OVERVIEW
Israel overtly uses culture as a form of propaganda to whitewash, or artwash, its genocide in Gaza and underlying regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and military occupation over the Indigenous Palestinian people. Israel’s genocide has included a deliberate obliteration of archeological sites and cultural heritage across Gaza.
Just as South African anti-apartheid movements had called on international artists, writers and cultural institutions to culturally boycott South Africa, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urges international cultural workers and cultural organizations, including unions and associations, to boycott and/or work towards the cancellation of events, activities, agreements, or projects involving Israel, its lobby groups or its complicit cultural institutions.
International venues and festivals are asked to reject funding and any form of sponsorship from the Israeli government or complicit entities. Since Israel’s cultural institutions are implicated in genocide, apartheid and military occupation, international artists and arts organizations have a profound ethical duty to do no harm to the Palestinian struggle by working to end links of complicity with those institutions. Accountability for Israel’s oppression against Palestinians is more urgent than ever.
Tens of thousands of artists across the world and a rapidly growing number of arts organizations have publicly endorsed the cultural boycott of apartheid Israel.
WHY?
The case for a cultural boycott of Israel
Israeli government officials have summed up how Israel instrumentalizes culture to cover up its grave violations of international law. “We are seeing culture as a hasbara [propaganda] tool of the first rank,” one official admitted, “and I do not differentiate between hasbara and culture.”
Israel’s cultural institutions are part and parcel of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and military occupation against the Palestinian people. These institutions are clearly implicated, through their silence or active participation in supporting, justifying and whitewashing Israel’s systematic oppression and denial of Palestinian rights.
According to the BDS movement’s Guidelines for the International Cultural Boycott of Israel, in order for Israeli cultural institutions to end their collusion in Israel’s regime of oppression and become non-boycottable, they must fulfill two basic conditions:
- Publicly recognize the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law (including the three basic rights in the 2005 BDS Call) and
- End all forms of complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law,including discriminatory policies and practices as well as diverse roles in whitewashing or justifying Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights.
When international artists perform at complicit Israeli cultural venues and institutions or at events sponsored by Israel, its lobby groups or its complicit institutions, they help to create the false impression that apartheid Israel is a “normal” state. The absolute majority of Palestinian writers, artists and cultural centers have endorsed the cultural boycott of Israel, and there is a growing number of anti-colonial Israelis who support BDS, including the cultural boycott of Israel.
To distract from and whitewash its crimes against the Palestinians, and in response to PACBI, Israel launched the well-oiled “Brand Israel” propaganda campaign in 2005.
Following its 2009 massacre in Gaza, for example, an Israeli official announced a plan to “send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, exhibits” to “show Israel’s prettier face.”
As revealed in the Israeli media, Israeli artists who receive state funding to perform overseas often sign a contract pledging “to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel,” thus forfeiting any claim to artistic freedom.
International venues, festivals and other arts organizations are increasingly refusing to accept Israeli government funding or host artists/writers acting as cultural ambassadors for Israel’s apartheid regime.
As part of its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, Israel has pursued a policy of deliberately targeting Palestinian culture. To give just a few examples:
During its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip, Israel has deliberately destroyed irreplaceable Palestinian cultural heritage sites in Gaza, whose history goes back 4,000 years. According to UN human experts, Israel’s genocide has included scholasticide and cultural genocide, which had been documented by the US-based Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Last October, the Arab Regional Group of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) wrote:
“Gaza alone contains more than 350 archaeological sites, along with historic centers, natural landmarks, and traditional buildings. At least two-thirds of these sites have been bombed and destroyed, either partially or entirely, representing a severe loss of the cultural and human heritage of the Palestinian people and the world’s cultural heritage.”
But Israel’s attacks on Indigenous Palestinian culture did not start with the Gaza genocide. During the 1948 Nakba (Zionist ethnic cleansing of most of the Indigenous Palestinians), Zionist militias and later Israel plundered and/or destroyed tens of thousands of Palestinian owned books.
In 2018, during its brutal military aggression on Gaza, Israeli fighter jets deliberately bombed and destroyed the Said al Mishal cultural centre, including its children’s cinema
In 2009, the Arab League and UNESCO designated Jerusalem as Capital of Arab Culture for that year. Israel banned the celebrations and its police broke up cultural gatherings in venues across occupied East Jerusalem.
During Israel’s military invasion of Ramallah in 2002, soldiers ransacked cultural centers and destroyed original manuscripts belonging to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Israel’s regime of oppression against the Palestinian people is a special cocktail of settler-colonialism, apartheid and military occupation. But some leading South African anti-apartheid leaders, like Ahmed Kathrada, Mandela government minister Ronnie Kasrils and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have argued that Israel’s is a more brutal form of apartheid than its South African predecessor.
The cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa targeted complicit individuals as well as institutions, whereas PACBI’s boycott is institutional. BDS targets complicity, not identity. Those who are now hesitant to support an institutional cultural boycott of Israel while having in the past endorsed a blanket cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa are hard pressed to explain this inconsistency.
In 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) issued its historic call for the cultural boycott of Israel. In 2005, PACBI became one of the many Palestinian entities that launched the historic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Call.
The PACBI call urges international artists, cultural workers and cultural organizations to boycott and work towards the cancellation of activities that involve Israel, its lobby groups and complicit institutions, or that whitewash Israel’s human rights violations.
Find out more by reading the full call and the cultural boycott guidelines.