors Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, children’s author Michael Rosen and actress Miriam Margolyes.
The reaction to this letter from within their own creative world has been seismic. More than 1000 leading names in the entertainment industry have hit back. A counter-letter has been published by the Creative Community for Peace, signed by writers such as Lee Child, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Herta Müller, Sir Simon Schama, Howard Jacobson, Simon Sebag Montefiore, David Mamet, Lionel Shriver and Elfriede Jelinek as well as names from film and TV.
Howard Jacobson said he was “staggered” that the boycott signatories could dream they had a right to silence other writers, while Lionel Shriver said they had sought to “intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals”.
Let’s remind ourselves against whom Israel is currently fighting: genocidal enemies who carried out the worst single set of atrocities against the Jews since the Holocaust and who openly declare their aim to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people. Instead of supporting the resistance to such evil, Rooney, Roy, Rosen and their fellow signatories are actively pumping out the propaganda lies being invented to promote that unspeakable cause.
The Guardian reports:
Institutions that have never publicly recognised the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law” will also be boycotted.
But there are no “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” in international law. The only inalienable legal rights to the land belong to the Jews.
These much-garlanded authors and hangers-on aren’t targeting people because of what they are said to have done. They are attempting to silence Israelis because they have failed to express the only approved opinion by opposing their own government’s actions. That’s a totalitarian impulse to crush all dissent. And there’s worse still. As Lionel Shriver has written:
But the intention is not only aimed at punishing Israel’s tiny cultural institutions. The boycott seeks to go well beyond the signatories and intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals. That includes writers who disagree with the organisers and do not believe that the IDF’s effort to root out Hamas qualifies as genocide as well as a range of Jewish writers in and outside of Israel whose views on this war may be tortured or finely nuanced. Because we must all speak as one.
The tactic Shriver is aptly describing is designed to set one Jew against the other, to act as a kind of proxy assassin on behalf of the Jew-basher who can thus claim to have clean hands.
The Times (£) reports:
Brian Message, the co-chair of ATC Group which represents many of the world’s leading musicians, said he was “somewhat staggered by the arrogance of Rooney and her fellow signatories”.
He argued a boycott movement targeted at Israel was support for the “regimes of Iran and its proxies who wish to eject Israel from the Middle East’. He told The Times that whether he was “right or wrong … I wouldn’t try to boycott the signatories for their views. As for the danger of boycott movements, both in literature and other art forms such as music; it looks to normalise the shutting down of free speech, differences of opinion, debate”.
The idea of books being banned is redolent of the 1930s when the Nazis burned Jewish books, and of the Middle Ages when kings and priests burned the Talmud in European town squares.
The Creative Community for Peace says:
History is 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).
Over the past year, planned bookstore appearances by Jewish authors have been canceled, ads for books about Israel have been rejected, book readings have been shut down, literary groups have been targeted, and activists have publicised lists of “Zionist” authors to harass.
In similar vein, the Jewish News reports:
Lucy Abrahams, a Tel Aviv-based literary scout, told Jewish News that “even before [the boycott] letter, we’ve been having big problems this year. I’m in touch with an agency here in Israel who say they are about 30 per cent down in business this year”.
She said she had had four different meetings recently in which people had expressed reluctance to publish anything to do with Jews or Israel, saying it was “not the moment”. When she had challenged them because the books under discussion had nothing to do with the Israel Hamas conflict, they insisted that it was not the right time to publish such books.
But Ms Abrahams investigated and discovered “it was two specific people who were telling all the agents that their clients weren’t interested in such books.” Nevertheless, she added, there were more and more agencies “who are really pumping out a lot of books of a certain persuasion, only telling one perspective, very much against Israel’s narrative”.
She deplored a situation in which “it was just accepted that Israel should be boycotted. I think there should be outrage at the demonising of Israel, our ally, who did not start or want this war, while publishers have no such qualms about selling to Russia and China”.
Exactly. As Rabbi David Wolpe has tweeted on X:
Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean authors, relax. They are only going after the Jews.
The boycott letter is particularly shocking because literature is not only the quintessence of free expression but stands for truths about the human condition which exist above and beyond division and aggression. Creativity is the generous flowering of the human spirit. Yet in their Israel boycott letter, some of the west’s most garlanded authors and creatives are expressing murderous lies and bigotry. In their inhumanity, they don’t just reveal their moral degeneracy. They also betray art itself.