UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) have written to the Publishers Association to alert the organisation and its members to the legal consequences of participating in a “discriminatory and illegal” boycott of Israeli publishers, agencies and publications organised by various pro-Palestine organisations (Guardian, Literary Hub, Times, Times of Israel).
The petition, which has been signed by hundreds of leading authors, including Sally Rooney – a long-time supporter of cultural boycotts of Israel, having previously refused to allow her novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? to be published in Hebrew – Percival Everett, the British-based Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, Rachel Kushner and former Booker winner Arundhati Roy, 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 and/or are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights”, including operating “discriminatory policies and practices” or “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide”.
Institutions that have never publicly recognised the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law” will also be boycotted.
The petition has been organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature, alongside campaign groups Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books.
In its letter to the Publishers Association – a leading trade organisation that represents UK publishers of books – UKLFI describe the boycott as “plainly discriminatory against Israelis”, and highlight the legal and reputational risks of participating in, assisting or supporting the discriminatory boycott.
According to the legal advocacy group, the boycott is contrary to section 29(1) of the UK Equality Act 2010 which states that:
“A person (a “service-provider”) concerned with the provision of a service to the public or a section of the public (for payment or not) must not discriminate against a person requiring the service by not providing the person with the service”.
The letter goes on to note that the boycott is also contrary to laws prohibiting discrimination on grounds of nationality in many other countries around the world, including most states in the United States, which have adopted legislation providing for sanctions against participants in boycotts targeting Israel.
A number of leading figures from the literary world have also spoken out against the attempted boycott.
The Booker prize-winning author Howard Jacobson said he had looked at the text of the boycott letter with “scarce belief that one writer, that one person from the artistic community, should dream that he or she has a right to silence another. It is staggering.”
Writing for The Free Press, FSU Writers’ Advisory Council member Lionel Shriver, another prolific author who won what is now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction with We Need To Talk About Kevin, said the intention of the letter goes well beyond “punishing Israel’s tiny cultural institutions”, and seeks to “intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals.
“Boycotts are about withholding, and for writers, boycotts are about silence as well as about silencing,” she continues. “It would be more in keeping with Rooney’s and Roy’s profession for these authors to put their anguish about Israel into words rather than to mutely withdraw their work and pressure other authors to shut up.”
Shriver adds that, while she finds the whole ‘open letter’ format “a little obnoxious”, she has just signed one circulated by another organisation, Creative Community for Peace, in opposition to members of the entertainment industry who are currently attempting to organise a boycott of an Israeli film festival and “harass and ostracise their colleagues because they don’t share a one-sided narrative” about Israel. (You can find it here).
It comes just months after literary festivals in the UK were accused of discrimination on the basis of nationality, which is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, over the decision to drop a major sponsor because of its alleged investment in companies operating in or trading with Israel.
Hay Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival cut ties with Baillie Gifford after pro-Palestine activists alleged it had links to the “genocidal” Israel, and authors threatened a boycott.
The campaign against Baillie Gifford was led by Fossil Free Books, which alleges the investment management firm has interests in companies with ties to Israel’s defence and technology industries, which have a hand in what the group has branded “Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide”.
More than 200 authors supported the group’s threats of “escalation” and “disruption”, including Naomi Klein and Sally Rooney, who signed an open letter calling for the firm to drop investments in companies which profit from “colonial violence”.
Following sustained pressure, Baillie Gifford went on to withdraw sponsorship of all the literary festivals it supported, including the Stratford Literary Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival and Wigtown Book Festival.
However, according to Philippe Sands KC, who is on the legal team at the International Court of Justice seeking an end to Israel’s 56-year occupation of Palestinian territory, the boycott movement’s case against Baillie Gifford was based on “rather tenuous” evidence.
A Baillie Gifford spokesman has previously said: “The suggestion that Baillie Gifford is a large investor in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is seriously misleading. It is based on conflating two different types of exposure.”
The company said that it invested approximately $19 billion in multinational technology companies such as Amazon, NVIDIA and Meta, which have commercial dealings with Israel “that are tiny in the context of all of their overall business. Practically every consumer and investor in the developed world is using the services of these companies.”
It said it was a “small” investor in three companies that have been identified as having activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Airbnb, Booking.com, and Cemex – and is “committed to responsible analysing and engaging with the companies in which we invest.”
