PSC Cymru calls on Hay Festival to drop deal with Airbnb

Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cymru (PSC Cymru) is today calling on the Hay Festival, one of the world’s most celebrated literary gatherings, to immediately end its sponsorship partnership with Airbnb.

This comes amid growing international condemnation of the company’s role in profiting from illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

The call arrives as the Hay Festival’s own partnership is already unravelling. UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, and forensic architect Professor Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London) have both withdrawn from this year’s festival in direct protest at the Airbnb sponsorship.

Albanese described Airbnb as profiting from:

an economic system that supports occupation, annexation, and forced displacement.

The United Nations has formally named Airbnb in its database of companies implicated in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank. The International Court of Justice has ruled these settlements unlawful.

Hay Festival and Airbnb launch unintentionally ironic award

Airbnb has partnered with the Hay Festival to launch a writing award called “Room to Write”. This claims to champion:

creativity and the importance of place and space in storytelling.

PSC Cymru says the irony could not be more stark. Airbnb is simultaneously listing properties on land from which Palestinians have been violently displaced and stripped of the right to tell their own story.

Hay Festival is not the first cultural institution to face this reckoning. When Airbnb sponsored Vivid Sydney, multiple artists withdrew from the festival, refusing to allow their work:

to be used to legitimise or sanitise unethical corporate relationships.

They cited Airbnb’s documented history of listing properties in illegal Israeli settlements. Vivid Sydney subsequently dropped Airbnb as a sponsor.

The message from the cultural world is becoming impossible to ignore. Airbnb’s settlement listings are incompatible with the values of any festival that champions ideas, human rights, free expression, and the power of storytelling.

PSC Cymru co-chair Bethan Sayed said:

It is deeply shocking, and bitterly ironic, that the Hay Festival has taken money from Airbnb to promote ‘the importance of place and space in storytelling’, while Airbnb profits from the violent erasure and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Airbnb is complicit in a war crime. Its settlement listings help fuel the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes and land, propping up Israel’s system of apartheid, and forcing Palestinians into isolated enclaves, subjected to violent settler attacks, cut off from their families, their communities, and their cultural and historic space.

By accepting Airbnb’s sponsorship, the Hay Festival is sending a clear message that Palestinian lives are not important, that stolen land is acceptable, and that war crimes are acceptable. Is it content to accept that the destruction of an entire people’s home, story, and identity is someone else’s problem?

We say: it is not. The Hay Festival would not platform a plagiarist, and it must not platform land theft. Close the book on Airbnb. End the sponsorship now.

PSC Cymru is calling on:

• The Hay Festival to terminate its partnership with Airbnb without delay.
• Authors, speakers, and literary figures to publicly condemn the sponsorship.
• Festival-goers to sign our e-action and demand Hay Festival ends its sponsorship deal with Airbnb.

Sign the e-action: No Room for Apartheid at Hay Festival. Close the Book on Airbnb.

Featured image via Getty Images