Politics above culture? The 2023 ‘Palestinian Festival of Literature’ redux. Commentary on a New York Review of Books discussion.
Jon Abbink, 19 June 2024
Paying attention to the Israel-Arab/Palestinian conflict is a regular feature in the New York Review of Books. But it is usually done in a predictable ideological perspective. There is some obsession with always picturing the State of Israel and Jews in a negative light, as the culprits of everything, and beyond the bounds of reasonable criticism of Israel’s policies. Despite efforts at ‘nuance’ by various writers in the NYRB, it ultimately always amounts to the same — primarily Israel is to be blamed. I am writing this as a centre-Left, non-Jewish Dutch person[1] who likes the NYRB for its great contributions on literature and culture, as evidenced for instance by the latest, 18 June 2024 online issue under the title ‘Regressing Standards of Decency’. But when the magazine starts about international relations, and notably the Middle East, it is often getting a real nuisance. When talking/writing about this subject, it is apparently difficult to be honest or balanced, pursue truth, and avoid retrograde Left intellectualist fashion.
These thoughts come to me after reading Yasmine El-Rifae’s interview in the NYRB, online since 15 June 2024, her surrealistic article ‘A view from Cairo’ (12 May 2024), and the misleading, biased and cynically timed ‘Open Letter’ (14 October 2023!) from an assembly of people participating in the ‘Palestine Festival of Literature’ of October 2023, co-organized by Ms. El-Rifae. I really admired her courageous book Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution — an account of Egyptian women’s feminist struggle against sexual violence during the 2011 ‘revolution’. But when reading her discussing Israel-Palestine that admiration fades. Contrary to what Ms. El-Rifae says in her NYRB interview, the PFL event is quite problematic. Ms. El-Rifae summed up the two aims of the PFL: “[T]o break the cultural siege on Palestinians imposed by the Israeli occupation, and to develop and embolden international discourse and knowledge production about Palestine.” These are not literary aims that can showcase Palestinian-Arab cultural life, but hardcore ideological-political aims. If it is retorted that this is what preoccupies Palestinians, then it shows again that their (cultural) identity is constructed purely as a political opposition to the Israeli Jews and the State of Israel. Not a healthy basis.
So, let the PFL be held, but it is not something to ‘celebrate’ or even highlight in the NYRB. In the 2023 version we saw unequivocally anti-Semitic speakers invited, like the repulsive ex-Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, a guy with a long track record of using anti-Semitic tropes to denigrate the Jewish people. He is really a moral fraud. We remember his sickening act in May 2023 during a concert in Berlin, where he desecrated the memory of Holocaust victim Anne Frank, compared Israel to the Third Reich, and paraded around a stage wearing an SS Nazi uniform.
Another speaker at the PFL with a well-documented history of antisemitic rhetoric and behavior was Marc Lamont Hill, who on CNN has called for Israel’s eradication and repeatedly referred to mainstream media companies as “Zionist outlets” — of course total BS and deliberately mendacious. Why he is at all seen as someone qualified to be invited on the issue of the Middle East beats me.
Such people are of course not at all ‘experts’ on the Middle East or on ‘Palestinian culture’ — if such a thing already exists seeing the recentness of the term (only emerging well after 1964 when the PLO was founded). So no credence or space should be given to such persons; on the basis of ‘fame’ achieved in very different fields, they act as provocateurs willing to spread anti-Semitism (Jew-hatred) and dishonesty regarding one of the most inflammable conflict situations in the world — which they would like to fuel even more, in the West as well. None of these people of course was ever quoted as expressing disapproval of the October 7, 2023, tragedy — on the contrary.
In addition, the PFL had other deeply problematic content issues: its screening of the film Farha: just sick and devious. It includes disgusting anti-Semitic tropes, including a modern version of the idiotic blood libel trope that ridiculously casts Jewish ritual and Jews as ‘vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel’. No evidence for this evil accusation has ever existed. It is straight from the Middle Ages and from the Russian falsification pamphlet ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — a total baloney text. That film Farha is a distortive piece of fiction. It is shameful to suggest it has evidentiary value of any kind on anything — and it is seriously incorrect in asserting “extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty” towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence. Why give this film such prominence at that festival? Devious. Nothing of this kind will create any understanding or bridging narrative of common ground that we need in getting out of this conflict. Fomenting more anti-Israel/anti Jewish hate based on non-factual and biased information is just wrong. The Festival cannot get away with such hateful expression and has to confront the indignity of it. Significantly, as far as I know, nothing was said during the PFL either on the horrendous acts of torture, rape, burnings alive, and other killing by the Hamas on October 7 and after.
And of course the festival featured the eternal babble on Israel as a “settler colonialist” state. This historically inaccurate and ideologically fueled nonsense term does nothing to clear up the issue; nor even describe the situation. It is more like neo-Marxist-Islamist banter. I have no room here to delve into the issue, but the term “settler colonialism” in reality refers to a pattern whereby an imperial power replaces the native population of a land with a new population/society of settlers. It indicates a system of oppression in which the expansive colonizing nation engages in ‘ethnic cleansing’ and/or displacement and dispossessing a native or pre-existing population. It was not like that with the Zionist movement. First of all, the Jews coming back in larger numbers, adding to the Jews already living in the area of the then Ottoman empire in the 2nd half of the 19th century, had indigenous roots to the land going back ca. 3000 years. Second, the actual process of rehabilitation and settlement in the area and acquiring and cultivating (starting with the desolate and swampy areas) was via purchases and pioneering agrarian labour — which I fact attracted tens of thousands so Arabs from neigboring areas in the course of the first sixty years. So this phrase of “settler colonialism” is just incorrect and unhelpful, and is an ideological term of insult. It amounts ultimately to delegitimization and resulting demonization of the Jews who returned to the indigenous land and of the State of Israel as having no rights, etc. International law says otherwise. While history in the general sense — knowing the whole range of relevant facts — in this conflict is clearly important, commentators and ‘activists’ these days are very eager to bypass it and immediately revert to moral judgements that nicely blame one party in the conflict only. This lack of curiosity or integrity about the complex history of the region — and its connections with European and Middle Eastern history — is worrying and keeps the old negative tropes alive.
It is a rhetorical question why observers can’t be more attentive to the facts and to reason when talking about and discursively representing this tragic conflict between people who have to find a compromise. But it has to be posed. Thus giving a platform to one side only (the pro-Palestinian-Arab) and smoothing over their incorrect and tendentious statements, as seen and voiced at the PFL and in that ‘Open Letter’, is unhelpful and reactionary. It is time to stop the repetitive narratives and stop exalting the eternal ‘victimizing’ discourse around the Palestinian Arabs — it takes away their constructive agency and doesn’t hold them responsible for their choices. Yes, they have suffered and lost much. But they so far have neither much to show for in terms of finding solutions or reaching out. The Palestinian Arab ‘leadership’ have rarely been constructive on anything, and no, that is not only the result of their being occupied or pitiful, or marginalized, etc. The old refrains will not work — the loads of money that leadership of the Palestinian Authority-PLO-Hamas received in the past decades have not produced constructive progress. The choices they made brought them nowhere. The irony is that only among the fact-free, if not ignorant and destructive protesting students and other radical Leftist and Islamist activists blighting today’s USA and some European campuses the old refrains are still supported.
But we really need a new way of talking about this conflict and leave the retrograde Leftist pontificating of the past behind. Events such as this PFL festival, while allowing some new cultural expressions by the Palestinians, were mostly cultivating victimhood and hate, and thus achieved little. People on the right and left should be urged to revise their often ill-formed opinions on this conflict and on the unacceptable demonisation of Israelis/Jews and their right to self-determination. Yes, yes, of course the State of Israel has no ideal government and made big mistakes; these have to be recognized, addressed and rectified (which often has happened). The turn to the political right in Israel over the past 15 years or so is the result of decades-long Arab/Muslim incitement, hatred and Western complicity in delegitimizing and undermining Israel. But nothing invalidates this right of the Jewish people to exist in their own homeland. Yes, Palestinians too have the rights, as Israel has been saying this and offering compromise for seventy years since 1947. But the Palestinian Arabs had their tone set by the heavily anti-Semitic and Nazi-collaborating former Palestine Mandate mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini (1897–1974), who never accepted the Jewish right to a state or even a presence in their land on origin (In contrast to his cousin Fawzi al-Husseini, who was therefore assassinated in 1941). Palestinian Arabs perhaps do not see that one cannot violently attack 10 times (starting with the 1929 Hebron massacre of the Jewish community), lose 10 times, and then whine every time about having lost — instead of changing course.
I am an outside observer in this conflict although I visited Israel and Palestinian territories many times, but it seems to me that theologically motivated hatred and demonization of Israel or the Jewish people that we see among Palestinians and their Iranian and Arab saboteur-sponsors is neither morally nor politically justified. It is a dead end, and self-destructive as well. And a ‘what-aboutist’ response (‘What about Israel, doing this and that…’) is not useful either. People on all sides should show courage to appreciate the facts and make balanced judgements towards peace and co-existence, and de-emphasize religion-based hatred — as we see it fuelled by Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian regime patrons. We hardly saw this courage and honesty exercised or even tried during events like that ‘Palestine Festival of Literature’.
PS
As I finished this commentary, another article in the NYRB reached me, via its Newsletter, written by Isabelle Hammad (‘Acts of language’, at www.nybooks.com/online/2024/06/13/acts-of-language-isabella-hammad/). An amazing, tone-deaf lament on the so-called assault of some journalists on ‘the speech of pro-Palestine protesters in the US’. But the examples she cites in the beginning of the paper are all true… The language of pro-Palestine protesters is not analyzing in her article but is in fact quite appalling and violent in an unprecedented way. And even worse, beyond language, because in the ‘students’ protests’ over the past months, many people primarily of Jewish background have been physically harassed, bullied, chased out, insulted, spat upon, and a few even raped and killed by these so-called pro-Palestine protesters and related activists. Hammad ignores the evidence. Unfortunately, her article is also full of terrible and false accusations. If someone whines about a ‘genocide’ in Gaza, that is already a red flag: totally incorrect, and an abuse of a well-defined legal term. The ‘anti-Zionist’ rhetoric and actions of the protesters easily and nearly always have morphed into Jew hatred. The evidence is overwhelming and it is rather disingenuous to ignore or deny it. This is in fact one of the most disturbing and shocking aspects of the entire ‘protesters’ movement’ — they have basically turned into ugly campaigns of hate. And obviously not one word in Hammad’s text on the Hamas violence on October 7 and after, let alone on the abject fate of the Israeli hostages still in Hamas’s claws — except for the obligatory note that they have to be released in an agreement for a ‘permanent ceasefire’. Well, folks, any proposal for a ceasefire has been rejected by Hamas, which has posed preposterous demands (that Israel has often even accepted) but with whom one cannot really negotiate.
We struggle intellectually and morally to deal with this conflict and its terrible, violent fall-out. Hammad’s article does nothing to evoke elements of mutual understanding and dialogue to try and bring the warring parties and people together to at least agree on a way to talk about this sad conflict. On the contrary. No further comments on this appalling piece are needed. I find all this very regrettable because while always having liked the NYRB, I am almost forced to give up reading it and move into the camp of more moderate if not conservative writers. But if the kind of writing by El-Rifae and Hammad c.s. is becoming dominant it leaves me and many others no choice.
Jon Abbink
Univ. Leiden, The Netherlands
Note
[1] Years ago, I also did 1,5 year of anthropological field research on the black Ethiopian-Jewish community in Israel.
