The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, calls to boycott Pop-Kultur Berlin festival 2023 and urges all artists to withdraw.
Since 2017, at least twenty artists have cancelled their performances at the anti-Palestinian racist festival and distanced themselves from its partnership with apartheid Israel’s embassy.
Festival organisers stubbornly insist on sustaining the shameful partnership even at the cost of the once-progressive festival’s reputation among international artists.
Pop-Kultur Berlin’s festival director has said the question of ending the partnership with Israel "does not arise". Festival organisers have told artists who disagree with them to "stay at home".
Last year, the festival attempted to conceal apartheid Israel’s sponsorship, only updating its website with the embassy’s logo a matter of days before the festival - a cynical move that organisers may repeat.
One artist who nonetheless withdrew from the festival last year said that this deception was “tantamount to entrapment”, and “compromis[ed] the ethics and livelihoods of many artists”.
Leading Palestinian, international and Israeli human rights organisations are among those that deem Israel an apartheid regime that oppresses millions of Palestinians at home and in exile.
The current Israeli government is the most far-right, sexist, bigoted and fundamentalist ever. One minister describes himself as a “fascist homophobe”. This year alone, apartheid Israel has murdered 170 Palestinians, including children in the besieged Gaza ghetto.
Israeli artists, progressive Jewish groups around the world, and Berlin-based queer groups are just some of those to have supported the campaign since 2017, as well as more than twenty festival artists.
We urge all artists booked for the 2023 edition of Pop-Kultur Berlin festival to withdraw, to avoid art-washing the festival’s harm to our nonviolent struggle for freedom, justice and equality.