Palfest Writes: More than 1,000 authors, including winners of the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award are launching a mass boycott of Israeli publishers complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kaveh Akbar, Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, Téa Obreht, Peter Carey, Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Mary Gaitskill, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Justin Torres, Raven Leilani, Susan Abulhawa, Valeria Luiselli, Jia Tolentino, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Hisham Matar, Maaza Mengiste, China Miéville, Torrey Peters, Max Porter, Miriam Toews, Leslie Jamison, Layli Long Soldier, and Ocean Vuong are among the hundreds of prominent authors who have signed an open letter pledging not to work with “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”—from LitHub

Viet signed this letter announcing a boycott of Israeli publishers and cultural institutions that are complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people. He wrote:
“Every writer wishes to be published everywhere. But I have told my Israeli publisher that if they will not support the basic principles expressed in this letter – an end to complicity with Israel’s apartheid and full rights for Palestinians–I cannot approve the forthcoming publication of my book, The Refugees. This pains me, but even the laudable impulse for translation, dialogue, and cultural exchange needs to be situated in the context of occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
BDS is nonviolent, and yet the Israeli government and its supporters have sought to shut down any protest of Israel, including nonviolent ones like BDS. Even literature and the arts from Palestinians or those sympathetic to them are being silenced. The weight of the West—that is, the still beating heart of colonial and global empire—is with Israel. For any of us opposed to that injustice, we should see that silence is not innocent. Especially when Israeli leaders turn to the rhetoric of colonial genocide: Palestinians as “human animals,” Israel waging a war of the civilized against the uncivilized. This fatal rhetoric and reality requires boycott.”
The letter has been signed by multiple winners of, and finalists for, almost every major literary award in the world—from the Booker to the Pulitzer, the National Book Award to the Women’s Prize for Fiction—and closes with a call to action for all in the book world:
To work with these institutions is to harm Palestinians, and so we call on our fellow writers, translators, illustrators and book workers to join us in this pledge. We call on our publishers, editors and agents to join us in taking a stand, in recognising our own involvement, our own moral responsibility and to stop engaging with the Israeli state and with complicit Israeli institutions.
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Here is the letter in full (Source: LitHub):
We, as writers, publishers, literary festival workers, and other book workers, publish this letter as we face the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century. The overwhelming injustice faced by the Palestinians cannot be denied. The current war has entered our homes and pierced our hearts.
The emergency is here: Israel has made Gaza unlivable. It is not possible to know exactly how many Palestinians Israel has killed since October, because Israel has destroyed all infrastructure, including the ability to count and bury the dead. 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.
This is a 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. This follows 75 years of displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
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.
We have a role to play. We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement. This was the position taken by countless authors against South Africa; it was their contribution to the struggle against apartheid there.
Therefore: we will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians. We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:
A) Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide, or
B) Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.
To work with these institutions is to harm Palestinians, and so we call on our fellow writers, translators, illustrators and book workers to join us in this pledge. We call on our publishers, editors and agents to join us in taking a stand, in recognising our own involvement, our own moral responsibility and to stop engaging with the Israeli state and with complicit Israeli institutions.
THE AUTHORS (Source: Palfest)
Over 1,000 authors are the initiating signatories.
These include:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kaveh Akbar, Michelle Alexander, Dionne Brand, Jericho Brown, Simone Brown, Judith Butler, Amit Chaudhury, Anne Chisholm, Siddhartha Deb, Junot Díaz, Natalie Diaz, Brian Dillon, Ben Ehrenreich, Inua Ellams, Annie Ernaux, Nick Estes, Percival Everett, Eve L. Ewing, Shon Faye, Mary Gaitskill, Greg Grandin, Guy Gunaratne, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Marilyn Hacker, Isabella Hammad, Mohsin Hamid, Omar Robert Hamilton, Will Harris, Tobi Haslett, Afua Hirsch, Cathy Park Hong, Leslie Jamison, Ha Jin, Daisy Johnson, Owen Jones, Rupi Kaur, Naomi Klein, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Raven Leilani, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Layli Long Soldier, Valeria Luiselli, Carmen Maria Machado, Miriam Margolyes, Hisham Matar, Maaza Mengiste, China Miéville, Pankaj Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tea Obreht, Torrey Peters, Max Porter, Casey Plett, Derecka Purnell, Sally Rooney, Jacqueline Rose, Arundhati Roy, Sarah Schulman, Kamila Shamsie, Christina Sharpe, Nikesh Shukla, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gillian Slovo, Astra Taylor, Miriam Toews, Jia Tolentino, Justin Torres, MG Vassanji, Cecilia Vicuña, Ocean Vuong and Mirza Waheed.