Israeli poet boycotts international poetry festival in Jerusalem

To Yitzhak Eizenberg Shalom
Fifth international poetry festival in Jerusalem

Thank you for your invitation to participate in the international poetry
festival in Jeruslaem in 2006 and the details. I would like to take my
name out of the list of participants. I read these days on the
barabarism in the Qalandia checkpoint. I oppose an international poetry
festival in a city in which the Arab inhabitants are oppressed
systematically and cruelly, imprisoned between walls, deprived of their
rights and living spaces, humiliated in chekcpoints and the
international laws are violated. I think that even poets were not
allowed in the past, and not in the present, to ingore persecutions and
discriminations on a racial or national basis.

yours
Aharon Shabati