Endorsing PACBI

We’re signing up to PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Since 2004, PACBI has been advocating for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. This is based on the fact that these institutions are complicit in the Israeli system of oppression that has denied Palestinians their basic rights guaranteed by international law. Cultural institutions are one part of the ideological and institutional framework that makes up Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid against the Palestinian people.

We’ve spoken about and around a commitment to BDS before, many times in many forms: when we wrote about Boycotting the Zabludowicz Art Trust, with Strike Outset, we packed up and remade our entire website because of the ongoing Wix Boycott. This commitment to PACBI is yet another way that we, as cultural workers, are looking to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine through the avenues we have available: the withdrawal of our labour.

This is not about targetting individuals, it is about committing to boycott institutions. It might seem like a moot point because, honestly, we’ve been really clear about where we stand over the years. I doubt we’ll ever find ourselves in a situaton where we’re being offered work that’d involve crossing this particular picket line. But it’s worth us committing to PACBI, to make that implicit solidarity unambiguous and explicit, and to hopefully encourage other organisations to make this same commitment.

We agree to not work with or provide work for Israeli cultural institutions. This includes writing about cultural products (artworks etc) commissioned by Israeli institutions.

Our book, Poor Artists, is being published by Penguin Random House’s Particular Press. Our editor and publishing team understand that we do not want to pursue foreign rights or translation deals with Israeli publishers. We don’t have control over what third party sellers (UK based retailers and distributors) do with the UK English language version of the book. We’re not expecting it to be a problem we encounter, but we want to make it clear that we don’t want our work being sold in occupied territory.

We urge other arts organisations to make this same commitment to PACBI: publications, galleries, collectives, all of us. Even if it feels like it’s implied, it’s absolutely worth making the implied commitment explicitly clear. If you’d like to find out more information about how you can do this or what it would involve: go to bdsmovement.net/pacbi or writersagainstthewarongaza.com/pacbi or write to PACBI(@)wawog(.)com