But the piece, written by Israeli literary agents Deborah Harris and Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs, ironically appears to defend some kinds of censorship.
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?...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.
...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?
Throughout the article, the authors implicitly divide Israel up into good Jews and bad Jews, and much of the argument is that the boycott will silence the good Jews along with the bad.
What is missing here is any argument that all censorship and cultural boycotts are inherently immoral, especially for opinions that one disagrees with (if they do not cross the line into incitement to violence.)
This op-ed is not a liberal argument. It is an argument begging the Western progressives that leftist Israelis not be lumped in with those who everyone apparently agrees really should be silenced and censored.
Those who want to see Hamas and Hezbollah defeated and those who want to see Iran's support of terror groups stopped do not have a place in this discussion. Other opinions, such as that Israel has strategic and cultural interest in maintaining presence in Judea and Samaria, or that a Palestinian state would encourage terror and war rather than bring peace, are considered beyond the pale: everyone agrees they must be silenced, let alone occupy a section of the "Israel/Palestine" table of Western bookstores.
Their argument is that boycotting Israel hurts the very Palestinians the haters pretend to support, not that censorship is wrong altogether. Those who cannot even bring this obvious point up for discussion are part of the problem, not the solution. Throwing those whose opinions you disagree with under the bus in the name of being against boycotts is not exactly a winning argument.
Contrast this op-ed with the unapologetic statement against cultural boycotts issued by the Creative Community for Peace, signed by over a thousand artists:
We continue to be shocked and disappointed to see members of the literary community harass and ostracize their colleagues because they don’t share a one-sided narrative in response to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.The exclusion of anyone who doesn’t unilaterally condemn Israel is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality.History is full of examples of self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed, who made lists of people with ‘bad’ views, who burned ‘sinful’ books (and sometimes ‘sinful’ people).Over the past year, planned bookstore appearances by Jewish authors have been canceled, ads for books about Israel have been rejected, book readings have been shut down, literary groups have been targeted, and activists have publicized lists of “Zionist” authors to harass.The instincts and motivations behind cultural boycotts, in practice and throughout history, are directly in opposition to the liberal values most writers hold sacred.Boycotts against authors and those who work with them is illiberal and dangerous.
That is the difference between a craven argument to save your own job and a principled stand for liberal values. That the New York Times prefers to platform the former tells us a lot about the state of the mainstream media today.
