Melanie Phillips
Substack, Oct. 30, 2024
“The tactic Shriver is aptly describing is designed to set one Jew against the other, to act as a kind of proxy assassin on behalf of the Jew-basher who can thus claim to have clean hands.”
It’s a fair bet that the authors and publishing professionals who have called for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions didn’t anticipate the scale of revulsion and outrage they have caused.
After all, given the current tsunami of hatred and insanity directed at the Jewish people throughout the West, they may well have thought they were merely going along with the overwhelmingly accepted narrative in “progressive” circles — in other words, anyone whose opinion was worth bothering about — that Israel should be shunned as a pariah because of the war in Gaza.
Hundreds supporting a campaign organized by the Palestine Festival of Literature, alongside Books Against Genocide, Book Workers for a Free Palestine, Publishers for Palestine, Writers Against the War on Gaza and Fossil Free Books, have signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions which they claim have been “obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades” and have thus been “complicit in genocide”.
“We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” they write.
Among the signatories are award-winning authors Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, children’s author Michael Rosen and actress Miriam Margolyes.… [To read the full article, click here]