“As we watch the continuing destruction and devastation occurring in Palestine, we cannot stand by in silence. We urge you to consider the values we cherish and how we can translate them into meaningful action.
The disproportionate violence that Israel is currently waging on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel is indiscriminate, inhumane, and illegal. Israel is a nuclear superpower, with the fifth largest military in the world. Palestinians are a stateless, almost entirely unarmed, civilian population. We thus refuse to describe this situation as a ‘conflict’ between ‘two sides’, a language which obscures the grossly unequal death toll, destruction, and devastation that Palestinians are inevitably forced to endure.
We also call on you to take note of Human Rights Watch’s recent report which concluded that Israeli authorities “have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity”, such conduct amounting to crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.
As cultural institutions, we are deeply disturbed by the violent targeting of our Palestinian partners and colleagues who are critical of Israeli oppression and by the destruction of Palestinian schools in Gaza and the ransacking of cultural spaces, including the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem. Wala’ Sbeit, a musician, was beaten and put under house arrest in Haifa for taking part in a demonstration; Mohammad El-Kurd, a poet and resident of Sheikh Jarrah, detained for no other reason than speaking publicly against Israeli threats to his family home.
We also note the power of language, its ability to gloss over state-sanctioned violence, and its role in normalizing occupation, institutionalizing colonialism, and erasing history. A case in point is the use of ‘evictions’ in reference to the removal of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem and how it deliberately misdirects from the reality of the Israeli occupation and the illegal displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes.
As we have stood in solidarity with the protests for black lives over the past year, as we have called for the decolonisation of our institutions, we must surely now extend our struggle against racism and colonialism to the defense of the Palestinians. It is morally incumbent upon us as artists and cultural workers to do so.”
Read the full statement and see the list of signatories on the website of The Mosaic Rooms, here.