United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), Austin for Palestine Coalition (AFP) and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) call on SXSW to adopt an ethical policy on programming and partnerships.
In 2024, following successful pressure from the No Warmongers at SXSW campaign, with more than 100 artists boycotting, SXSW dropped its weapons industry and US military sponsors. Artists and audiences alike, who reject partnerships with those enabling Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, welcomed that decision as bringing SXSW closer to the right side of history.
But in 2025, SXSW held an edition in London that programmed speakers representing deeply complicit companies like Palantir, and targets of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement like Barclays. Palantir provides military technology enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Barclays finances weapons manufacturers arming the genocide. Last year, massive artist and fan boycotts forced Barclays to end its sponsorship of Live Nation's British music festivals.
While both these speakers were dropped after pressure from artists and campaigners, SXSW London then added Tony Blair as speaker at short notice. Blair is credibly accused of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity by human rights experts, political parties and leaders in the UK and elsewhere for his role in the illegal US-led war on Iraq and genocidal sanctions that together killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Meanwhile, SXSW in Austin hosted a panel this year with the CIA. SXSW Austin’s 2026 festival has already announced a panel featuring reps from AI surveillance and biometrics company RealSense Inc, which spun off this year from an Israeli branch of BDS priority boycott target Intel. The company’s primary operations and key staff are based in apartheid Israel under the subsidiary RealSense Ltd, embedded in an industry with close ties to apartheid Israel's genocidal military and intelligence infrastructure.
Other SXSW 2026 panels feature reps from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—all tech companies the BDS movement has identified as pressure targets over their involvement in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. This deep and pervasive complicity with the military-security industrial complex should give all artists pause before accepting any booking with any SXSW event. Without any meaningful ethical policy on programming and partnerships, SXSW has again faced artists with the prospect that they will be sharing a line-up with war criminals and genocide-enablers.
The global support for boycotts as a nonviolent tool to counter complicity has never been stronger. This year, over 5,000 film workers including major Hollywood figures publicly refused to work with complicit Israeli institutions. No Music for Genocide saw major label artists joining over a thousand independent artists and labels blocking their music from streaming in apartheid Israel. In a recent open letter, over 2,000 Dutch and Belgian artists and over 700 cultural organizations joined the cultural boycott.
UMAW, Austin for Palestine Coalition and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) call on SXSW to fully commit to a policy* of ethical screening, rejecting sponsorship and speakers from the war industry and those that are otherwise complicit in, that advocate for, or that whitewash grave violations of international law anywhere, including crimes committed against Palestinians. Until SXSW publicly commits to this, we call on all artists offered performances at any SXSW event to privately and publicly echo this demand.
*Please see below for a model policy developed by the Palestinian Performing Arts Network
- Programming: This institution will not include in its programming artists, cultural groups/bands/orchestras, or cultural products that are produced by entities that are verifiably complicit in, advocate for, or whitewash grave violations of international law (such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide), racism or racial violence.
- Sponsorship & Funding: This institution will not accept sponsorship/partnership or other forms of funding from individuals, corporations or other entities that are verifiably complicit in, advocating for, or whitewash grave violations of international law (such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide), racism or racial violence.