Contagious flatulence

A.B. Yehoshua, the (racist, judeophobic, blood thirsty ) leading Israeli author, had a brain fart. One admits--by the standards he himself had set, it wasn't even a particularly odorous one. (for these standards, do click on these links, please, because there are few better ways to get a measure of a society than by the bottomless pits scaled by its luminaries).

Yehoshua starts by putting forward a phony question, "Why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict refuses to be resolved"? As if conflicts have mind and agency and can be blamed for not resolving themselves. (Mind you, if only that poor conflict could be subjected to two or three sleepless weeks in a Shabak dungeon, I am sure it would have cried uncle already. But the famous efficiency of Israel's security services only works on flesh and blood subjects.)

With the question thus framed, all matters of (criminal, ideological, historical) responsibility can be summarily executed, and their place filled with metaphysical cant and Hasbara. First comes the Hasbara. "There is no precedent for a nation that lost its sovereignty 2,000 years ago, was scattered among the nations, and later decided for internal and external reasons to return to its ancient homeland and re-establish sovereignty there." Indeed, there is no precedent because it never happened. No nation lost its sovereignty 2,000 years ago because the concept of a sovereign nation didn't exist then. Second, it didn't happen because it can't happen. A nation is a metaphysical concept, not an entity capable of making decision. Herzl, Rupin, Weitzman, Ben Gurion, etc., were not the elected representatives of a trans-historical Jewish polity stretching back in time 2,000 years. They were a tiny organized minority of European Jews who developed a Jewish nationalist ideology drawn on contemporary Eastern European models, based on a reading of the Bible adapted from German Protestantism, and using a concept of the relation of European Jews and the Ancient Hebrews that was first articulated by a the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder. Not that there is anything inherently bad about borrowing ideas from Herder, but he did not live 2,000 years ago.

In addition, the whole argument is a non-sequitur. The story of Zionism is indeed "unprecedented", in the sense that all historical narratives are unique. No country except Australia was forged on the basis of a former penal colony, and no country except Haiti was the first ever state established by liberated African slaves. The unique way each country came to be is of course of great importance, but nothing follows from that uniqueness itself. It is important to distinguish between, on the one hand, the trivial sense in which every history is unique, and, on the other hand, the Zionist claim to uniqueness, which is a preemptive strike against the comparative method of historical inquiry, and therefore completely bogus.

Let's continue with the Hasbara.

"The Jewish people...did not want to expel the Palestinians, and certainly not to destroy them." Surprisingly, that is almost true. "The Jewish people", having neither agency nor will, did not indeed "want to expel the Palestinians". For that very reason, "the Jewish people" did not in fact expel the Palestinians (contrary to what Yehoshua's sly negative construction implies). It was the militaristic Zionist cadres, the Histadrut, the JNF, the Hagana, the Palmach, etc., that indeed wanted, planned and executed the expulsion. It is very chivalrous of the High Priest of the Third Temple Yehoshua to assume responsibility for the Nakba on behalf of "the Jewish people." It's a priestly tradition.

"Moreover, there was no attempt here to impose a colonial regime, since the Jews had no mother country that had sent them on colonial conquests, as in the case of Britain or France." The idea that Zionism isn't colonial would have shocked Herzl, Rupin, Nordau, Jabotinsky, and practically all the Zionists who lived before the area of decolonization, when "colonialism" become a dirty word. The sophistry is breathtaking, not unlike that of the Israeli lawyers who argue with a straight face that the Geneva conventions do not apply to the OPT. For information, here is a classic definition of settler colonies from "key concepts in post-colonial studies":

In settler colonies “the invading Europeans (or their descendants) annihilated, displaced and/or marginalized the indigenes to become a majority non-indigenous population”.

Nowhere is it part of the definition of colonialism that the settlers must be agents of their own metropolitan nation state. The formulation "sent them for colonial conquests" is a trap for the unwary. To take just one example, Britain didn't send the Puritans to "colonial conquests" in North America. It persecuted them. This is typical. Settlers in all settler colonial formations were drawn from the marginal elements of their metropoleis. They were persecuted religious and ethnic minorities, destitute economic refugees, criminals and demi-monde, etc. The case of Zionism is unexceptional. The beauty of the argument that subtracts Israel from colonialism is that, not only it is willfully blind to the self-understanding of early Zionists, who clearly thought of themselves as colonizers, but it also reinvents what colonialism means to suit itself. What makes Zionism colonialist is the relation between European settlers, supported by Western powers, and Southern indigenous people. That Jews didn't come to Palestine from a country called Judonia is irrelevant.

Thus far, I scooped the hors d'œuvre (and left enough hanging Hasbara fruits for others to pick). It is time to get to the pièce de resistance.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a question of territory, as in the case of many historical conflicts between nations, but a battle over the national identity of the entire homeland.

Now, the homeland in question, isn't that presumably that land between the river and the sea? Namely, a territory? And isn't the battle about the future of that land? About the right of people to live there and to determine that future? Yehoshua argues that a battle over the future of a territory, over the rights to be in that territory, is not "about territory." Odd, but let's try to decipher.

There are conflicts that are "about territory" but do not implicate the "national identity of the entire homeland". Examples would be Alsace, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, etc. Of course, from the perspective of the people who live there, it is hard to argue that their identity and future is not deeply at stake. But who cares about people anyway? Yehoshua's distinction only makes sense from a nationalist perspective that treats land as possession of the abstract nation, not as the lived world of flesh and blood people. Thus the fate of Gibraltar would be purely a "territorial" matter, a property dispute between "Spain" and the "UK" in which the national identity (of the diplomats, not of the residents) is not at stake. Yehoshua cannot apply that framework to Palestine. Perhaps because he really lives there. And as obtuse as he is, he cannot fail to see that the future of that place and the people who live there cannot be reduced to his beloved abstractions.

But he tries nevertheless, tying himself in knots. First, he blames the uniqueness of Jewish history. But surely, the struggle in South Africa, In Northern Ireland, in Algeria, were just as much "not a question of territory" according to this distinction, at least not from the perspective of those in the thick of it. There must be something else.

For both sides, and mainly for the Palestinians, the size of the nation confronting them is not clear - whether it consists only of Israeli Jews or the entire Jewish diaspora. And the Israelis don't know whether they are confronting only the Palestinian people or the entire Arab nation. In other words, the demographic boundaries of the two sides are not clear either. This is therefore a fundamental conflict that constantly creates primal and profound mistrust between the two peoples, preventing a possible solution.

One could point out that there is hardly any party to a conflict that knows exactly the size of what confronts it. What confronts the democratic revolt in Bahrain? The royal family of Bahrain? Sunnis? Saudi Arabia? The GCC? Arab reactionary governments? The US? The world? But lets stay on topic. That Palestinian nationalism has a relationship with Arab nationalism (and also with other identities, for example Islam), and that Israeli national identity is bound with Jewish identity (as well as other identities, for example, Europe), these are trivial observations about both Jews and Palestinians. Identity is fuzzy and relational, with multiple, fluid, opposing components operating at different levels, changing over time and in response to circumstances. First year psychology students get that. What Yehoshua makes of these elementary facts which he imagines world shattering discoveries makes little sense. First, if Israeli Jews are part of the Jewish nation and Palestinians part of an Arab nation, then, according to Yehoshua's own logic of nationalistic abstractions, this should have made the future of Palestine a mere "territorial conflict", with Arabs and Jews fighting over Palestine the way Argentinians and Brits fought overs Las Malvinas. It should have simplified things, not complicated them. Isn't it a staple of Zionist cant that Arabs have already 22 (or 23, or 24) states to choose from? It doesn't work like that because the basic logic is nonsense.

Then there is the issue of "mistrust." This term belongs to the language of the "peace process," of which Yehoshua is a doyen. It lurks there together with "dialogue," "confidence building measures," "mutual understanding" and other such cant designed to create the illusion that the conflict is not a matter of power and dispossession, but a giant misunderstanding. According to Yehoshua, then, the conflict persists because Palestinians and Israelis do not trust each other. They do not trust each other because they cannot be sure of each other identity. And they cannot be sure of each other identity because they are not clear about the boundaries of their own identity.

Let's note that the premise is pure cant. Palestinians have about one thousand reasons to mistrust Israelis apart from the fact that Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews have bonded over Zionism in recent decades. The history of violence, dispossession, deception and bad faith, for example? The elementary political truth that "trust me" is not a solution to powerlessness? On the Israeli side, the main reason Israeli Jews mistrust Palestinians is that they have lived three generations on a diet of an orientalist discourse that portrays Arabs as inherently untrustworthy and violent. I trust that Yehoshua knows that, as he himself made some contributions to that discourse.

But facts aside, one has to grasp the real thrust of this exposition. The next sentence of the essay discloses the goal post:

Is it still possible to resolve the conflict without ending up in the trap of a binational state?

The solution to the conflict, according to Yehoshua, is in the clear demarcation of identities. What does that mean, for Yehoshua, the supporter of withdrawal from the OPT, Jewish secularism, the apartheid wall, and the unrestrained use of military hardware against Palestinians? This is what I understand. If only Palestinians were clear about who they were, if they gave up their complex identities, memories, family ties, and saw themselves as members of an abstract Palestinian nation confined in a clear territory, say, the West Bank and Gaza, minus Ma'ale Edumim. If only Israeli Jews figured out that they alone were the true Jews, that being Jewish is not a question of tradition or religion but merely about holding sovereign power over a well defined Jewish territory, (like a "normal" nation) and therefore cut their umbilical cord to the various diasporas, stopped listening to Arab music, and stopped taking American Jewish political advice... Then everything would be simple. Then both Jews and Palestinians would become "normal" nations. A wall built roughly over the 1967 border, Palestinians over there, Jews over here. Done! Then Israel could be the dream of white European separatist racism that has always inspired Yehoshua, the dream of secular Zionism. And Palestine? Palestine would be that same dream, only upside down.

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A coda, and a return to the title. I probably wouldn't have noticed Yehoshua's fart if it weren't for Gilad Atzmon noticing it, and I wouldn't have noticed the latter if it weren't quoted by Philip Weiss on Mondoweiss.

Atzmon is moved by the "interesting insight" such as that "It is also far from being clear where the Israeli ends and the Jew starts." Describing something that has been discussed ad nauseam for the last 60 years in every Jewish Israeli high school, summer camp and youth movement gathering as an "insight" is special. Atzmon, who, tragically enough, cannot let go of his IDF uniform, compliments Yehoshua for being "a proud Israeli Jew," one assumes as opposed to those spineless diaspora "progressive Jews" who offend Atzmon so much. It is as shocking as drought in the Mojave Desert that two who share the same secular Zionist assumptions, the same dislike of the radical left, the same belief in the trans-historical agency of abstractions, and the same colonial/racial/sexual anxieties about the impure and the unformed diaspora Judaism, would find each other insightful. Possibly the only thing to say about sentences like "In the contemporary Jewish world there are no clear dichotomies. We are dealing with a spineless elastic metamorphic identity that shapes itself to fit every possible circumstances," (aside from the sheer falseness), is that by the standards set by these two authors it isn't particularly odorous.

As to why Philip Weiss finds that deep, one should ask him. Weiss confesses that he "generally avoids" Atzmon. But why does he avoid Atzmon? Is there some political consciousness there that is struggling to take shape. Or is it just fear of what those over-sensitive "progressive Jews" might say? I am not sure Weiss himself can tell, but time will tell.

McEwan's lousy acceptance speech, and reasons to be be cautiously optimistic

Ian McEwan went to Jerusalem, shook the hands of apartheid officers, hobnobbed with war criminals, and gave a lousy acceptance speech, though I must admit not as lousy as the petulant and self-indulgent comic relief delivered last year by Margaret Atwood and Amitav Gosh after they collected their tainted million dollar. As you'll remember, Atwood and Gosh dedicated their acceptance speech to criticizing those who dared interfere with their sacred right to be given money, and compared their predicament to that of writers tortured and imprisoned for their writings. McEwan, while clearly unhappy about being so inconvenienced, calibrated his speech to appease the criticism and at least tried to prove he was not, as he was in fact, mollycoddling apartheid.

McEwan is an imperial liberal who believes passionately in the supremacy of European culture. Of course, perish the thought that he would define it that way. He would rather call it "secularism", or "rationalism", or whatever. But it is what it is. He is not therefore the first person one would turn to for supporting an anti-colonial struggle. Just listen to how he describes, in Jerusalem, the uprising in Egypt:

When Egyptians decide en masse to reform their society and think constructively, and take responsibility for their nation into their own hands, they will be less inclined to blame outsiders for all their misfortunes.

Because of course, Egyptian misfortunes have nothing to do with outsiders. Nobody poured billions of dollars into Egypt each year for forty years to maintain a brutal and tyrannical regime. Nobody feted and embraced Mubarak for the way he starved his people for the benefit of global neoliberal accumulation. It was all the fault of Egyptians who failed the test of maturity administered by the white man. They did not "take responsibility" for their fate. They were not "constructive." Maybe, of course that is exactly what McEwan implies in this formulation, they deserved tyranny.

There is only so much one can get from someone who thinks that way. But that is precisely the test of a campaign like BDS, which seeks to impose itself through public moral pressure. For a campaign like BDS, success is ultimately not measured by the supports of friends, but by the grudging compliance of people like McEwan. While he was able to resist the pressure to boycott, he was not able to ignore it. The speech he gave in Jerusalem was racist, white supremacist, misleading, confused, and Islamophobic, but it was also a rare across the board condemnation of Israel as a political entity from a purely liberal perspective. McEwan went where almost no imperial liberal had gone before, even condemning Israel's discriminatory Right of Return for Jews. It was evident from his own words that he didn't go there because he wanted to, but because he felt compelled by the pressure building up over his acceptance of the tainted prize. That's good.

Speaking about money, McEwan also donated the prize money to Combatant for Peace, which is emerging as an Israelo-Palestinian joint money-laundering services for celebrities with a dirty conscience. In a twist that is familiar from the history of other social movements, one the effect of the success of BDS is more money flowing to organizations that normalize the occupation, organizations such as "combatants for peace" which promote a false equivalence between the oppressor and the oppressed using the phony language of the "cycle of violence." Nevertheless, the fact that Israeli money associated with such prizes as the Jerusalem Prize is becoming too dirty for McEwan to take home should count as an achievement.

Now for the speech itself. McEwan checked all the check boxes of a good "political" literary speech about the "situation" in the Middle East. He mentioned (twice) the holocaust, alluded to the "clash of civilizations" theme, promoted his pet secularism, bashed Hamas with the canned bullet points for bashing Hamas, commended Israeli democratic culture (failing to note that it is for Jews only), and criticized the settlements and the massacre of Gaza. As a bonus, he even presented a history of the European novel that would have easily earned him a B in a not too demanding freshmen course. Impressive.

Nevertheless, it is worthwhile parsing some of the speech's contradictions and entanglements, because its political unconscious is rich with insight about the decrepit state of Western intellectual life. My rule for reading is that the treasure is always hidden beneath the weakest argument. I would like to focus on two points in the speech in which politics and literature intersect, the meaning of violence, and the power of literature.

The framework McEwan invokes to explain "the situation" in Jerusalem is an opposition between creativity, that is artistic, scientific and political ingenuity, and the nihilism of violence.

I'd like to say something about nihilism. Hamas whose founding charter incorporates the toxic fakery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has embraced the nihilism of the suicide bomber, of rockets fired blindly into towns, and embraced the nihilism of an extinctionist policy towards Israel. But (to take just one example) it was also nihilism that fired a rocket at the undefended Gazan home of the Palestinian doctor, Izzeldin Abuelaish, in 2008, killing his three daughters and his niece. It is nihilism to make a long term prison camp of the Gaza Strip. Nihilism has unleashed the tsunami of concrete across the occupied territories. ...

...Look to the editions in this book fair, the numbers translated in and out of Hebrew, or to the number of successful patent applications, (astonishing for a small country) or the numbers of scientific papers cited, the breakthroughs in solar energy technologies, the sell-out concerts around the world for the Jerusalem Quartet. The creative energy index is high and so is the capability. But where is Israel's political creativity? What do national politicians have to compete constructively with Israel's artists and scientists? Surely not the concrete mixer? Surely not the eviction order? We have all read the documents leaked to Al Jazeera. That was surely not the best Israeli politicians could do...In this context, the opposite of nihilism is creativity.

To describe political violence as nihilism is to deny it an interiority, to reject the possibility that it might form part of a distinctively human project, a form of action that is intelligible, that is rooted in positive goals, aspirations, plans, feelings, that is executed with creative force and ingenuity, that its failures and successes can be exhilarating, satisfying, crushing, disappointing. This is a strange statement coming from a novelist who, a paragraph later, can assure us that

There is no man, woman or child, Israeli or Palestinian, or from any other background, whose mind the novel cannot lovingly reconstruct.

Surely, then, after that declaration of the omniscience and infinite empathy, the novel and the novelist should be able to reconstruct lovingly the mind of a suicide bomber. Surely the novelist who holds that principle should be able to reconstruct lovingly even the mind of those who are now systematically ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem (and whose hand McEwan shook). If McEwan were to seriously apply his professional insight to the political situation he is facing in Jerusalem, he should have been able to reconstruct in his imagination a plausible series of choices and circumstances that ended with the Protocols being cited in the Hamas charter, and furthermore, do so "lovingly." Such an empathy guided attention to human existence in its particularity does not preclude a negative judgment, but it does preclude exactly the kind of rhetorical knee jerk that characterizes McEwan's canned bashing of Hamas. (And don't even bother asking why McEwan reserves his vitriol to Hamas rather than, for example, the venality and the torture chambers of the Abu Mazen bantustanat.)

If McEwan were to apply the tools of his trade to the political situation he is facing in Jerusalem, he would not have made a distinction between the nihilism of Israeli politicians and the ingenuity of Israeli scientists. The flechette bomblet, the corner shooting rifle, the smart fence, the DIME bomb, are all products of the ingenuity and creativity of Israeli scientists and at the same time essential elements of the crimes McEwan describes as "nihilism". And the scientists are hardly alone. The politicians who designed the "matrix of control" that dominates Palestinian lives, are they not creative? The peace process that never ends and never progresses, is it not an ingenious solution to the actual challenges that Israel's generals and statesmen faced within their own understanding of "the situation"? The legal system that makes the territories at once subject to Israeli power and outside Israeli law, is it not a brilliant solution to the position of Israel as a colonial settler state in a supposedly "post-colonial" world? The uniquely Israeli separation between citizenship and nationality, is it not an ingenious way to institutionalize racism against the native people while maintaining the appearance of a liberal democracy within the green line?

I don't think McEwan is incapable of these insights. After all, if the vain Ehud Barak, a death squad commander and mass murderer, was able to muster the empathy needed for imagining himself becoming a Palestinian terrorist, I have no doubt McEwan can as well. It is not his imagination that failed, but his will. It is a matter of intellectual cowardice.

For if McEwan were to actually think about the politics he entered by being awarded the prize, if he thought through the violence of both sides, not as the equivalent abstract failure of creativity but as two distinctive, concrete, and morally worlds apart, human projects, he would have had to make choices. The one choice that he would have had to deny himself is the course of action he actually took, of believing that he can do good by pretending that everybody is on the same side, that the conflict can be solved simply by re-framing it, and by lecturing everyone to get good and "creative". At least, he he would have had to deny himself the comfort of not knowing that his lecture and even his wagging finger against the settlements did nothing more than armed the apartheid regime with a continuing sense of normalcy and legitimacy.

McEwan addressed his remarks to "Israeli and Palestinian [citizens]". He mentioned a long list of mostly British, but also a few non-British, writers. The living writers from the area he mentioned however, are three Israeli authors, to be precise, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz, whom he calls "the conscience of the country." There are, significantly, no Palestinians among the authors. Palestinian authors do not inspire McEwan. For someone given a prize for his contribution to freedom, for someone who eulogizes literature for celebrating the downtrodden, that seems at least eyebrow raising. He knew he was going to the contested city of Jerusalem. He knew there are Jews and Palestinians there, and that the downtrodden there, that's mostly Palestinians. He could have faked it, googling the name of a Palestinian writer. He could have actually read something by a Palestinian writer. He could have at least apologized that he hasn't read anything by a Palestinian. But he chose neither. There may be two people in Jerusalem, but there is only one culture worthy of attention for McEwan in Jerusalem, an Israeli-Jewish one.

The three authors he mentions are not just any authors, but pillars of the Israeli establishment and globe trotting celebrities like McEwan, writers whose every shopping list, let alone literary work, has been translated into most European languages. We can safely conclude that McEwan's access to the literary cultures of the region is strictly filtered through the glitzy side of European culture industry and its politics. The content of that politics is reflected in what he presents as a European history of the novel.

The English tradition is just one among many, but it is intimately connected with all others. We speak of a Jewish tradition in the novel -- a vast, complex tradition, but still bound by common themes: a sometimes ironical attitude to a god; acceptance of an underlying metaphysical comedy and above all, in a world of suffering and oppression, deep sympathy for the individual as victim; finally, determination to grant to the downtrodden the respect that fiction can confer when it illuminates the inner life. We find the strands in the existential allegories of Kafka's In the Penal Colony and The Trial; in the sadness and beauty of Bruno Schulz, in the work of Primo Levi as he gave individual voice in the nightmare of the Shoah, that industrialised cruelty which will remain always the ultimate measure of human depravity, of how far we can fall; in IB Singer's fiction, which conferred dignity on the cramped lives of immigrants; in different terms we find a parallel theme in Saul Bellow, whose agonised intellectual heroes struggle ineffectually to flourish in a raucous, materialist culture. Always, the victim, the stranger, the enemy and the outcast, the face in the crowd, becomes a fully realised being by the grace of fiction's magic dust -- a dust
whose recipe is an open secret -- full attention to detail, empathy, respect.

This tradition is vigorously upheld in Israel's literary culture -- and right from the beginning of the founding of the state. A recent discovery for me has been S Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh, published in 1949 -- the luminous account of the clearing of an Arab village during the '48 war -- and of a protest that never quite leaves the throat of its narrator as the houses are demolished and the villagers driven from their land.

There is a British novel. There is an Israeli novel. And there is a Jewish novel, whose focus on the holocaust and the victim ties together Israeliness and Europeanness. The common thread of all is, allegedly, the focus of the outcast individual, a focus which is "vigorously upheld in Israel's literary culture." This literary history builds a facile continuity between the major literature of Europe, embodied by Jane Austen, the minor literature of Jewish European authors (such as Kafka, already a stretch, what two authors could be further away as these two), and the literature of Israeli Jews. The history of the novel that McEwan offers thus affirms the two major points of Zionist ideology, that Israel fulfills Jewish history and that Israeli culture is European in essence.

Now, to put it mildly, McEwan, who doesn't read Hebrew, speaks in ignorance and is merely shuffling stereotypes. His crowning example, S. Izhar's Khirbet Hize'a, is an exception, almost a freak accident, not merely in Hebrew literature, but even in its author's own career, whose major work was an epic paean to the "conquest" of the Negev. Unlike the works of the three superstars, Khirbet Hize'a was kept carefully hidden from the world, only translated to English for the first time in 2008, when there was no longer any danger that it would inform Europeans about the events narrated, and thus could be repackaged as another example of superior Israeli sensitivity. And Khirbet Hize'a doesn't focus on the "inner life of the downtrodden." How could it? It is a tale told by a soldier of an ethnic cleansing army and from his point of view, illuminating, and in a rather flattering way, the inner conflicts of the colonizers. Reading Khirbet Khize'a as proving the Israel's high moral sensitivity is like reading "Heart of Darkness" as proof of the higher morality of Europe. (which, by the way, is probably McEwan's point.) Comparing Izhar to Kafka, if McEwan had wanted to actually do that, would only have highlighted the sharp discontinuity between Israeli and Jewish diasporic literary forms and sensibilities.

The paragons of that Euro-Judeo-Israeli continuum (which perforce must erase Palestinian literature, as the latter can only spoil the argument) do not quite fit the enlightened role that McEwan makes for them. Apart from the fact that A.B. Yehoshua's literature and public pronouncements are both hostile to the Jewish diaspora, and apart for the fact that this died in the wool racist described Arab writers writing in Hebrew as a threat to Israeli culture, Yehoshua not only endorsed the mass murder in Gaza (which McEwan called nihilist), but anticipated it, advocated for it, and defended it after the fact. It is true Yehoshua opposes the settlements. But McEwan should have taken the time to ask why. Already in 2004, Yehoshua explained his support for removing the settlers from Gaza on the assumption that it would facilitate genocidal war crimes:

After we remove the [isolated] settlements and after we stop being an occupation army, all the rules of war will be different. We will exercise our full force. We will not have to run around looking for this terrorist or that instigator -- we will make use of force against an entire population. We will use total force. Because from the minute we withdraw I don't want to know their names. I don't want any personal relations with them. I am no longer in a situation of occupation and policing and B'Tselem [the Israeli human rights organization]. Instead, I will be standing opposite them in a position of nation versus nation. State versus state. (J. Cook, 2006)

David Grossman was not as precocious, but he too made himself available for the defense of the slaughter of civilians in Gaza in 2009. a few days into the massacre, in a disgusting New York Times op-ed that reads like a strategy brief from a consigliere to his mafia don, Grossman endorsed the slaughter of by then over 400 people, mostly civilians, and wounding of thousands, as made necessary by Hamas's (imaginary) refusal to compromise. Amos Oz was not far behind. On the same day he joined his friend Yehoshua in op-eds in Italian newspapers, dutifully repeating the line of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, that "Hamas was responsible for the violence".

If these three are the "conscience of a country", that country would be better off without one. You probably couldn't find anywhere finer examples of the employment of literary skill and notoriety for the purpose of, not the "determination to grant to the downtrodden the respect that fiction can confer when it illuminates the inner life", but rather the determination to provide the political and military establishment with rhetorical cover as they go on killing the latter with impunity.

How could McEwan get Israeli culture so wrong? The simplest answer I believe would be the right one, "class and race." McEwan knows about Israel what he reads in the Guardian, and what he is told by his glitzy Israeli celebrity friends, friends who share his class prejudices and his white supremacist beliefs about Western culture. If you're looking for insight, look elsewhere. But if you are looking for evidence that Israel is becoming so unpalatable that even the McEwans of the world cannot afford to remain silent, there is your evidence.

The full transcript of the conversation between Ian McEwan and Shimon Peres at the Jerusalem Prize Ceremony

Ian McEwan: Nice meeting you, Mr. President.

Shimon Peres: Oh Ian, can I call you Ian? What a pleasure to meet you! You must know I am a great admirer of your books!

Ian McEwan: I am truly honored. Anything in particular?

Shimon Peres: you know, we used to have that Zionist song when I was young, that we would cover the homeland with "a dress of concrete and cement." And we did it! When you look at Jerusalem today, look at the mountains. A dress of concrete and cement. Isn't that wonderful? Your "Cement Garden" always reminds me of that.

Ian: But, Mr. President. I am not certain that this is what the book was about. I was more interested in children trying to cope with an extreme situation.

Shimon: Exactly what I meant! Weren't we all? Children in extreme situations? I was barely passing thirty when I plotted my first false flag terrorist attack in Egypt.

Ian: I hardly think thirty qualifies as a child. But perhaps, Mr. President, you are confusing my novel with "the lord of the flies?"

Shimon: Not at all! Not at all! Just coming out of the holocaust, traumatized, really, just like those children, having to deal with Nasser's attempts to tie down our hands with peace. Syria offering us peace. The King of Jordan ready to divide Palestine with us. The US even offering our little state a defense pact if we only agreed to make peace with Egypt. That was the time when I started my political career. You can't imagine how lonely and endangered we felt. We were scared to death. We had to be creative. Apropos the holocaust, I really liked how you managed to insert a mention of Dachau in the very first paragraph of your speech today. That's the thing I admire about creative types like yourself. If you ever want to be an ambassador for Israel, call me.

Ian: Oh Mr. President, I am flattered...I hardly think...oh...but there was something I wanted to discuss with you.

Shimon: Of course, Ian, I always enjoy conversations with writers. Thankfully, I don't know how it is in Britain. But Israeli writers always enjoy the illusion that they have the ears of our politicians. Let's walk to the pastry table and you tell me everything what's on your mind.

Ian: It's the settlements.

Shimon: Yes, the settlements. Terrible business. Terrible. Shortsighted. We are digging our own grave. When I started the settlement project, we had young men and women with values. They treated their Palestinian neighbors like...

Ian: You started it?

Shimon: But of course, Ian. Those were the days. Just after the Six Days War. Covering the homeland in "a dress of concrete and cement". Fence and stockade. After 1967, we were at the beginning again. We were reborn again and then reborn again again. God has granted us a second start, to do in Judea and Samaria what the generation before us did in Jaffa and Lydda and Haifa. We were so beautiful, so energized!

Ian: I don't know what to say.

Shimon: If you care for the advice of an old Israeli politician, when you don't know what to say, mention the holocaust!

Ian: Mr. President, no offense, but I need to insist. I came here to be honored for my "contribution to the freedom of the individual in society" and I must tell you that people all over the world are shocked by the way Palestinians in this city even are denied their freedom.

Shimon: Ian, I am with you on that. It is terrible. But as you said yourself in your speech, unlike Hamas, at least we "have embraced freedom of thought and open discourse" and we at least have "a precious tradition of a democracy of ideas in Israel." What can I do that there is nothing like that on the other side?

Ian: That's not what I read from wikileaks. But why don't you just stop the confiscations here in Sheikh Jarrah?

Shimon: We are ready to talk about everything. We and the Palestinians need to negotiate. It's not that complicated. We give a little. They give a little. And we reach a compromise. But if they don't want to talk.. if they only want to do shows and publicity stunts like that damned flotilla...

Ian: You need an international treaty to stop kicking defenseless people out of their homes?

Shimon: This khummus dip is excellent. Too bad I have to watch my cholesterol. The doctors believe they can keep me alive forever...and sometimes I start believing that too.

Ian: I was hoping I could make a difference.

Shimon: But you did already. Wait! Stand still for the camera. Here, give me your hand. Like that. Thank you guys! You're doing a fantasic job. Ian, you have no idea how much the moral support of people like you means to us. Here on the Jordan River is the frontier of Western Civilization, the frontier of Europe. We stand between you an the hords of fanatical Islam that want to take over the world. Egypt can succumb to the masses. Bahrain can succumb to the masses. Jordan can succumb to the masses. But Israel will always remain a civilized, Western country. We protect you from them with our lives on the line, so that, as you said in your speech, you can live in Britain, "in relative stability." Never forget that!

Ian: What about the Palestinians here in Jerusalem?

Shimon: It's tragic. But their situation here is temporary.

Ian: what about the settlements?

Shimon: Ian, Ian! You know about Bismark, do you? Bismark said that politics are like sausage. If you want to be able to enjoy them, you don't want to see how they are made. What's going on here is not very pretty. But this is the price you pay for keeping your country prosperous and safe. And all we ask in return is a little appreciation and a little support. I'll tell you what, next year, you should bring your wife and I'll take you around the desert in a Jeep. The desert is amazing on a starry night.

Ian: Why do I suddenly feel so dirty?

Shimon: you have dip on your tie.

Margaret Atwood believes in dialogue, unless she is criticized, and she likes submissive natives as well

My previous post, Novelistic Scabs, criticizing Atwood and Ghosh, didn't get approved in the comments to her posting of the two's "acceptance speech" for the Dan David prize on Atwood's blog. It was deleted twice.

She does allow critical views. My post wasn't more critical than other comments she let through. It was more detailed, and rather than merely challenging them on moral grounds, it also paid close attention to how poor the logic of their arguments was. I guess that was just too painful. So much for openness to views not her own, that she so pretentiously described as her trademark and the reason for accepting the prize!

But half a million dollars can sooth a lot of wounds to a writer's ego.

Oh, by the way, she went to the West Bank. If you're interested in how one can make literary experiments, nouveau roman and poliphonic turds out of apartheid, go and read her collection of "Israelis said, Palestinians said" cliches.

There, in the Occupied West Bank, Atwood had an amazing discovery:

Nor was there an avoidance of the situation: on the contrary, people really wanted to talk about it. These people were from many areas, but self-selected, of course. (That is: There are a lot of people from extremes and semi-extremes who would not have talked to me, and certainly not freely).

Some people didn't avoid talking about the situation with a visitor who tours the West Bank and meets them in the process of explicitly pretending to be interested in the situation. Can you imagine? But what about those "from the extreme and semi-extremes." who wouldn't talk to her? Why not call them extremists, given that this is what she wants to say? How did Atwood realize that some people don't care whether she understands them? Did they refuse to meet with her? Or is it simply her projection? She doesn't say. What exactly does she mean by saying that people "from the extreme and semi-extremes" would not be speaking "freely"? What opposition between freedom and lack of it is being presented?

People from the semi-extremes are people who shun conversation, or make preconditions, or if they speak, they do not speak "freely." Presumably, their "extreme" politics gets in a way of providing Atwood with decontextualized shreds of discourse. That is, presumably, people from "extremes and semi-extremes" tend to maintain their right to speak in their own voice, to make sense and present a coherent speech rather than to become formelss material for someone's else discourse. That means they do not speak "freely." To speak freely consists on providing Atwood with cliches such as

'A war of the strong against the weak will always fail.’ ” “There are no stereotypes that fit.” “It’s like a roll that’s stuck in your throat: you can’t swallow it, you can’t cough it up.”

That is, "freedom," for Atwood, is willingness to submit, to be someone else's raw material, not to make sense but to be the object one makes sense of. To speak freely is to speak like one speaks to a therapist, hesitantly at first, but with increasing openness once one realizes "the other" is a blank stare, without any identity or content, the ideal, apolitical, neutral listener:

there was some initial tentativeness about me—where did I stand, did I have preconceptions? Being neither an Israeli, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, nor Christian, nor American, was probably facilitating.

Free speech is therefore the opposition of politics, that is of speech that is engaged in the demand of freedom. Free speech is speech free from the constraints imposed by a concern for freedom. Lack of freedom is the condition of those who insist of a measure of control of their position in the conversation. They are constrained by, made "unfree", presumably, by their claim to speak as one who is free, or as one who wants to be free; they might not even speak to her. The main opposition that structures Atwood's impression of the native is thus the one between "speaking freely" and speaking as a political Subject who demands freedom. That is, what Atwood's calls the freedom of the native, is in fact the freedom of the ethnographic visitor to control the representation of the native.

I assume that a quite a few Palestinians told her not to bother dropping by, given that she accepted a prize at Tel-Aviv University that violated the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Painful! But again, half a million dollars can sooth a lot of wounds to a writer's ego.