One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

In mid-October 2023, the Frankfurt Book Fair decides to cancel a ceremony in which the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was to be presented with an award for her novel Minor Detail. The book is based on the true story of a Bedouin Palestinian girl raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers. Later, the organizers will claim the decision to cancel the award was made jointly with the author (it wasn’t) and that the awards ceremony was not canceled, only indefinitely postponed. Looking back, the cancellation marks one of the earliest instances of what would become a cascade of institutional gutlessness in the arts world. Over the next few months, book clubs would preemptively prohibit questions about Palestine in their events. An academic article by Rabea Eghbariah on the Nakba—the calamitous, violent expulsion of Palestinians from their own land in 1948—set to be published in the Harvard Law Review is pulled at the last minute. When the Columbia Law Review agrees to publish the article, and refuses pressure from its own board of directors to delete it, the board takes the journal’s entire website down. The Pulitzer Prize, which in previous years issued special citations to the journalists of Ukraine and Afghanistan, will instead commend the work of “Journalists and Media Workers Covering the War in Gaza”—avoiding the word “Palestinian” altogether. A memo from the standards editor at The New York Times, leaked to The Intercept, cautions against using the word “Palestine.”