Why boycotting Edinburgh International Book Festival over Baillie Gifford sponsorship and Israel's war on Gaza is wrong – Gavin Francis

A couple of years back, I was invited to the Kalimat Literature Festival in Palestine. I went because they’d invited me, and because book festivals are among the few spaces left in our culture where thoughtful people who love books can come together and discuss issues too polarising for other forums. Issues too polarising for social media, for TV panel shows, for online comments below the line.

There’s so much polarisation around that you’d think humans are born with their opinions ready-formed, and those opinions simply harden as we age. But psychologists tell us the truth is very different – that we come to our opinions through discussion and debate. We are a social species and learn what we think about a subject by talking it through, in company with others.

I work as a GP as well as a writer, and when I was in east Jerusalem for the book festival, I was invited to see the work of my medical colleagues in Augusta Victoria and Al-Makassed hospitals, and in simple community clinics in the hills around Ramallah. In those places, I met doctors and nurses doing work recognisable to me from my own clinical experiences in Scotland – humane, professional, skilled and compassionate work.

Palestinians gather at the site of an Israeli strike on a camp for internally displaced people in Rafah earlier this week (Picture: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)

I was impressed by the good quality healthcare there, which felt instantly familiar, because its standards are universal. Though the clinic was funded by Japanese aid, I saw people cared for in a way I recognised, care that I knew was going on over the border in Israel, as well as in the Scottish communities where I work.

Hay Festival writers pressured to pull out

When I think of those clinics now, and the ongoing attacks on similar clinics in Gaza, I’m appalled that the principle of medical neutrality – the same principle that makes the work of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent possible – appears to have been ignored in the war on Gaza. It is little comfort that the authorities at the International Court of Justice now are gathering evidence to verify those claims.

Get our weekly opinion newsletter for expert analysis from The Scotsman’s team of columnists

Sponsorship of the cultural sector is under scrutiny in a way it never has been before. For the most part, that’s a good thing. But at Hay Festival last week writers were approached by activists who asked them to pull out of the festival because of concerns over the investment portfolio of one of the sponsors, Baillie Gifford. The festival felt it had no option other than to cancel its relationship with the sponsor, because writers were coming under intense pressure to boycott their own events. The same approach to writers is threatened of the Edinburgh International Book Festival this August.

Some numbers: state and city support for the arts is now so low that corporate sponsorship for festivals has become necessary if they are to function at all, pay their staff, and offer a diverse range of speakers – it now makes up about 35 per cent of the income that Edinburgh’s book festival needs to pay its bills. Ticket sale revenue makes up about 15 per cent.

Swinney in Palestine state letter plea as Israel Rafah strikes condemned

Just 2 per cent

I’m told that 2 per cent of Baillie Gifford’s funds are involved in companies that have a presence in Israel, and a similar proportion of funds is invested in companies that profit from the sale of fossil fuels. As an NHS doctor I’m paid by the state, and at least 2.2 per cent of the UK state’s revenue comes from the sale of hydrocarbons (it’s not so easy to find out its revenue from sales of arms).

When I travelled to east Jerusalem and Ramallah to see the work of Palestinian writers, doctors, and nurses, well over 2 per cent of the money I spent to get there, and stay there, no doubt went into supporting the Israeli economy. I should perhaps have refused to go – but then I would have missed out on a valuable opportunity to meet and celebrate words and ideas across borders, to reinforce the principles of medical neutrality, to contribute a tiny part to the worldwide fraternity of medical practice and of literature.

The Edinburgh Festivals blossomed out of the ashes of the Second World War, as a forum to bring people together through the arts. The tragedy of this evolving crisis in the future of our book festivals is that writers who want to be able to discuss and debate the issues of the day are on the same side as the activists asking them to pull the plug.

Chekhov’s wisdom

There are few people now who’d deny the need for an urgent transition away from fossil fuels, and the number of people prepared to defend the actions of Israel are dwindling by the day. Until recently, Hay Festival paid me in bottles of wine (which I always gave to the staff, rather than cart them home on the train to Scotland), and anyway fees were never what was important.

Writers don’t go to festivals to be paid by sponsors – they go to meet audiences, and in the hope that they will, with their readers, be moved, enlightened, inspired, and persuaded.

A far wiser (and better) doctor-writer than me, Anton Chekhov, once wrote an irritated letter to his editor, who had asked him to make comment on contemporary politics. “You confuse two things,” Chekhov wrote, “solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.” As a writer I believe it is my duty to do my best to state a problem correctly. And if we boycott and defund our book festivals, that duty is going to become a lot more difficult to fulfil.

Author and doctor Gavin Francis hopes to speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on themes of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and a just climate transition