AN OPEN LETTER TO CANADIAN WRITERS, JOURNALISTS, AND CULTURAL WORKERS

“I am against boys becoming heroes at ten / Against the tree flowering explosives / Against branches becoming scaffolds. / Against the rose-buds turning to trenches / Against it all / And yet / When fire cremated my friends my youth and country / How can I / Stop a poem from becoming a gun?”

From the poem “Opposition” by Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein (1936-1977)

We are writing this letter to you today to ask for your support in boycotting the bookstores Indigo/Chapters, SmithBooks and Coles. The majority owners of these stores are Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz, who are proud and vocal supporters of the Israeli government. Reisman and Schwartz have founded an organization known as the “Heseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers,” which distributes up to $3 million per year in scholarships and other support to former “lone soldiers” -- individuals who have no family in Israel but join the Israeli military anyway. As Israeli soldiers, they participate in a military that operates checkpoints restricting Palestinian freedom of movement, enforces the occupation of Palestinian land, and has a documented history of human rights abuses. By rewarding and supporting such "lone soldiers" who have served in the Israeli military, Reisman and Schwartz support Israel’s military actions and the war crimes it has committed in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

While they would like to present themselves as tolerant, open-minded and devoted to freedom of expression, Reisman's and Schwartz's blanket defence of Israeli government policies and military actions means they openly support Israel’s past and ongoing targeting of writers and journalists for assassination, its destruction of Arab media outlets, its harassment and censorship of Palestinian writers, and its pillage and destruction of Palestinian libraries and archives.

Meanwhile, there is a litany of evidence that Israel supports the ongoing destruction of Palestinian culture. Consider the following short history:

On July 8, 1972 Ghassan Kanafani, an exiled Palestinian novelist, short-story writer, journalist and member of the Popular Front for the

Liberation of Palestine (a political movement dedicated to regaining the Palestinian homeland and to establishing a new secular society there based on social justice), entered his car outside his home in exile in Beirut. Accompanying him was Lamis, his eight-year old niece.

The car exploded, leaving Kanafani and his niece as martyrs.

It was later discovered that Kanafani had been targeted for extra-judicial assassination by Israeli agents sent by Israeli Prime Minister

Golda Meir. Kanfani never carried a gun in his life – he instead used words as his weapons. But that didn't stop Israeli forces, who had expelled him from his homeland on his 12th birthday, from marking Kanfani for assassination.

Why? Because his writing provided a human dimension to the pain and agony accompanying the large-scale expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 -- in a way that an historian could not. His characters, who expressed the pain and trauma of living with the consequences of ethnic cleansing and expulsion from their homeland, eloquently and starkly refuted Meir’s racist assertion that before 1948 there were no Palestinian people and that Palestine had been an empty country. (Meir, who once stated “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” admitted to not being able to sleep at night because she kept thinking about all the Arab babies being born the same night.)

Less than a year after Ghassan Kanafani’s assassination, on April 10, 1973, his friend and colleague Kamal Nasir -- a poet, journalist and university professor -- was murdered by an Israeli hit squad headed by Ehud Barak (later Israel's prime minister). Nasir was in the sanctuary of his bedroom, writing an elegy to his friend. His body was found with hands outstretched, his mouth and right hand riddled with bullets.

Like Kanfani, Nasir had been exiled as a result of the ethnic cleansing of 1948. He was exiled a second time after the Israeli capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, and was one of the first people deported by the Israeli Occupation Forces.

Like Kanafani, Nasir did not participate in armed struggle, but was targeted because he was a spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization and editor-in-chief of its journal, “The Palestinian Revolution.” His assassination demonstrated Israel's commitment to destroying any embodiment of Palestinian identity and all resistance to its attempts to establish “facts on the ground.”

The assassination of intellectuals has long roots in Israel's ethnic and cultural cleansing of Palestine.

On September 17, 1948, for example, Count Folk Bernadotte, the Swedish general director of the Red Cross, who had been appointed as United Nations mediator for Palestine five months earlier, was assassinated by the Zionist Stern Gang, headed by Yitzak Shamir (later another Israeli prime minister). Bernadotte's crime? Among other things, in a report he blamed the Jewish Zionists for their “uncooperative attitude" regarding his mediation, condemned their inhumanity towards Palestinian refugees, and demanded that they be repatriated to areas that were now Jewish-controlled. His killers were pardoned by the newly established Israeli government after two weeks in jail.

In modern Israel, Antwan Shalhat, a literary critic, journalist and translator prominent in the Palestinian Arab community in Israel as well as in the Arab world, received an order on December 25, 2005 signed by prime minister Ariel Sharon barring him from leaving Israel. The letter accompanying the order informed Mr. Shalhat that the decision was based on “classified” information, but the real reason is clear.Mr. Shalhat is a vigorous critic of the Israeli government and maintains relations with other intellectuals in the Arab world who oppose the Israeli regime’s brutal occupation of Arab lands.

Mr. Shalhat’s travel prohibition has echoes in the years following the ethnic cleansing of Arabs in 1948, during which Arab writers who remained in Israel were also forbidden to travel abroad, and were prohibited from publishing books and journal articles on the same spurious pretexts. After Mr. Shalhat was barred from leaving Israel, several Palestinian journalists and Internet website administrators with Israeli citizenship were summoned to interrogations led by the Israeli secret service, the Shabak, under the pretext that their writings were incendiary. An Arab Palestinian citizen of Israel who had submitted an article to an Arab publication outside Israel on the Palestinian Intifada, for example, was taken for interrogation. In early 2004, Lutfi Manshour, editor of the leading Arabi Israeli newspaper As-Sinara, who was boarding a flight to accompany the Israeli president, abandoned the flight after submitting to a body search, while Amir Makhoul, the director of the largest Israeli Arab non-profit organization Ittijah was taken away for a lengthy interrogation at the airport. These instances recall the treatment of Arab Israeli poets and writers (who lived under military rule until 1976) who were imprisoned because their poems and other works were considered provocative. Indeed, since 1948, the Israeli government has repeatedly closed dissident Arab Israeli newspapers, most often providing no excuse for its actions. Instead, the Israeli government simply employs an emergency law enacted by the British in 1933.

Israeli Arab school-children suffer at extreme disadvantages. The class sizes are much bigger, there are fewer text-books and school buildings are in far worse condition compared to those of the Jewish majority. The security force, the Shin Bet, ensures that Arab children cannot learn about their own history or gain any sense of national identity. Since 1948, the Shin Bet has determined or intervened in the appointment of principals and teachers, even deciding which janitors clean the school bathrooms. Arab teachers who discuss Palestinian history or identity are subject to investigation and dismissal. The curriculum, which has remained unchanged since 1981, denies Palestinian Arab children with Israeli citizenship the right to study Palestinian poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, Rashid Hussein, and Sami Al-Qassem, as well as the assassinated writer Ghassan Kanafani.

Israel’s extreme contempt for Palestinian cultural institutions can be graphically seen in the devastation inflicted by the Israeli Occupation

Forces (IOF) upon almost every institution of cultural significance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This devastation includes the destruction of historic buildings, central government offices, the municipal offices of several towns, schools, private radio and television stations, and various non-governmental organizations and cultural institutions. At the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in Ramallah, members of the IOF wrecked and stole computers, furniture, television sets and children’s paintings, and left much of the building soiled with excrement and urine.

Libraries and archives as well as the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (dedicated to the promotion of arts and culture in Palestine), were not exempt from destruction. For example, at the Al-Quds Educational

Television station, a library of children’s social and cultural films was destroyed while the entire music and program libraries of two

FM radio stations were destroyed.

In fact, Palestinian libraries routinely suffer hardships resulting from confiscation and censorship of materials and the closure of Palestinian universities for weeks and months at a time. Such gross violations of the right to free expression moved the American Library Association (ALA) in 1993 to pass a resolution calling for an “end to all censorship and human rights violations in the Occupied West Bank, and in Israel itself,” while the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the ALA passed a resolution in 2002 deploring the “destruction of these cultural resources” and called upon the Israeli government to “refrain from further actions of this type.”

In the meantime, journalists seeking to cover the current Intifada in the West Bank face severe restrictions on their freedom of movement and personal safety, with several journalists having been killed as a result of actions by the Israeli Offence Forces. Any examination of Israeli actions during the Intifada uncovers a litany of journalists wounded by Israeli gunfire or detained by Israeli soldiers, attacks on media stations, and direct attacks on media vehicles.

For example, Raffaele Ciriello, an Italian freelance photographer on assignment for the Italian daily "Corriere della Sera," was killed in 2002 -- by Israeli gunfire in Ramallah, according to press reports. Imad Abu Zahra, a Palestinian freelance reporter who worked as fixer and interpreter for foreign journalists, died in the same year after being hit by IOF gunfire in the West Bank town of Jenin. In July 2006, a Palestine TV camerman, Ibrahim al-Atla, was directly targeted by an

Israeli tank shell while covering fighting in Gaza (fortunately, he escaped). Only recently the Israeli army detained a local television director and harassed several journalists during a military operation in the West Bank city of Nablus.

During Israel’s assault on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the IOF totally destroyed the transmitters of several Lebanese television stations, and reduced the premises of Al Manar, the Hezbollah TV station, to ruins. The IOF inflicted injuries on a three-member

New TV crew, killed a young woman photographer, Layal Najib, near Tyre, and detained al-Jazeera television crews covering Hizbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel using the allegation that they were “assisting the enemy.”

Through the Heseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers, Reisman and Schwartz have participated in ceremonies celebrating Israel’s military. In a recent ceremony honoring a "lone soldier" killed during Israel’s attack on Lebanon, the deceased soldier’s platoon commander handed the soldier’s firearm to Reisman and Schwartz. The Heseg Foundation itself was launched at the Sde Dov air base, in a ceremony attended by 170 "lone soldiers" as well as the IOF Chief of Staff, the Chief of the Air Force, Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz (who has been implicated in war crimes), and many other dignitaries.

As writers of conscience, we hope that you agree that Reisman’s and Schwartz’s actions have no place in a tolerant and democratic society, and that their efforts in support of Israeli militarism are worthy of censure.

Will you add your voice to our call for a boycott of Chapters / Indigo (which forms part of a wider boycott / divestment campaign of Israel) until Reisman and Schwartz cut their ties with the Heseq Foundation?

Could you support us by passing on this letter to individual writers? If anyone wishes more information, wishes to sign on publicly, or wishes to participate in the campaign please contact us at authors@caiaweb.org