MoMA employees call on museum to boycott Israel

A group of employees at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) have published an open letter urging the institution to “reflect on the impact of your silence” regarding Israeli attacks on Palestine. They ask the museum’s leaders to call for an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza but even more to boycott Israel on cultural and academic levels.

“We firmly believe that the current crisis must be considered a genocide and addressed urgently” they say in the letter, recalling that more than 100,000 Gazans are dead, injured, presumed dead or missing and more than a million have been displaced since the bloody Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.“We believe that cultural institutions, including our own, have a responsibility to engage in discussions about important global issues, particularly those that affect the lives and well-being of countless individuals”

. The signatories of the letter call on MoMA leaders to engage in the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) or at least to be inspired by its principles. Launched in 2004 by a group of Palestinian intellectuals from the West Bank, PACBI advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions due to“their complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights”

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When it was published, the letter included the signatures of twenty-five MoMA employees, to which were added those of artists and other cultural actors who expressed their support. The list currently includes just over two hundred and fifty names. This open letter comes just days after the demonstration of around eight hundred pro-Palestinian activists in the entrance hall of MoMA on Saturday February 10, forcing the museum to close its doors for the day. Protesters demanded the departure of several MoMA board members, accusing them of directly funding“the Zionist occupation by investing in the production of Israeli weapons and the manufacturing of surveillance devices”

. Pro-Palestinian protests have recently increased in New York. More than a hundred New York museum employees and cultural actors published an open letter on Saturday condemning the “shameful silence”