Mick Hartley

The literary world, once again, beshits itself:

A schism in the literary world has grown wider after two award winning authors criticised a petition signed by some of the world’s leading writers calling for Israel’s book industry to be frozen out.

The Booker prize-winning author Howard Jacobson said he was staggered that the petition’s signatories could dream that they had a right to silence other writers, while Lionel Shriver criticised their intimidatory tactics.

The petition, which has been signed by hundreds of leading authors, including Sally Rooney, Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner, calls for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions they claim are “complicit in genocide”.

They have pledged to boycott Israeli publishers, book festivals, literary agencies and publications that have not spoken out against their country’s military actions in the Middle East.

The petition has been organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature. Fossil Free Books — a pressure group that co-ordinated attempts to boycott Britain’s book festivals because of their sponsorship by the asset management company Baillie Gifford — circulated the letter in Britain.

Remember them? They demanded that various book festivals drop ties with Baillie-Gifford because of its investment in fossil fuel companies and those “linked” to Israel. The usual idiots – with Sally Rooney's name notably to the fore – were in full support. As Alex Massie noted at the time:

The hypocrisy of these fools knows no bounds. Waterstones is Britain’s biggest bookshop and it is owned by Elliott Advisors, a hedge fund with extensive oil and gas interests. Yet all these authors objecting to Baillie Gifford seem content to allow Waterstones to sell their books. Nor have I noticed authors revolting against Amazon even though, in the weasel words of “Fossil Free Books” the world’s largest online retailer has “direct or indirect links to Israel’s defence, tech and cybersecurity industries”.

But then so, apparently, do companies such as the chip manufacturer Nvidia and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. By this standard pretty much anyone who uses the internet is “linked” to Israeli “genocide” and anyone with shares in any stock market tracker fund is doubtless doubly implicated.

It is of course, in that over-worked but useful phrase, virtue-signaling – a vice to which the literary world seems particularly prone.

From the JC:

UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a legal advocacy group, has accused the letter circulated by Fossil Free Books (FFB) of being “plainly discriminatory against Israelis”, citing the UK Equality Act 2010 and other discriminatory legislation from around the world.

In a letter to the Publishers Association, Jonathan Turner, Chief Executive of UKLFI, said: “This boycott is plainly discriminatory against Israelis. The authors do not impose similar conditions on publishers, festivals, literary agencies or publications of any other nationality.

“The boycott is also contrary to laws prohibiting discrimination on grounds of nationality in many other countries around the world… most US States have adopted legislation providing for sanctions against participants in boycotts targeting Israel.”

He also said the letter made false allegations about Israel, such as accusing the country of genocide, despite the former president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) clarifying in a BBC interview that the court did not decide that there was a plausible case of genocide on the part of Israel, as had been incorrectly reported in some media.

The letter also puts the Palestinian death toll at 43,362 without saying that the figure comes from the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza, whose data, Turner says, “has been shown to be fabricated and manipulated”.