Prominent Writers Withdraw From PEN World Voices Festival Over Gaza

Writers including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hamad, and Zaina Arafat announced Wednesday that they will not participate in this year's PEN World Voices Festival over what they say is host PEN America's weak response to Israel's "cultural genocide" in Gaza.

"We have concluded that attending this year's festival would only serve to contribute to the illusion that PEN America is truly devoted to 'the defense of free speech at the center of humanity's struggle against repression,' as it has claimed," the writers said in an open letter published by Literary Hub announcing their decision. "In the context of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, we believe that PEN America has betrayed the organization's professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere."

"This failure is particularly striking in light of the extraordinary toll this catastrophe has taken in the cultural sphere," the letter continues. "Israel has killed, and at times deliberately targeted and assassinated journalists, poets, novelists, and writers of all kinds. It has destroyed almost all forms of cultural infrastructure that support the practice of literature, art, intellectual exchange, and free speech through the bombing and demolition of universities, cultural centers, museums, libraries, and printing presses."

"In less than five months, Israel has killed nearly 100 journalists and media workers, more than in the two-decade war in Afghanistan, and more than in the deadliest year of the Iraq War," the authors noted. "Israel has also killed nearly 100 academics and writers. If organizations like PEN America cling to the illusion of political neutrality in the face of a clear effort to destroy Palestinian lives and culture, one can only wonder whether there will be any writers left in Gaza to tell the story of their apocalypse, or to trust words and speech, when the killing finally ends. Or any record left of the history they have lived."

According to Palestinian officials and international humanitarian groups, Israeli forces have killed at least 31,341 Palestinians—mostly women and children—in Gaza since October 7 while wounding more than 73,100 others and leaving thousands more missing and believed buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of damaged or destroyed buildings. Around 9 in 10 Gazans have been forcibly displaced, many of them more than once.

As the letter notes:

In January, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel's siege on Gaza could amount to genocide and ordered 'immediate and effective measures' to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories by ensuring sufficient humanitarian assistance and enabling basic services. Thousands more Palestinian adults and children have been killed since the ICJ ruling; not only has Israel refused to facilitate adequate aid, it has actually hindered it. Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of famine, and a growing number of children and elderly people are dying of malnutrition and dehydration even after they survive the bombing of their homes. Despite all this, PEN America has declined to join other leading human rights organizations and United Nations officials in the demands for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire.

The letter also laments PEN America's "history of condemning authors who choose to honor the Palestinian call for a cultural and academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in their oppression."

The writers said that condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights "contradicts PEN's own mandate to protect freedom of expression, as it contributes to a neo-McCarthyite environment in North America and Europe, in which the growing support for BDS is increasingly criminalized."

"Opposition to BDS overlooks the long and proud history of the boycott as an effective, nonviolent tool of collective liberation," the letter states. "Just as boycott was a principal tool used to successfully end political apartheid in South Africa, so it should be accepted that some are free to adopt it as a vital tool in the nonviolent resistance movement against Israeli impunity today."

"The global network of PEN chapters and PEN International has a long history of providing a safe haven for artists under siege," the authors noted. "It has not only saved individual lives by evacuating writers from danger zones (including from Gaza) but has created gatherings where writers under attack can experience the warmth of genuine solidarity from the global literary community."

"If the current onslaught was directed against any other people, there would have been clear condemnations of the crime."

"Palestinian writers deserve that kind of respite. Instead, many have found themselves in the insulting position of having to fight PEN America to loudly call for the U.S.-funded bombs to stop falling," they said. "They have been forced to point out, over and over again, that if the current onslaught was directed against any other people, there would have been clear condemnations of the crimes, as well as support for all forms of nonviolent resistance against oppression, alongside events focused on the artists who are the most vulnerable in the world."

"We hope," the signers added, "that our decision not to participate will add to existing efforts to yield concrete and lasting change at a time that calls for moral courage from us all."