The Jews are known as the people of the book. Not many people are aware that this expression originated in Islam and refers to those who received the divine word of Allah in the form of scripture. The phrase has become a proud and gentle chide among Jews, conjuring memories of a people with their noses in books as the world either passed them by or persecuted them.
That a group of authors — including Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Lethem — have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications said to be “complicit in violating Palestinian rights,” strikes us as a counterproductive and misguided rebuff by the very people who have been our comrades in the sacred mission of making books.
This attack on culture divides the very people who should be in direct dialogue, reading one another’s books. It cannot be that the solution to the conflict is to read less, and not more. For authors who would in any other case denounce book bans and library purges, what do they hope to accomplish with this?
We are Jerusalem-based literary agents, operating a small independent company built over 35 years, with partnerships in more than 50 countries. Our mission is to bring Israeli literature to the world. Among our clients, David Grossman was a recipient of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” was translated into more than 60 languages. Our writers have earned international reputations by inspiring readers and exploring the complex texture of Israeli life — writers like Meir Shalev, Yehuda Amichai, Tom Segev, Zeruya Shalev, Matti Friedman and Hila Blum, who more often than not challenge the powerful with the truth.
Some readers may view this column as a gripe of the privileged Israeli creative class. But if they believe that we sit here in comfort and tacit approval of the war in Gaza, that means they don’t know that many Israelis are desperate for this war to end. We are traumatized, we are burying our dead, we are caught in the dread and anguish of what this war has wrought here and in Gaza and in Lebanon — if they don’t know those things, do the writers who signed that letter even read?
As urgent as this latest open letter purports to be, a chill descended over the world of Israeli literature over a decade ago. We would know. It was our books that were rejected at acquisitions meetings. It was our inboxes that were filled with letters from editors with an open disdain for anything Israeli. The gates have been closing well before this latest war.
What does this rejection achieve other than to serve as fodder for nationalist parties who exploited these boycotts for their own political gain? When Israel is isolated, the country’s extremists become only more entrenched.
In bookstores around the world, a table sits at the front. The Israel-Palestinian table. The war is at the front of everyone’s minds, so why shouldn’t shop owners capitalize on the interest? But the wares at these tables can reveal the dangerous myopia of booksellers who believe they are acting in the name of Palestinians.
Most tables we’ve seen favor the Palestinian narrative. These books should get published; in fact, we have represented some of their authors ourselves. But the few Israeli books that make it to these tables occupy only a paltry corner: history, politics and current affairs, novels and stories — a body of work that represents a people and its culture, their stories, their secrets and their testimonies, a body of work that is now shrinking as Jewish and Israeli writers struggle to find publishers.
Sally Rooney’s most recent blockbuster novel is titled “Intermezzo,” a word that describes a movement that comes between two sections of a piece of music. It is a deep reflection about the interplay between brothers who are separate but connected.
You cannot solve a problem by looking at only one part of the equation. You cannot understand the terrible tragedy of this place if you read only the literature of one side. You cannot advocate Palestinian rights by excluding and alienating the people who would fight for them from the only battleground where they might be won.
Targeting the Israeli publishing industry as if we have the power to negotiate a cease-fire deal or depose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a gesture of foolish acrimony that contradicts the very thing literature is supposed to do. If you believe that books have the power to change hearts and minds, why wouldn’t you try to use that power constructively instead of engaging in a boycott, to take advantage of cultural institutions to argue your case on behalf of the Palestinians?
To the authors who don’t want their books translated into Hebrew, who don’t want Israelis to read what they have to say, to the authors who don’t want the international community to read the Israelis who are, in fundamental ways, their allies — you are acting not only against your own interests, but against your own ideals.
You can lead a cultural boycott of Israeli literary institutions only if you believe that we don’t deserve to be there in the first place. And if that is your position, you are not looking to solve this conflict and alleviate suffering and death and herald an independent Palestine. You are advocating the expulsion of the other indigenous people of this place, the people about whom you apparently read very little.
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