Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee has declined an invitation to the Jerusalem International Writers Festival, scheduled for 25–28 May, denouncing what he called Israel's “genocidal campaign” in Gaza. The 86-year-old South African-born writer, now based in Australia, communicated his decision in a letter to the festival’s artistic director, Julia Fermentto-Tzaisler.
In his letter, reported by The Guardian, Coetzee wrote: “For the past two years the state of Israel has been conducting a genocidal campaign in Gaza that has been vastly disproportionate to the murderous provocation of 7 October 2023.” He added that the campaign “appears to have had the enthusiastic support of the vast majority of Israel’s population,” and argued that “it is not possible for any considerable sector of Israeli society, including its intellectual and arts community, to claim that it should not share in the blame for the atrocities in Gaza.”
Coetzee’s Shift from Supporter to Critic
Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 for works such as Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians, noted that he had once been a supporter of Israel. He visited Jerusalem in 1987 to receive the Jerusalem Prize, an award given to writers who champion individual freedom. However, he said Israel’s current “campaign of annihilation in Gaza” had changed his stance. “I kept telling myself that surely the day was coming when the Israeli people would have a change of heart and deliver some form of justice to the Palestinian people whose land they had taken over,” he wrote.
Fermentto-Tzaisler responded with a letter expressing shock at the harshness of Coetzee’s refusal. “As a South African writer who fought apartheid, I would have expected—or perhaps dreamed—that you would extend a hand to me, that you would say to me, ‘Fight, my daughter. Do not stop fighting.’…You left me in despair,” she told Israeli news outlet Ynet.
Growing Cultural Boycott Movement
Coetzee is the latest literary figure to distance himself from Israeli cultural events. In 2021, Irish novelist Sally Rooney refused to sell Hebrew-language translation rights for her novel Beautiful World, Where Are You to Modan, an Israeli publishing house, in a move widely seen as support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Canadian author Naomi Klein pulled out of the 2024 PEN World Voices Festival to protest PEN America’s response to the Israel-Gaza war.
In the film world, actors including Olivia Colman, Ken Loach, and Tilda Swinton have signed the “Film Workers for Palestine” pledge, vowing to decline work with Israeli institutions such as the Docaviv and Jerusalem Film Festival, which they consider “complicit in genocide.”
The festival, which has previously hosted authors like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates, now faces a widening rift in the international literary community. Coetzee’s refusal underscores a broader trend of cultural figures using their platforms to protest Israeli policy, a movement that continues to gain momentum across Europe and beyond.
