The Society of Authors believes genocide in Ukraine must be condemned, but genocide in Gaza is not part of its remit. And now the SoA has an official “mandate” to look the other way.

The UK’s so-called authors’ trade union, the Society of Authors, held an extraordinary general meeting this past week, where three issues needed addressing: fossil fuels, AI, and Gaza.

The first two sailed through the EGM vote with predictable ease, following the SoA Management Committee’s recommendations.

The SoA agreed to lobby publishing industry companies to not invest in fossil-fuel operations and pursue sustainable-energy policies.

No equivocation here. The SoA will pull out all the stops, and even “write to such institutions in the publishing industry to this effect.“

All very worthy and laudable, and of course in keeping with general publishing industry sentiment on sustainability. We only have one planet.

A safe bet

And of course there’s nothing the SoA likes more than a safe bet, so the resolution on AI also had the full backing of the Management Committee.

Check out the full and largely sensible, if wholly predictable resolution, riding heavily on the UK Publishers Association’s own deliberations on this topic, here.

Then spin back to the SoA in victory summary, where it states: “With this new mandate from members, we will start to plan how we can most effectively challenge AI developers on your behalf.“

Note the word “challenge” which sums up the SoA’s Luddite position on AI, however it dresses up its opposition with fanciful phrases about how “We know that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be a useful tool.“

Again, a safe bet for the SoA, which has spent the past couple of years demonising AI at every turn.

Let the NUJ and PEN deal with it

But the third resolution that made it through to the EGM was the thorny topic of invasion and human rights abuse in Palestine, where suddenly the SoA was far too busy being a trade union for British authors to have time to worry about genocide in the Middle East.

The SoA led the objections against the resolution, explaining tritely that, “As individuals, we are all devastated by the loss of life, destruction and continuing conflict in Israel/Gaza. We all hope that a solution can be found very soon, and that peace can be brokered in the region.”

The SoA went on: “While we mourn the shocking and tragic deaths of journalists, poets, and other media workers, these issues are more appropriately a matter for organisations such as the NUJ and PEN with a view to their wider roles. We would urge concerned members who have not done so already, to add their voices to support the campaigning of these organisations.”

The moral cowardice beggars belief. This was not a call to take up arms against Israel, or even to suggest the faults were all on one side.

13,000 children buried before their time

Yes, of course Israel has a right to defend itself. But as the Resolution detail notes, as of March 24, the time the resolution was proposed, “more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli government’s offensive in the occupied Gaza Strip since October 7th, 2023. This includes at least 13,000 children, with more than 73,000 injured, and 1.7 million displaced (and that) on 26th January, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it plausible that Israel’s attacks on Gaza could amount to genocide.“

The SoA was unmoved by the idea of 13,000 children buried before their time. “As a trade union, our remit and mission is to support members in relation to the business of authorship. The SoA’s board has therefore taken a decision that the SoA should not publish a statement…on issues that are outside of our remit and expertise and where we have no mandate from our membership.“

These word games could only come from a society of authors. “We have no mandate from our membership“? That’s exactly what the resolution was intended to fix. But the SoA took the decision in advance, and threw its collective weight against any such mandate becoming, well, mandatory.

But let’s dwell here on the SoA’s hiding behind these issues being “outside of our remit and expertise.”

The SoA has been quite indifferent to any need to invoke expertise and joined-up thinking

That would be oh-so-funny were it not for the seriousness of the tragedy unfolding in Palestine. The SoA had proven itself quite indifferent to any need to invoke expertise and joined-up thinking in its knee-jerk opposition to AI.

But there’s nothing funny about the situation in Palestine, any more than there is about the situation in Ukraine, where apparently the SoA has plenty of expertise and unequivocally believes European lives lost in Ukraine, unlike Arab lives lost in Palestine, are absolutely part of its remit.

The hypocrisy is simply astounding.

This was the SoA in February 2022.

“We join our European colleagues in declaring solidarity with the Ukrainian people and our fellow Ukrainian writers and translators.

We stand with all Ukrainian people, and in particular with Ukrainian writers, illustrators, translators, journalists, and others whose lives and livelihoods are so entwined with the right to think, speak, write and create freely. Vladimir Putin’s pretext for war is regressive. His actions are a direct assault on that right.

We join the global union movement in calling for peace, and we urge all governments to work towards a negotiated solution through diplomacy.”

Okay, so that was 2022. But as recently as October 2023 the SoA still thought the Ukraine invasion was within its remit and it had an expert on hand to prove it, in the form of “Journalist Jen Stout on the essential role of writers and culture in war-torn Ukraine.“

1600 words spell out the SoA’s hypocrisy

Per Stout, as given voice by the Society of Author with a 1,600 word article:

“Writers always matter in wartime. Correspondents and reporters have a huge role to play, getting the facts as straight as possible, finding those stories which stick with the reader, being there on the ground to witness it.”

Pah! Journalists! What was it you said last week, SoA? “These issues are more appropriately a matter for organisations such as the NUJ and PEN with a view to their wider roles.”

That’s right. We at the SoA are “proper” writers. Authors, not hacks, don’tcha know?

A mandate to look the other way

Apparently the SoA did not go back and re-read the Stout piece before its latest round of hypocrisy and moral cowardice, or it might have noticed how Stout told us then of “the terrible pine forests where nearly 450 bodies had been found (one being) Volodymyr Vakulenko (who) wrote books and poems in Ukrainian…Children’s books, mostly.”

There are of course any number of similar tales with Palestinian authors, not white Europeans, but you won’t find them on the website of the Society of Authors.

The Society of Authors believes genocide in Ukraine must be condemned, but genocide in Gaza is not part of its remit.

And now the SoA has an official “mandate” to look the other way.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Pulse newsletter.