Publishers for Palestine Open Letter to the Frankfurt Book Fair

Read our open letter in German, Arabic, Catalan, French, Italian, and Spanish.

We international publishers stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and with resisters of Israeli apartheid and genocide within Germany, including the organizers and participants of the Palestine Congress that was brutally and undemocratically shut down by German authorities. 

While a massive wave of writers, artists and cultural institutions worldwide speaks out for Palestinian liberation, enraged by Western complicity in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, the crime of crimes, many German institutions insist on isolating themselves from the world by attempting to censor those expressions of solidarity, contrary even to German public opinion, which generally opposes Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 

Even Pop-Kultur Berlin was forced to dump its years-long partnership with the Israeli embassy after many artists boycotted the flagship German music festival. Many federal German politicians and Berlin senators condemned the campaign, which nonetheless compelled the publicly-funded event to conclusively abandon its partnership with genocidal Israel.

Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest and oldest international book fair in the world, is also complicit in the German state’s deep involvement in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Despite supposedly standing for “respect, diversity and tolerance”, through its financial operations and cultural presence the fair is enmeshed in Germany’s financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocide, and last year engaged in shameful repression of solidarity with Palestine.

1. Publicly denounce Israel’s regime of genocide and setter-colonial apartheid against the Palestinian people.
   
2. Adhere to the long-standing calls from Palestinian civil society, including the absolute majority of writers, scholars, and cultural institutions, to refuse professional engagements with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit in whitewashing or justifying Israel’s oppression against Palestinians. This means refusing collaboration with Israeli book publishers, including their participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair, unless those institutions fulfill the basic demands to affirm the legally enshrined rights of the Palestinian people according to international law, including refugees’ rights.
   
3. Acknowledge and denounce Israel’s deliberate targeting of writers, academics, journalists, book publishers, schools, universities, libraries, archives, and all cultural producers and caretakers of the written word in Gaza and Palestine, acknowledging that these attacks on culture, language, history, and art, are part of a genocidal project that seeks to erase Palestinian life and culture.
   
4. Create programming for Frankfurt 2024 that prominently features Palestinian writers, publishers, and narratives, in a way that does not attempt to mask or minimize the truth of Palestinian history, and that does not attempt to minimize or omit the truth of the current Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestinians.