Sally Rooney, Deborah Levy, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen are among 20 authors urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a “lifeline” programme for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars and artists from Gaza.
The Pause programme for writers and artists in emergency situations, as well as a student evacuation programme, were abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a “collective punishment”.
“As writers, we urge you to restore this lifeline as soon as possible, and to call on other heads of state to create similar programmes”, says the letter, which was sent to Macron’s office on Friday.
Further signatories include Nobel laureates Abdulrazak Gurnah and JMG Le Clézio along with Anne Enright, Leïla Slimani, Madeleine Thien, Édouard Louis, Isabella Hammad, Didier Eribon, Naomi Klein, Max Porter, Alain Damasio, Mathias Énard, Kapka Kassabova, Karim Kattan and Rashid Khalidi.
The Pause programme was set up by the French government and the Collège de France in 2017 to help foreign researchers, scientists, intellectuals and artists who find themselves in emergency situations. It has since been used to offer French talent visas and give practical support for people from Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.
Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, a total of 31 Palestinian artists, writers and academics and their families have been sheltered in France through Pause and France’s student evacuation programme.
However, on 1 August, foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced that “no evacuation of any kind” would continue while authorities were investigating allegedly antisemitic statements shared by a female student who had arrived in France from Gaza in July and was due to start attending classes at Sciences Po Lille University in the autumn.
“This suspension of evacuation programmes on the basis of one case of a racist social media post is a form of collective punishment at a time when all signatories to the Genocide Conventions should be doing their utmost to save Palestinians from annihilation and should refuse to be complicit in crimes against humanity”, the appeal to the president says.