BRICUP is an organisation of UK based academics, set up in response to the Palestinian Call for Academic Boycott.
Note: For background information about the first annual International Writers Festival in Jerusalem, click here and here.
Dear Nadine
Gordimer:
Many of us
who paid attention to, and valued, your writing during the dark days of
apartheid are dismayed to see that you are participating in the International
Writers Festival in Israel
in May.
It can only
send a dispiriting message to the Palestinians that a writer of your moral
standing and international renown is prepared to appear in a city at least half
of which is under illegal military occupation by a state founded on ethnic
cleansing. ('Ethnic cleansing' isn't
just our term—it's what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says he has finally
accepted is the most accurate description for what Israeli forces did to the
Palestinians in 1948.)
Think of a
Palestinian villager in the occupied West Bank—hemmed in by Israeli army
roadblocks, cut off from her fields by the Wall, the water in her wells drained
by a nearby settlement, some of her sons and daughters in prison without charge
or trial, her other children unable to leave the village to go to school. There are hundreds of thousands like her. In this context, isn’t it a contradiction to
be sitting in occupied Jerusalem,
discussing the morality and responsibility of 'the writer' with Amos Oz?
We take it
as given that you still believe everything you said during apartheid times about
the responsibility of the writer not to ignore injustice, and about your hatred
of racism. But how does your visit
square with this? By taking part in
an event substantially funded by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you
will be lending credibility to the state that has for decades subjected
Palestinian towns and villages to collective punishment, that boasts of its
extrajudicial killings, that carpeted south Lebanon with cluster bombs in 2006
when the ceasefire had already been agreed (the list truly is endless).
In one of
your essays you describe Professor John Dugard as a friend. You must know that in his capacity as UN
Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories, John Dugard unequivocally
denounced the wrongs inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. His doing so has not brought Palestinian
suffering to an end. But he did, to his
great credit, unmask the systematic cruelty of Israeli policy towards the
Palestinians.
The whole of
Palestinian civil society has called for a cultural boycott of Israel. Please don’t give the Israeli establishment,
the Israeli press, the whole Israeli PR machine, the prize they want—your
apparent condoning of their policies.
Your
reputation as a figure of conscience is world-wide.
Your
withdrawal from the May event will have a great impact on an Israeli public
largely in denial about the cruelties it perpetrates. Please don't go.
Yours
sincerely,
Professor
Hilary Rose
Professor
Steven Rose
Professor
Jonathan Rosenhead
British
Committee for the Universities of Palestine
BM BRICUP
London
Wc1N 3XX
e-mail:
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http://www.bricup.org.uk
This letter was also published in the Mail & Guardian South African weekly newspaper on 18 April.
According to the Mail & Guardian, "Nadine Gordimer, contacted on a working trip in Italy, told the Mail & Guardian that she would comment once she had seen the letter."
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