Publishers for Palestine, a global network of almost 600 publishers across 50 countries, calls on London Book Fair to disinvite Israeli exhibitors that are complicit in whitewashing Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel’s wider aggression in the region.
The Fair has had an official stand representing the genocidal state of Israel in previous years, and currently has listed on its website three Israeli literary agencies that are implicated in artwashing apartheid, settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing. Yet in 2022, the London Book Fair banned the Russian Pavilion over its illegal invasion of Ukraine. This shameless anti-Palestinian racist hypocrisy and complicity in genocide must end. Now.
The current brutal escalation of US-Israeli aggression against Iran, Lebanon and neighbouring states comes in the wider context of naked US imperialist threats against Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland and elsewhere. Our industry must vocally resist this era of might-makes-right.
The publishing and literary world has an important role to play in pursuing accountability for the perpetrators of genocide and those complicit in it. The industry is central to the global circulation of information as well as the direction of cultural tides. With this centrality comes responsibility.
More than 7,000 writers and book workers – including Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award winners – have pledged to refuse to work with Israeli literary organisations and companies that whitewash, justify or advocate for Israel’s oppression against the Palestinian people, and have urgently called on the wider industry to join them.
Not only has the British government failed to uphold its legal obligations under international law – it has enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians and likely far more. British arts organisations clearly have profound ethical, historical and legal responsibilities to decisively end their own complicity in the violation of Palestinian rights.
Publishers for Palestine calls for pressure on London Book Fair to refuse to host all complicit Israeli exhibitors, to explicitly condemn Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and to stand in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Given Britain’s key role in the dispossession of the Palestinian people, this is the least that the Fair must do.
Publishers for Palestine 