Dear Joel and Ethan Coe

Please reply to: BRICUP, BM BRICUP, London WC1N3XX
email: bricup@bricup.org.uk
www.bricup.org.uk





Dear Joel and Ethan Coen:

We understand that you’re among this year’s winners of a $1mn
Dan David prize, awarded jointly by the Dan David Foundation
and Tel Aviv University. We read that you’re likely to attend the
award ceremony in Israel on May 15, in the company of Israeli
president Shimon Peres.

All this may seem unexceptional to you. But we think you’re too
smart not to understand that nothing in this situation is simple.
The Dan David judges apparently like your ability ‘to tell a simple
story in a complex manner’. Allow us to complicate your reported
acceptance of this prize.

Your much-celebrated presence will adorn a colonial settler state
still vigorously engaged in the business of dispossessing and
driving out the indigenous inhabitants, who are the Palestinians.
Of course the United States itself is built on the bones and
demolished civilizations of its own indigenous inhabitants, but for
the Palestinians the struggle is real and present – an every day
battle to hang on to land, houses, livelihoods, hopes and ambitions.

Your appearance in Israel will unfortunately help camouflage the
brutal realities of a powerful and illegal military occupation.
However much you believe you can go there simply as artists, your
presence will be spun to reassure the Israeli public that their
ruthless colonial society is ‘normal’, and to promote Brand Israel
abroad. You will be saying, to Israelis and to the world, that
Israel’s violently racist treatment of the Palestinians is acceptable.
Do you really want to do this?

Palestinian civil society organisations, grouped together as PACBI,
are asking international artists not to go to Israel while it flouts
international law and denies Palestinian rights. In the last few
weeks, musicians Roger Waters and Pete Seeger have announced
their support for this boycott call; they join film directors Mike
Leigh and Ken Loach, writers John Berger and Arundhati Roy,
musicians Massive Attack, Elvis Costello, Gil Scott-Heron, The
Pixies, and many others.
You may reject the idea of ‘taking a stand’ like this; you may feel it’s
antithetical to the whole spirit and ethos of your writing and film-
making. But by accepting the prize and going to Israel, you are
already taking a stand.
Boycott is a non-violent form of direct action. It gives citizens the
power to act in favour of justice when our governments fail to do
so. Is it conceivable that during the long struggle against
apartheid South Africa, you would have travelled there to receive a
award from an apartheid institution? If it isn’t, you’re already
willing to boycott an unjust system.

Right now a group of Israelis organising as Boycott! Supporting
the Palestinian BDS Call from Within are threatened with legal
sanctions by an anti-boycott bill that has just passed its first
reading in the Israeli parliament. You could maybe stand with
them. Or with these Palestinian children, woken from sleep by an
Israeli army unit and photographed because, apparently, they
represent a threat to the state. Or with 11 year old Kareem
Tamimi, arrested in January in the chilling circumstances of this
video.
But if you go to Tel Aviv and accept the prize, you’ll be standing
with Shimon Peres, capo dei capi of the security forces whose
activities one gets a glimpse of in these clips. Won’t it make you
queasy to do so? We think it ought to. Please don’t go.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Haim Bresheeth
Mike Cushman
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead

London, 10 March 2011