‘We’re persona non grata. Almost Satan’: Global boycott of Israeli culture ratchets up

The February 2024 protest at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Nirit Anderman, Gili Izikovich, Shira Naot and Ofir Hovav report in Haaretz on  25 April 2024:

‘Everyone is keeping their distance from Israeli cinema’ | Nirit Anderman

Last September 7, exactly a month before the nightmare began, Russia’s culture minister and Israel’s ambassador to Moscow faced the camera together – relaxed, smiling, presenting for the edification of the world an agreement for cinematic cooperation between the two countries. Olga Lyubimova wore a small, modest smile, befitting a minister from a country that had long since become an international outcast. In contrast, Ambassador Alexander Ben Zvi was positively beaming. He apparently saw nothing amiss about collaborating with the country that had invaded Ukraine, igniting a bloody war and sustaining countless boycotts and sanctions as a result. He could not have imagined how soon the two countries would have to crowd together on the bench of the ostracized and the boycotted.

An early sign of things to come in terms of Israel’s cultural banishment came at the beginning of November, in Amsterdam, at the opening ceremony of the prestigious documentary festival IDFA. Three Palestinian activists burst onto the stage carrying a sign reading “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The festival’s director was caught applauding, and the hurricane was unleashed. Israeli filmmakers condemned the incident. The festival’s management squirmed and apologized. The social networks seethed. Israel’s Kan public broadcaster announced that it would boycott the IDFA, and the Palestine Film Institute chipped in by decrying the management that had dared to apologize.

Even before that ado had died down, a new one sprang up. A festival in Sweden that had invited filmmaker Aleeza Chanowitz to present her TV series “Chanshi,” retracted the invitation. That story too quickly deteriorated into a saga of accusations, apologies and twists and turns, spawning headlines worldwide.

In the five months since then, the situation has only become more acute. At present, almost every important film festival is compelled to deal with pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and the participation of an Israeli film or Israeli artists signals in advance a potential scandal. A case in point is the director Yuval Abraham at the Berlin Film Festival in February, when controversial remarks he made (mentioning the occupation but not October 7) after the film he co-directed – “No Other Land” – won a prize, sparked a furor and received cross-continental coverage.

Deborah Harris

Is it surprising, then, that festival directors today prefer to keep away from Israeli films like the plague, or that members of the Israeli film industry find themselves excluded and rejected, similar to the treatment their Russian counterparts have been subject to for more than two years?

“Our festival was supposed to be held in November, but after the war started, I decided to postpone it for two months,” relates Meir Fenigstein, the founder and CEO of the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles, which is one of the leading Israeli cultural events in the world. “But I got a phone call from the owner of one of the two venues where our festival was going to be held. He told me that one of his partners had a problem with the festival. He said she was worried that after the festival a young, pro-Palestinian audience would stop coming to the movie theater, which is in Beverly Hills, and that revenues would suffer. I got frightened, because I’d never heard anything like that. Usually our festival actually spurs audiences to come! I was in a state of shock, I was hurt, I never expected this.”

After he realized that the war wasn’t going to end anytime soon, Fenigstein postponed the festival again, until this November. It soon emerged that he wasn’t alone. In February, an Israeli film festival in Barcelona was compelled to change the venue of the screenings at the last minute, when anti-Israeli activists made threats against the site. In March, an event at a Jewish film festival in Canada was canceled in the wake of similar threats. At the beginning of April, a cinema in Philadelphia refused to screen an Israeli film, to avoid creating the impression that it was on Israel’s side. And a few days later, it came out that a British movie theater chain had announced it would not host an Israeli film festival, “for security reasons.”

Israel is now the new star of the global cancel culture. Veteran Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher relates that it was his bad luck to encounter that dubious state of affairs. “I’m currently involved in a large international project that everyone loves, which has a very striking Israeli element, and I was asked whether it absolutely has to be Israeli,” he says. “At first they asked more shyly, then less so. By now it’s the norm to say, ‘This is not the time.’ Personally, I haven’t heard ‘You’re like Russia,’ but I was definitely told, ‘This is not the time to deal with Israeli content.’ Of course, we earned that honorably.”

No risks are being taken these days with Israeli films on the international stage, notes director and producer Shlomi Elkabetz (“Gett,” “Shiva”), who has been in France for several weeks. “Even beforehand there was no great enthusiasm [for Israeli films], but now it’s worse. Now it’s complex and complicated to sell Israeli cinema internationally, because people don’t want to see those films,” he says. “It’s really impossible to find distributors. I understand them, because what’s the prospect of recouping their investment? Very small. Even if the distributor is an avowed supporter of Israel, it’s still business.”

Everyone who’s familiar with the international festival scene agrees that the likelihood of a major festival accepting a few Israeli films – as was the case just three years ago, when the Cannes festival screened five such works – is negligible. “All the big festivals say that if an Israeli film they like arrives, they’ll screen it, but in practice it’s hardly happening. Everyone prefers to keep their distance from Israeli cinema these days,” Elkabetz says. “That includes investments by distributors in Israeli films, which is also impossible to come by today. I doubt that now I’d be able to close five or ten percent of the deals I struck at the beginning of the year. Today there is pretty well zero success in recruiting partners from abroad.”

The documentarian Tal Barda, who completed a film just before October 7, got a closeup look at the ways Israeli films are excluded from international festivals. “In some of my conversations, I heard festival people asking, ‘Where is that director from? Is she Israeli or not? Because we’re not taking films from Israel now,'” she recalls.

Her new work, “I Shall Not Hate,” is about the physician Izzeldin Abuelaish, three of whose daughters were killed in 2009 when the Israeli army bombed the Gaza Strip while he was being interviewed by Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar in a live broadcast. If Barda didn’t hold French citizenship and if she hadn’t made the film with non-Israeli funding, she stresses, it’s doubtful whether it would have had a chance of being accepted by festivals abroad. At a certain stage there was talk of screening it in an important French festival, but then, she says, someone told her he had spoken with the festival management about the film. “‘They asked me about you,’ he said. ‘They told me that they aren’t taking Israeli films now, but I explained to them that you’re French.'”

Israeli translator Joanna Chen. A column she published in the prestigious online American magazine Guernica generated a storm

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement and other pro-Palestinian organizations are today working vigorously and effectively in the cultural realm. They are pressuring festival directors not to screen Israeli films, calling on filmmakers to remove works from festivals in which an Israeli film is taking part, and organizing demonstrations and acts of protest at festivals. As a result, even festival directors who aren’t anti-Israeli prefer to avoid the headache that’s involved in having films from Israel participate. They may understand that filmmakers in Israel enjoy relative freedom (so far), at least in comparison to their Russian counterparts, and it’s possible that if an Israeli masterpiece should come their way, they will agree to screen it, but in most cases they simply prefer to spare themselves the trouble.

“Overall, we are pretty much like Russia now, only it isn’t official yet with us. That may actually be worse, because if it were official, at least we’d be able to fight it,” says Adar Shafran (“Running on Sand”), the director and head of the Israeli Producers Association. “When they want to submit a film to a festival, the Russians are told in advance not to do so. We aren’t told that – our films simply aren’t accepted.”

Even in the realm of television series, in which Israel has been considered something of a powerhouse in recent years, exclusion is becoming tangible, albeit far more gently. Apple TV decided to postpone indefinitely the broadcast of the third season of “Tehran,” which had been scheduled to begin last month, and has also suspended the writing for the fourth season.

“Everything is on hold now, there’s no ‘yes’ and no ‘no,'” says “Tehran” producer Shula Spiegel. Netflix, too, isn’t hurrying to carry Israeli series with military themes. For example, last September it acquired the rights to “Mishmar Hagvul” (“Border Police”), but to date it still has no broadcast date.

Still, Guy Amar and Hanan Savyon’s dramedy series “Bros” (Hebrew title: “Ba’esh Uvamayim” – “Through Fire and Water”), is newly available on Netflix. (It had been due to air in November but its launch was postponed).

A producer who preferred to remain anonymous notes that some in the international community are starting to equivocate with their Israeli colleagues. “We are detecting initial signs of ‘polite’ reactions, let’s call it that,” he says. “They’re telling us, ‘We have time, let’s not talk about it now.’ I’m also talking both about investments in series and about acquiring property. Today it’s harder for us to sell.”

‘The worst of times’ – Gili Izikovich

The annual Jerusalem Writers Festival, held at the historic Mishkenot Shaananim venue, facing the walls of the Old City, will take place at the end of May. It is the largest and most prominent literary event in Israel. Guests in recent years have included the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk and Pulitzer Prize winners Jennifer Egan and Joshua Cohen. But the list of this year’s foreign guests, which is not lengthy, was kept largely secret until this past week.

It’s not difficult to guess the reason for the delay. In the current climate, after more than six months of war, with Israel’s image at a nadir and agents of culture and intellectuals leading the struggle against the country, recruiting guests for the festival was likely more difficult than usual. And even the usual hasn’t been easy in recent years, either. In each of the festival’s 12 years, its directors and artistic editors have encountered a certain rate of politically motivated refusals. But this year, says the festival’s director, Dr. Julia Fermentto-Tzaisler, “Most of the invitations I sent for participation in the festival simply got no response. That’s something that has never happened to me with any writer. I always got a response, always with a nifty excuse and a polite request – ‘Let’s try again next year?'”

She adds: “This year, when I realized that my invitations were going down the tubes, I revised my approach. I contacted only writers whom I could reach via a personal connection, and then we immediately started to speak more openly.”

Fermentto-Tzaisler’s experience reverberates widely in the field of world literature. The cumulative effect is a partial cultural boycott, which is strengthening. The field of world literature, certainly in the United States and also in Europe, is identified with the politically active segment of the progressive left, which opposes the war.

From the war’s outset, literary circles, young writers and others, non-Jews and Jews alike, organized petitions, manifestos and public letters. The continuation was a chronicle of rapid deterioration: from manifestos to declarative boycotts, from there to practical boycotts; from mild disapproval of the idea of hosting an Israeli writer, to the demand that said writer provide a declaration of their political worldview as a condition for participation, or simply cancelation.

An April 10 protest in Malmö, Sweden, against Israel’s participation in Eurovision.

There is also increasing opposition by foreign writers, mainly young, either directly or by awkward evasiveness, to having their books translated into Hebrew and being published in Israel. The growing impression is of a country that is becoming a pariah state and is being painted in shades of the prohibited. It’s impossible not to wonder whether Israeli literary figures will become, or already have become, persona non grata like their colleagues in Russia.

“I’ve just returned from the London Book Fair, which is one of the most important annual events in our industry,” says Ziv Lewis, the acquisitions editor at Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir publishing house. “I arrive at every fair with a book or two of ours, and try to sell the translation rights internationally. This time I didn’t even try. Based on what I gathered and heard, there has never been a worse time for Israeli art. There’s no open door and no desire to listen.”

Many events in recent months bear witness. In mid-November, the finalists of the U.S. National Book Award carried out an act of protest during the ceremony and called for peace in the region. Just two weeks after Hamas’ attack, some 4,000 writers, scholars and cultural figures signed a public declaration stating that they stood by the Gazans in their struggle against colonialism. Even before that, veteran writers published a manifesto in the New York Review of Books urging the world’s governments to obligate Israel to desist from its offensive in Gaza.

Around the same time, poet and editor Orit Gidali withdrew from the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa where she had been taking part on a Fulbright Scholarship, citing an intolerable atmosphere and a boycott against her. The Fulbright program stated that the University of Iowa had revised its procedures to ensure that the Israeli writer who would take part in this year’s program would not endure the sort of experience Gidali did.

But what seemed sporadic soon became increasingly organized. Russian-Israeli writer Dina Rubina canceled a public meeting that was scheduled to take place at Pushkin House in London, after the organizers informed her that they had received “critical messages” in connection with her participation and asked her to “declare [her] position” on “the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” Other Israeli writers I spoke to noted the cancellation of events and public discussions, but asked not to be named, in light of ties they had forged with great toil and which might be restored at some future stage. Last month, a column written by the Israeli translator Joanna Chen, which was published in the prestigious online American magazine Guernica, generated a storm. Chen wrote about her attempt to extend her hand in peace to Palestinians in Gaza, and in response 10 of the quarterly’s staff resigned, and its publisher called for a cultural boycott of Israel. The article was removed from the site, and replaced by a statement from the editorial board: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it.”

Amid this atmosphere, the London Book Fair became a test case. Many Israelis, including some who in the past had never missed the event, decided not to go this year. Those who did attend reported a mixed experience. “It’s the first time I decided not to go,” explains Deborah Harris, whose literary agency has long been active in the international field. “I sent agents, and those who went did so with fear but received mainly support. The Jewish community held supportive events, and the atmosphere was one of curiosity, caring and support. On the other hand, our sales are really down. Support-support, but we’re not selling.”

What would have happened at this stage in a regular year?

“I’d be meeting with agents and publishers at the fair, offering them books, and in general now I’d be getting a lot more requests, interest, a desire to read manuscripts and form an impression. I see the difference.”   Lewis describes the situation almost verbatim. Other publishers are also reporting similar experiences. Face-to-face, the interpersonal ties are warm, but business is slow, and in some areas nonexistent. “It’s morphed from being an uncommon problem into a phenomenon that I’m dealing with on a scale I’ve never known,” says Talia Marcos, acquisition editor at Modan Publishing House. “I reach out to writers via publishers abroad and get a negative reply. I’m told, ‘The writer asked that we not present their book to any Israeli party at this time.’ I had two cases of writers who canceled contracts, one of them after we’d already translated the book. It used to be that I’d have a case like that maybe once a year. I can easily recall no fewer than five cases like that just recently, and it will increase.”

Lewis says: “We didn’t have a case of a boycott by writers, but in our subsidiary that publishes romantic literature, there were quite a few cases. It’s genre-related and it’s demographic: young, progressive, American women who are afraid of being canceled and prefer not even to enter into a discussion.”

“You see it less among more ‘literary’ writers,” says Ornit Cohen-Barak, the editorial director of literary fiction at Modan. “They are from an older generation, and tend to be those whose marketing isn’t done via social networks. With writers whose promotion is done via TikTok – in other words, fiction that is more commercial and also younger, in genres such as romance, thrillers and erotica – the boycott is unequivocal.”

“There is a boycott, but it can be divided,” says Harris. We have a client who left us because he doesn’t want any of his books to be published in Hebrew. There are many young writers in the United States – whose publishers we represent – who are refusing to accept our offers. In the past, they were a handful of cases, but today they are 15 percent or slightly more of the deals we’re working on. They are writers of romantic comedy in the main, generally Black or Hispanic, a great many gays. We had a woman author who writes lesbian erotica and wasn’t willing to be published in Israel. These are young writers, just starting out. I’ve never heard of most of them, and they’re refusing to sign. We’ve arrived at a situation in which our partners in other countries are telling us in advance that this one and that one will not sign with Israel. It’s also happening to publishers in Israel. There’s a trilogy two of whose titles have been published – and the writer informed his publisher in Israel that he’s unwilling for the third one to be published [in Hebrew].”

There’s a two-way process in these areas. After writers published political declarations on social media, Israeli readers also responded to them, especially ones who are active on social media – in areas such as erotica, romance and so forth. But the phenomenon, at least for now, is spreading and is harming mainly Israeli writers. Few of them – an example is Tehila Hakimi, whose novel “Hunting in America” was recently sold to U.S. publishing giant Penguin – have succeeded in breaching the wall and striking a deal after October 7.

And it’s impossible not to reflect on what would have happened to books written in Hebrew that have sold worldwide in the past few years if they’d been published now. “We sold Hila Blum’s ‘How to Love Your Daughter’ [winner of Israel’s leading book award, the Sapir Prize, in 2020] to more than 20 countries, but I wouldn’t have been able to sell the book if it had been published this year,” Harris says in sorrow. “In the past, when things were bad in Israel, we could find consolation in our work. Now, it’s so bad here that it’s impossible to find consolation in anything. Everything is now entangled with everything else.”

‘Missing out for being Israeli or Jewish’ –  Shira Naot

When Eden Golan, Israel’s representative to the Eurovision song contest, arrives in Malmö in another 10 days, the competition’s famous turquoise carpet will not be waiting for her. Nor will there be overwrought selfies with fans, amusing videos with other competitors and lovey-dovey emojis in response to photos of her in rehearsals that are posted online. Instead, she will be greeted by huge demonstrations in which she will be branded as the representative of genocide in Gaza, and she will be under the close protection of Israel’s Shin Bet security service. No one, even in Israel, will give two hoots about the song she will perform onstage, “Hurricane.”

For months, coverage of Eurovision has forgone the glitter in favor of reports about artists who are leaving the lineup and petitions calling for a boycott of Israel at any price. Eden Golan was sent because she’s a wonderful singer, but she has another task – a political one: to sing “Hurricane” live with minimum snafus, to traverse the demonstrations and to return home safely.

Eurovision encapsulates the fear harbored by owners of concert halls and producers of festivals everywhere: namely, that inviting an Israeli performer will render them the object of anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian demonstrations, that other artists in the lineup will drop out, and the hall will join the list of places to boycott that will be circulated on Instagram by pro-Palestinian protest movements. Politics will drown out the music, in this case.

“The majority understand the complexity of Israel’s situation, but no one wants to mess with that and with the backlash. That’s what we’re being told, without any beating around the bush,” relates Dan Basman of the Supernova agency, which manages the singer Liraz Charhi, the band Boom Pam and the musical artist Beatfoot, all of whom perform overseas frequently. “There are concerts,” he says, “but it’s either huge festivals, which can cope with things or that rely on the audience not exactly knowing where the performers are from. At the start of the war, I thought the situation was truly awful, afterward I became a bit optimistic. But the [March 25] resolution of the United Nations Security Council [calling for a cease-fire] and the U.S. support [by various officials] for a cease-fire generated another change. Public opinion toward us is now worse than it was in November,” he says.

At the start of the war, many musicians spoke about a rift they experienced with the international communities to which they belonged. That impacted especially on DJs and denizens of nightlife, who did not get support and an embrace from their colleagues after the massacre at the Nova and Psyduck festivals on October 7. Yuval Hen, a cofounder of the London-based club E1, resigned as CEO after the Instagram page of the Ravers for Palestine group carried photos of him from reserve service in the Gaza Strip and many party producers announced that they would boycott the venue.

The same group also called for a boycott of two clubs in Berlin, Berghain and About Blank, because they had canceled events of pro-Palestinian groups and had urged others to refrain from boycotting Israel. HÖR, an internet radio station in Berlin, also found itself on the list, because it’s owned by Israelis, and artists claimed they had been barred from deejaying there because they wore shirts bearing a depiction of the Palestinian flag. Ravers for Palestine is also running a “strike fund” to provide financial assistance to artists who will boycott those venues.

Yet even so, some of the Israeli artists who are successful abroad have resumed touring. Red Axes duo performed in Europe and the United States during the past two months, and Liraz Charhi, who canceled shows in October and November, has published a new schedule of performances abroad. But Charhi’s list, for example, is 80 percent shorter than it was last year, and she was also apprised by Glitterbeat, the label she worked with in recent years, that they would not be releasing her new album, despite an earlier commitment. Charhi switched to the London-based, Israeli-owned Batov label.

In addition, the hard-rock band Hayehudim (“The Jews”) shared the information that a performance scheduled for a club in Brooklyn was canceled by the venue because the band was “too political.” Three performances by the Jewish-American singer Matisyahu in various venues were canceled when the halls found out that demonstrations were planned outside and declined to provide security.

In the realm of pop, consolation can be taken from the fact that the singer (Jonathan) Mergui released singles internationally during the past few months and was also invited to the highly regarded television talk show of Kelly Clarkson. In Israel, though, he was criticized for not wearing the yellow ribbon-shaped pin of support for the return of the captives from Gaza.

In some cases, the fact that Israeli artists who are accustomed to appear abroad remained at home and immersed themselves in the Israeli pain brought about a change in their writing. Netta Barzilai, a Eurovision winner who created international hits in English, put out her first song in Hebrew last month, “Natek Oti” (“Release Me”) in collaboration with the singer Kfir Tsafrir, and stated in interviews that she’s planning an entire album in Hebrew.

Noga Erez, whose previous album, “Kids,” was recommended by Billie Eilish, chose to release as a single the song “Come Back Home,” which though it continues her English-language line, clearly samples the iconic Arik Einstein song, “How Good that You’ve Come Home.”

Similarly, the Lola Marsh duo, who had released three albums in English and frequently made long concert tours in Europe, released a song in Hebrew for the first time. Titled “Until You Come Back,” it’s about the longing for the return of the hostages. “In the past half a year, we started writing about the war on Instagram. Until now we never engaged with the fact that we are Israelis, we always said we perform for people and not for states,” Gil Landau, who’s half of the duo, notes.

His partner, Yael Shoshana Cohen, adds that the war prompted her to listen to more music in Hebrew, and for the first time also spurred the two to write in Hebrew. At present they are working on new songs in both languages. Shortly before the Hamas attack that started the war, last autumn, they returned from a tour in Europe, having planned from the outset to take a break from international touring in order to focus on writing. They received offers to perform in Europe and the United States during the war, they emphasize, but turned them down in order to write.

“I don’t know whether in the future we will be more international or less,” Landau says, “but I’m hearing more and more artists around me who are missing opportunities because they are Jews or Israelis. I don’t really know what will become of us.” Cohen adds, “There were fans who wrote to us: ‘Too bad, I loved your music until now.’ But there were also a great many supportive reactions from our international audience. ‘We’re waiting for you,’ they wrote.”

In October, the attitude toward us was that we are deserving of pity, but that attitude changed in world public opinion. Now there is no one to talk to, not even about summer 2025. Everything has gone down the tubes.

On October 7, the American singer Bruno Mars was scheduled to perform at Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park. An earlier show, two days earlier, had been infused with euphoria. Both shows had sold out quickly. At last an artist had come to Israel at the top of his career and not in its waning period. In the past few years, Israeli impresarios had been able to bring to the country big names, like Maroon 5, Christina Aguilera and Imagine Dragons. The dream of Israelis to see their country become a self-evident venue for tours by A-list performers from abroad seemed about to come true. But on October 7, Mars and his staff were rushed out of Israel in a private plane.

“In October, the attitude toward us was that we are deserving of pity, but that attitude changed in world public opinion. Now there is no one to talk to, not even about the summer of 2025. Everything has gone down the tubes,” says Carmi Wurtman, whose 2B Vibes company has in recent years brought Paul Anka, Al Stewart and Matisyahu to Israel – the latter appeared this month in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. “During COVID, for example, there were performances that were postponed four or five times, but that in the end did happen in Israel, like Pixies and the singer LP – in the end we were able to pull it off late. But at the moment there’s no one to talk to. We’re not like Russia; many people in the music industry have a fondness for Israel, they are simply saying, ‘Not now.'” The Bluestone Group, which brought Bruno Mars to Israel, for example, are convinced that he will return to give the performance that didn’t take place on October 7.

‘We’re persona non grata, almost Satan’ | Ofir Hovav

Every year, Zumu, Israel’s mobile museum, holds an online art sale. Half the revenues go to the artists and the other half is earmarked for financing at least part of the museum’s activity. This year the sale, held earlier this month, was particularly challenging, says Milana Gitzin-Adiram, the executive director of the “museum on the move” and its chief curator. “The situation is acute this year, and comes on top of true anxiety for our existence. This was going to be a quantum-leap year for us. Until the war broke out, we were in meetings and processes of working with potential international partners on the scale of the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which were impressed by our work.

“But everything collapsed in an instant,” she continues. “We understand very well that we can’t do anything abroad at all. Both because I can’t take responsibility now for having a team wandering about in Kassel or in Venice, and also because no one is willing to meet with us. They broke off ties with us and didn’t bother to explain why. An international WhatsApp group of curators, with which I’m in contact in regular times, has gone totally silent. No one has written me a word.”

Similar feelings are expressed by Tania Coen-Uzzielli, director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. “We are isolated from our entire artistic milieu – museums, galleries, artists. It’s completely palpable,” she says. The museum’s schedule of exhibitions, which is determined far in advance, was compelled to adjust. Some institutions cancelled, and are no longer willing to lend artworks, saying that the insurance is too high. There are those who told the museum that they were afraid to come to Israel.

“Lately,” says Coen-Uzzielli, “we are not even approaching artists, because we don’t want to put them in a position of having to turn us down – some of them because they support a boycott of Israel, and others, who might not support a boycott at all, but who are apprehensive that their decision to visit or exhibit here will draw condemnation.” She acknowledges that the museum “will not – at least for the coming year – be able to exhibit the last word in world contemporary art.”

The annual Israel Festival, too, is in adjustment mode. “Up until October 7,” says Itay Mautner, the festival’s artistic director, “we were planning a large international festival, and of course we realized that it would be impossible to hold it. That’s both because the feeling is that this isn’t a time to be celebrating, but also because we face a complex situation in terms of bringing artists from abroad. In the past, we managed somehow to work around the movement of the cultural boycott of Israel, and at the same time to maintain quite extensive international cultural relations. Today that’s completely impossible. It just doesn’t exist.” Mautner describes the situation as “a particularly dangerous isolation, because as long as we don’t have an artistic and political and moral dialogue with the outside world, we are fated to talk only with ourselves.”

Gitzin-Adiram says she feels like “we are being treated – institutions, artists, curators, private individuals – the same way that Russia is viewed, only in our case it is perhaps worse. If before the war I could hang on to the idea that I didn’t represent the government, and I identified myself as left-wing and pro-Palestinian, today the categories have changed. I can’t say anything like that at all, and I won’t have the opportunity to say it. In many places we are simply persona non grata, almost Satan.”

The cultural boycott movement against Israel is not new. However, the war, which is dividing the art world, definitely gave it a boost. Thus, for example, hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists demonstrated inside the Museum of Modern Art in New York in February, calling for the liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea” and for Israeli jails to be emptied of “prisoners of Allah.” Terming some of the museum’s trustees “genocide supporters,” they called on the American public to boycott the institution until they are dismissed, and held up a banner reading, “MoMA Trustees Fund Genocide, Apartheid, and Settler Colonialism.”

At a Zine Fair held last November at the Brooklyn Museum, one could find on sale posters and fanzines calling for “the globalization of the intifada” and the expulsion of the Jews from Israel.

The list goes on. The artists Nicholas Galanin and Merritt Johnson asked the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to remove a large joint sculpture of theirs from an exhibition of contemporary Native American art, because of American support of Israel. Earlier this month, seven Jewish artists who characterize themselves as anti-Zionist requested that their works be removed from an exhibition at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, citing the museum’s “inability to meet artists’ demands, including transparency around funding and a commitment to BDS.” At the end of a performance show at a highly regarded festival in New York last November, the four participants called out, “With blood and fire we’ll redeem Palestine.” All the members of the Documenta 16 curatorial search committee in Kassel, Germany, resigned over the issue of the war.

And then there are the digital petitions and the open letter, which were the opening salvo in this campaign. They were published in the magazine Artforum and afterward on art sites worldwide. The letter, which appeared 12 days after October 7 and expressed solidarity with the Palestinians without mentioning the massacre perpetrated by Hamas, was signed by, among many others, the photographer Nan Goldin, the feminist scholar Judith Butler, the artist Kara Walker, and also Israelis living abroad, notably Ariella Azoulay and Eyal Weizman.

At the end of February, matters reached the boiling point when artists and activists established the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), a niche group that calls for a boycott of Israel and tried to torpedo the country’s participation in the 2024 Venice Biennale. The complex and beautiful installation chosen to represent Israel, “(M)otherland,” by Ruth Patir, risked being disregarded altogether, because of the superficiality of the current discourse, and in the end Patir and the curators, Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit, decided not to open the Israeli pavilion to the public.

In contrast to Russia, which did not exhibit in the biennale that opened in 2022, immediately after the start of the war in Ukraine, the Israeli pavilion was not taken down. But for the moment, it’s locked, with an explanatory sign stating that, “The artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”

There have been increasing reports about cases in which galleries and museums that are Jewish-owned or connected with Israel, such as the Neue Galerie museum (headed by Ronald Lauder) and the Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery in New York, have been defaced by graffiti or red paint, representing blood. The doors of the highly regarded Pace Gallery, in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, which represents the well-known Israeli artist Michal Rovner, were covered with red paint, the word “Intifada” was sprayed on the façade, along with posters with such messages as “Propaganda is not art” and an attack on Rovner claiming that her work “regurgitates Zionist propaganda and incites genocide.”

Amon Yariv, the owner of Tel Aviv’s Gordon Gallery, was set to open a branch in New York last October, but the event was postponed until December. “We opened with a grieving heart, and we were also apprehensive that there would be a protest, but other than one marginal case, we actually received a great deal of support,” he says. The reason, he thinks, might be that Gordon is geared mainly to Israeli collectors.

The Batsheva Dance Company has not performed outside Israel since October. “We postponed most of our tours for fear of retaliatory actions spurred by anger, which now appears to be overflowing,” says Lior Avizoor, the company’s artistic director. “We have a protocol for coping with demonstrations – we’ve had them in the past – but we were concerned that this time it could be swept into more than that.”

Unlike Russia, says Coen-Uzzielli, from the Tel Aviv Museum, “we still have the right to freedom of expression here, and the demonstrations at ‘Hostages Square’ [in front of the museum] are the proof of that. As long as artists and also the directors of institutions are allowed to express a critical view of the government, I hope there will also be those who will want to hear it.”

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