OCTOBER 2015:   

Artists respond to a letter in the Guardian organised by ‘Culture of coexistence’  which opposes our Artists’ Pledge for Palestine launched eight months before in February 2015.

The letter from JK Rowling and others (Israel needs cultural bridges, not boycotts, 23 October) is well past its sell-by date. Cultural bridges between Israel and Britain’s elite have been part of the landscape for decades – and they’ve helped lead to where we are now; they’ve given Israel the veneer of respectability it needed to camouflage its expansionist, racist policies.

Today there’s no question: an artist or intellectual who collaborates with activities funded or approved by the Israeli state is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. It’s sad to see distinguished names attached to a collection of worn-out, provenly false cliches. But in the end, it’s a matter of personal conscience and of how seriously people take their art and their responsibility to their public.

Artists from the west who have signed up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) have done so after much thought and soul-searching. They have taken the trouble to really learn about the situation, sometimes to see it for themselves. They sign because BDS is a democratic, conscience-led, non-violent way to try to end a 19th-century colonial enterprise still bleeding into our lives in 2015. Many are paying a price for their position. But, as one of these courageous and serious people said to me, “Our business is the truth.”
Ahdaf Soueif, writer

It’s customary to speak about this crisis as though it’s a deadlock, as though nothing is moving. But that’s not true: every day armed Israeli settlers are illegally occupying more and more Palestinian land, and cutting away at the few freedoms the Palestinians still have left, with the tacit or overt backing of the army and the state. And every day the government is building new walls through neighbourhoods to fence the Palestinians off even more. Israel benefits from the crisis and uses it as cover – in the name of self-defence – to extend its control further and further into Palestinian lives. Now, having said during his election campaign that there will never be a Palestinian state, Netanyahu is trying to blame the Arabs for the Holocaust (and he’s described as one of the more sane people on the right wing of Israeli politics). Does that sound to you like a good way to initiate a dialogue about a two-state solution? Or is it more likely the prelude to an Arab-free Israel?

I respect the good intentions of the signatories to this letter and I appreciate the desire for dialogue, but what kind of dialogue is realistically possible between a largely unarmed and imprisoned people whose land is disappearing before its eyes, and the heavily weaponised state that’s in the process of taking it? Sounds a bit like the “dialogue” that the Native Americans were offered en route to being liquidated by another group of settlers.

BDS has the support of almost all Palestinians. It also has the support of many liberal Israeli Jews. In the current “Death to Arabs” climate, that’s a courageous position for an Israeli to take – certainly not the easy option. For what little difference it will make, I’ll stick with them.
Brian Eno, composer

If our governments insisted on Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law, there would be no need for a boycott.
David McDowall, writer

I am sure that none of the distinguished artists who have signed the letter calling for cultural bridge-building between Israel and Palestine intends any harm to Palestinians. I am confident that they do not wish to see Palestinian houses demolished, farms destroyed, or land seized; nor do they approve, I guess, of military occupation, separation walls and ever-tighter restrictions on the movement of people. But the effect of their call for dialogue is to create a soothing soundtrack to just such a record of brutality. “Dialogue” and “cooperation” are lovely words, but they are often disingenuously used by propagandists for Israel, to suggest a way forward that Israel’s own actions are responsible for blocking. For writers like Rowling, Mantel and Schama to put their names to a letter like this brings painfully to life a situation that they themselves have explored in fiction and history. Good intentions can come to serve bad ends.
Farhana Sheikh, writer

When, in 2005, a coalition of representatives from Palestinian civil society called for a boycott of Israel (not, note, of individual Israelis), they were asking for, and had a right to receive, solidarity from all who value justice and international law; solidarity with a people suffering a never-ending occupation, whose land and water are being stolen, whose lives are hemmed in by walls, checkpoints and an apartheid system, whose houses are bulldozed, whose olive trees are destroyed, whose children are abused and incarcerated, whose national aspirations are stifled. So this declaration by Culture for Coexistence is an act of betrayal, the moral equivalent of crossing a picket line or buying goods from apartheid South Africa. I am shocked by their political illiteracy and their arrogance.
Leon Rosselson, songwriter and children’s author

They are not actually talking about dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. They are talking about dialogue between themselves and Israel. The Palestinians are irrelevant.

(Read the full argument here and here)
Omar Robert Hamilton, filmmaker and writer

It’s a cracker isn’t……I wonder what it is like, down there in the dust, the Israeli jackboot on your neck, every aspect of your life controlled by the occupier, then you have the lack of decency to ask for peaceful support from the international community by calling for a boycott, and then you are told from afar by the great and the good you are misguided and that what you really need is peaceful co-existence and dialogue.  I wonder what you would think?

I am sure there must be a few writers out there who can let their imagination soar above the cement wall and under the barbed wire of Gaza. I wonder what the Arabic is for “pious piss.”
Paul Laverty, screenwriter

It is the height of infantile fantasy to expect anyone to coexist with white phosphate, years of siege and massive bombardment, to build bridges with bullets in your head, heart and limbs or with rubble retrieved from hundreds of erased villages.
Guy Mannes-Abbott, writer and critic

It is important to use the language of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement and clarify that this boycott does not mean dialogue is not possible, the boycott has clear and strict terms of engagements, and why boycott is important – to challenge the occupation, not to close doors of engagement.
Yasmin Fedda, filmmaker and programmer 

There was a strong boycott movement during apartheid South Africa. We must once again stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle against Israeli apartheid.
Sarah Streatfeild, violinist

The Palestinian people and their culture cannot ‘coexist’ with the brutal Occupation of the Israeli apartheid state. The Israeli and Jewish artists who are doing most to advance the cause of Palestinian rights are supporters of the cultural and academic boycott of the State of Israel. The time has come to stop Israel from using art and culture as a ‘civilised’ cover for its racist oppression.
Mark Brown, theatre critic

I was sorry and frustrated to see the cultural and academic boycott of Israel once again misrepresented by its opponents. Far from being ‘discriminatory’, the boycott is grounded in respect for human rights and international law. It does not prevent cultural exchanges or co-operative endeavours between Israelis and Palestinians, but insists that these must not be funded by a government actively engaged in ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation in defense of an apartheid state.

Like its great precedent against apartheid South Africa, the boycott also asks international artists to reject commercial ventures in Israel until the conflict is resolved in a just peace. I urge signatories to ask themselves if they would have ‘played Sun City’. If not, please reconsider your support for the current status quo in Israel, where ‘cultural bridges’ serve only to strengthen a highly privileged relationship with the West. Literary prizes,  rock-n-roll concerts in Tel Aviv, and state-sponsored theatre tours of UK all signally failed to prevent Israel’s ruthless assaults on Gaza; rather such cultural events buttress a situation in which a country’s grave crimes do not simply go unpunished, but are rewarded with sympathy, respect, and eye-watering amounts of military and financial aid. In contrast, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement subjects Israel to sustained moral pressure, and provokes the honest and informed debate that all campaign proponents welcome.
Naomi Foyle, co-founder, British Writers In Support of Palestine (BWISP)

Please will someone invite JK Rowling to experience life in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
Jane Rossiter-Smith, writer

The notion of ‘peaceful engagement’ with Israel and it’s current policies is at best disingenuous equivocation, and at worst, tacit encouragement, through acceptance, of Israel’s brutal and inhuman regime. ‘Open dialogue and interaction’ are simply not possible while Palestinians have no voice, no nation, no identity.  There is a naked obscenity to the notion that ‘cultural engagement builds bridges, nurtures freedom and positive movement for change. It is important to encourage such a powerful tool for change rather than boycotting its use.’ It is outrageous to imply parity while Goliath is being given a platform that David can not hope to ascend; while Palestinian artists, writers and poets are subjected to travel restrictions, regularly jailed for their views and summarily and consistently silenced by the State of Israel.

… We, too, seek to inform and encourage dialogue about Israel in the wider cultural and creative community. Indeed, we relish the prospect of a universal awareness of the realities of Zionism. We believe passionately in BDS and we broadly share the same views on the racist policies of the Israeli government. We also share a steadfast desire for the peaceful coexistence of the Palestinian people and an Israeli-Jewish population disabused of the current prevailing Jewish-supremacist opinion that holds an ethos of virulent racism and the practice of ethnic cleansing to be acceptable in the 21st century.

… Given the failure of peace initiatives and of all other approaches over decades, Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, including cultural boycotts singling out and isolating Israel are now the only remaining route to peace. Peace, by any other means, is no more than a euphemism for the complete submission of the Palestinian people to live under their Israeli masters as a ghettoed underclass on the discontinuous bantustan fragments of the systematically-resource-impoverished rump of their own land. That is not going to happen. “No justice, no peace” is not merely slogan; it is also a plain fact…
Jimmy Powdrell Campbell, writer and composer

As an education development consultant in the 1990s I witnessed first hand the subtle oppression of the Palestinian people at the very time the Oslo accord was supposed to be ushering in new peace talks. Time and time again the state of Israel has mobilised propaganda to deflect from their persecution of the people of Palestine through encouraging settlers’ occupation and annexation of the land designated Palestinian. No artist of conscience can sanction their open disregard of human rights by providing a semblance of a dialogue of equals.
Carolyn Yates, writer 

I would also reply to Culture for Coexistence that it is fine to have culture links, but to talk of coexistence in a situation where the existence and wealth and territorial possession of one section of a population over another is not co-existence but apartheid.
Pat Bryden, teacher, literature 

Many of those signed up to the “Culture for Coexistence” statement have form as partisans of the Israeli state, and as apologists for its brutal and remorseless campaign of politicide: their spurious concern for ‘coexistence’ is a commitment to Israeli supremacy, and need not detain us. It needs to be demanded of the others, some of whom perhaps even signed in a good faith (if incredible and wilfully myopic) belief that this is the best hope for peace, why they choose to deny oppressed Palestinians – including countless Palestinian artists and writers – the solidarity for which they have, for over a decade, been calling.
China Miéville, writer

‘Culture for Co-existence’ could be seen as wilfully naive or an intentional distraction from the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. How can you have ‘dialogue’ with a violent oppressor (Israel) who does not listen & has no respect for world opinion or international law, as shown by its continual flouting of UN resolutions & war crimes against an oppressed people? How would ‘building bridges’ stop Israel from confiscating Palestinian land, demolishing homes, building illegal settlements, dropping bombs on & shooting unarmed civilians?

The conflict has been going on for far too long to be engaging in such mealy mouthed appeasement. The cultural boycott is a means of grassroots international pressure while our governments not only do not take action against Israel, they sell it arms.
Deborah Fink, soprano and music teacher