Image courtesy: The Independent
It is with dismay that we learned of the decision of the City of Dortmund to rescind the Nelly Sachs Award for Literature from Kamila Shamsie because of her stated commitment to the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
As a statement by more than forty progressive Jewish organisations says, ‘dangerously [conflating] anti-Jewish racism with opposition to Israel’s policies and system of occupation and apartheid … undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and the global struggle against antisemitism. It also serves to shield Israel from being held accountable to universal standards of human rights and international law.’
In Germany, the attacks on BDS are among the most fierce. In May 2019 the Bundestag passed a motion labelling the movement as antisemitic. Yet on 13 September, the Administrative Court of Cologne became the third court in the country to rule in favour of the right to boycott.
In its ruling the court wrote: ‘The motions of the Bonn City Council … and the German Bundestag (17 May 2019), do not constitute legislative acts but are political resolutions or expressions of political will. These motions alone cannot justify, from any legal perspective, the restriction of an existing legal right.’
Yet a few days later, the City of Dortmund chose to punish an author for her human rights advocacy while simultaneously refusing to make public the statement she wrote on learning of the decision.
So we publish Kamila Shamsie’s statement here:
In the just concluded Israeli elections, Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to annex up to one third of the West Bank, in contravention of international law, and his political opponent Benny Gantz’s objection to this was that Netanyahu had stolen his idea; this closely followed the killing of two Palestinian teenagers by Israeli forces – which was condemned as ‘appalling’ by the UN special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process. In this political context, the jury of the Nelly Sachs Prize has chosen to withdraw the award from me on the basis of my support for a non-violent campaign to bring pressure on the Israeli government. It is a matter of great sadness to me that a jury should bow to pressure and withdraw a prize from a writer who is exercising her freedom of conscience and freedom of expression; and it is a matter of outrage that the BDS movement (modelled on the South African boycott) that campaigns against the government of Israel for its acts of discrimination and brutality against Palestinians should be held up as something shameful and unjust.
What is the meaning of a literary award that undermines the right to advocate for human rights, the principles of freedom of conscience and expression, and the freedom to criticise? Without these, art and culture become meaningless luxuries.
Khalid Abdalla
Alaa Abd el-Fattah
Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Nadia Abu el-Haj
Diana Abu-Jaber
Susan Abulhawa
Lila Abu-Lughod
Maan Abu Taleb
Ammiel Alcalay
Kazim Ali
Nir Alon
Hanan Al-Shayk
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
Suad Amiry
Tahmima Anam
Sinan Antoon
Lisa Appignanesi
Nicole Aragi
Arnold Aronson
Elsa Auerbach
Zeina Azzam
Kafah Bachari
Sunandini Banerjee
Frank Barat
Mourid Barghouti
Josh Begley
Joel Beinin
Linda Benedikt
Phyllis Bennis
Susan Bernofsky
Omar Berrada
Dwayne Betts
Akeel Bilgrami
Nicholas Blincoe
Leah Borromeo
Brian Boyd
Victoria Brittain
Virginia Brown
Simone Browne
Jehan Bseiso
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
John Burnside
Margaret Busby
Diana Buttu
Carmen Callil
Juan Cárdenas
Zeynep Celik
Hayan Charara
Amit Chaudhuri
Anne Chisholm (Vice President
Royal Society of Literature)
Noam Chomsky
Susannah Clapp
Jennifer Clement (President
PEN International)
J.M. Coetzee
Teju Cole
Michael Collier
Irene Cooper
Cindy Corrie
Craig Corrie
Molly Crabapple
Selma Dabbagh
William Dalrymple
Najwan Darwish
Katy Derbyshire
Kiran Desai
Natalie Diaz
Laurence Dreyfus
Marlene Dumas
Hilda Dunn
Geoff Dyer
Barbara Ehrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich
Deborah Eisenberg
Inua Ellams
Pary El-Qalqili
Annie Ernaux
Brian Eno
Nick Estes
Richard Falk
Rose Fenton
Sylvia Finzi
Erica Fischer
Adam Foulds
Maureen Freely (Chair
English PEN)
Duranya Freeman
John Freeman
Ru Freeman
Esther Freud
Ruth Fruchtman
Tess Gallagher
Cristina Garcia
Tomer Gardi
Suzanne Gardinier
Apoorva Gautam
Ashish George
Ralph Ghoche
Noelle Ghoussaini
Eileen Gillooly
Georgina Godwin
David Gorin
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Subhi Hadidi
Rawi Hage
Omar Robert Hamilton
Yasmeen Hanoosh
Jeremy Harding
Githa Hariharan
Joseph Harris
Rodrigo Hasbún
Iris Hefets
Jehan Helou
Mischa Hiller
Marianne Hirsch
Jane Hirschmann
Elizabeth Hodges
Rachel Holmes
Amy Horowitz
Jennifer Ruth Hosek
Jean Howard
Aamer Hussein
Kim Jensen
Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres
Lucy Jones
Fady Joudah
Louis Kampf
Remi Kanazi
Brigid Keenan
A.L. Kennedy
Omar el Khairy
Mona Khalidi
Rashid Khalidi
Hannah Khalil
Shamus Khan
Naveen Kishore
Naomi Klein
Alexander Kluge
Nancy Kricorian
Hari Kunzru
Rachel Kushner
Olivia Laing
Nick Laird
Laila Lalami
Léopold Lambert
Patrick Langley
Paul Lauter
Paul Laverty
Kiese Laymon
Mason Leaver-Yap
Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Ben Lerner
Alan Levine
Richard A. Levy
Ken Loach
Zachary Lockman
Claudia Castro Luna
Ruth Luschnat
Sabrina Mahfouz
Jamal Mahjoub
Lori Marso
Yann Martel
Dave Mason
Ahmed Masoud
Zeinab Masud
Diana Matar
Hisham Matar
Khaled Mattawa
Farid Matuk
Nyla Matuk
Colum McCann
John McCarthy
Tom McCarthy
Fiona McCrae
Sarah McNally
Askold Melnyczuk
Helaine Meisler
Maaza Mengiste
Ritu Menon
Christopher Merrill
Lina Meruane
Brinkley Messick
Claire Messud
China Miéville
Gail Miller
Pankaj Mishra
W.J.T. Mitchell
Nadifa Mohamed
Aja Monet
Jenny Morgan
Benjamin Moser
Michel Moushabek
Jack Murchie
Nancy Murray
Eileen Myles
Karma Nabulsi
Karthika Naïr
Mary Jane Nealon
Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark
Marcy Newman
Donna Nevel
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Lulu Norman
Naomi Shihab Nye
John Oakes
Andrew O’Hagan
Richard Ohmann
Ben Okri
Michael Ondaatje
Susie Orbach
Ursula Owen
David Palumbo-Liu
Nii Ayikwei Parkes
William Parry
Shailja Patel
Ian Patterson
Ed Pavlic
Jeremy Pikser
Shahina Piyarali
Sheldon Pollock
Vijay Prashad
Paul B. Preciado
Alexandra Pringle
Rania Qawasmah
Shazea Quraishi
Charles Rice-Gonzalez
Cynthia Rimsky
Bruce Robbins
Sally Rooney
Constancia Dinky Romilly
Jacqueline Rose
Andrew Ross
Alice Rothchild
Pru Rowlandson
Bee Rowlatt
Arundhati Roy
Joe Sacco
Nayantara Sahgal
Mariam C. Said
Rebecca Saletan
Preeta Samarasan
Sapphire
Shuchi Saraswat
George Saunders
James Schamus
Sarah Schulman
Felicity Scott
Stephen Sedley
Karen Seeley
Gamini Seneviratne
Rachel Shabi
Elhum Shakerifar
Anton Shammas
Solmaz Sharif
Adam Shatz
Raja Shehadeh
Farhana Sheikh
Jack Shenker
Adania Shibli
Ahmad Shirazi
Ann Shirazi
Avi Shlaim
Marc Siegel
Rick Simonson
Tom Sleigh
Gillian Slovo
Nirit Sommerfeld
Ahdaf Soueif
Linda Spalding
Gloria Steinem
Amy Kepple Strawser
William Sutcliffe
Billie Swift
Janne Teller
Kate Tempest
Jacques Testard
Madeleine Thien
T.C. Tolbert
Carles Torner (Executive Director, PEN International)
Salil Tripathi (Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee for PEN International)
Monique Truong
Jennifer Tseng
Chika Unigwe
Tanya Ury
Karen Van Dyck
Lawrence Venuti
Margo Viscusi
Gauri Viswanathan
Ocean Vinh Vuong
Dirk Wanrooij
Roger Waters
Marina Warner
Terry Weber
Eliot Weinberger
Irvine Welsh
Ben White
Mabel Wilson
Jeanette Winterson
Jacqueline Woodson
Jay G. Ying
Mona Younis
Dorothy M. Zellner
Alia Trabucco Zerán
