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.
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The British Museum is one of the world’s few encyclopaedic museums: it tells the story of how civilisation was built; it boasts seven million visitors a year and is committed to free entry; it holds a unique place of authority in the nation’s – perhaps the world’s – consciousness. A few days ago I resigned from its Board of Trustees.
My resignation was not in protest at a single issue; it was a cumulative response to the museum’s immovability on issues of critical concern to the people who should be its core constituency: the young and the less privileged.
Read more about On Resigning from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees