Friday, July 21, 2006
A Tale of Two Nobel Prize Winners
Recently on Ready Steady Book I came across a link to an essay (apparently written in 2002) by the distinguished Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In it he bitterly attacks Jose Saramago, the distinguished Portuguese writer and 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
What divides them is not literature but politics and history; in a word, Israel.
Kertész is a passionate supporter of Israel, and as a Holocaust survivor and former inmate of Auschwitz he was appalled by Saramago’s bitter criticisms of human rights violations committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories in early 2002:
I saw the Portugese writer Saramago on TV, how he bent over a sheet of paper, compared Israel’s line against the Palestinians with Auschwitz—proof that the author did not have the slightest idea of the scandalous irrelevance of his comparison. Even worse, he did not know that the concept represented by the term Auschwitz has long had a fixed meaning in Europe’s cultural consensus and can be used indisputably in a populist way and for populist purposes.
What exactly did Saramago say? According to one report:
On a visit to Israel, Jose Saramago declared to Portuguese radio station Antenna 1, that “It must be said that in Palestine, there is a crime which we can stop. We may compare it with what happened at Auschwitz”.
He added that only by visiting the territory and seeing first-hand the repressive policy adopted by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians, could the injustice of the situation be understood. He reported that he had seen an ambulance carrying a pregnant Palestinian woman stopped at the border. She was refused entry and the baby was delivered in the vehicle. Others have not been so lucky.
In one incident, in October 2001, a pregnant Palestinian woman was left dying in the street near a checkpoint which had refused her entry, with the Israeli soldiers standing around laughing and jeering at one less terrorist being born.
In The Guardian (December 28, 2002), Saramago clarified his position:
Six months after his visit to Ramallah, Saramago confirmed that he spoke as he intended. "To have said that Israel's action is to be condemned, that war crimes are being perpetrated - really the Israelis are used to that. It doesn't bother them. But there are certain words they can't stand. And to say 'Auschwitz' there... note well, I didn't say that Ramallah was the same as Auschwitz, that would be stupid. What I said was that the spirit of Auschwitz was present in Ramallah. We were eight writers. They all made condemning statements, Wole Soyinka, Breyten Breytenbach, Vincenzo Consolo and others. But the Israelis weren't bothered about those. It was the fact that I put my finger in the Auschwitz wound that made them jump."
Saramago arrived in Israel as part of a delegation from ‘the International Parliament of Writers’ (IPW), which consisted, apart from Saramago, of Russell Banks (USA), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Bei Dao (China), Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Vincenzo Consolo (Italy), and Christian Salmon (IPW Executive Director). The IPW also runs an “appeal for peace in Palestine.”
In his essay Kertész says that he “met no Israeli intellectual who doubts the importance of a Palestinian state.” But Ran HaCohen of Tel-Aviv University's Department of Comparative Literature had a different take on this controversy:
No one asked what Saramago had seen to make him use such an appalling analogy. Ramallah was forgotten immediately, only Auschwitz was left. The entire liberal intellectual main-stream – from playwright Yehoshua Sobol to rhinocerised Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit – did its best to attack and discredit Saramago. How vociferous can one be when shouting consensus slogans. And how quiet can one be when a critical word is required.
Of Israel's countless writers and poets, of the entire glorious literary milieu, only six persons bothered to sign the IPW appeal, long before Saramago's words. One of the six is an Israeli Arab (translator and writer Mohamad Ghanayem), three are Israeli Jews of oriental origin (writer Shimon Ballas, children's books writer Ronit Chacham, poet Sami Shalom-Chetrit), and of European origin we have poet Yizchak Laor and playwright Matti Meged. Have you ever heard of them? Probably not. But you probably did hear of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and their ilk. Now you know why. They did not sign the appeal. But they would be more than happy to attack Saramago, I am sure.
So this is the Auschwitz logic in a nutshell. Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death-camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison.
Saramago’s disgust at the crimes of the Israeli army is understandable. But the phrase “the spirit of Auschwitz” could be read two ways. The first would be to define Auschwitz as the ultimate expression of sectarianism and racism. This is presumably the sense in which Saramago uses it. The spirit of racism and sectarianism, he argues, drives the Jewish state and leads to its excesses.
But “The spirit of Auschwitz” could just as reasonably be defined as genocide. What happened at Auschwitz was deliberate extermination, organised with all the bureaucratic and technological resources of an advanced society (the US company IBM was pleased to assist), on a vast, industrial scale. Zionism was from its origins a racist, sectarian and reactionary project, quite consciously intending to dispossess a people of their land and transfer them elsewhere, but it was never consciously a genocidal project. The Zionist dream was of Palestinian land and expelling, not exterminating, the natives. But as what’s happening in Lebanon today indicates, there is a genocidal impulse inside the self-righteous and chauvinist Jewish state. It’s not hard to imagine that one day Israel will commit an atrocity on a scale so spectacular it will dwarf all the previous barbarisms which have formed a core aspect of its 58-year existence.
Kertész complains that Saramago “did not know that the concept represented by the term Auschwitz has long had a fixed meaning in Europe’s cultural consensus and can be used indisputably in a populist way and for populist purposes.” But surely Saramago did know exactly what he was doing. He chose to use the Auschwitz analogy precisely because he knew it would offend. Saramago simply inverted the orthodox narrative and threw it back in the face of Israel and its supporters. Imre Kertész’s banal assertion that “This land [of Israel] was built with hard work” is itself offensive in its erasure of the Naqba and failure to acknowledge the massive sponsorship of the Jewish state by the great imperialist powers, interested only in control of the Middle East for its oil.
It’s noticeable that Kertész cannot bring himself to utter one word of sympathy for the victims of Jewish terror or one word of criticism of the actions of the Israeli army. His fleeting reference to “Israel’s line against the Palestinians” (my italics) is a euphemism worthy of David Irving. He adopts the usual Zionist strategy of proposing that Israel=Jews, which allows him to draw the conventionally trite conclusion that critics of human rights abuses by Israel are anti-Semites. There is the usual feverish nonsense about anti-Semitism boiling up all over the world. His rhetorical sleight of hand then allows him to equate the war criminals of the Israeli army with the persecuted Jews of Europe in the Hitler era: “The object of hate is a people which is in no way ready to disappear from the face of the earth.” But the flaw in that reasoning is that the leading critics of the Israeli state and its human rights abuses have always been Jews: Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart, just as some of the most authoritative exposures of the orthodox Zionist narrative have been by Jewish (often Israeli) historians: Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Ahron Bregman.
In it he bitterly attacks Jose Saramago, the distinguished Portuguese writer and 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
What divides them is not literature but politics and history; in a word, Israel.
Kertész is a passionate supporter of Israel, and as a Holocaust survivor and former inmate of Auschwitz he was appalled by Saramago’s bitter criticisms of human rights violations committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories in early 2002:
I saw the Portugese writer Saramago on TV, how he bent over a sheet of paper, compared Israel’s line against the Palestinians with Auschwitz—proof that the author did not have the slightest idea of the scandalous irrelevance of his comparison. Even worse, he did not know that the concept represented by the term Auschwitz has long had a fixed meaning in Europe’s cultural consensus and can be used indisputably in a populist way and for populist purposes.
What exactly did Saramago say? According to one report:
On a visit to Israel, Jose Saramago declared to Portuguese radio station Antenna 1, that “It must be said that in Palestine, there is a crime which we can stop. We may compare it with what happened at Auschwitz”.
He added that only by visiting the territory and seeing first-hand the repressive policy adopted by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians, could the injustice of the situation be understood. He reported that he had seen an ambulance carrying a pregnant Palestinian woman stopped at the border. She was refused entry and the baby was delivered in the vehicle. Others have not been so lucky.
In one incident, in October 2001, a pregnant Palestinian woman was left dying in the street near a checkpoint which had refused her entry, with the Israeli soldiers standing around laughing and jeering at one less terrorist being born.
In The Guardian (December 28, 2002), Saramago clarified his position:
Six months after his visit to Ramallah, Saramago confirmed that he spoke as he intended. "To have said that Israel's action is to be condemned, that war crimes are being perpetrated - really the Israelis are used to that. It doesn't bother them. But there are certain words they can't stand. And to say 'Auschwitz' there... note well, I didn't say that Ramallah was the same as Auschwitz, that would be stupid. What I said was that the spirit of Auschwitz was present in Ramallah. We were eight writers. They all made condemning statements, Wole Soyinka, Breyten Breytenbach, Vincenzo Consolo and others. But the Israelis weren't bothered about those. It was the fact that I put my finger in the Auschwitz wound that made them jump."
Saramago arrived in Israel as part of a delegation from ‘the International Parliament of Writers’ (IPW), which consisted, apart from Saramago, of Russell Banks (USA), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Bei Dao (China), Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Vincenzo Consolo (Italy), and Christian Salmon (IPW Executive Director). The IPW also runs an “appeal for peace in Palestine.”
In his essay Kertész says that he “met no Israeli intellectual who doubts the importance of a Palestinian state.” But Ran HaCohen of Tel-Aviv University's Department of Comparative Literature had a different take on this controversy:
No one asked what Saramago had seen to make him use such an appalling analogy. Ramallah was forgotten immediately, only Auschwitz was left. The entire liberal intellectual main-stream – from playwright Yehoshua Sobol to rhinocerised Ha'aretz journalist Ari Shavit – did its best to attack and discredit Saramago. How vociferous can one be when shouting consensus slogans. And how quiet can one be when a critical word is required.
Of Israel's countless writers and poets, of the entire glorious literary milieu, only six persons bothered to sign the IPW appeal, long before Saramago's words. One of the six is an Israeli Arab (translator and writer Mohamad Ghanayem), three are Israeli Jews of oriental origin (writer Shimon Ballas, children's books writer Ronit Chacham, poet Sami Shalom-Chetrit), and of European origin we have poet Yizchak Laor and playwright Matti Meged. Have you ever heard of them? Probably not. But you probably did hear of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and their ilk. Now you know why. They did not sign the appeal. But they would be more than happy to attack Saramago, I am sure.
So this is the Auschwitz logic in a nutshell. Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death-camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison.
Saramago’s disgust at the crimes of the Israeli army is understandable. But the phrase “the spirit of Auschwitz” could be read two ways. The first would be to define Auschwitz as the ultimate expression of sectarianism and racism. This is presumably the sense in which Saramago uses it. The spirit of racism and sectarianism, he argues, drives the Jewish state and leads to its excesses.
But “The spirit of Auschwitz” could just as reasonably be defined as genocide. What happened at Auschwitz was deliberate extermination, organised with all the bureaucratic and technological resources of an advanced society (the US company IBM was pleased to assist), on a vast, industrial scale. Zionism was from its origins a racist, sectarian and reactionary project, quite consciously intending to dispossess a people of their land and transfer them elsewhere, but it was never consciously a genocidal project. The Zionist dream was of Palestinian land and expelling, not exterminating, the natives. But as what’s happening in Lebanon today indicates, there is a genocidal impulse inside the self-righteous and chauvinist Jewish state. It’s not hard to imagine that one day Israel will commit an atrocity on a scale so spectacular it will dwarf all the previous barbarisms which have formed a core aspect of its 58-year existence.
Kertész complains that Saramago “did not know that the concept represented by the term Auschwitz has long had a fixed meaning in Europe’s cultural consensus and can be used indisputably in a populist way and for populist purposes.” But surely Saramago did know exactly what he was doing. He chose to use the Auschwitz analogy precisely because he knew it would offend. Saramago simply inverted the orthodox narrative and threw it back in the face of Israel and its supporters. Imre Kertész’s banal assertion that “This land [of Israel] was built with hard work” is itself offensive in its erasure of the Naqba and failure to acknowledge the massive sponsorship of the Jewish state by the great imperialist powers, interested only in control of the Middle East for its oil.
It’s noticeable that Kertész cannot bring himself to utter one word of sympathy for the victims of Jewish terror or one word of criticism of the actions of the Israeli army. His fleeting reference to “Israel’s line against the Palestinians” (my italics) is a euphemism worthy of David Irving. He adopts the usual Zionist strategy of proposing that Israel=Jews, which allows him to draw the conventionally trite conclusion that critics of human rights abuses by Israel are anti-Semites. There is the usual feverish nonsense about anti-Semitism boiling up all over the world. His rhetorical sleight of hand then allows him to equate the war criminals of the Israeli army with the persecuted Jews of Europe in the Hitler era: “The object of hate is a people which is in no way ready to disappear from the face of the earth.” But the flaw in that reasoning is that the leading critics of the Israeli state and its human rights abuses have always been Jews: Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart, just as some of the most authoritative exposures of the orthodox Zionist narrative have been by Jewish (often Israeli) historians: Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Ahron Bregman.
# posted by Ellis : 10:32 PM
