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ITALIAN PUBLISHERS’ APPEAL AGAINST
THE INVITATION OF ISRAEL CULTURE MUST SERVE PEACE, NOT CELEBRATE COLONIALISM “I don’t think that a State which maintains an occupation and commits daily crimes against civilians deserves to be invited to whichever cultural week. This is anti-cultural. It is a barbarian act masked as culture in the most cynical way. It shows support for Israel and maybe for France too, which is supporting the occupation. And I do not want to participate.” Aharon Shabtai As small and not-so-small publishers it is our duty to intervene in the intense debate surrounding the Turin Book Fair, to which Israel has been invited as guest of honour. Such a choice, it seems to us, is motivated not by cultural reasons, nor by the desire to promote Israeli writers and literature, but by political considerations which have nothing to do with a cultural exchange among peoples. In fact it risks causing harm to Israeli artists. The press reported that for several months there were written agreements approving the invitation of a different guest: Egypt. But under pressure from Israeli diplomatic bodies engaged in organizing worldwide celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel, the Book Fair altered its invitation. Frankly it seems to us that this decision was inappropriate, wilfully disregarding what is happening on the ground in Palestine/Israel. Sixty years ago, when the State of Israel was born, the people living in that land were chased out by violence and terror and either became refugees or were forced to live on more and more restricted portions of the land because of Israeli expansionism. Sixty years ago the Nakba, the Catastrophe, started and it has never ended. More than three and a half million people now live in refugee camps outside Palestine, while people inside Palestine live in the Occupied Territories and suffer all the constraints and harassments of a military occupation. In these sixty years the UN has passed dozens of resolutions which Israel has failed to respect. The State of Israel has no cause to celebrate. Is it appropriate to celebrate the illegal colonization of Palestinian land, the destruction of homes and agricultural areas, the “targeted” murders, the kidnapping of democratically elected representatives, the indiscriminate infliction of collective punishments on communities or the denial of the most basic human rights to Palestinians who live in Gaza and on the West Bank, such as access to water, freedom of movement etc? Israel’s behaviour towards Palestinian writers and culture is certainly no cause for celebration. Consider the targeted murders of Palestinian intellectuals and writers deemed troublesome (we remember here Ghassan Kanafani, Wael Zwaiter, Kamal Nasser, Mahmoud Hamshari and Majed Abu Sharar) and the massive denial of the right to study to Palestinian children and young women and men who, because of the Wall or the checkpoints or the daily bombings, cannot reach their schools. How can we ignore the hypocrisy of those who try to disguise a partisan decision as an innocent cultural exercise? If their real motivation had been to use a cultural forum as an opportunity for exchange, to bridge the gap among peoples and intellectuals regardless of the policies of their governments, then there should have been two guest countries - Israel and Palestine - both accorded equal dignity, whereas those who exerted pressure on the Executive Council of the Turin Book Fair so that it decided to invite Israel only have also refused every plan to offer equal opportunity and space to Israeli and Palestinian culture. Finally, we want to denounce here and now those who use the specious charge of anti-Semitism in an attempt to deny us the right to dissent from a decision which was dictated by political expediency, aiming to throw a smoke-screen in the eyes of public opinion. Luckily, millennia-old Jewish traditions are not represented by the State of Israel only. Are Israeli intellectuals and writers such as Aaron Shabtai, Ilan Pappe and many others - who were the first to consider it wrong to invite the State of Israel on the occasion of the anniversary of the Palestinian people’s tragedy - anti-Semitic? Is it anti-Semitic for movements within the State of Israel itself to struggle courageously against their own government’s policies, or for young Israeli soldiers to prefer to go to jail rather than blindly obey those who would use them as the tools of another people’s martyrdom? We therefore urge the Executive Council of the Turin Book Fair to revoke this inappropriate invitation and to resist the political pressure that is trying to transform the Book Fair from an occasion of cultural and educational development into propaganda: trying to showcase as having a human face a colonial country which practises apartheid even against citizens of Arab descent who live inside Israel. Milan, 19 February 2008
First signatories: To endorse this appeal: zambon@zambon.net; zambon.italia@fastwebnet.it
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