Anonymous
The JC, Dec. 27, 2024
“Producers of culture should not be claiming fiction as fact. Artists interested in “social justice” should not be turning this ideal on its head.”
We live in an age in which the words “genocide”, “apartheid”, “colonisation” and “ethnic cleansing” are swiftly losing all meaning and, as the recently sacked adviser to the UN Alice Wairimu Nderitu has noted – after she failed to support repeated claims that Israel was guilty of such atrocities – this poses serious consequences for real victims.
Too many within the literary and arts scenes of both this country, and across the West, are actively leading an assault against language, and by extension against humanity, by perpetuating the lies and false narratives that are the source of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. Moreover, they are “proud” to be doing so.
Since October 7, 2023, in a rush to be relevant and radical (condemning terror and, especially, sexual torture seems passé), a stampede of publishers, presses, cultural institutions and arts organisations have feted and platformed so-called Palestinian writers, artists and film-makers – very often with public funding.
Among all the stunningly brave writers and artists from whom I keep receiving updates about “solidarity” and “unconditional liberation”, I have tried and failed to find a single one historically literate enough to understand that the ongoing conflict might be more complicated than: bad Israelis like to massacre innocent Palestinians and take their land.
Bracketing, for a moment, the grotesque irony of feminist, trans and queer activist organisations signing up to the side that perpetuates actual gender apartheid and other atrocities against women and the torture and death of gay people, there is a larger irony here.
These writers and artists are using public money in the free West – using their “privilege”, in other words – to lobby for the oppressors of some of the most oppressive places on Earth: Gaza under Hamas, Lebanon under Hezbollah, Yemen under the Houthis (actively trying to bring back slavery) and Iran under its Islamic regime. Unlike actual Gazans, such as Mosab Hassan Yousef, Taysir Abu Saada, Yaron Avraham, Dor Shachar and Hamza Howidy, who work tirelessly to bring the world’s attention to Hamas’s cruelties, having each been imprisoned and tortured, for example for participating in the We Want to Live protests to which no one in the West paid any attention, Western writers and organisations choose not to campaign for true freedom and a sustainable peace for Palestinian-Arabs.
Instead they repeat and disseminate the lies, hatred and historical misinformation that keep Palestinians locked in perpetual struggle against their Israeli neighbours.
It should be noted that the word “Palestinian” itself was used to define Israeli-Jews within living memory, and that the phrase “free Palestine” was coined by an American Jew in the 1930s as a call to free the Jewish homeland from the British. …SOURCE