“Think twice! No, think thrice before you put a word on paper!” This was the advice that the great Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal, a son of India, advised his disciples in the last century. “In using words let caution be your guide.”
That thought found an echo in the writings of Sayyed Kazem Assar, an Iranian theological scholar. He wrote: “I have sat down to put pen on paper and words are jostling one another to assume existence. But do I know which one I should let in and what each will do?”
The letter published by 1001 writers from more than 30 countries calling for a cultural boycott of Israel in solidarity with the “the Palestinian cause” reminded me of Iqbal’s “caution,” Assar’s “unexpected event” and Kierkegaard’s anxiety.
Having thrown all caution to the winds the esteemed writers did at least four things that one does not expect from people of letters.
The first was casting anathema on publishers, book clubs, cultural associations, art festivals and, inevitably, hundreds or perhaps thousands of writers, poets, composers, cineastes, dramatists, painters and other artists associated with them simply because they happen to be Israelis.
Sally Rooney, an Irish novelist who signed the letter, went even further by saying she would not allow her novels to be translated in Hebrew. Annie Ernaux, the French winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also a signatory, explained her move as opposition to “institutions that have never recognized the undoubted rights of the Palestinian people” without saying what those rights were and why are they undoubted.
The second move not expected from the literati, even including its glitterati fringe, is to preach blanket censorship based on guilt by association.
In other words, if we disagree with what the Israeli government does, we have the right, nay the duty, to try and shut Israeli poets, writers and artists out of the global market. This is all the more surprising because most signatories are from the “Western world” where refusing guilt by association is a fundamental principle of the law.
Thirdly, a writer always provides, even the character he most dislikes, the chance to put his case before he is stamped with a final judgment of banishment.
Finally, a writer should not throw his other words around the cavalier the way some politicians do. Words such as “genocide” and “Apartheid” are verbal hand-grenades. That a few Israelis label the October 7 attack as “genocide” or a new “Holocaust” against the Jews does not bat back against all Israelis.
As for “Apartheid,” Israel did build walls to ensure a physical separation from its avowed foes. But wall-building, now done by the United States, Türkiye, Iran, Hungary, Poland and Estonia doesn’t amount to Apartheid. In any case, as Israelis built walls to keep Hamas away, Hamas built tunnels to go and visit them.
In other words, a writer cannot or should not stoop to the level of an ideologue let alone a penny-farthing propagandist for even the “noblest of causes.”
The Palestinian cause may be a noble one. So, as a writer, show us what it is and why it is. A writer isn’t a labelling machine or a virtue-signaling device.
In the 1960s, as student activists in London and Paris, on several occasions, we sought the signatures of the then fashionable French intellectuals for our juvenile petitions on a range of then fashionable “noble causes.” Jean-Paul Sartre always signed without even reading our petitions. It was enough that we were fighting for a “noble cause.” Raymond Aaron, on the other hand, sent us packing, telling us to properly understand the “cause” before asking him to buy a ticket.
Few of the 1001 signatories have a direct experience of witnessing the Palestinian tragedy. One who has is the African-American writer Alice Walker who says she visited Palestinian refugee camps and was moved. But she, like former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin, another peddler of the “cause” who visited Gaza before the October 7 attack and was dithyrambic about how Palestinian refugees in camps were building an economy and creating a cultural sphere.
However, neither Walker nor Corbyn wondered why so many Palestinians in Gaza were still in refugee camps although Hamas had ruled Gaza for more than a decade after the Israeli withdrawal.
More broadly, they and the 1001 writers have never wondered why it is that since World War II the world has absorbed millions of refugees from more than 40 countries while keeping four generations of Palestinians in refugee camps, thus inventing refugee-ness as a hereditary career. Nor did they wonder why millions of Palestinians did settle across the globe but not in Gaza, the West Bank and four Arab states.
Virtue-signalers do no service to Palestinians by using and abusing their undoubted sufferings to vent historic, cultural and pseudo-religious hatreds.
If they are sincere in supporting the Palestinians, they should call for transforming a “cause,” that in Hamas’ version means the annihilation of Israel-a cause that has produced nothing but grief eight decades into a “project” to shape a better future for Palestinians beyond eternal refugee camps.
