Writers Turn on Israel

The call by 1,000 writers to boycott Israeli cultural institutions is a moment to mark just how far the arts have fallen. The glee with which the wordsmiths have wheeled on the Jewish state may surface something rotten in the republic of letters. It cannot come, though, as a surprise. Even great minds — and mediocre ones — have been drawn to blaming the Jews. Just ask Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, or Ta-Nehisi Coates. The boycott’s organizers claim that “this mass declaration represents the biggest cultural boycott against Israeli cultural institutions in history.” They shun writers, publishers, translators, and the like who fail to “denounce and distance themselves from Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime” and endorse “the right of return.” Torquemada would be proud of the claim that of 98 Israeli publishers investigated, only one met these demands.The writers lecture Israelis that “an ethical and non-complicit position is possible” — if they commit national seppuku. No notice is taken of such factors in Israel’s predicament, as, say, Hamas, Iran, October 7, antisemitism, Hezbollah, or the 101 hostages still held at Gaza. They accuse Israel’s cultural institutions of “artwashing” and “whitewashing.” This is the language of a campus struggle session, not Shakespeare. It telegraphs poor thinking.Most astonishing is the signatories’ stance that all Israelis are presumed “complicit” if they have “never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Never mind that no mention is made of Hamas’s intent to slaughter Jews or Tehran’s vow to wipe the Jewish state off the map. Were this worldview to find fictional expression, it would be a cartoon or a children’s book. Though that would do injustice to children’s literature.Odiousness is added by the effort to marshal prestige to deodorize this warped worldview. The letter boasts that it boasts the signatures of “winners of the Nobel Prize, Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award.” Its endorsements come from boldface names like Sally Rooney, Annie Ernaux, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Leslie Jamison. Would these scribes have been free to hone their craft and find their voices under Hamas? The closing of the literary mind augurs ill not for Israel — the Jewish state has its own constellations of literary talent — but for the West. It suggests an incurious, conformist generation of writers who have thrown in their lot with the kind of illiberalism that would come for their typewriters first and ask questions never. It is an extension of the cheerleading of campus riots and the meltdown over a CBS anchor challenging Mr. Coates’s tendentiousness.. The historian Fani Oz-Salzberger, daughter of Israeli novelist Amos Oz — a peacenik, by the way — took to X to explain that her father “would have been sad, disgusted, but proud to be banned by these 1000 writers and literati” and that he’d “be the first to tell these virtue signallers that they are historically and politically ignorant.” Imagine canceling not only Oz, but, say, the wondrous Yehuda Amichai or the subtle David Grossman. How about the Bible? One of the signatories, Sally Rooney, has for years forbidden her accounts of Irish ennui to be translated into Hebrew. The irony, as the writer Lionel Shriver notes in the Free Press, is that “like most Western literary subcultures these days, Israel’s is predominantly left wing.” The point, though, hardly appears to be persuasion. The boycott is peddling the kinds of fictions — blood libels come to mind — that have done real harm.

Writers Turn on Israel

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