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Opinion | Silencing Palestinian voices helps no one cope with the war [1]
['Ursula Lindsey']
Date: 2023-10-19
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Ursula Lindsey is a writer, book critic and journalist who lives in Amman, Jordan. On Oct. 13, the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany announced it would no longer host an award ceremony for the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli and her book “Minor Detail.” A public discussion with Shibli and her translator was also canceled. The German literary association Litprom, which is behind the award, stated that its decision was “due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering.”
At the time, days had passed since the news emerged that Hamas fighters had broken out of the blockaded Gaza Strip and killed more than 1,300 Israelis and taken 199 hostages. The Israeli retaliation was already underway. Water and electricity had been cut in Gaza, home to 2.2 million people, nearly half of them children. A bombing campaign had begun that has now claimed the lives of more than 3,000 Palestinians.
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“The terror war against Israel contradicts all the values that Frankfurter Buchmesse stands for,” said Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos. “Frankfurter Buchmesse has always been about humanity, its focus has always been on peaceful and democratic discourse.” He added that “we want to make Jewish and Israeli voices especially visible at the book fair.”
It is understandable why, especially in Germany, people felt the need to stand unequivocally against the brutal murder of Jews. But why sharing in Israeli mourning required silencing a Palestinian writer with no connection to Hamas — why Palestinians could not be part of the book fair’s peaceful and democratic discourse — was not explained. The very notion of a Palestinian being recognized, speaking in public, was evidently beyond the pale.
When it first announced the award for Shibli, Litprom described her novel as a “rigorously composed work of art that tells of the power of borders and what violent conflicts do to and with people.” Litprom’s website says its goal is to promote underrepresented literature from the Global South and to help readers “learn that there are different, but equally relevant perspectives on the one world in which we live.” But the truth is that Palestinian perspectives have long been treated with condescension and suspicion in the West. And never more so than now, when Palestinians are being collectively punished for Hamas’s attack and denied the chance to voice their concern over the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Gaza or to share their own suppressed histories and pain.
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Shibli’s slim and searing novel (translated into English in 2020 by Elisabeth Jacquette, and free to download from its British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions) is divided into two parts. The first is a reconstruction of a true event, based on Israel Defense Forces records and reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Shortly after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, in the summer of 1949, an Israeli army unit patrolling the armistice line with Egypt in the south of Israel captured a Bedouin girl and took her back to their camp. They stripped her, washed her with a hose, cut her hair and cleaned it with kerosene, then raped and killed her.
In the book’s second half, a Palestinian woman living in Ramallah in 2004 becomes obsessed with the story and travels to the south of Israel, anxiously making her way through checkpoints, to the scene of the crime. Shibli tells the story in a subdued, almost benumbed style; it unfolds with the tense, strange, inevitable logic of a nightmare, suffused with dread. The literary scholar and critic Robyn Creswell has called it “a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma.”
Although Shibli’s book has faced accusations of being antisemitic from a handful of German critics, I have seen no evidence to back these charges, no arguments that the crime she recounts in her book is untrue, no references to any comments she might have made on current events. It is the mere fact of being a Palestinian writer, telling a Palestinian story — the fact of Palestinian existence and self-expression — that has been deemed inflammatory.
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According to a letter of support for Shibli, signed by writers from around the world, she would have welcomed her appearance at the book fair as an “opportunity to reflect on the role of literature in these cruel and painful times.” One imagines the complex, almost certainly uncomfortable, but also enlightening conversation that might have taken place.
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Shibli’s case is egregious but hardly unique. The Egyptian activist and former political prisoner Patrick Zaki had stops on a book tour for his new memoir canceled after he called Benjamin Netanyahu “a serial killer” (even though Israelis themselves have said much worse of the prime minister in the past week). A How to Academy event showcasing the book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” was canceled after British police said there were unspecified “security concerns.” This nonfiction book by Nathan Thrall, a Jewish American journalist who lives in Jerusalem, is an account of life under Israeli occupation through the eyes of his Palestinian friend, who lost his son in a bus crash.
The list goes on. On Oct. 12, a play by the Freedom Theater, a Palestinian group based in the Jenin refugee camp, was canceled by the mayor of the French town Choisy-le-Roi. In the United States, even before the current conflict, Palestinian cultural events were being scrutinized. The Palestine Writes Festival, hosted at the University of Pennsylvania last month, faced what has become a predictable campaign of smears and harassment.
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Some people go along with the silencing of Palestinians out of a sympathy that is sincere but flows in only one direction. Others do so out of ignorance, cowardice or bad faith. As the civilian population of Gaza is starved and bombed, it is staggering to see the words and gestures of Palestinians and others calling for the protection of innocent people treated as threats. France has banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Berlin schools have instructed students not to wear the kaffiyeh. The British home secretary has suggested that waiving the Palestinian flag might be illegitimate. Palestinians are constantly told to condemn violence, but everything they do — from peacefully marching to the Gaza border in 2018, to organizing boycott campaigns, to putting on a play or writing a novel — is framed as an act of violence.
The cynical capitalizing upon the horror of Hamas’s violence to invalidate all Palestinian voices is part of a campaign to constrict the space for empathy, thought, debate and truth. To accept this is to accept the chipping away of our collective freedom of speech and thought. In cultural and literary spaces, where this freedom is our mainstay and our responsibility, we have to resist censorship, intimidation and the strident insistence that there is only one side worth listening to.
And this goes both ways. This weekend, I plan to meet with a Palestinian friend whose family is from Gaza and who reached out to me to talk, partly to understand the Western viewpoint. Some of what I will share with her are the words of Jewish American leftists and the relatives of Israeli victims — words that have given me solace in the past week, and that articulate both fear and grief over Hamas’s killings and the imperative to equally value Palestinian life.
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Crucially, Shibli’s book does not celebrate violence; it is an account of the violence suffered by two defenseless women. One of the many valuable things we can learn from Palestinian writers is the way their lives and imaginations are narrowed and grooved by unrelenting insecurity.
Rereading Shibli’s book in the past 24 hours, I was struck by the geography: The part of the Negev Desert the narrator visits runs alongside the sealed border of Gaza, near the Rafah crossing to Egypt. The narrator, spending the night in a bland rented room in an Israeli settlement, hears far-off bombing and immediately guesses what it is — because there is nothing unusual or surprising about the sound.
“It’s far, past the Wall. It must be Gaza, or Rafah. Bombing sounds very different depending on how close one is to the place being bombed, or how far away. The rumblings from the shelling aren’t strong at all, and the noise isn’t unsettling, rather it’s a deep, heavy sound, like a languorous pounding on a massive drum.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/19/palestinian-writers-canceled-censorship-literature/
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