I Need to Be Honest: Watkins Media & Palestine Solidarity

Bewildered author, boycotting her own books.

Darlings,

Over the past few weeks, ugly truths have come to light – truths I have only been aware of for the past 3 days, and which I’m still getting my head around at the present time. I feel it’s more important than ever to keep Palestine in our hearts and stay vigilant of how our attention, support, money, and creative efforts, are used in ways we never would have condoned or imagined. With this in mind, please know that I write these words with both a heavy sadness and an infuriated defiance inside me. (Links provided at the end of the piece.)

Here’s what I understand at the moment. Watkins Publishing (the publishing company that produced my books) is owned by a man called Etan Ilfeld. It has very recently come to light that, in 2023, Ilfeld ordered the head of Repeater Books (a sister company of Watkins Publishing under the Watkins Media umbrella) to remove Repeater Books from the Publishers for Palestine petition. Following this disagreement, the head and founder of Repeater Books left the company. Many of Repeater Books’ authors agreed with the premise of the petition, and this means they were all effectively silenced too.

Ilfeld is also an investor in Remagine Ventures – an Israeli venture capital firm that proudly boasts a collaboration with a cyberwar unit of the IDF. Remagine Ventures are a company that calls the genocide In Gaza, ‘the war with Hamas.’ So, I think it’s clear to see where Etan Ilfeld’s interests lie. He has taken steps to silence pro-Palestinian sentiment within his own organisation. He is funnelling money into a company that aids genocide.

Obviously, these revelations compromise my ability to be able to market my own work at this time, since the copyright is ultimately owned by a man whose views and actions are morally incongruent with mine, and that’s putting it mildly. It also means that I will not be signing a contract with Watkins Publishing for my third book, as I do not want any future creative labour to exist beneath a business umbrella that drips with the blood of children. I really don’t care who thinks I’m being histrionic. Anyone who would accuse me of ‘dramatics’ is either incapable of understanding exactly how much private Israeli companies contribute to the Israeli military, or incapable of caring about the maiming and butchering of untold thousands of people. Either way, we’re not on the same page about this. (Pun intended.)

It is not possible to boycott retroactively. We can only go forward with what we know in the present. I would therefore request that you avoid purchasing new copies of my books from any supplier for now, while I figure out what to do about copyright stuff. For those who have already purchased either of my books, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope you can continue to enjoy them and return to them. I put gargantuan effort into both of them – they are my babies. But if I’m not prepared to encourage the boycott of my own work from this point onwards, I don’t know what my solidarity with Palestine is worth.

To be clear, this is not an easy decision for me to arrive at. The incredibly creative, open-hearted people who worked tirelessly to bring my books to life are not to blame for any of this. Of course, I am worried about how they feel right now, and how they may be affected by any uproar. I am also thinking of the many authors who, like me, rely on book sales to form all or part of their income – authors who may feel inconvenienced by one of their own popping off online about the CEO of our publishing house. But boycott is not always clear-cut and obvious, like it is when we say we won’t eat at McDonalds or sip on a cup of Starbucks. I am just simply an author who has to recognise that the sales of my creative work may be used, in even a miniscule way, to fund the most egregious horrors I have ever seen in my natural life. That has to mean something. If it doesn’t, then I don’t know who I am anymore.

I am crying as I type these words. I am crying because this is a sad situation all round. I’m crying because my art is tied up in this. I’m crying because I don’t understand why it’s so fucking difficult for people to just, like, not silence those who are trying to highlight the sniping and starving of literal children. I’m crying because I don’t understand why it’s so fucking hard not to take money that you made from radical, left-wing authors like the ones who write for Repeater, and use it to fund something you know they pretty much all stand against. Or why it’s so fucking hard to have some integrity. Or at least some transparency about your politics, rather than gagging people who want to be transparent about theirs, and then making out like you’re just politically neutral, which isn’t even a thing.

But I am also crying because I didn’t do my due diligence as an activist. It didn’t occur to me when I signed the first contract. How much I would have been able to discover at the time, I don’t know – that was 2018, before Ilfeld was an investor in Remagine Ventures, and before he silenced authors with integrity from publicly protesting mass human rights violations. But the reality is that I didn’t even think for a second about who owned Watkins Publishing. I just thought Watkins Publishing owned Watkins Books, and that’s as far as my curiosity ever took me. I want to take accountability for that.

The thing is, like many of you, I am deeply romantic about books. I am sentimental about books. I am overblown and overjoyed and awestruck by books. I always have been. Many years before I was published by Watkins, I owned the books they published. When I had my first online meeting with a contact at Watkins to discuss the possibility of writing a book for them, there was a Watkins book visible on the shelf behind me. I pointed it out and we both gleefully laughed. It felt like everything was coming cosmically full circle. I couldn’t have thought of a more suitable spiritual home for me, as an author. I am humbled by books, and I was humbled to see my own books displayed on the shelves at the bookstore in London when I did my launch event. I lost my breath for a second. It was a gorgeous experience. Watkins Publishing were the first publishing house to translate Jung into English. How much more romantic do you think I could feel about them?

But it’s clear that I was also blindsided by books. I was lulled into a false sense of security and energetic resonance by books. I was convinced to feel at home and at ease in any situation involving the writing, selling, and vocal appreciating of books. I was convinced that good people get into publishing for good reasons - because they love books too and they want to get as close as they can to the process that supplies such profound enrichment. I can point out many other instances of approaching a company or opportunity with caution, and with certain standards I want to see. Yet, with saying ‘yes’ to Watkins Publishing, I displayed none of this conscientious behaviour. It just.. felt safe.

We love books because they are instruments of alchemy. They change us. But how do we want to be changed, exactly? Do we want to be changed in ways that count? Or do we just want to feel our consciousness shift for a moment before it gets put back into neutral? Do we only want to feel stirred, moved, and inspired while we turn the pages? Or do we want to be truly changed after we put the books down? For those of you who have been diligently using some of your reading time to get through a Palestine book list and swot up on what the literal fuck is going on over there, you are more than aware of what it feels like to read in order to be informed, illuminated, and changed for the better. Even if it hurts. Even if it means your life changes too. I have been on that same journey for many years, since I was a teenager. It did change me, profoundly, to the point where I have consciously avoided Israeli produce my entire life. And now I want it to change me again, by making me face up to this, rather than do what my hurt heart wants to do - just bury my head and hope it goes away.

I was so swept up in the romance of seeing my work in print, with a publisher that could really get it in front of the right eyeballs, that I never even thought to ask, ‘Who owns the place? And can I have a chat with them first?’ I never looked at Watkins’ track record of visibly supporting any political standpoint. I never checked if there were any scandals around treatment of authors. (There isn’t, to my knowledge, but my point is that I just overrode any of my usual considerations because I was giddy as fuck.) Whether I could have found out anything about Ilfeld at the time isn’t the point. I never had my finger on that pulse. It hadn’t occurred to me. I was living my dream. There’s nothing wrong with living your dream. But if your dream involves handing the rights of your work over to someone who might be funding other people’s worst nightmare -their children starving and their homes burning- you’d better be willing to go deeper than just, ‘This contract looks good for me – let’s go!’ As artists, we should never devalue our work. We should never fail to remember that handing a manuscript to a publisher means it becomes a brick in someone else’s castle. Whose castles are we building?

It has only begun to occur to me in the last year or so how difficult it probably is to find traditional publishing outlets that actually take a political position and have the money to print what they like, let alone encourage their connected business entities to do the same. We all know the flow of money is facilitated by silence. We can only deal with these issues in the publishing industry by speaking up about things like this. I have always classed myself as a complete outsider to the traditional publishing world. It felt like it impressed me but eclipsed me, and I just went along for the ride, provided I could write what I wanted. But that’s not enough. I’m a best-selling author. I should have a point of view, and I shouldn’t feel intimidated.

I will take this as a lesson, and I will strive to do better. I will never expect myself to be perfect. But I could have been more aware here.

At the risk of coming across as lazy, I will simply leave some links here and be grateful to those who have pulled information together so that it can be distributed.

Thank you for reading.

Free Palestine.

Kelly-Ann x

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: AI, Israel, and the Apparent Demise of Repeater Books:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-148647169

Crossing the Line: The Repeater Books Controversy and the Fight for Solidarity

Crossing the Line: The Repeater Books Controversy and the Fight for Solidarity

Petition signed by authors, employees and affiliates of Repeater and Zero Books:

https://xenogothic.com/2025/03/17/boycott-watkins-statement/

Remagine Ventures welcomes Ilfeld:

https://www.instagram.com/remagineventures/p/Cv9cUthtNeq/?hl=en

Unit 8200 is ‘the backbone of the Israeli intelligence community’ and its employees are soldiers:

https://www.visiontv.ca/2017/04/24/unit-8200-military-hackers-technology/

Remagine Ventures excited to work with 8200:

https://x.com/xenogothic/status/1902392122373796226