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 barbarism 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 checkpoints and the international laws are violated. I think that even poets were not allowed in the past, and not in the present, to ignore persecutions and discriminations on a racial or national basis.

Yours,
AHARON SHABTAI