Last week, more than 5,000 writers and publishers from across the world pledged not to work with “Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” The pledge may be the biggest single act of cultural boycott since the mobilization against apartheid South Africa. The list of signatories includes some of the world’s most well-known and loved writers. I was also one of the signatories.
The letter reads, “This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months. Israeli officials speak plainly of their motivations to eliminate the population of Gaza, to make Palestinian statehood impossible, and to seize Palestinian land… Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising, and art washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades…” The writers go on to say, “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.”
The text and the spirit of the letter have come into painfully sharp focus for me personally as I discovered, to my dismay, that the film adaptation of my Kashmir-set novel, The Collaborator, is slated for exhibition at the Tamuz Shomron Film Festival in Israel. The Tamuz Shomron Film Festival is held in the settlement of Ariel in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and is organized with support from the Shomron (“Samaria/West Bank”) Cinema Fund, dubbed the “settler film fund” by its critics in Israel. A large number of prominent Israeli filmmakers and actors boycotted the Samaria Cinema Fund and its inaugural film festival two years ago.
In their statement, the filmmakers said the fund was “whitewashing the occupation… The Samaria Fund is not a pluralistic fund—it is part and parcel of the apartheid regime, open to one ethnic group (Jews) and closed to another (Palestinians) living in the same geo-political area.” They also called upon the Israeli film community “not to turn Israeli cinema into yet another instrument in the oppression of the Palestinian people.”
I cannot allow my work to be associated with a platform whose purpose is to whitewash Israeli apartheid and undermine Palestinian rights.
Cinema can be uplifting, enlightening and cathartic; it can also be used in the service of empires, colonizers, and occupations. It can be employed to coat a sheen of normality over landscapes of injustice. Sadly, the festival in question unambiguously belongs in the latter category and I cannot, in good conscience, be a part of it in any form or manner. My novel is about occupation and its devastating consequences. I cannot allow my work, however indirectly, to be associated with a platform whose purpose, it is clear to me, is to whitewash Israeli apartheid and undermine Palestinian rights.
All this has given me a chance to further interrogate and reflect on the reasons why I have chosen to join a movement for boycott. When I learnt about the inclusion of the film in the TSFF program, I found myself rejecting the idea that it was simply business as usual. It felt necessary for me to put on record my objection to the exhibition of the film as part of a cultural event which is clearly about more than just culture. In fact, it seems obvious that culture is here being used to further a certain agenda, one that normalizes the injustice of occupation.
According to international law, all settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are illegal. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its recent landmark ruling declared that Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal, and that Israel should stop settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The ruling also called for the immediate and total withdrawal of Israeli settlers from occupied Palestinian territories.
Naturally, I am disturbed that my name may be associated, even tangentially, with any Israeli cultural organization, institution, or event linked to or complicit in the dispossession and disempowerment of Palestinians. It is not in my power to determine what the producers choose to do with their film, but it is wholly in my power to choose what I do in this matter.
There’s something fundamentally wrong about screening a film in an Israeli settlement in the middle of a genocide.
It is therefore with sadness that I must distance myself from the screening of the film at this festival. The decision to include it was one in which I had no role, and which I only became aware of by accident. It gives me no pleasure to dissociate from the exhibition of a film based on my own novel, but I am convinced not doing so would be morally wrong.
I am reluctant to insert myself into this issue at a time like this; I also understand that my decision might bring undue attention to the film festival in question. But staying silent is simply not an option. It would amount to complicity.
There’s something fundamentally wrong about screening a film in an Israeli settlement in the middle of a genocide. I will, therefore, no longer be a part of any promotion or public relations work related to the film—unless and until it is withdrawn from the Tamuz Shomron Film Festival. In other words, I boycott this festival.
Contrary to accusations levelled against the writers who signed the boycott pledge, boycotts are not acts designed to foster exclusion or hatred; they are, in fact, statements of intent that one will not be a party to injustice, because without justice there can be no equality. Boycotts are meant to declare, in word and in deed, that one will not cooperate with systems of oppression and cruelty. They are solidarity put into practice, words of support actualised, operationalized. In the current scenario, the pledge to boycott complicit Israeli cultural institutions simply means one will not look away as Israel commits mass murder after mass murder in Gaza, slaughtering Palestinian men, women, and children, day after day.
Last year, I was in Palestine with a group of writers as part of the Palestine Festival of Literature and we travelled through Palestinian towns and cities. I saw first hand the grotesque topography of Israeli apartheid in Palestine. I saw a meticulously put together system with layers and layers of apartheid against the Palestinian right to housing, land, water, movement, against the right to legal redress of these inequalities; essentially, a suppression of all those rights that may make Palestinians equal humans. I saw racism on an industrial scale; there is nothing like it on the planet. I saw fortified Israeli settlements dotting the Palestinian landscape, occupying well-watered heights, like the outposts of a settler-colonial enterprise, which they are.
It is for these reasons that I must boycott a film festival that is part of a legitimizing apparatus put together to normalize the colony.
