Talk about burying the lede. From a Haaretz article on the boycott movement in Ireland comes this tidbit:
Uri Dromi, the manger of Mishkenot Sha'ananim that hosts the festival said that "there is an increasing feeling of cultural siege and despite our success in attracting major writers, some of them, particularly from Britain, have come under huge pressure not to participate." He said that he had tried to invite South African writer and Nobel Prize laureate J. M. Coetzee "but he told me that he would come when the peace process goes forward."
I'm trying to find more on Coetzee's decision. In the meantime, for more on the International Writers Festival in Jerusalem see here and here.
Somebody else who knows firsthand what apartheid is.
Very good letter in the Guardian from a very senior UK politician
link to guardian.co.uk
Israel’s ambassador, Daniel Taub, is right to say the Unison boycott is discriminatory (From boycott to bigotry, 9 May). That is the unavoidable crudity of all boycotts, which are usually last-resort expedients when governments do nothing. For many there is no other practical means of expressing, with any sniff of effectiveness, abhorrence at the relentless colonisation by Israel of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (appropriating so far well over 40% of their land mass by recent Foreign Office calculations). The fact that a significant minority of Israelis, and many Jews here, vehemently oppose both that colonisation and Gaza’s slow strangulation, with the oppression and humiliation that attends them, only underlines the complete failure of western (particularly US and UK) diplomacy, replete as it is with double standards. If the Israeli government were remotely interested in accommodation with Palestine, as opposed to its subjugation, they would long ago have ceased their annexation programme, as President Obama once rightly demanded they should – only to be ignominiously overridden by Mr Netanyahu with complete impunity. Mr Taub is yet another plausible apologist for Israeli policy which, ironically, is founded on the very “bigotry and prejudice” he charges Unison with. Some of us so avidly labelled as antisemites by Zionist hardliners believe passionately in the right of Israel to exist in peace and security behind its lawful borders, and are also convinced that its policies are profoundly self-damaging.
Andrew Phillips
House of Lords
“[W]hen the peace process goes forward?”
What’s that mean? How about: when wall comes down and the settlers are removed OR IN THE ALTERNATIVE when a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine is signed and RATIFIED. (I’ll pass on what that last means w.r.t. Palestine. does PLO still exist? still speak for all the Palestinian diaspora?)
I would expect nothing less of the author of The Life and Times of Michael K. Has someone come up with a “washing” term for this yet? What colour is freedom?
What a nice plug for BDS!!! Which are the other two countries?
It gives other nations something to aspire to.
Possibly Britain and Spain:
When the “Israeli” ambassador to Spain, Raphael Schutz, finished his term in Madrid he wrote an op-ed in Haaretz he termed as a very dismal stay & seemed genuinely relieved to leave. This kind of complaint now seems to be standard farewell letter of all their ambassadors in W.Europe. “Israeli” ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, on his way to his new posting at UN in NY, complaining very much in same tone about his inability to speak in campuses in UK & whining about overall hostile atmosphere. Before him the ambassador in Dublin expressed similar relief when he ended his term in office in Ireland.
One of the other two is most likely Norway.
Well Go Irish!
Ireland knows what it is to be the victim of a colonial settler enterprise. In Ireland, it lasted some 800 years.
Ali Abunimah has recently written on the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland as a model for a possible peace deal in Israel/Palestine: Finkelstein, BDS and the destruction of Israel.
800 years? I’ve heard that my whole life, and yet it’s
Meaningless to speak of “colonisation” pre Cromwell. In any event, we certainly have a high opinion of our moral rectitude as a result.
Old English and Normans certainly settled in Ireland in considerable numbers in the centuries after the initial Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169-71. Now, it’s true that these pre-Reformation settlers eventually became assimilated into Irish society, especially after the Reformation took place in England and was at any rate attempted in Ireland, with ever-increasing numbers of Protestants brought in, from whom the Old English, who remained Catholic like their Gaelic neighbors, felt estranged, but the fact remains that they were originally colonial settlers. (I am myself three-quarters Gaelic and one-quarter Old English/Norman, and the prevalence of Norman and English surnames among the present-day Irish shows how numerous these early settlers must have been.)
Certainly the Protestant English (and eventually Scots) who were settled in Ireland from Tudor times onward exhibited a typical colonial settler mentality well before Cromwell. To see this, you have only to read a work like colonist/poet Edmund Spenser‘s A View of the Present State of Ireland of 1596, which is as racist (and genocidal) a work as one could well imagine.
Juxtaposition just happens, but it’s also tool to make a point, and often a tool to deceive. In this case, the ‘writers being pressured’ is juxtaposed with Coetzee not coming leading to a spontaneous suggestion that Coetzee was under pressure. I can’t tell if that’s deliberate. It could even be my dirty mind!
The article quotes Dromi as saying Tom Rob Smith was ‘attacked’ on his Facebook page. In fact Smith, writing for Israel Hayom, is clear that the boycott campaign was ‘intense’ but never aggressive. Israel Hayom was launched in 2007 by the billionaire Sheldon Adelson, of whom one prominent Israeli journalist said “When it comes to his views on the Palestinian Israel conflict he is a right-wing extremist”, and it is referred to by Israelis as the “Bibiton,” or Bibi’s mouthpiece. Not only did Tom Rob Smith agree to write for Sheldon Adelson’s paper, but he exhibited his ignorance of the purpose and objectives of the cultural boycott of Israel. He writes in Israel Hayom:
“One of the points presented to me by those advocating a cultural boycott of Israel was that the festival explicitly states that its purpose is to bring writers together from around the world and have them share a stage with Israeli writers. Those demanding a boycott presented this as a negative when it is, surely, the only reason for any literature festival to exist. What other purpose could it serve?… I fear the magic dies as soon as we begin to draw lines around people, grouping readers into categories of those we will and won’t listen to.”
No one has asked the British author not to share a stage with Israeli writers or not to interact with his readers. We have asked him to consider who provides that stage and frames that cultural exchange, and why.