Ian McEwan says Israel was ‘disproportionately violent’ in Gaza and practices ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Jerusalem

The writer Ian McEwan was on the BBC NewsHour yesterday, and at minute 8 was asked about Gaza. You have spoken out about the Israeli Palestinian question, accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 2011 and saying you would, rather than boycott, engage. Have you had any effect?

No. The best bit of Israel as represented in writers like Amos Oz and David Grossman is very much in retreat, overwhelmed by a kind of sense of panic. I have no time for Hamas, I feel very strongly for the civilian Gaza population trapped between the Israeli military and Hamas, but I think in this case the Israeli Defense Force– so called– has been disproportionately violent.

How should intellectuals respond?

Go there, engage. I gave a formal lecture when receiving the Jerusalem Prize. I was as strong against Hamas as I was against the expansion into, the ethnic cleansing really of East Jerusalem. So engage. Don’t neglect or shut out our very good friends in Israel who have a much more liberal pro-Palestinian sense of the whole conflict.

McEwan then says that he wishes he could just be a writer: “Every time I get involved… [I am] misunderstood and misquoted.” It’s an occupational hazard of journalism, he avers.

I love McEwan’s work, but it is interesting that he misremembers his 2011 Jerusalem Prize speech. While opposing settlements, he never referred to ethnic cleansing, as he does now. Evidence that everyone is being politicized by Gaza. Here are his comments on East Jerusalem, deploring

the continued evictions and demolitions, and relentless purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the process of right of return granted to Jews but not Arabs. These so-called ‘facts on the ground’ are a hardening concrete poured over the future, over future generations of Palestinian and Israeli children who will inherit the conflict and find it even more difficult to resolve than it is today, more difficult to assert their right to self-realisation.

He blasted Hamas for nihilism but skewered Israeli nihilism:

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. 

I don’t think engaging and going there is helping; it hasn’t had any effect in three years, as McEwan acknowledges, and rightwing attitudes are in concrete, 95 percent of Israeli society including some of his vaunted “liberals” were four-square behind the Gaza slaughter, and it is hardly a wonder that Palestinians support violent resistance. The society needs to come under political pressure. And as for the “best of Israel,” I believe that is represented by Tzvia Thier and Ezra Nawi and David Shulman. Thier– whom I will report on soon — had all of Oz and Grossman’s experience as a true believer on a kibbutz, later a writer of Zionist pedagogical books, and she has actually put her body down against ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and now embraced democracy.