While fighting in the Middle East continues, western authors are now fighting their own proxy battle via the medium of that modern scourge, the open letter, writes Hadley Freedman for the Times. She continues:
Last week Rooney – along with over a thousand other writers, including Arundhati Roy, Jonathan Lethem and Rachel Kushner – signed an open letter to let the world know that they are extremely against genocide because genocide is bad.
Or, to be specific, it’s bad when it is Israel killing Palestinians in a war. Organised by several groups, including those ever-mysterious yet suddenly ubiquitous activists Fossil Free Books, the letter calls for the boycott of all Israeli book publishers and publications and anyone who believes Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorism.
Of course, the letter doesn’t put it like that, and instead it decries those who “have never publicly recognised the rights of the Palestinian people”. This is because the signatories are too far up their own moral high ground to mention that Israel’s assault on Gaza began after October 7 last year, when Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel and slaughtered and kidnapped Israeli citizens.
These terrorists specifically recorded themselves saying they wanted to kill the Jews, which seems a bit, I don’t know, genocide-y? But that genocidal attempt is apparently fine with the genocide-hating authors, because the word “Hamas” does not appear in their letter even once.
Some of the letter-writers have compared their cultural boycott of Israel to the one in the 1980s against apartheid South Africa. And yet that boycott resulted in the absurd situation in which British activists such as Billy Bragg protested against Paul Simon because he hired South African musicians (who had been persecuted by the apartheid government) to perform on his album Graceland.
If you’re protesting against a nation’s people whom – paradoxically – you’re claiming to defend, then you should check if your backside is perhaps where your brain should be.
That letter has now received its own letter in response. Signed by David Mamet, Lee Child, Ozzy Osbourne and others, it calls for a boycott of all Palestinian institutions in retaliation for October 7. Kidding! Instead, it describes cultural boycotts as being “directly in opposition to the liberal values most writers hold sacred”.
This is what members of Radiohead have long said when criticised — as they were again last week — for continuing to perform in Israel. “The silencing of Israeli [artists] feels unprogressive to me. Not least because it’s these people that are invariably the most progressive members of any society,” their guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, said last year.
But is this still true of western artists? A few years ago a number of children’s authors complained they were being vilified by their peers — including Clara Vulliamy, author of the Dotty Detective series — because they had expressed doubts about gender ideology.
Agents, publishers and bookshops took fright and dropped these authors, including Gillian Philip, who was so shut out from publishing she now works as a lorry driver, and the award-winning poet Rachel Rooney, who now works as a carer. Vulliamy, incidentally, also signed the anti-Israeli petition, so I guess she got a taste for censorship.
“To support censorship, in theory, on behalf of vulnerable groups is a very slippery slope. It can lead to the opposite of what you want,” Sir Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about this subject, said earlier this year. This is true. Yet, there is one demographic of authors I struggle to read: those who prefer simplistic narratives.
Only a very simplistic person can’t see that, with Israelis and Palestinians, the trauma is on both sides. I thought fiction was supposed to expand empathy, not narrow it. Don’t worry, Rooney et al, I’m not banning you or — God forbid — writing an open letter. But if Ozzy Osbourne has a better grasp of history than you, I probably won’t bother reading you.
Worth reading in full.
