• Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was due to collect an award at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but the prize ceremony was cancelled in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
• Moni Ovadia resigned from the directorship of the Teatro comunale di Ferrara following calls from members of the governing majority: he had criticised the Israeli government.
• The award ceremony could be rescheduled and the resignation rejected, but a sense of suspended freedom would remain regardless.

Adania Shibli and Moni Ovadia are two artists who, through their respective works, have for years been spreading their cultures throughout the world — Palestinian on one side, Jewish on the other. What unites them today, beyond their artistic mission, is something else as well: censorship and the severe personal repercussions brought about by the climate of tension that has arisen since the Hamas attacks of 7 October and with the massive response of the Israeli army, which went beyond respect for international law.

Adania Shibli and Moni Ovadia: so different, so alike

il manifesto @ilmanifesto

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La decisione della Fiera di Francoforte di sospendere - fino alla fine della guerra? - il premio all’autrice palestinese Adania Shibli evidenzia la miopia del mondo occidentale

di @GiulianaSgrena

ilmanifesto.it/teniamo-alta-l…

♥ 236💬 8 17 ott 2023 · Apri su X →

A witch-hunt atmosphere, in which being Palestinian has frequently been confused with being a Hamas militant, and in which political criticism of the Israeli government's policies on settlements and the siege of Gaza has often been mistaken for anti-Zionism or even antisemitism. Adania Shibli and Moni Ovadia are probably, at present, the public figures who have suffered the greatest consequences as a result.

Award cancelled because of Hamas

The case of Adania Shibli is perhaps the most striking: the Palestinian writer has not, in recent days, made any public statements about what is happening in the Middle East. Despite this, the hugely prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair decided to cancel the prize ceremony at which Adania Shibli was due to receive the Literaturpreis 2023, an award given to an outstanding work of fiction by a writer from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world.

Litprom, the cultural association that presents the award, explained on its website that the decision was due to the "war started by Hamas for which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering." Shibli had won the award for a work entitled "A Minor Detail", which tells, among other things, of the rape and murder of a Palestinian girl carried out by a group of Israeli soldiers in 1949, and of the present-day investigation by a Palestinian journalist who is subsequently killed by other Israeli soldiers. A text that some sections of the German press also judged "ideological." The decision drew widespread criticism, particularly from Arab publishers at the Sharjah Book Authority and from the Association of Turkish Publishers, who cancelled their participation in the event. In Italy, the Associazione italiana editori (Aie) and the association of independent publishers expressed their opposition to the decision, arguing that freedom of expression cannot be censored.

The forced resignation from the Teatro di Ferrara

Then came the entirely Italian case of Moni Ovadia, a multifaceted artist, actor, musician, singer and director of the prestigious Teatro comunale di Ferrara. Ovadia is anything but Palestinian — rather, he is a man of the world with an enormously open mind and an enormously broad cultural outlook. But, as a Jewish man, he would pay the price for criticising Israel.

Repubblica ✓ @repubblica

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Moni Ovadia si dimetterà da direttore del Teatro Comunale di Ferrara dopo le sue frasi su Israele: "L'Italia è un regime" bologna.repubblica.it/cronaca/2023/1…

♥ 202💬 149 16 ott 2023 · Apri su X →

Born in Bulgaria to a Sephardic Jewish family and raised in Milan, shaped by the Yiddish culture typical of Central European Judaism, Moni Ovadia has openly criticised the aggressive policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu, identified as one of the causes of the tensions that exploded with the attacks of 7 October — a view that, incidentally, is shared by a not inconsiderable portion of Israeli public opinion itself. These words, however, earned him fierce criticism in Italy and calls for his resignation from the Ferrara theatre from prominent figures in Italian politics.

The resignation eventually came, motivated not by remorse but by the desire to protect the theatre's workers: his continued tenure as director, in fact, could have jeopardised the renewal of funding allocated to the Ferrara theatre for the coming season. Moni Ovadia has today restated his view on the situation in Gaza and Israel: "For me, all human beings are equal. The death of a Jewish person, of an Israeli, the death of a Palestinian, leaves me appalled. But the problem here is that the oppression of the Palestinians has been going on in Gaza for seventy-five years and in the West Bank for fifty-six, and nobody says a word — it's just let go."

Fisco24 @fisco24_info

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Dimissioni Moni Ovadia, Sgarbi: "Temeva bocciassero fondi teatro Ferrara": (Adnkronos) - Il retroscena all'Adnkronos del sottosegretario alla Cultura: "Chiedo al sindaco di non accettare le dimissioni" dlvr.it/SxWj4m

16 ott 2023 · Apri su X →

Is all lost for Adania Shibli and Moni Ovadia?

Is all lost, then, for Adania Shibli and Moni Ovadia? Technically, no. The prize ceremony for the Palestinian writer was cancelled, but the award itself has officially not been revoked: the ceremony could yet be rescheduled and go ahead normally, perhaps at a time of greater calm. Litprom itself has explained that "the awarding of the prize to Adania Shibli was never in question" and "firmly rejected as unfounded the accusations and defamations levelled against the author and the novel by the press." Similarly, Moni Ovadia's resignation from the Teatro comunale di Ferrara can be rejected by the mayor of Ferrara (as the Under-Secretary for Culture Vittorio Sgarbi, an unlikely long-standing friend of Ovadia's, also hopes), and in that case, the artist himself explains, "then I will make my own assessment. If so, I will be absolutely delighted to direct the Teatro di Ferrara." What will remain, in any case, is a sense of at least provisional restriction on freedom of expression and, perhaps, at least in the case of Shibli, of outright discrimination on ethnic grounds.