In 2024, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) marked its 20th anniversary. It has been 20 long years since Palestinian cultural and academic workers started the campaign in solidarity with the Second Intifada.
Also known as Al-Aqsa Intifada, this was the second mass uprising of Palestinians against Zionist settler colonialism which – like so many Palestinian acts of resistance – started in the streets and moved through collective society. In the face of Israeli forces breaking the ceasefire in March 2025 with further genocidal assaults on Gaza, PACBI plays an ever-more urgent role in standing with Palestine.
Cultural and academic workers played, and continue to play, a key role in Palestinian existence and resistance. PACBI offers direct and targeted resistance against Israeli academic and cultural institutions because, as Visualising Palestine and Maya Wind have documented, they are ideologically and materially complicit in the oppression of Palestinians. Not only are Israeli universities built on stolen land, but knowledge produced in these universities is directly implicated in the killing, dispossession and oppression of Palestinians. These institutions and ways of working actively erase Palestinian histories, presents and futures.
These colonial strategies are fundamental to Zionist settler colonial expansion. PACBI draws strength and methods from centuries of anti-colonial resistance: PACBI is a founding member of the more widely known Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, a Palestinian-led movement modelled after the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The AAM was organised by South African activists in the 1980s and successfully contributed to the fall of the apartheid regime.
On its model, BDS advocates globally for boycotts, divestments and economic sanctions against the Israeli state and against corporate interests in that state. Committed to BDS terms, PACBI urges cultural and academic workers and institutions worldwide to boycott Israeli institutions and to make this boycott public through becoming a PACBI signatory.
PACBI recognises that cultural and academic workers are internationally connected through means such as conferences, collaborations, funding, publication and translation. This offers a lever of solidarity for our direct attention and energy against genocide. A sense of powerlessness in the face of this genocide is common and comprehensible, particularly for those of us in the imperial core that is funding and profiting from the genocide and continued disspossession of Palestinians. PACBI gives us tools to recognise the power we do have, and how to use it.
As writers, publishers, booksellers and readers, we are accountable for making meaning, and PACBI acts as a reminder of this. Ghassan Kanafani wrote in On Zionist Literature that Zionism’s first manifestations were produced in literary texts. As cultural and academic workers we have the ability and the responsibility to act against cultures of fascism that normalise genocidal violence. This means using boycott strategies to isolate the Zionist state and stating clearly and loudly that we are doing so.
To participate in PACBI is to state that we believe, as cultural and academic workers, that it’s more important than ever, and more important than the status quo, to publicly boycott and to refuse to work with any Israeli cultural or academic institution or organisation that implicitly and explicitly plays a role in maintaining hegemony over Palestinian life.
Over the last six months and amid increasing sector-wide activity, many small presses and booksellers in the UK and beyond have, in conversation with Culture Workers for PACBI, become signatories of PACBI for these reasons. They join long-time UK signatories such as Out-Spoken Press and Haymarket Books, as well as many US and international arts and culture organisations who stand together, listed publicly on a site maintained by Writers Against the War on Gaza (W.A.W.O.G.).
As the editors of new UK signatory Sad Press state: “Public awareness in the UK has grown and grown, and the public supports the suspension of UK arms sales to Israel. I get that some organisations in the creative industries may have an initial hesitation about boycotts as tactics, but understanding here has grown and grown too. There’s a much wider understanding of the carefully considered guidelines that PACBI operates under, ensuring alignment with free speech, and accommodating solidarity in the most challenging circumstances. Crucially, this is a call led by Palestinians. If you’re an arts or cultural organisation that hasn’t yet signed up, the time is now!”
There are hundreds of international signatories on the W.A.W.O.G. list and here are the new UK and European signatories at a glance: Prototype Publishing, Burley Fisher Books, Silver Press, Cipher Press, Sad Press, Monitor Books, Decolonial Hacker, Distance No Object, Poets’ Hardship Fund, Run Amok, Veer2, Ma Bibliothèque, The Last Books, Red Herring Press, Rietlanden Women’s Office and Chateau International.
As Kanafani said, in perhaps his most famous words, “The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.”
Add your voice to the growing chorus. If you’re a publisher, magazine, bookstore, event series or other cultural and academic organisation, sign up here. It needs all of us.
Illustration by @ahlan.my.darlings who says: “This depicts how the hidden side of Zionist academia is intrinsically linked to the weaponry and destruction we are witnessing.”
