The letter from JK Rowling and others (Israel needs cultural bridges, not boycotts,
23 October) is well past its sell-by date. Cultural bridges between
Israel and Britain’s elite have been part of the landscape for decades –
and they’ve helped lead to where we are now; they’ve given Israel the
veneer of respectability it needed to camouflage its expansionist,
racist policies.
Today there’s no question: an artist or intellectual who collaborates with activities funded or approved by the Israeli state is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
It’s sad to see distinguished names attached to a collection of worn-out, provenly false cliches. But in the end, it’s a matter of personal conscience and of how seriously people take their art and their responsibility to their public.
Artists from the west who have signed up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) have done so after much thought and soul-searching. They have taken the trouble to really learn about the situation, sometimes to see it for themselves. They sign because BDS is a democratic, conscience-led, non-violent way to try to end a 19th-century colonial enterprise still bleeding into our lives in 2015.
Many are paying a price for their position. But, as one of these courageous and serious people said to me, “Our business is the truth.”
Ahdaf Soueif
London
• It’s customary to speak about this crisis as though it’s a deadlock, as though nothing is moving. But that’s not true: every day armed Israeli settlers are illegally occupying more and more Palestinian land, and cutting away at the few freedoms the Palestinians still have left, with the tacit or overt backing of the army and the state. And every day the government is building new walls through neighbourhoods to fence the Palestinians off even more. Israel benefits from the crisis and uses it as cover – in the name of self-defence – to extend its control further and further into Palestinian lives. Now, having said during his election campaign that there will never be a Palestinian state, Netanyahu is trying to blame the Arabs for the Holocaust (and he’s described as one of the more sane people on the right wing of Israeli politics). Does that sound to you like a good way to initiate a dialogue about a two-state solution? Or is it more likely the prelude to an Arab-free Israel?
I respect the good intentions of the signatories to this letter and I appreciate the desire for dialogue, but what kind of dialogue is realistically possible between a largely unarmed and imprisoned people whose land is disappearing before its eyes, and the heavily weaponised state that’s in the process of taking it? Sounds a bit like the “dialogue” that the Native Americans were offered en route to being liquidated by another group of settlers.
BDS has the support of almost all Palestinians. It also has the support of many liberal Israeli Jews. In the current “Death to Arabs” climate, that’s a courageous position for an Israeli to take – certainly not the easy option. For what little difference it will make, I’ll stick with them.
Brian Eno
London
• The letter calling for increased cultural links with Israel and not boycotts beggars belief. What do the signatories think has been going on for the last 40 years since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza? It has not stopped the relentless march of the settlers into the West Bank and the continuing persecution and humiliation of Palestinians.
John Kerry is not much better with his naive call for a “solution” to the problems on the Temple Mount.
There will be no end to the suffering of the people in Palestine, and to a much lesser extent of Israelis, until the Israeli government and its people realise there is no future in its present policies and withdraws from Palestinian land, creating two secure states.
Boycott of all things Israeli is needed until this is achieved, and only we ourselves can do this in the face of our government’s inability to act for fear of offending “the Lobby”.
Jenny Tonge
House of Lords
• I write to express my wholehearted support for the letter by Culture for Coexistence. The approach they are advocating is well-reasoned and a long-overdue counterbalance to the increasing criticism of anything, and most everything, that Israel does.
There can only be merit in trying to bring people together and achieving common consent through conciliatory and meaningful dialogue with the ultimate aim of building hope, trust and perhaps – sometime soon it must be hoped – real peace between both sides in this conflict.
The increasingly one-sided approach to criticising Israel and – not so far under the surface – Jews in general has to end if we all believe in a fair and balanced solution. If not for this generation, then maybe the next.
Attempts to force Israel to unfair accommodations with people who still will not accept the very existence of a Jewish state only exacerbate the problems and entrench the respective positions of the parties. You can’t talk in isolation, so isolating any side is patently the wrong way forward.
Nigel Tobias
Hale Barns, Cheshire
• The letter from 150 signatories calling for cultural “coexistence” and “dialogue about Israel and the Palestinians” would be more credible if a significant number of them had some record of engagement and empathy with the experience of Palestinians over the last half century and more.
Instead, we find the list thickly populated with the names of those who have consistently devoted their time and energy to protecting Israel from criticism and accountability. In some cases, such as that of Eric Pickles – former cabinet minister and chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel – they have shown their understanding of dialogue by intervening to suppress an academic conference on Israel earlier this year.
Not every signatory shares the views of Pickles. We ask those who genuinely desire a just peace to reconsider their decision, and to follow the example of more than a thousand of their peers who have signed the Artists’ Pledge for Palestine. JK Rowling, Hilary Mantel, Zoë Wanamaker – there are better ways of defending the rights of Palestinians than keeping company with people for whom “coexistence” is empty rhetoric, used to divert attention from the discomfiting realities of occupation.
John Graham Davies, Doug Holton, Hilary Westlake
Artists for Palestine UK
• I am sure that none of the distinguished artists who have signed the letter calling for cultural bridge-building between Israel and Palestine intend any harm to Palestinians. I am confident that they do not wish to see Palestinian houses demolished, farms destroyed, or land seized; nor do they approve, I guess, of military occupation, separation walls and ever-tighter restrictions on the movement of people. But the effect of their call for dialogue is to create a soothing soundtrack to just such a record of brutality. “Dialogue” and “cooperation” are lovely words, but they are often disingenuously used by propagandists for Israel, to suggest a way forward that Israel’s own actions are responsible for blocking. For writers like Rowling, Mantel and Schama to put their names to a letter like this brings painfully to life a situation that they themselves have explored in fiction and history. Good intentions can come to serve bad ends.
Farhana Sheikh
Essex
• There is a touching naivety in the call by a group of British writers and artists for “cultural engagement” between Israel and the Palestinians rather than a cultural boycott. Organised by a group with strong links to existing pro-Israel organisations, the letter seems unaware that in the decades before the boycott movement took hold, the “cultural engagement” that did take place achieved precisely nothing in the face of Israel’s relentless takeover of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinians. Why on earth would it make any difference now, as the rightwing Israeli government continues to show its contempt for international law and the rights of the Palestinians?
Karl Sabbagh
Author, Palestine: A Personal History
• The signatories to the letter “Israel needs cultural bridges – not boycotts”, naively or otherwise, assume that a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine issue is still possible – and that this will somehow be brought about by continuing “business as usual” with Israel.
In April 2013, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said: “I believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we have some period of time – a year to a year and a half to two years, or it’s over.” That time is now up. The situation for Palestinians is significantly worse than it was in 2013, and the United States and EU countries continue to provide Israel with massive support, via direct aid and preferential access to EU markets and research programmes – while ignoring Israel’s relentless assaults on Palestinian cultural and educational life.
Cultural boycott is a non-violent means of supporting Palestinian legal rights, even as these are ignored by our own governments, and of telling the Israeli government that “business as usual” is no longer acceptable.
Professor James Dickins
Leeds
• The business-as-usual method of creating a two-state solution advocated in the letter of 23 October has over a long period done nothing whatsoever to prevent ongoing Israeli colonisation of the West Bank, rendering any solution to the conflict impossible.
The colonisers welcome business as usual. The only external pressure that worries them is Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which – as occurred in the case of South Africa – may continue to expand and be joined by other genuine pressures.
Professor Richard Seaford
University of Exeter
• Regarding the letter published in the Guardian calling for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and opposing a cultural boycott, isn’t the answer to this position that there are already in place, and have been for many years, manifold cultural bridges to Israel that have had little or no effect on the policies of the Israeli government and which have if anything emboldened successive governments in their illegal oppression of Palestinians. To remove those bridges is surely a worthwhile non-violent action to see if cultural isolation will bring effective pressure on Israeli politicians and a complicit electorate to change their ways. It is not incidental to the argument that such isolation is overwhelmingly supported by Palestinians inside and outside the country.
Hubert Murray
Cambridge, Massachusetts
• When, in 2005, a coalition of representatives from Palestinian civil society called for a boycott of Israel (not, note, of individual Israelis), they were asking for, and had a right to receive, solidarity from all who value justice and international law; solidarity with a people suffering a never-ending occupation, whose land and water are being stolen, whose lives are hemmed in by walls, checkpoints and an apartheid system, whose houses are bulldozed, whose olive trees are destroyed, whose children are abused and incarcerated, whose national aspirations are stifled. So this declaration by Culture for Coexistence is an act of betrayal, the moral equivalent of crossing a picket line or buying goods from apartheid South Africa. I am shocked by their political illiteracy and their arrogance.
Leon Rosselson
London
• I was saddened to read that some of the artists who have given me enormous pleasure – Wendy Cope, Hilary Mantel, Fay Weldon and Zoë Wanamaker, for example – are opposing the cultural and academic boycott of Israel.
Of course it is their right and, in principle, I am against cultural and academic boycotts myself. This boycott is very specific, however, and I wonder how carefully the signatories to this latest letter have read it. It does not set out to boycott an Israeli artist or academic just because he or she is Israeli.
It only targets those who have played or acted in the occupied Palestinian territories, thus seeming to normalise the illegal occupation which steals more Palestinian land every week. It only targets those who accept money from the state of Israel for their tours etc.
This financial support comes from the extremely well-funded and cynical Brand Israel initiative, which aims to distract from the unnumbered human rights violations of the state and to present Israel’s “pretty face” to the world.
In fact the cultural boycott works enthusiastically with Israeli artists and academics – Arab or Jew – who stand up against Israel’s policy of occupation.
Of course talking and building bridges are desirable, but the talking on this issue has been going on since 1967. Meanwhile Israel continues to violate the fourth Geneva convention on a daily basis: demolishing homes, giving away stolen land to illegal settlers, shooting at water butts so their victims lose even the little of that precious commodity they are allowed under the Oslo accords and dragging terrified children from their beds to handcuff, blindfold and abduct them on the spurious grounds of “security”.
I am disappointed in my own heroes.
Sharen Green
Wimborne, Dorset
• It would have been far wiser if JK Rowling had stepped down from her magical world and ventured, if for a moment, to the reality in Palestine before signing up to the call opposing the cultural boycott of Israel. Cultural coexistence can only succeed between free peoples, but not between the oppressor and the oppressed. In principle, open dialogue and interaction can indeed promote greater understanding and mutual acceptance, but sadly not in the case of Israel. That road has been travelled time and again to no avail.
Israel used it as cover to implement its national project for the total conquest of Palestine. Step down from the high pedestal of lofty idealism, Ms Rowling, and review the record of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations over the past 25 years – I promise the reality will shock you. You will realise that BDS and other civil society pressure or boycott movements are now the last-resort peaceful undertakings that are capable of convincing Israel to fulfil its obligations to peace.
The so-called “peace process” has a proven record as an exercise in futility. At its starting point in the early 1990s, the Palestinians conceded 78% of historic Palestine to Israel in return for the remaining 22% on which they hoped to build their own state. But that promise was never realised. For close to a quarter century of negotiations, the “peace process” ground on with no end in sight. Israel conceded nothing but self-rule on 3% of that 22%, Palestinians were also permitted to administer another 20% at the pleasure of Israel and under its military boot, while over 70% of the West Bank remained under the exclusive control of Israel. The “peace process” turned into a farce, all process but no peace.
A “cottage industry” as Roger Cohen of the New York Times described it, the “peace process” did work, but only for the benefit of duplicitous career-minded book-writing mediators and unyielding Israeli negotiators, while the quixotic Palestinian negotiators vainly persevered battling windmills. As this charade played out, land grabs continued unabated, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem tripled, and no reprieve was in sight from the daily humiliation and abuse the Palestinians were receiving at the hands of the Israeli authorities and their settler proteges.
It has become crystal clear that Israel never intends to withdraw to its own borders or accede to the establishment of a Palestinian state. And yet Israeli leaders, including prime minister Netanyahu of very questionable credibility, never tire of repeating the litany of readiness to negotiate “without pre-conditions”. And why not? It has worked quite well for them until now.
The boycott campaigns, including the BDS movement are meant to challenge Israel’s obduracy and convince it that there is a price to pay: economic, cultural as well as political, for its refusal concede to Palestinian legitimate rights under international law.
Israel has now started to feel the pinch of the boycott movements, but is still not heeding their message. Instead, it has launched a campaign to fight them, utilising all available assets it has worldwide to delegitimise them. If Israel succeeds in defeating BDS, it will extinguish the last ray of hope for genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace. Whether consciously or not, by signing that letter, Ms Rowling, you have become an instrument of the Israeli occupation system, a tool used in the fight against a legitimate and peaceful movement of resistance to occupation and oppression. Please do a little soul-searching. I hope and pray you will reconsider.
Today there’s no question: an artist or intellectual who collaborates with activities funded or approved by the Israeli state is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
It’s sad to see distinguished names attached to a collection of worn-out, provenly false cliches. But in the end, it’s a matter of personal conscience and of how seriously people take their art and their responsibility to their public.
Artists from the west who have signed up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) have done so after much thought and soul-searching. They have taken the trouble to really learn about the situation, sometimes to see it for themselves. They sign because BDS is a democratic, conscience-led, non-violent way to try to end a 19th-century colonial enterprise still bleeding into our lives in 2015.
Many are paying a price for their position. But, as one of these courageous and serious people said to me, “Our business is the truth.”
Ahdaf Soueif
London
• It’s customary to speak about this crisis as though it’s a deadlock, as though nothing is moving. But that’s not true: every day armed Israeli settlers are illegally occupying more and more Palestinian land, and cutting away at the few freedoms the Palestinians still have left, with the tacit or overt backing of the army and the state. And every day the government is building new walls through neighbourhoods to fence the Palestinians off even more. Israel benefits from the crisis and uses it as cover – in the name of self-defence – to extend its control further and further into Palestinian lives. Now, having said during his election campaign that there will never be a Palestinian state, Netanyahu is trying to blame the Arabs for the Holocaust (and he’s described as one of the more sane people on the right wing of Israeli politics). Does that sound to you like a good way to initiate a dialogue about a two-state solution? Or is it more likely the prelude to an Arab-free Israel?
I respect the good intentions of the signatories to this letter and I appreciate the desire for dialogue, but what kind of dialogue is realistically possible between a largely unarmed and imprisoned people whose land is disappearing before its eyes, and the heavily weaponised state that’s in the process of taking it? Sounds a bit like the “dialogue” that the Native Americans were offered en route to being liquidated by another group of settlers.
BDS has the support of almost all Palestinians. It also has the support of many liberal Israeli Jews. In the current “Death to Arabs” climate, that’s a courageous position for an Israeli to take – certainly not the easy option. For what little difference it will make, I’ll stick with them.
Brian Eno
London
• The letter calling for increased cultural links with Israel and not boycotts beggars belief. What do the signatories think has been going on for the last 40 years since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza? It has not stopped the relentless march of the settlers into the West Bank and the continuing persecution and humiliation of Palestinians.
John Kerry is not much better with his naive call for a “solution” to the problems on the Temple Mount.
There will be no end to the suffering of the people in Palestine, and to a much lesser extent of Israelis, until the Israeli government and its people realise there is no future in its present policies and withdraws from Palestinian land, creating two secure states.
Boycott of all things Israeli is needed until this is achieved, and only we ourselves can do this in the face of our government’s inability to act for fear of offending “the Lobby”.
Jenny Tonge
House of Lords
• I write to express my wholehearted support for the letter by Culture for Coexistence. The approach they are advocating is well-reasoned and a long-overdue counterbalance to the increasing criticism of anything, and most everything, that Israel does.
There can only be merit in trying to bring people together and achieving common consent through conciliatory and meaningful dialogue with the ultimate aim of building hope, trust and perhaps – sometime soon it must be hoped – real peace between both sides in this conflict.
The increasingly one-sided approach to criticising Israel and – not so far under the surface – Jews in general has to end if we all believe in a fair and balanced solution. If not for this generation, then maybe the next.
Attempts to force Israel to unfair accommodations with people who still will not accept the very existence of a Jewish state only exacerbate the problems and entrench the respective positions of the parties. You can’t talk in isolation, so isolating any side is patently the wrong way forward.
Nigel Tobias
Hale Barns, Cheshire
• The letter from 150 signatories calling for cultural “coexistence” and “dialogue about Israel and the Palestinians” would be more credible if a significant number of them had some record of engagement and empathy with the experience of Palestinians over the last half century and more.
Instead, we find the list thickly populated with the names of those who have consistently devoted their time and energy to protecting Israel from criticism and accountability. In some cases, such as that of Eric Pickles – former cabinet minister and chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel – they have shown their understanding of dialogue by intervening to suppress an academic conference on Israel earlier this year.
Not every signatory shares the views of Pickles. We ask those who genuinely desire a just peace to reconsider their decision, and to follow the example of more than a thousand of their peers who have signed the Artists’ Pledge for Palestine. JK Rowling, Hilary Mantel, Zoë Wanamaker – there are better ways of defending the rights of Palestinians than keeping company with people for whom “coexistence” is empty rhetoric, used to divert attention from the discomfiting realities of occupation.
John Graham Davies, Doug Holton, Hilary Westlake
Artists for Palestine UK
• I am sure that none of the distinguished artists who have signed the letter calling for cultural bridge-building between Israel and Palestine intend any harm to Palestinians. I am confident that they do not wish to see Palestinian houses demolished, farms destroyed, or land seized; nor do they approve, I guess, of military occupation, separation walls and ever-tighter restrictions on the movement of people. But the effect of their call for dialogue is to create a soothing soundtrack to just such a record of brutality. “Dialogue” and “cooperation” are lovely words, but they are often disingenuously used by propagandists for Israel, to suggest a way forward that Israel’s own actions are responsible for blocking. For writers like Rowling, Mantel and Schama to put their names to a letter like this brings painfully to life a situation that they themselves have explored in fiction and history. Good intentions can come to serve bad ends.
Farhana Sheikh
Essex
• There is a touching naivety in the call by a group of British writers and artists for “cultural engagement” between Israel and the Palestinians rather than a cultural boycott. Organised by a group with strong links to existing pro-Israel organisations, the letter seems unaware that in the decades before the boycott movement took hold, the “cultural engagement” that did take place achieved precisely nothing in the face of Israel’s relentless takeover of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinians. Why on earth would it make any difference now, as the rightwing Israeli government continues to show its contempt for international law and the rights of the Palestinians?
Karl Sabbagh
Author, Palestine: A Personal History
• The signatories to the letter “Israel needs cultural bridges – not boycotts”, naively or otherwise, assume that a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine issue is still possible – and that this will somehow be brought about by continuing “business as usual” with Israel.
In April 2013, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said: “I believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we have some period of time – a year to a year and a half to two years, or it’s over.” That time is now up. The situation for Palestinians is significantly worse than it was in 2013, and the United States and EU countries continue to provide Israel with massive support, via direct aid and preferential access to EU markets and research programmes – while ignoring Israel’s relentless assaults on Palestinian cultural and educational life.
Cultural boycott is a non-violent means of supporting Palestinian legal rights, even as these are ignored by our own governments, and of telling the Israeli government that “business as usual” is no longer acceptable.
Professor James Dickins
Leeds
• The business-as-usual method of creating a two-state solution advocated in the letter of 23 October has over a long period done nothing whatsoever to prevent ongoing Israeli colonisation of the West Bank, rendering any solution to the conflict impossible.
The colonisers welcome business as usual. The only external pressure that worries them is Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which – as occurred in the case of South Africa – may continue to expand and be joined by other genuine pressures.
Professor Richard Seaford
University of Exeter
• Regarding the letter published in the Guardian calling for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and opposing a cultural boycott, isn’t the answer to this position that there are already in place, and have been for many years, manifold cultural bridges to Israel that have had little or no effect on the policies of the Israeli government and which have if anything emboldened successive governments in their illegal oppression of Palestinians. To remove those bridges is surely a worthwhile non-violent action to see if cultural isolation will bring effective pressure on Israeli politicians and a complicit electorate to change their ways. It is not incidental to the argument that such isolation is overwhelmingly supported by Palestinians inside and outside the country.
Hubert Murray
Cambridge, Massachusetts
• When, in 2005, a coalition of representatives from Palestinian civil society called for a boycott of Israel (not, note, of individual Israelis), they were asking for, and had a right to receive, solidarity from all who value justice and international law; solidarity with a people suffering a never-ending occupation, whose land and water are being stolen, whose lives are hemmed in by walls, checkpoints and an apartheid system, whose houses are bulldozed, whose olive trees are destroyed, whose children are abused and incarcerated, whose national aspirations are stifled. So this declaration by Culture for Coexistence is an act of betrayal, the moral equivalent of crossing a picket line or buying goods from apartheid South Africa. I am shocked by their political illiteracy and their arrogance.
Leon Rosselson
London
• I was saddened to read that some of the artists who have given me enormous pleasure – Wendy Cope, Hilary Mantel, Fay Weldon and Zoë Wanamaker, for example – are opposing the cultural and academic boycott of Israel.
Of course it is their right and, in principle, I am against cultural and academic boycotts myself. This boycott is very specific, however, and I wonder how carefully the signatories to this latest letter have read it. It does not set out to boycott an Israeli artist or academic just because he or she is Israeli.
It only targets those who have played or acted in the occupied Palestinian territories, thus seeming to normalise the illegal occupation which steals more Palestinian land every week. It only targets those who accept money from the state of Israel for their tours etc.
This financial support comes from the extremely well-funded and cynical Brand Israel initiative, which aims to distract from the unnumbered human rights violations of the state and to present Israel’s “pretty face” to the world.
In fact the cultural boycott works enthusiastically with Israeli artists and academics – Arab or Jew – who stand up against Israel’s policy of occupation.
Of course talking and building bridges are desirable, but the talking on this issue has been going on since 1967. Meanwhile Israel continues to violate the fourth Geneva convention on a daily basis: demolishing homes, giving away stolen land to illegal settlers, shooting at water butts so their victims lose even the little of that precious commodity they are allowed under the Oslo accords and dragging terrified children from their beds to handcuff, blindfold and abduct them on the spurious grounds of “security”.
I am disappointed in my own heroes.
Sharen Green
Wimborne, Dorset
• It would have been far wiser if JK Rowling had stepped down from her magical world and ventured, if for a moment, to the reality in Palestine before signing up to the call opposing the cultural boycott of Israel. Cultural coexistence can only succeed between free peoples, but not between the oppressor and the oppressed. In principle, open dialogue and interaction can indeed promote greater understanding and mutual acceptance, but sadly not in the case of Israel. That road has been travelled time and again to no avail.
Israel used it as cover to implement its national project for the total conquest of Palestine. Step down from the high pedestal of lofty idealism, Ms Rowling, and review the record of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations over the past 25 years – I promise the reality will shock you. You will realise that BDS and other civil society pressure or boycott movements are now the last-resort peaceful undertakings that are capable of convincing Israel to fulfil its obligations to peace.
The so-called “peace process” has a proven record as an exercise in futility. At its starting point in the early 1990s, the Palestinians conceded 78% of historic Palestine to Israel in return for the remaining 22% on which they hoped to build their own state. But that promise was never realised. For close to a quarter century of negotiations, the “peace process” ground on with no end in sight. Israel conceded nothing but self-rule on 3% of that 22%, Palestinians were also permitted to administer another 20% at the pleasure of Israel and under its military boot, while over 70% of the West Bank remained under the exclusive control of Israel. The “peace process” turned into a farce, all process but no peace.
A “cottage industry” as Roger Cohen of the New York Times described it, the “peace process” did work, but only for the benefit of duplicitous career-minded book-writing mediators and unyielding Israeli negotiators, while the quixotic Palestinian negotiators vainly persevered battling windmills. As this charade played out, land grabs continued unabated, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem tripled, and no reprieve was in sight from the daily humiliation and abuse the Palestinians were receiving at the hands of the Israeli authorities and their settler proteges.
It has become crystal clear that Israel never intends to withdraw to its own borders or accede to the establishment of a Palestinian state. And yet Israeli leaders, including prime minister Netanyahu of very questionable credibility, never tire of repeating the litany of readiness to negotiate “without pre-conditions”. And why not? It has worked quite well for them until now.
The boycott campaigns, including the BDS movement are meant to challenge Israel’s obduracy and convince it that there is a price to pay: economic, cultural as well as political, for its refusal concede to Palestinian legitimate rights under international law.
Israel has now started to feel the pinch of the boycott movements, but is still not heeding their message. Instead, it has launched a campaign to fight them, utilising all available assets it has worldwide to delegitimise them. If Israel succeeds in defeating BDS, it will extinguish the last ray of hope for genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace. Whether consciously or not, by signing that letter, Ms Rowling, you have become an instrument of the Israeli occupation system, a tool used in the fight against a legitimate and peaceful movement of resistance to occupation and oppression. Please do a little soul-searching. I hope and pray you will reconsider.
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