In a cultural boycott of Israel, we cannot ignore our own backyard

"Israeli-born choreographer Keren Levi considers the cultural boycott of Israel morally necessary, but also simplistic. "The boycott demands accountability abroad, but is largely silent on the structures within our own country."

LINK for full articlein dutch here| english version below

When the Dutch and Belgian arts sectors recently announced a cultural boycott of Israel , I read the text several times. It was moving, precise, and morally necessary. I agreed with every word and wondered why it had taken so long. And yet I didn't sign it. I tried to understand why; this article is the result of that process.

I was born and raised in Israel. I've spent two-thirds of my life in Europe. Many of the artists who are now being "boycotted" are people I've worked with in the past—friends with whom I have a deep personal connection. The war in Gaza feels both unbearably close and irreparably distant.

Yet the moral claim of the boycott is irrefutable. The destruction of Gaza; the mass murder of civilians; the deliberate targeting of journalists, medical personnel, and artists; the erasure of cultural life—these are not "complex political events." They are crimes. To these must be added the continued occupation of the West Bank, the construction of settlements, and the systematic violations of human rights within the State of Israel. Calling for an end to cooperation with the Israeli state and its complicit institutions is an act of conscience, not an ideology.

So why did I hesitate?

Because I realized that the statement, while justified, speaks only one way. It points—rightly—to Israeli complicity, but is silent on the complicity that maintains the moral authority of the boycotters themselves. The boycott demands accountability abroad, but remains largely silent on the structures that benefit us at home. I wanted to sign the statement, but I also wanted to rewrite it—so that we, the arts sector in the Netherlands and perhaps also in Belgium, are included.

The Budgetary Mirror

Let's start with the banality of money. A wise person once said to me: If you want to understand the source of geopolitical conflict, follow the money . So that's what I tried: follow the money, as much as a week of unpaid research allowed me—two weeks before the premiere of my one-woman project organization.

Every euro of cultural funding from the Dutch government comes from the same state budget that purchases weapons and surveillance systems from Israel. Over the past five years, the Netherlands has ordered nearly €1.9 billion worth of Israeli military equipment : rocket launchers, drones, anti-tank missiles, naval systems, and cyber intelligence platforms. Half of these purchases were made after October 2023 – while the bombs were falling on Gaza. Even though the financial overlap between cultural funding and the arms economy is minimal – approximately 0.0006 percent of the annual cultural budget – it remains symbolic of the deep entanglement between the financial systems of the Netherlands and Israel.

At the same time, Dutch pension funds, which guarantee the pensions of teachers, nurses, and cultural workers, have invested billions in companies active in the Israeli arms and security industry. The profits from these investments ultimately return as taxable pension income, which flows back into the same treasury that funds our cultural institutions. However indirectly, this creates a closed loop: cultural work, investments, taxes, and subsidies are interconnected within an economic system that profits from war.

When the arts sector criticizes Israeli institutions for accepting government funding from a regime that commits atrocities, it's right. But when we in the Netherlands receive government funding from a government that continues to arm that same regime, what makes us different? Our distance? Our liberal vocabulary? Our confidence that our own complicity is being diluted by bureaucracy?

If we were to be consistent—and please bear with this proposal from an independent artist who receives no structural funding but does receive government subsidies—the Dutch arts sector should be willing to cut that symbolic 0.0006 percent of its budget: to say: we don't make art with blood money. That symbolic gesture—given that the boycott itself is presented as a symbolic act by some signatories—would cost virtually nothing in terms of numbers, but everything in terms of comfort. Could that be precisely why it didn't happen?

The Easy Purity of Distance

It's always easier to be moral when you're not materially involved. If the boycott had been directed against another country—say, China, Hungary, or the United States—most of us, myself included, would have signed without hesitation. But Israel is part of us in a different way. Its weapons guard Europe's borders. Its technologies protect our airports, our phones, our data systems. Its military doctrine is studied by NATO officers. And its cultural producers move through the same circuits of residencies, festivals, and European funding as we do.

Boycotting Israel is therefore also a boycott of part of the infrastructure that sustains Western cultural life. And this is where the courage of our declarations often ends. A true boycott, one that bites (us, here), would require us to scrutinize our own funding, our own institutions, our own pensions and partnerships. It would mean not only refusing invitations to Tel Aviv, but also refusing funding from a government that buys Israeli missile systems while simultaneously cutting cultural budgets at home. It would mean asking ourselves how far we are willing to go—what we are willing to lose—to make our ethics tangible.

The Moral Illusion and the Risk of Acting

When I make all this assertion, I can already predict the counterargument: that doing something, however small, is still better than doing nothing. But this is precisely the illusion I'm trying to expose. As a colleague of mine astutely observed, this "something" often functions as a moral alibi—a symbolic gesture of care that perpetuates the very structure it claims to challenge. It relieves us of the discomfort of our complicity without truly confronting it. Acting within the system without questioning its premises is not resistance, but participation.

A friend who works locally at an NGO added: Those who belong to the small minority who dare to boycott—artists, academics, cultural workers—already have a target on their backs. It's easy to be dismissed as naive, self-righteous, or extremist. But when the boycott also encompasses your own contradictions—your own funding and privileges—you regain the power to define the terms of critique: to first identify the target and determine the direction of the debate.

What I propose instead is not paralysis, but a sustained engagement—an engagement in which we fully allow the burden of our limitations and hypocrisy to sink in. Only from the discomfort of not knowing how to act "right" can another kind of action become conceivable: action that doesn't reflect our need to transform morality into a performative gesture, but rather exposes its limits.

Surveillance In Our Backyard

The Netherlands is not only a buyer of Israeli weapons, but also of Israeli surveillance technology. The police have purchased intelligence and eavesdropping systems from Elbit and Cognyte – systems that have already been linked to abuses in other countries. Parliamentary questions in 2024 and reports by NRC Handelsblad and Buro Jansen & Janssen pointed to technical shortcomings and concerns about privacy legislation, but the contracts remained in place. They normalize the idea that technological monitoring is not only a solution to societal problems, but also for controlling society.

As the Netherlands drifts to the right—again elections this week, another flirtation with authoritarian populism—these technologies could easily turn inward. The same software being tested on Palestinian and Israeli citizens could soon be monitoring Dutch citizens, activists, migrants, and artists.

To talk about Gaza while ignoring our own backyard is to miss the full picture of the world we are building: a global network of militarized economies and data regimes in which art becomes a decorative afterthought.

What Would Responsibility Look Like?

I ask this from my deepest connection with both aspects: what does responsibility look like for us here?

Transparency : Cultural institutions could start by publicly acknowledging the origins of their funding – by naming the paradox rather than hiding it behind moral gestures.

Divestment : Artists and unions could demand that their pension funds exclude investments in weapons, surveillance, and occupation economies. This is already happening to some extent, but remember that the fees paid to arts workers come from the national budget, which remains (albeit indirectly) intertwined with the State of Israel.

Redistribution : Even a symbolic redistribution – 0.0006 percent of the cultural budget – to humanitarian or reconstruction projects in Palestine would say more than any open letter.

Self-reflection : Every collaboration, festival or residency could ask the question that the boycott of others demands: Who pays for this, and at what human cost?

These actions would not weaken the arts; they would restore credibility to a field that too often preoccupies itself with ethics, yet simultaneously thrives on the opposite.

Beyond the Signature

Despite my reservations about the capacity of academic or cultural boycotts to bring about meaningful change, I still believe that the cultural boycott of Israel is necessary at this stage. But I also believe that a boycott that focuses solely on the outside risks becoming a moral luxury—a glamorous expression of outrage. To avoid being portrayed as self-absorbed and self-interested by those who seek to dismantle the arts sector and undermine its social impact, the real challenge is to build an inner boycott: a rejection of the financial, technological, and ideological complicity that binds us to the violence we condemn.

Now that a ceasefire and the release of prisoners and hostages have been achieved, the pressure on Israel must not diminish; it must increase until the occupation ends and Palestinian statehood is recognized. But parallel pressure must also increase here—on our own government, our institutions, our financiers, and ourselves.

Because if we truly want to end systems of apartheid and domination, we can't outsource morality to distance. We have to live it, budget for it, and sometimes bleed for it. Otherwise, art becomes what those in power always wanted it to be: decoration.