Liberal Values

On Monday, 28 October, six small book collectives, including the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), published an open letter signed by a thousand writers (I am one of them) pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’ and have ‘never publicly recognised the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law’. This is the boycott that Palestinian civil society began calling for twenty years ago.

On 25 October, before the open letter was published, UK Lawyers for Israel had already issued a statement threatening the would-be boycotters, and on 29 October an organisation called the Creative Community for Peace, part of whose mission is to ‘galvanise support against the cultural boycott of Israel’, issued its own thousand-signature open letter in response.

The CCP letter opens with a misrepresentation, claiming that the call is for a boycott on ‘Israeli and Jewish writers … along with those who support, work with or platform them’. The call is, in fact, to boycott ‘Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians’. As for the eliding of ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israeli’, my Jewish colleagues have been battling that one for a long time so I leave it with them. But pretending that the boycott is against writers enables the CCP letter to accuse the boycotters of ‘harass[ing] and ostracis[ing] their colleagues’, insisting on ‘a one-sided narrative’, excluding ‘anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel’ and ultimately shutting down free speech.

I continue to be amazed by the degree to which Israel’s apologists project their own actions onto others. ‘The exclusion of anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel,’ they write, ‘is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality.’ But the most prominent demand for unilateral condemnation since last October has been the media refrain: ‘Do you condemn Hamas?’

‘Boycotts of creatives and creative institutions,’ the CCP letter says, ‘simply create more divisiveness and foment further hatred.’ They would have us believe that it’s our withdrawing our labour that creates divisiveness and hatred, rather than the killing of children, the reducing of homes to rubble, the friends and family lost, the forced marches, the torture, the hunger and humiliation. They’ll take all these in their stride, but baulk at a boycott.

As for their paragraph describing ‘self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed’ – isn’t that what Israel is doing? Every accusation is a confession. They even accuse these ‘sects’ of potentially burning people – and they wrote this after the Israeli attack on a hospital in Jabalia on 14 October, after the world had watched as 19-year-old Shaban el-Dalou and other patients were burned alive in their beds.

Other texts have come out in the last few days attacking the boycott letter. Most, like the CCP letter, wheel on the obligatory paragraphs about ‘the liberal values most writers hold sacred’: freedom, justice, equality, peace. How do we get them? We ‘bring people together, transcend boundaries, broaden awareness, open dialogue.’ The ‘exchange of ideas’ is also a favourite. Getting a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim onstage together is an act of derring-do and a step towards ‘peace’.

Enough, really, enough with the rhetoric with the cuddly words: Amira Hass (need I add ‘the Jewish Israeli journalist’?) said early on in this war that the normal is now obscene. For many of us now, these innocent-seeming words have become obscene; for decades they’ve been used to cover up appalling crimes. So writers who engage in a collective boycott will be obstructing the path to peace? Is that the path that has been trodden in the eight decades of non-boycott? Which life, which acre of Palestinian land, which olive tree has been saved by the free exchange of ideas? How much worse is the Palestinian situation now and how much of that is the responsibility of the cultural smokescreen cocooning Israel?

It’s too late. If the tonnage and spread of Israel’s bombs, the footage of destruction, the numbers of the killed and the maimed, the testimony of Palestinian journalists, medics and international workers, were not enough to convince the rest of the world of the reality of what Israel is doing in Palestine, the self-filmed boasting of Israeli troops, the bluster of politicians and the dead-eyed pronouncements of settler leaders have done it. There is no more purview for pleasantries.

There comes a moment when people realise that all these manifestations of ‘liberal values’ are cover for what is happening on the ground. The number of signatories to the boycott open letter has now passed five thousand.