THE 15th Karachi Literature Festival took place against a backdrop of conflict and protest against the Israeli war in Gaza, which has been going on for 75 years or 153 days, depending on whom you speak to. Pakistanis have been speaking up loudly for an end to the war. People of conscience everywhere have been doing the same. Actors, academics and artists, Muslim and Jewish, Arab and non-Arab, have been risking their professional careers to show their support for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

When the Karachi Literature Festival programme was announced, the British-Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh and the Palestinian-American academic Joseph Massad were given prominent places in the line-up; Dabbagh was to deliver the keynote speech at the opening ceremony and Massad the keynote at the closing. But controversy arose at the inclusion of Ronya Othmann, a German poet and journalist whose work deals with migration, homeland and war.

The Feminist Collective, a Pakistani feminist leftist group, unearthed details on social media about Othmann’s support for Israel in the current conflict, and statements where she likened support for Palestinians to antisemitism. The Collective then wrote an open letter demanding that KLF remove Othmann from the programme altogether, and that KLF should apologise, or they would boycott the festival now and in the future.

The letter received nearly 500 signatories, but neither KLF nor the Goethe-Institut which sponsored Othmann’s visit addressed the controversy just yet. When speakers who were scheduled to appear alongside Othmann informed the KLF organisers they were dropping out of her panels in protest, the KLF quietly removed Othmann’s name from the programme, and then announced the next day that her sessions had been cancelled.

The consensus among speakers who opposed Othmann’s appearance was that the controversy should subsequently be starved of all oxygen. Once Othmann was dropped from the programme, nobody spoke about it again and the festival went on as planned. Selma Dabbagh delivered an extremely powerful keynote speech about Palestine and the disastrous effects of Israeli aggression on innocent civilians, within the context of 75 years of displacement and oppression. Later, she said that she found both energy and empathy at the festival, both of which she had needed badly.

Maybe if given a chance, Othmann could have clarified her position.

Meanwhile, I spoke on stage with Kenize Mourad, the renowned French-Turkish writer and journalist best known for her successful memoir, Regards from the Dead Princess. Mourad spent many years on the front lines of various conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia, including the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, the Iranian Revolution, the civil war in Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

She recounted that when she wrote a book in 2006 called Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestinian-Israel Conflict, she placed herself firmly on the side of the downtrodden: the Palestinians who were living under Israeli oppression and those Israelis who opposed the occupation. For this, she was boycotted in France, despite having sold four million copies of her memoir. No longer was she invited on television; reviewers refused to even open her books. For this reason, she had moved, broken-hearted but defiant, to Istanbul.

I later learned that Ronya Othmann was of Syrian descent, Kurdish-Yazidi on her father’s side. Her people faced tremendous state oppression in their Kurdish village on the border of Turkey, which forced her father to emigrate to Germany, where she was born in 1993. Twenty years later, when IS tore through the region and enslaved and murdered thousands of Yazidis, it ripped her world apart again, and the indifference of Ger­mans to this brutality inspired her to write her first novel, The Summers.

Maybe if given a chance, Othmann could have clarified her position and we would have understood where she was coming from. But people must act according to their principles, and boycotts and sanctions are powerful tools to hold the guilty to account and to shift policy, as Joe Biden is now experiencing through protest votes in the US primaries. Othmann was not the face of Zionism but she had aligned herself with it and faced the consequences too.

But we still should speak to each other, writers and artists, while boycotting Israeli government funding. Deplatforming a pro-Israel voice at one venue is a mirror image of deplatforming a pro-Palestinian voice at another, and learning opportunities are erased when we boycott individuals instead of institutions. It may feel correct in the moment, but it’s a cycle that never ends, like the violence itself. And just because we can’t hear the words doesn’t mean the realities, or the histories behind them, disappear on either side.

The writer is an author.

X: @binashah

Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2024