Activists call for boycotting Israel. (Photo via BDSMovement.net)
In less than 48 hours more than 5,000 authors, book workers, and publishers—including many of the most prominent names in the publishing world—signed on to our collective campaign to commit to an anti-apartheid boycott of complicit Israeli publishing institutions that uphold and whitewash the unfolding genocide of Palestinians.
Alongside our collaborators—Books Against Genocide, Bookworkers for a Free Palestine, Fossil Free Books, Palestine Festival of Literature, and Writers Against the War on Gaza—we have been blown over by the overwhelmingly positive response and moved by a volume of signatories that we can hardly keep up with. Translations of the letter of commitment have been offered up by publishers from around the world, who have been sharing it through their own networks. The workers of the publishing world say no to genocide and are ready to wield their collective power.
As the campaign picks up steam, publishers have a critical role to play in joining this call to refuse collaboration with Israeli publishing institutions that are complicit in Israel’s apartheid regime.
This powerful uptake of the Palestinian cause among cultural workers and institutions has strong historical precedent in the South African anti-apartheid movement, when authors, artists, and cultural institutions took up the struggle against South African apartheid and became an integral part of its fall. Publishers withheld their books from shipment to the apartheid state. Library boards implemented limitations on what they would add to their collections based on publisher complicity. Publishing institutions around the world should be proud to take a similar stand today, and be part of this moment of reckoning.
A sea change is underway that has been built up slowly over two decades and intensified over the past year. The extent of the slaughter and destruction is clear; in such an urgent moment, no one should stand by and watch the annihilation of the Palestinian people. Those of us who work in the publishing world must do our part to throw sand on the gears of genocide.
The eye-opening report of Librarians and Archivists with Palestine published earlier this year helped to reveal the extent of Israel’s targeting of Palestinian libraries, archives, and cultural institutions. Publishers for Palestine’s article on the relationships between major publishing multinationals and the state of Israel and complicit Israeli institutions brought the enormity of the Western publishing world’s own complicity into focus.
As publishers, the collective institutional power we wield is tremendous. As purveyors of cultural products that influence the drift of public opinion, we must hold ourselves to a high standard and embrace our ethical responsibility to universally accepted principles of human rights. The fact that the vast majority of Israeli publishing institutions are failing that basic standard cannot be ignored.
The silence alone of Israeli publishers on the historical reality of generations of Israeli occupation and Palestinian dispossession, and on the present situation of apartheid and genocide directly implicates them. More obvious examples include large Israeli trade and academic publishers responsible for publishing Israeli military propaganda, books on strategic implementation of Israeli settlements, and celebratory accounts of the colonial history of Israel that are part of the broader cultural erasure of Palestinians and their dehumanization, as well as direct collaborative projects with the Israeli state.
Bar-Ilan University Press for instance, 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.” The massive Modan Publishing works in direct partnership with the Israeli government, producing and marketing propaganda books for the Ministry of Defence. The two major Israeli book chains, Steimatzky and Tzomet Sefarim, operate in near-monopoly conditions and combined they have hundreds of branches, including some in illegal West Bank settlements.
In our press release for this campaign, we hold up a very clear instance of an Israeli publisher that is a non-complicit exception, a press that fulfills the longstanding calls from Palestinian civil society that make up our basic demands: first, to denounce the occupation and genocide, and second, to affirm the legally-enshrined rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return.
Fulfilling the above two requirements is a minimum that, disgracefully, most Israeli publishers have failed to meet. The single exception demonstrates that it is not impossible for Israeli institutions to comply with this very reasonable set of demands.
For many publishers around the world, supporting the BDS movement is a point of immense pride. Inspired by the historic boycotts of apartheid South Africa, over the past twenty years BDS has become a vibrant global movement made up of labour unions, academic associations, churches, and grassroots communities and organizations. BDS’s precursor and cultural wing, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights, provides a beautifully principled roadmap that informs our guiding principles, including the basic demands outlined above.
Any publisher or publishing institution should feel empowered by the immediate impact of this historic campaign, not only to sign on to it, but to commit to PACBI’s minimum: denunciation of occupation, apartheid, and genocide of the Palestinian people, and affirmation of the basic human rights of Palestinians.
This is our right and our responsibility as authors, book workers, and publishers: to use whatever power we have to bring about an end to apartheid and genocide and contribute to bringing about what has become in the eyes of the world a necessary and desperately urgent outcome: the full freedom and legal rights of the Palestinian people.
