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The Giller Prize and the ‘Indigo 11’

How Canada’s most prestigious literary prize is weaponizing its wealth and power against pro-Palestinian speech

Canadian BusinessCultureSocial Movements

Writers have joined forces with visual artists, filmmakers, and cultural workers under the banner of No Arms in the Arts, a campaign demanding that all cultural institutions receiving funding from Scotiabank, including the Giller Prize, pressure it to divest from Israeli arms manufacturers and end its complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Photo by Yuula Benivolski.

Since October 7, 2023, the Toronto Police Service has made 92 arrests of demonstrators and organizers protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Police have acted against the many protests, sit-ins, occupations, visual interventions, picket lines and boycotts that have mobilized activists across a broad range of sectors. What is striking, however, is that 16 of those arrests (over 17 percent of the total number) have been focused on one sector in particular: the Canadian literary world.

On November 13, 2023, a broadcast of the Giller Prize gala was interrupted by protestors calling attention to lead sponsor Scotiabank’s investment in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. At the time, Scotiabank had $500 million invested in Elbit, making them the company’s largest foreign shareholder. Three people were arrested for their alleged involvement in the disruption that evening, and were criminally charged. A fourth arrest was made months later, and a fifth just over a week ago.

In the days that followed the gala, an open letter with more than 2,100 signatories from Canada’s literary community was penned demanding the charges against the protestors be dropped. The No Arms in the Arts campaign launched the following March, in dissent against the links between cultural institutions like the Giller and the companies fuelling and supporting the genocide, with an emphasis on Scotiabank. After months of obfuscation from the Giller Foundation, which funds and presents the annual award, nearly 40 authors pledged to boycott the prize altogether. Authors pulled their 2024 Giller-eligible fiction releases from consideration, and past winners and nominees refused to participate in any publicity around the prize going forward. According to the campaign, the boycott will end when the foundation drops all sponsors who are materially supporting the oppression of Palestinians. This includes Scotiabank, but also the Azrieli Foundation, the charitable wing of an Israeli real estate empire with past and present economic ties to illegal West Bank settlements, and Indigo Books.

The “Indigo 11” was the term given to individuals who, in the early hours of November 22, 2023, woke up to the Toronto Police violently raiding their homes. Some had their belongings tossed and their doors knocked off their hinges. Parents were handcuffed in front of their children. Their alleged crime was the postering of windows at an Indigo location in downtown Toronto. The flyers depicted Indigo CEO Heather Reisman’s face, and accused her of being complicit in the siege on Gaza. The charges—mischief, criminal harassment and conspiracy—were described by the police as “hate-motivated.”

Despite efforts to obscure the relationship between Indigo and Israel’s occupation, it is a well-known fact that Reisman, alongside her husband and Indigo Director Gerald Schwartz, is the founder of the HESEG Foundation. HESEG has been a regular source of controversy for years due to its financial support of “lone soldiers” in the Israeli military—non-Israeli citizens who want to volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This means that Reisman and Schwartz are subsidizing the military tours of soldiers who are actively enforcing Israel’s regime of apartheid, occupation and genocide. They are the only substantial donors to the HESEG foundation, and have provided over $185 million to it over the years. Those donations are in turn subsidized by Canadian tax dollars, despite flaunting federal charity law which would otherwise disqualify organizations offering financial support for “foreign militaries.”

When confronted with moral questions about corporate ties to the arts, we hear all-too-familiar refrains around the funding crisis our industries are facing. We are told that, like it or not, the money has to come from somewhere. I do not mean to invoke that crisis flippantly. Artists are living more and more precariously, and it is a situation which has only been exacerbated by our arts institutions staking the whole of their existence on a handful of corporate sponsorships. When looking at the Giller’s entanglements with Scotiabank, Azrieli and Indigo, both sympathetic and cynical perspectives of the institution might characterize it as a cornered animal. Giller supporters paint the picture of a foundation forced to choose between self-preservation and ethics, reliant on these massive prize pool injections in order to sustain itself—regardless of where they come from. While that might hold true as a partial explanation, it does not quite capture the way power and ideology coalesce in the cultural sphere.

These arrests are all-too material manifestations of power and ideology. The past year has seen more visible and materially disruptive direct actions in Toronto, so it might at first seem a bit arbitrary that the state would crack down so hard on Giller and Indigo protestors. Why would the Canadian literary community become such a locus for political jockeying? The answer lies in the ways these cultural institutions maintain ideological commitments to Zionism, and wield their cultural influence in service of this ethnonationalist worldview.

In both instances, it has been wielded in very blunt ways. As The Walrus reported, Giller Executive Director Elana Rabinovitch was seen “berat[ing] police into charging the protesters.” This was also confirmed in a statement the following day when she told the Globe and Mail that “organizers [were] working with local law enforcement authorities.”

When 2024 Giller winner Sarah Bernstein (who would later join the Giller boycott signatories list) was slated to do an online book club for the prize, Giller organizers warned her that audience questions about Gaza or the protestors would be edited out. In April, the Gillers sent out a vaguely threatening email to publishers asking that authors they put up for awards submissions be “willing to honour the nomination and commitments.” It was a warning to ‘get in line’ that came shortly after the mass withdrawals from the PEN America gala (in turn, the tactic of asking publishers to discipline their authors ahead of a potentially controversial awards ceremony was taken up by PEN itself last month). Simmering underneath the Giller’s warnings is the threat of a blacklist. There is a justified fear among authors that anyone who isn’t content to live with their work being used to whitewash corporations that are complicit in genocide might face professional repercussions for saying so, and lose access to valuable publicity, prestige and book sales.

The Indigo store at Bay and Bloor in downtown Toronto was splashed in red paint and plastered with posters of CEO Heather Reisman. Photo by Nick Mount/X.

Like many literary institutions, the Gillers have had to embrace the truism that all art is political. Their 2023 ceremony opened with a land acknowledgement, and featured many stock references to the transformative political power of reading, as well as the role the Gillers have played in uplifting marginalized speech. This made it all the more awkward that when doubling down on their Scotiabank partnership, they had to pivot to an out-of-vogue position of passive apoliticism. On July 11, the organization released a statement confirming it had been retaining Scotiabank as a sponsor, and wrote that “the Foundation is not a political tool.” And yet here Elana Rabinovitch is, weaponizing the wealth and power of Canada’s most prestigious literary prize against pro-Palestinian speech. One might expect the response of a genuinely non-partisan institution to go the tried and true route of riding out the controversy, rather than implicating itself further with threatening and censorious emails to authors and publishers. On a purely craven level, it would certainly have been a savvier public relations strategy. That we have been seeing something far uglier instead reveals the true colours of an ideologue.

While other players in the Canadian publishing world might have to adopt more demure facades, Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz have felt emboldened to express their anti-Palestinian positions openly and unabashedly. Aside from their own efforts aimed at encouraging foreigners to join the Israeli army, Reisman and Schwartz’s family foundation has also donated to a number of other Zionist organizations with ties to illegal West Bank settlements and the IDF. This has included the Jewish National Fund and the Ne’eman Foundation, both of whose charitable statuses were recently revoked by the Canada Revenue Agency over those ties; and the Jerusalem Foundation and Mizrachi Canada, which also support illegal settlements, as well as several Israeli far-right groups. Reisman and Schwartz were also central to the creation of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a notorious pro-Israel lobbying group that pushes Zionist talking points and suppresses Palestinian perspectives in Canada’s media and politics.

Many of these associations would normally be at odds with the “progressive” sensibilities of the literary world. Yet, Reisman has always maintained her position as a benevolent benefactor and lover of the arts by force. Indigo (which Reisman and Schwartz took private earlier this year) is a monopoly that has, after all, done irreparable damage to our industry by decimating Canadian independent bookselling, and its policies around book returns remains a scourge to Canadian small presses. Her figurative and literal seat at the table at festivals, awards shows and galas is the result of the rest of the publishing industry being her reluctant, captive audience.

When the Indigo 11 were arrested, it was shocking to see a commonplace act of civil disobedience like flyering bring down levels of police violence and criminal charges normally associated with more severe offences. Reporting from The Breach explains why: Reisman herself made a personal phone call directly to Toronto’s chief of police, according to a police source. Like the Giller gala arrests, these criminal charges, and the resulting hardships that come along with them, are largely the result of one individual or institution’s lobbying.

Just weeks ago, we saw Reisman abuse the court system further, when Indigo filed an emergency injunction against the campaign Indigo Kills Kids. Under the grounds of copyright infringement, telecom companies were ordered to temporarily suspend all traffic to IndigoKillsKids.com ahead of their nationwide call to action protesting the bookseller’s connection to HESEG. Should the injunction become permanent, it would be a major blow to political speech and freedom of expression in Canada.

The cultural sector holds an important role in both legitimizing some types of speech, and delegitimizing others. Zionists have often chosen the arts as the ideological battleground upon which to wage this war against language. It is a war we have borne witness to for many decades, from Israel’s murder of Palestinian authors and journalists, to its practice of destroying libraries, universities and archives in what has been described as a “cultural genocide.”

We cannot afford to treat the role art has in “politics” as some abstract or existential dilemma. In Toronto, the delegitimization of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech has taken on many forms, including high-profile firings, acts of censorship, cancellations and arrests. Indigo and the Giller’s assaults on language have had material, and potentially irreversible, consequences. Even though four of the Indigo arrestees’ charges have been dropped after the court deemed there was “no reasonable prospect of conviction,” at least two of them still lost their jobs as a result of the police and media’s public smears against them. Reisman, Rabinovitch and the institutions they represent are responsible for jeopardizing the lives and livelihoods of arrestees, raining down professional, psychic and physical harm on those they’re attempting to silence.

But as demonstrated by the Giller withdrawals, these institutions need us—authors and readers—more than we need them. The boycott of the Giller Prize sees authors not only exercising their voice but leveraging their labour in service of a free Palestine. The boycott is an assertion of our agency and power as cultural workers, not only as culture producers.

Scotiabank’s 2024 quarterly disclosures saw their stake in Elbit cut down to one-fifth of what it was at the beginning of the year. This represents a divestment of close to $400 million in shares, and is one of the biggest recent divestments from the Israeli war machine. While there has been nationwide dissent to Scotiabank’s Elbit investment, many of the most-publicized efforts have been related to the No Arms in the Arts campaign, which has weaponized Scotiabank’s arts sponsorships against it. This barrage of negative press was cited by Elbit’s CEO himself as the cause for Scotiabank’s divestment.

Let this be a reminder that our power as artists isn’t purely symbolic, but material. The boycott has already stripped the Giller Foundation of any claim to legitimacy, despite some nominees being willing to break ranks to attend the ceremony this year. Let’s see how much cultural capital the Gillers, its director, and its sponsors are able to wield when their ceremony is reduced to an empty ballroom. They might have the blacklist. We have the picket line.

Michael DeForge is an author and illustrator based in Toronto. His published work includes Birds of Maine and Heaven No Hell. He is also an organizer with the No Arms in the Arts campaign and Writers Against the War on Gaza.

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