Category: Israel’s culture wars

Model Ethical Policy for Cultural Institutions 

What are the responsibilities of a British cultural institution, organisation or charity when the gravest of crimes are being committed in plain sight in Gaza? What meaningful steps can a cultural institution take at a time when arts workers, artists and communities feel frustrated and distraught at their collective failure to prevent genocide?

In September Amnesty International published a report that called on public institutions, as well as states, to live up to their obligations and responsibilities under international law and standards with regards to Israel’s genocide, military occupation and system of apartheid against Palestinians. Amnesty adds: 

“The public at large must demand that they [institutions] do so … The actions and commitments of everyone – states, public institutions, companies and the public – must match the gravity of the situation amidst a staggering loss of Palestinian lives, [and] the irreparable damage caused to Palestinians”.

Palestinian civil society has for over two decades consistently called on international cultural workers and cultural organisations, at a bare minimum, to abide by the principle of ‘do no harm’, and crucially, to end the complicity of their own governments and institutions in Israel’s crimes.

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Royal Television Society U-Turns on Special Award for Palestinian Journalists

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In response to a statement tonight by the Royal Television Society, UK Screen Industry has said:

“We welcome the Royal Television Society’s U-turn in reinstating the Special Award for the courageous Palestinian journalists of Gaza. However, the charity’s statement does little to address or allay our concerns.

“The RTS now claims the award was simply ‘paused’ due to unspecified ‘potential for controversy’ at its Television Journalism Awards on 5 March – a claim that has never previously been mentioned. It also refers to a ‘previously announced review process’ of which we are entirely unaware.

“It is clear to all that this award must be presented at the RTS Programme Awards on 25 March with the full recognition and honour these journalists deserve. Yet the RTS continues to prevaricate.

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Leading Broadcasters Demand Reinstatement of Special Award Recognising Gaza Journalists

Broadcasters Jonathan Dimbleby, Lindsey Hilsum, Sangita Myska, Matt Frei, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Alex Crawford, Fergal Keane and Orla Guerin are among more than 400 TV and journalism professionals who have sent a letter to the leadership of the Royal Television Society (RTS) demanding transparency around its decision-making after the charity abruptly cancelled its Special Award for journalists in Gaza last week. 

The letter (copied in full below) “strongly urges” the RTS to reinstate the Special Award at their forthcoming Television Awards ceremony on 25 March.  

The program-makers, who include Channel 4’s chief correspondent Alex Thompson, executive producer and former editor of Channel 4 News Ben de Pear, Oscar-winning directors Kevin MacDonald and Asif Kapadia, and RTS- and Emmy-winning director Ramita Navai, say the RTS’ cancellation of the award “reveals a concerning lack of independence, due process and accountability” . 

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BBC bosses ‘throwing Palestinian children under a bus’

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Following Tuesday’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee session on the BBC axing of Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, a move which prompted concerns of racism and censorship from 1000+ programme-makers, Artists for Palestine UK said:

“Rupa Huq asked about the risk of ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’. We say Tim Davie and Samir Shah are throwing Palestinian children under the bus.

“BBC bosses must explain how they plan to safeguard the children who participated in the film. Their lives are in danger as Israel cuts off aid and threatens to collapse the ceasefire in Gaza. How will Britain’s public broadcaster ensure it isn’t putting a target on innocent kids’ backs?

“We welcome Tim Davie saying an independent review of the BBC’s Middle East coverage is appropriate and urge that this accounts for its abject failure to stand by the Palestinian voices it features. We all know Israeli guests would never be treated this way.”

TV industry urges MPs to press BBC execs over Gaza documentary removal

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UK TV and film programme-makers have urged a panel of MPs to press BBC executives on Tuesday over the controversial removal of a documentary about children in Gaza.

The UK Screen Industry group sent a letter (copied below) to members of the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) Committee on Monday, the day before they grill BBC director-general Tim Davie and chair Dr Samir Shah.

The group urged the lawmakers to ask Davie and Dr Shah to “clarify the specific editorial standards relied upon and the decision-making processes that led” to the axing of Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, a move which has prompted concerns of racism and censorship.

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Our response to the BBC’s shameful statement on ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone’

Following Thursday’s BBC board meeting and statement on Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, Artists for Palestine UK said:

“We are appalled that the BBC has chosen to give credence to a politicised campaign that sought to discredit a documentary about children’s experiences of unspeakable Israeli military violence, because one child’s father was deputy agriculture minister in Gaza. This disgraceful decision comes despite nearly 900 media figures having warned the BBC of the dangers of such an approach.

“Reports over the last week have detailed Israel’s detention and torture of hundreds of Gaza’s medical workers. The world has seen images of traumatised and emaciated Palestinian captives emerging from Israeli jails, some with limbs amputated. Rather than adequately reporting on these horrors, the BBC is instead removing a documentary about children in Gaza because of misleading claims about the identity of one child’s parent.”

1,000+ programme-makers condemn censorship and racism after BBC pulls Gaza documentary

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Gary Lineker, Khalid Abdalla, Anita Rani, and Miriam Margolyes have joined over 1,000 film, TV, and media workers in condemning censorship and racism after the BBC pulled a documentary about children’s lives in Gaza.

The media professionals, including sixteen BBC staff, sent a letter to the broadcaster’s director-general Tim Davie, chair of the board Samir Shah, chief content officer Charlotte Moore, and head of news and current affairs Deborah Turness on Wednesday. The letter (in full below) condemned a “racist” and “dehumanising” campaign targeting the film Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, which the BBC removed from its iPlayer streaming service after pressure from supporters of Israel. The BBC’s board is set to discuss the documentary on Thursday.

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Leading artists condemn campaign against ‘Let it be a Tale’ theatre production

Leading artists, including writer Michael Rosen, actors Billy Howle and Khalid Abdalla, playwrights Caryl Churchill and Tanika Gupta and composer Orlando Gough, have spoken out against attempts to damage the reputation and stifle the work of Brighton’s ThirdSpace theatre company. 

ThirdSpace works with young people. Its latest show, Let it be a Tale, is scheduled for performance in venues across the city before Christmas. 

‘We all carry our stories with us and pass them down,’ reads the company’s description of the show. ‘When someone dies, we keep their memory alive through stories. When cultures are under threat, we keep them alive through stories.’

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Hundreds of Artists Condemn the Royal Academy of Arts’ Anti-Palestinian Censorship

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Royal Academicians Jock McFadyen, Rana Begum, Vanessa Jackson, Tim Shaw, David Nash, Helen Sear, David Mach and Goshka Macuga are among hundreds of arts professionals condemning the Royal Academy of Arts’ anti-Palestinian censorship after it removed two artworks from its Young Artists’ Summer Show.

In an open letter published today by Artists for Palestine UK, the signatories, including more than 100 Jewish creatives, decry as “shameful” the Royal Academy’s removal of a photograph of a protestor holding a placard that reads, “Jews Say Stop Genocide on Palestinians. Not In Our Name”. 

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UK cinemas must refuse Israel-sponsored film festival

Picturehouse and Curzon cinemas have already refused to host the festival. The festival has also been refused at the Cines Girona, Barcelona. We believe there is no moral or ethical justification for a British cultural venue to do ‘business as usual’ with any organisation that is sponsored by the Israeli regime while it intensifies its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.

To the Trustees of the Phoenix Cinema, Everyman Cinemas Hampstead and Barnet, and JW3

We write as filmmakers, arts workers, London and Brighton residents and audiences who are ardent supporters of independent cinema.

We are disturbed and horrified to find that Seret, the UK-Israeli Film Festival is being held at several cinemas, co-sponsored by the Israeli government.

Amnesty International has designated Israel as a regime of apartheid against the Palestinian people. In February 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that accusations of genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza were “plausible”. 

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Olivia Colman among 1000+ artists accusing art institutions of censorship on Palestine

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More than 1,300 artists, including Academy Award winning Olivia Colman, Olivier Award winners Harriet Walter and Juliet Stevenson, BAFTA winners Aimee Lou Wood and Siobhán McSweeney, Paapa Essiedu (I May Destroy You), Susanne Wokoma (Enola Holmes), Youseff Kerkour (Napoleon), Nicola Coughlan (Derry Girls, Bridgerton), Amir El-Masry (The Crown) and Lolly Adefope (Ghosts), have launched a letter addressed to the arts and culture sector, that accuses cultural institutions across Western countries of:

 “repressing, silencing and stigmatising Palestinian voices and perspectives”. 

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On Speaking and Silence: the New McCarthyism

For anyone who cares about their fellow human beings in Gaza, nothing is more important at this moment than to speak out.

Israel and its allies are trying to build a wall of silence around their devastation of Gaza.  Around the world, those who seek to break through it are having to contend with an extraordinary and shameful campaign of pressure and threats. No-one who speaks out, from the UN Secretary-General  to a London tube-driver, is exempt. 

Yet the breakthrough has happened. In every sector of society people horrified by the attack on Gaza are speaking out. The huge demonstrations in the major cities of the world reflect the strength of public feeling.

Among cultural workers, we have seen an outpouring of solidarity, and resistance to attempts to undermine it. Here are just a few examples, from Britain and the US. 

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Thousands of visual artists and curators signed an open letter published in Artforum magazine that expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people and called for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza. A behind the scenes campaign by a number of powerful art dealers and collectors aimed to pressure individual artists to retract. A week later, the magazine’s owners fired its editor, David Velasco. 

“I resent these cowardly bullying and blackmail campaigns to distract everyone in the art world from the central demand of the letter, which was: cease-fire!”

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The Barbican, Censorship, and Anti-Palestinian Racism

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Artists for Palestine UK is shocked at reports that the Barbican told a Palestinian artist to avoid talking about freedom for Palestinians. 

Having welcomed a co-founder of Palestinian station Radio Alhara to give a talk on “the radical nature of radio”, the Barbican reportedly instructed him to “safeguard the audience” by keeping his comments about Palestinian freedom to a minimum.

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Leading artists oppose Barbican’s partnership with apartheid Israeli embassy

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More than fifty artists, including poet and writer Benjamin Zephaniah, actor Miriam Margolyes, DJ The Blessed Madonna and Turner Prize co-winning artist Tai Shani have called on London arts venue the Barbican Centre to end its partnership with the embassy of Israel.

The Barbican is due to host the Jerusalem Orchestra East & West this Sunday 5th February, in an event organised “in collaboration with the Embassy of Israel in the UK”. 

Writers China Miéville, Rachel Holmes and Pauline Melville are among those saying they “doubt the Barbican would have partnered with the South African embassy during its apartheid era”, citing reports by leading human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that designate Israel an apartheid regime.

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Leading lights of British theatre accuse European Drama Prize of modern-day McCarthyism

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  • Lifetime achievement award for Caryl Churchill rescinded over support for Palestinians
  • Withdrawal prompts major intervention by more than 170 actors, directors, writers

More than 170 actors, writers and producers have accused the jury of the 2022 European Drama Prize in Germany of “modern-day McCarthyism”, after it withdrew a Lifetime Achievement Award from renowned British playwright Caryl Churchill over her support for Palestinian rights.

The comments come in an open letter (published below, in full) whose signatories include Dame Harriet Walter (Killing Eve, Succession), directors Mike Leigh (Peterloo, Mr Turner, Vera Drake), Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Crown), Phyllida Lloyd (The Iron Lady, Mamma Mia!), and the National Theatre’s Dominic Cooke CBE.

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Campaign to silence rapper and campaigner Lowkey reaches new low

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The Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, a trade union-organised ‘celebration of solidarity’, disinvited the pro-Palestinian artist following behind-the-scenes pressure.

In a summer punctuated by missile strikes and the targeted killings of Palestinians, Israel’s defenders in the UK continue to respond to critics with defamatory allegations and quasi-legal attempts to silence debate. We have now reached a new low: an artist disinvited by an organisation which has historically prized the right to free expression.  

The Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival is a trade union-organised ‘celebration of solidarity’, open to all those prepared to ‘stand up and be counted’ as defenders of workers’ rights. In culture and in political debate, it commemorates the Dorset trade unionists who in 1834 were evicted from their homeland and transported as criminals to Australia. 

The disinvitation of rapper and campaigner Lowkey from the 2022 Festival, following behind-the-scenes pressure, is a denial of solidarity where it is badly needed. Lowkey’s music has inspired and energised audiences, igniting an interest in issues of militarism, economic injustice, and Palestinian rights. It has also provoked attempts at censorship. Earlier this year more than 44,000 people, including actor Mark Ruffalo, musician Kae Tempest and philosopher Cornel West, came to the aid of Lowkey, successfully calling on Spotify to resist pressure from the lobby group ‘We Believe in Israel’ that sought to have him deplatformed. 

Lowkey has been singled out for continuous harassment. What also makes his case significant is that a leading part in the effort to ban him from Tolpuddle was taken by one of the largest unions in Britain, the GMB. Its General Secretary, Gary Smith, wrote to a Festival organiser announcing his ‘severe doubts’ about Lowkey’s appearance and implying that it somehow carried a risk of promoting antisemitism.

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Israeli filmmakers call on Locarno Festival to drop ‘complicit’ Israeli film

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Israeli filmmakers and artists including Oscar-nominated director Guy Davidi and Turner Prize co-winner Tai Shani have urged Locarno International Film Festival to cancel its Thursday screening of an Israeli film due to concerns over its funding. 

My Neighbor Adolf was funded by the Rabinovich Foundation’s Israel Cinema Project, Israel’s largest film fund. Last week, Artists for Palestine UK revealed that the foundation contractually obligates filmmakers to undertake “that there is not and will not be in the film any presentation, statement or message that calls for … denial of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state [or] marking Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning”.

The group of Israeli filmmakers and artists cited leading human rights organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s leading human rights group B’Tselem who have all reported that Israel, far from being a “democracy”, is an apartheid regime.

The filmmakers and artists added: “this regime of oppression was founded through the violent displacement and dispossession of most of the Indigenous Palestinian population. That the Israeli state, its complicit institutions and influential lobby groups would want us as Jewish Israelis to remain silent on this systematic ethnic cleansing is not surprising. But storytellers accepting such censorial and unethical conditions for their film projects is an undeniable form of complicity in covering up this ongoing Nakba that Palestinians face.”

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Israel’s largest public film fund attaches political strings to its funding

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The Rabinovich Foundation obligates filmmakers to whitewash apartheid and ethnic cleansing

Since launching in 2015, Artists for Palestine UK has advocated for artists and arts organisations to refuse professional engagements with Israel’s complicit cultural sector. We have helped publicise much information in support of arts professionals taking these stands.

We have now obtained a full copy of the standard contract of the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts’ Israel Cinema Project that filmmakers must sign before receiving funding. Rabinovich’s Cinema Project is Israel’s largest film fund.

We are publishing an excerpt of the contract, which shows that the fund insists that filmmakers pledge not to acknowledge Israel’s apartheid or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. 

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Service of thanksgiving for journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to be held at Fleet Street church

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A service of thanksgiving for journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is to be held at St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, on Tuesday 28th June at 11.30am. Doors open at 11am and the service is open to all.

Shireen Abu Akleh was a much loved and respected Palestinian journalist. She was killed by Israeli forces in May, as she arrived, wearing a clearly marked press vest, to report on an Israeli incursion in occupied Jenin. Her case has been referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

St Bride’s has had a long association with the press, ever since the emergence of the first newspapers in London’s Fleet Street. It is known as the ‘journalists’ church‘ for its remembrance of journalists, especially those in danger or who have been killed.

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Leading artists demand accountability for Israel’s killing of Palestinian journalist

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Pedro Almodovar, Susan Sarandon, Tilda Swinton, Mark Ruffalo, Eric Cantona, Miriam Margolyes, Jim Jarmusch, Naomi Klein and Peter Gabriel call for “meaningful measures to ensure accountability for the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh and all other Palestinian civilians.”

*photo of Shireen Abu Akleh by AFP

More than a hundred artists, including Hollywood stars, acclaimed authors and prominent musicians, have condemned Israel’s killing of esteemed Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

Actors Susan Sarandon, Tilda Swinton, Mark Ruffalo, Kathryn Hahn and Steve Coogan are among the signatories to an open letter calling for “full accountability for the perpetrators of this crime and everyone involved in authorizing it”. 

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