A Writers’ Boycott of Israel Betrays the Values of Literature

This week the Palestine Festival of Literature, known as Palfest, announced that over 1,000 writers have signed on to a literary boycott of Israel. In a public letter, these writers declared that they will not allow their books to be translated into Hebrew, contribute to Israeli magazines and newspapers, attend conferences or give readings in Israel, or work with Israeli publishers and literary agents. The signatories include some of the leading writers in America—Pulitzer Prize-winners Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz, MacArthur Fellows Jonathan Lethem and Ben Lerner—and around the world, including Nobel Prize-winners Annie Ernaux and Abdulrazak Gurnah.

The BDS movement has long urged “boycott, divestment and sanctions” against Israel to advance the Palestinian cause, and many individuals and groups in American academia have pledged not to work with Israeli universities. Yet Palfest proudly describes its own effort as “the largest cultural boycott against Israeli institutions in history.”

The reason for its popularity is the Israeli war in Gaza, which has killed more than 42,000 people, according to Gazan health authorities, whose figures don’t say how many were combatants. But it is noteworthy that the letter to which so many writers put their names doesn’t call for an end to the war, or the resignation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or even an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory in the West Bank. Rather, the letter commits its signers to avoid working with any Israeli who engages in “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide,” or who fails to “publicly recognize the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.”

These aren’t the kinds of demands typically found in a boycott. The boycotted institutions aren’t just being accused of, or asked to refrain from, actions that harm or insult Palestinians, such as refusing to publish Palestinian authors or staging events in contested territory. Instead, the demands are entirely about statements and opinions: Israelis can get off the blacklist only by publicly saying what the boycotters want them to say about Israel.

Which is what, exactly? The language of the Palfest letter is deliberately vague, so much so that even some signatories may not fully understand what it is they are demanding. What does it mean, for instance, to “justify Israel’s occupation” of the West Bank? A religious Zionist might justify it on the grounds that the land was promised in the Bible to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob forever. A secular Israeli, by contrast, might justify it on the grounds that withdrawing from the West Bank would mean handing it over to a dangerous enemy bent on Israel’s destruction—which is what happened when Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005. According to the Palfest letter, both of these positions constitute complicity in genocide.

The phrase “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” is similarly unclear. Does it mean that the Palestinian people have a right to a state of their own on part of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea? Or does it mean that the descendants of refugees who left or were driven out of Israel in 1948 have a right to return and take back their ancestors’ land? In that scenario, Jews would become a minority in the world’s 23rd Arab country. Respecting the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” in this view, means that the Jewish state must disappear.

It is hard to think of another boycott with demands so far-reaching: not that a country change its policies or leadership, but that it cease to exist altogether. So it makes sense that, according to a press release issued alongside the letter, of the 92 Israeli publishers contacted by Palfest, 91 refused to accede to its demands. The only exception was a small publisher called November Books, which declared, “We are committed to the idea, in line with Palestinian and democratic voices in Israel, that Israel should not be a Jewish state.”

Why frame a demand in such extreme terms that it is guaranteed to be rejected? This strategy wouldn’t make sense if the goal of the literary boycott were to energize Israeli opposition to the war in Gaza. Like the earlier academic boycotts, this one will punish exactly the kinds of people who, in Israel as in America and Europe, are most likely to be progressive themselves: professors and artists and writers.

But if the goal of the literary boycott is to shape intellectual opinion in the U.S. and other Western countries, then its means are well chosen. The writers who lent their reputations to this cause are sending a clear message: If you support the existence of a Jewish state—in any borders, under any government—you deserve to be treated as a moral pariah.

Annie Ernaux Photo: christine olsson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Palfest letter targets Israelis, not Jews per se. But over the past year, there have been a number of incidents in which writers and literary institutions have refused to associate with Jewish writers, on the presumption that they are “Zionists” and therefore complicit in genocide. In July, for instance, a Chicago bookstore announced that its book club wouldn’t feature the popular novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” because, a manager of the store wrote, “It was brought to my attention that the author Gabrielle Zevin is a Zionist.” In fact, Zevin, who is of Jewish and Korean descent, had never spoken publicly about Israel. Apparently the reason for the boycott was that Hadassah, a women’s Zionist organization, had chosen “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” for its own book club.

How long will it take for the boycott aimed at Israelis to affect writers elsewhere? Is a writer who sets a novel in Israel, or invents an Israeli character, also complicit in genocide? How about one who visits the country or donates to an Israeli nonprofit? In practice, the Palfest boycott is a green light to supporters of the Palestinian cause to “deplatform” any writer who will not publicly reject Israel or Zionism in terms that will satisfy those making the demand.

There are Jewish writers who will be happy to comply—a number have already signed on to the boycott. But surveys consistently find that 80% of American Jews say caring about Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity. The literary boycott of Israel won’t change the way Israel fights in Gaza, or convince Israelis to dissolve their country, but it will encourage literary people and institutions to ostracize American Jews who refuse to deny a central part of their identity.

The most ironic thing about the literary boycott of Israel, however, is that it betrays a lack of faith in literature itself. In the past, when Western writers were critical of a country or a regime, they were all the more committed to getting their work published there, believing that it could actually change things for the better. In the 1940s, George Orwell worked with Ukrainian and Russian dissidents to smuggle translations of his anticommunist novels past the Iron Curtain.

Israel is a free country with a free press. To have their work published there, all that today’s writers have to do is not engage in a boycott. If their work has things to say about justice and humanity that they believe Israelis don’t understand, wouldn’t it make sense to insist on publishing in Hebrew? Instead, the boycotters have fallen victim to our era’s mania for ideological purity—the profoundly unliterary idea that disagreement is a reason to reject dialogue, rather than the best reason to begin it.

Adam Kirsch is an editor for the The Wall Street Journal’s Review section and the author, most recently, of “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice,” published by W.W. Norton.

Appeared in the November 2, 2024, print edition as ‘A Writers’ Boycott of Israel Betrays the Values of Literature’.