Does Margaret Atwood Support Israel?

Noa Cohen Feb 24, 2025 4 min read

Short answer: As of July 2026, Margaret Atwood does not "support Israel" in an advocacy sense, but she is not a boycotter either. The one clearly pro-Israel-adjacent fact on record is that in 2010 she refused a BDS cultural boycott and traveled to Tel Aviv to accept the privately funded Dan David Prize (shared with novelist Amitav Ghosh), arguing that cultural boycotts amount to censorship. In the same period, and again in 2023 and 2024, she was publicly critical of Israeli government policy: she wrote a Haaretz op-ed calling Israel's treatment of Palestinians a "shadow," backed Palestinian statehood, praised Israel's anti-judicial-overhaul protesters, and signed a letter defending a Palestine-sympathetic article. Her stance is best described as independent and critical of the Israeli government while opposed to cultural boycotts, not pro-Israel.

What Margaret Atwood has actually said and done

Here is the documented record, in order, with the source for each item:

April 2010: Palestinian students, including students at Gaza universities, publicly called on Atwood to decline the Dan David Prize awarded through Tel Aviv University, citing the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, as reported by The Electronic Intifada.
May 9, 2010: Atwood traveled to Tel Aviv University and accepted the Dan David Prize for Literature (shared with Indian author Amitav Ghosh), refusing the BDS cultural boycott and defending "artists without armies," per Bloomberg and also covered by The Forward.
May 9, 2010: Explaining her refusal, Atwood framed boycotting a literary discussion as a form of censorship and said she would not "throw overboard" writers around the world who are imprisoned or censored; the pro-Israel outlet Tablet Magazine headlined its coverage "Atwood Boycotts Boycotts."
June 2, 2010: Atwood published a Haaretz op-ed, "The Shadow Over Israel," arguing that the shadow is Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and that it will remain until Palestine has a legitimized state within recognized borders, per Haaretz, with her shift also documented by rabble.ca.
March 21, 2023: Atwood publicly reacted to Israeli women protesting the judicial overhaul in "Handmaid's Tale" costumes, tweeting "Astonishing" and noting she had never seen so many Handmaids marching outside the TV series, as reported by The Jerusalem Post.
May 7, 2023: Appearing by video at the Jerusalem International Writers Festival, Atwood called Israel's proposed judicial changes "a protest against a proposed totalitarian takeover of a democracy" and said the protests were already altering Israel's trajectory, per The Times of Israel.
March 1, 2024: Atwood was among roughly 70 Royal Society of Literature fellows who signed an open letter over the alleged suspension of an RSL magazine article sympathetic to Palestine during the Gaza war, as reported by Hyphen.
May 2024: Amid the Gaza war, Atwood shared (without adding her own comment) an article criticizing writers who boycotted the PEN World Voices festival, framing such boycotts as "bullying writers into silence"; critics noted her relative silence on Gaza itself, per Hyphen.

Jewish identity, and why this question keeps coming up

Margaret Atwood (born 1939 in Ottawa) is a Canadian novelist and poet best known for "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Oryx and Crake." She is not Jewish. Her documented heritage is English, Scottish, and Irish: her mother was Margaret Dorothy Killam, a dietician, and her father was Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. In interviews she has described herself as "a strict agnostic." Claims circulating on low-quality SEO sites that she had "a Jewish mother née Morrison" and "a Methodist-minister father" are fabricated and contradicted by the primary biographical record, so we do not repeat them.

The "does Margaret Atwood support Israel" question comes almost entirely from one 2010 event. When the Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asked her to decline the Dan David Prize awarded through Tel Aviv University, she declined the boycott instead. Pro-Israel outlets framed this as "Atwood boycotts boycotts," while pro-Palestinian voices criticized her. Her own writing right afterward, the Haaretz op-ed "The Shadow Over Israel," was sympathetic to Palestinians and critical of Israeli policy, which is why the record is genuinely mixed rather than pro-Israel.

The bottom line

Atwood is a boycott skeptic, not an Israel supporter. She rejected the BDS cultural boycott in 2010 and engaged with Israeli cultural life (accepting the Dan David Prize, appearing by video at the Jerusalem International Writers Festival in 2023), which is why she surfaces in "supports Israel" searches. But her substantive statements criticize the Israeli government and support Palestinian statehood, and in 2024 she signed a letter over the alleged censorship of a Palestine-sympathetic piece. She is not Jewish and has no documented ongoing ties to Israeli communities. For a pro-Israel reader, the fair takeaway is to welcome her anti-boycott, pro-free-expression stance without presenting her as a pro-Israel figure.

Support Israel directly

Public figures will keep giving mixed signals, and you cannot always tell where a novelist or an actor really stands. Your own choice is clearer. If reading through Atwood's record left you wanting to do something concrete, you can put your values on plainly through our Support Israel collection, from "I Stand With Israel" pieces to designs that celebrate Am Yisrael Chai. Every order backs Israeli-made products and the people who create them.

Last updated July 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.