French writer Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel prize in literature on Thursday, has been a staunch supporter of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement.
In May 2019, Ernaux signed a letter along with over 100 other French artists calling for a boycott of the Eurovision song contest as it was being held in Tel Aviv. The artists also called for the France Television to not broadcast the event.
Ernaux opposed French-Israeli cultural cooperation
In 2018, the author signed a letter alongside about 80 other artists expressing outrage at the holding of the Israel France cross-cultural season by the Israeli and French governments. The letter claimed that the season helped to "whitewash" the image of the State of Israel.
"It is a moral obligation for any person of conscience to refuse the normalization of relations with the State of Israel," read the letter.
Ernaux called for Lebanese terrorist to be released from prison
Ernaux has also signed a letter calling for the release of Georges Abdallah, a Lebanese militant who co-founded the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions in 1980 and was sentenced to life in prison for the 1982 assassinations of US military attaché Lt.-Col. Charles R. Ray and Israeli diplomat Yaakov Bar-Simantov.
The letter the French author signed describes Ray and Bar-Simantov as "active Mossad and CIA agents" and Abdallah as "committed to the Palestinian people and against colonization."
Ernaux called Israel an "apartheid state" in letter ignoring Palestinian violence
In 2021, shortly after Operation Guardian of the Walls, Ernaux signed a letter titled "A letter against apartheid" which listed attacks on Arabs and Palestinians and Israeli strikes on Gaza, without mentioning any of the riots led by Israeli Arabs throughout Israel or the over 4,000 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
"To frame this as a war between two equal sides is false and misleading. Israel is the colonizing power. Palestine is colonized. This is not a conflict: this is apartheid," read the letter Ernaux signed.