HERZL: BOURGEOIS!

Lazare and Herzl

You are bourgeois in your thought, bourgeois in your feelings, bourgeois in your ideas and bourgeois in your conception of society. As such, you want to guide the people, our people, who are poor, unhappy, working class . . . You act outside of them and above them: you’d like to have them follow you like a herd of sheep. Like all governments, you want to disguise the truth, you want to be a proper government whose principle obligation is not exposing the national shame. But I want to expose it, so that everyone can see poor Job on his dungheap, scraping his sores with a piece of broken bottle.   

— Bernard Lazare in a Letter to Theodor Herzl, February 4, 1899.

The masses had two functions in Herzl's initial strategy of Zionism. On the one hand, they would provide the shock troops of exodus and the settlers in the promised land. On the other, they could be used as a club to compel the rich European Jews to support the Zionist solution. The ghetto Jew as carrier of the new nation, the ghetto Jew as weapon: of the first of these mobilizations, Herzl spoke publicly; the second, no less integral to the new key in politics, he confided to his diary.  

In his first and greatest political pamphlet, Der Judenstaat (1896), Herzl candidly explored the best methods for directing the masses. Criticizing the attempts of Jewish philanthropic colonizers to attract pioneers by appealing to personal self-interest and by financial inducements, the irreligious Herzl urged instead that the Jews follow the models of Mecca and Lourdes. A mass can best be led if one sets a goal or center of aspiration for its "deepest need to believe." In the Jewish case, the desire to harness and guide was the age-old wish for "the free homeland." While Herzl tapped the archaic religious aspiration, however, he did not, as a modern secular leader, fully rely upon it. At first he did not even wish to locate the Jewish homeland in Palestine though, as he told the Rothschilds, "the name alone would be a program . . . strongly attractive to the lower masses." Most Jews, however, were "no longer orientals, and had accustomed themselves to other climes [andere Himmelstriche].""  

Theredor Herzl added essentially modern attractions to the allurements of ancient hopes in his political Gesamtkunstwerk. He envisaged the seven-hour day as the principal magnet for the modern European Jew. Zion would outbid the Socialist International by one hour of leisure! Even the flag of the Jewish state was to reflect the value which Herzl attached tothe drawing power of modern social justice. On a white field signifying the new life of purity, seven gold stars would represent the seven golden hours of our working day. " For under the sign of work the Jews go into the promised land." Of the star of David or any other Jewish symbol, Herzl made no mention.  

— Carl E.Schorske “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Triptych,” The Journal of Modern History, V. 39 N. 4. December, 1969. p.380-381. Later republished in Schorske’s 1979 book Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.

Herzl viewed Polish Jews from the vast distance of his Viennese bourgeois standards of gentility and cultivation. He himself spoke the pure German of the cultivated, without a trace of even the Viennese dialect. Even after having become a Jewish statesman, he referred to East European Jews as “semi-Asiatic.” For Herzl, Polish Jews were undifferentiated. He was a stranger to the vast differences between the elite Talmudic culture of Vilna and the more down-to-earth Hasidic communities of Galicia or the schools of Jewish enlightenment in Brody. What he saw was a stereotype, shaped by conceptions of Germanic enlightenment and Viennese refinement.

—Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism, Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 80.

TOM CRUISE LIBERATES KUWAIT VIA AGRABAH

 (للعراق) 

The war stinks of shit.   

— Pier Paolo Pasolini (May, 1944) 

Enough of smoke and mirrors and smooth talking hustlers.   

— Edward W. Said (April, 2003) 

1. 

Walt Disney Studios’ now infamously racist film, Aladdin, must, to use Raymond Williams’ phrase, be placed in its structure of feeling. “Our success in the Gulf will shape not only the new world order we seek but our mission here at home,” president Bush (41) said in 1991 after our (the U.S.A) brief (but bloody) incursion into Iraq, a year before the release of the Disney film. The Cold War was over and the United States was on top, the former president seems to be saying to the New World. But the elder Bush does not stop there; the imperial homeland must itself recognize the might of their state, and the weakness of its enemies in the face of such exceptional might (a “clash of civilizations,” the reactionary Samuel Huntington would famously call this relationship around the same time). As Edward Said made clear in his book Orientalism (1978), the process of imagining the other is part and parcel with that modern process of imaging the self (power, of course, is fundamental to Said's analysis of the colonial period). In the late capitalist, as it was called then, United States, the image of the other was increasingly drawn in Arab garb.* Two decades later (as a second Gulf War was winding down, at least in the official discourse of the state**), president Obama — after presiding (as the leader of the free world, so called) over the extensive bombing of Libya by that military relic of the Cold War, NATO — addressed the Libyan people: “The rule of an iron fist [more Cold War!] inevitably comes to an end. You have won your revolution.” Our philosopher king becomes the emperor of the liberated. 

2. 

In the June 1986 issue of American Film, the late Alexander Cockburn, one of the Anglophone fourth estate’s most reliable challengers of empire, reviewed Tony Scott’s Top Gun.*** He ended his stinging critique of the “high flying” military-industrial romance, by pointing out the irony in the fact that the fighter pilots in the film (Tom Cruise et. al.) were portrayed in such noble and heroic terms only ten years after the end of the United States’ bumbling imperial air-war on the people of Vietnam. A few years later, with the extensive media coverage of George H.W. Bush’s war in the Persian Gulf, the American public could for the first time virtually follow the aerial bombing of Iraq on television and imagine themselves the pilots of their own jets, just like their heroes Maverick and Goose. Fast-forward a year later, and Disney’s Aladdin is in theaters. 

3.   

In his “The Monstrous Births of ‘Aladdin,’” scholar of Arabic literature, Michael Cooperson, traced the process through which characters and themes were translated into different versions of the famous folk tale.**** Cooperson notes how the producers of the 1992 animated film changed the moral of the story, originally an 1980s-style message of “greed is good,” in order bring it properly into the a post-Cold War American milieu of superpower as enlightened policeman. Thus, the genie in the Disney feature places a limit on the amount of wishes he can grant and Aladdin — whose look, Cooperson notes, animators modeled after Tom Cruise (!) — saves his third and final wish to liberate his friend the genie, literally, from his chains. In the end, the genie, voiced by Robin Williams, decides to remain with Aladdin despite his “freedom.” More than 20 years after the initial war, after a decade of brutal sanctions, and finally the total destruction of its neighboring state of Iraq, Kuwait remains a staunch ally of the United States and an essential staging ground for its imperial maneuvers in the Arab world and beyond. The recent release of Sacha Baron Cohen’s film The Dictator — a latter day Orientalist-minstrel created by a devout Zionist of the so-called liberal stripe — in the aftermath of the western takeover of Libya and in the midst of the United States’ continued assault on the Arab/Islamicate world even as its people rise up in courageous and imaginative revolution, is another instance of an empire rehearsing its role (as leading civilization à la Huntington) on the silver screen. 

---

*Though, as any passing look at Said’s encyclopedic book or a viewing of John Rawlins' 1942 film Arabian Nights would prove, such tropes have long existed in both scholarly and popular discourses. 

**Though the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is the largest in the world, not to mention the drones…or the sanctions on Iran...etc. etc....

***Alexander Cockburn, “Top Gun,” in Corruptions of Empire (London: Verso, 1988) pp. 163-172 

****Michael Cooperson, “The Monstrous Births of ‘Aladdin,’” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review v. 1 (1994), pp. 67-86.

KILLING THE BLACK REVOLUTION AT UCLA, 1969

Last month UCLA's student newspaper reported on student efforts to preserve a long covered-up mural in the campus' student center. Now partially behind a stomach-churning Panda Express© and a false wall, the mural of seven black UCLA alumni entitled "The Black Experince," was painted by students in 1970 after protests in response to the student killings at Kent State. A year earlier,  in January of 1969, Black Panther Party leaders Bunchy Carter and John Huggins were murdered in Campbell Hall at UCLA. Below, the story of those murders as recounted in Martha Biondi's recent book The Black Revolution on Campus. In September of '69, it should be noted, Angela Davis was dismissed from her post in the philosophy department at UCLA by the UC Board of Regents.  

 ~ ~ ~ ~

In distinction to the Bay Area. where the Panthers were predominant, the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party was embroiled in a sharp rivalry with US, a cultural nationalist organization headed by Maulana Karenga. Both groups emphasized physical prowess and training in weaponry. But in contrast to the leftist, anti-imperialist politics of the Panthers, who criticized the government and built dynamic community-based programs, cultural nationalists tended to emphasize African roots, cultural grounding, and gender hierarchies as remedies for contemporary racism. Their conflict culminated on January 17, 1969, with the shooting deaths of Panther leaders Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins by US members after a Black Student Union meeting on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. Subsequent accounts revealed that the FBI had infiltrated and provoked discord between the two groups. [1968 San Francisco State College strike] leader and Panther minister of education George Murray believes those bullets were actually for him.

Even though the Black student movements in Los Angeles was deeply marked by the Panther-US rivalry, the students who spearheaded the creation of the Center for Afro-American Studies at UCLA endeavored to withstand these ideological currents. And in many respects they stood in contrast to the students who devised Black studies at San Francisco State. Black students did not always agree on the form or function of African American studies, and the local political landscape shaped their thinking. The UCLA student leaders tried to resist the efforts of community leaders to gain influence over Afro-American studies, and endeavored to imbue the program with academic rigor and independence. The creation of the center gave rise to a fierce battle for "control" between these student leaders and members of the Community Advisory Board, who wanted the center to be a social and political force in the Black community. The Black Student Union itself was divided over the issue. According to Mary Jane Hewitt, an African American administrator and advisor to Black students at UCLA, "The prime movers in getting that Center started" were Virgil Roberts, Arthur Frazier, Mike Downing, and Tim Ricks. She remembers them as "a group of very bright, very energetic, and very determined young African American students." They also helped design and administer the High Potential Program, and affirmative action program that actively utilized Black students in student recruitment. Members of the US organization as well as the Black Panther Party, including Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, were recruited to UCLA through High Potential. Beginning in the summer of 1968, Roberts, Downing, Frazier, and Ricks researched Black studies programs and proposed an interdisciplinary center consisting of four ethnic studies units. As part of their proposal, they called support for an academic journal (which later became the important Journal of Black Studies) and funding for conferences and research. The students visited San Francisco State to examine how Black studies was evolving there and borrowed some of their ideas. But in the end, they advocated creating, and won, a center rather than a department, incorporating Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American units, because, in their view, this promised to "be more salable politically."

It was a time of intense nationalism, but they built alliances, in part because the number of Black students at UCLA was small. Roberts recalls that Black students and faculty were unified in their desire to create the center. "The conflict later on came over who the people were going to be. We had this conflict with Maulana (Ron) Karenga and our Community Advisory Board." But the president of the BSU, history graduate student Floyd Hayes, opposed the plan and virtually "excommunicated" Roberts, Frazier, Ricks, and Downing. "There was a meeting in which the BSU members said they were going to kill all of us," Roberts recalls, still taken aback at the threats and level of vitriol. The four students felt betrayed and ostracized, he says, after having given so much of themselves to build the center, so much so that Virgil Roberts stopped wearing his dashiki in favor of a suit and tie when he came to campus, so as not to be associated with the BSU.

Students and community leaders had contending visions for he center. Dr. Alfred Cannon, a psychiatrist at the medical school and prominent community leader, sat on the Community Advisory Board for the Center for Afro-American Studies and promoted as director of the new center Dr. Charles Thomas, the director of a health center in Watts. Ron Karenga, who also sat on the Community Advisory Board as head of the US organization, supported Thomas as well. "Take the community to the campus, bring the campus to the community--there's no way around it," Karenga later described his stance. Hewitt, who directed the EOP and High Potential programs, recalls that US members had given the very first director of the center, UCLA political scientist Sylvester Whittaker, "a bad time," helping hasten his departure to Princeton. Among some students and faculty, there was a concern that Karenga and the advisory board were overreaching in campus affairs. Roberts and several other students came to view Thomas as "unacceptable" after he visited campus and gave a job talk. They questioned his ability to hold his own in a rigorous academic environment. "We wanted to have a really heavy brother come in who could deal with UCLA, and we were convinced at the meeting that there's no way he could deal with UCLA--you know the faculty would be able to just push him over."

At a packed meeting in Campbell Hall--where the shootings would happen two days later--the students related their opposition to Thomas to the Community Advisory Board. Virgil Roberts was there, along with Bunchy Carter and John Huggins. The Simbas, the appointed muscle for the US organization, were out in force. Roberts remembers that advisory board members went "ballistic, especially Maulana." The students adjourned to another room and Karenga began lecturing them about what was in their best interest, when Mary Jane Hewitt stood up and confronted him. "I just remember saying to him I thought he was damned irresponsible to be playing this kind of role and bringing this kind of madness to campus," she later recalled. "I chastened him. I can remember saying that 'you ought to know better than to do this kind of thing, manipulating young people like this.'" Community groups should advise, she told him, not dictate. Virgil Roberts remembers her upbraiding Karenga: "The students (were) cheering and stuff," but Karenga "was totally upset." Meanwhile, Panthers and US members lined the hallways of Campbell Hall in long coats, which allegedly concealed their weapons. Before departing, the students formed a new search committee on, which Carter and Huggins were appointed to serve.

Two days later, an alleged FBI operative in the US organization gunned down Carter and Huggins in Campbell Hall, killing them both. Claude Hubert, the alleged gunman, was never apprehended, but Donald Hawkins and brothers Larry Stiner and George Stiner were convicted of conspiracy and second-degree murder. In 1974 then Stiners escaped from the maximum security prison at San Quentin and went to live as fugitives in South America. All three men had been members of the Simbas. A group of Simbas, Virgil Roberts said, "came in, walked in, shot in the hall and ran out." The killings traumatized students and ushered in a long period of political quiescence, anxiety, and fear on campus. There were many witnesses, including some who lived under police protection for the rest of the quarter. FBI counterintelligence operations against the Panthers, including assassination, have been well documented, yet neither the Panthers nor US shied from armed struggle. Members of both groups carried weapons and "physically disciplined" members; Karenga was himself imprisoned in 1971 for ordering the beating of a woman. But after gaining an early release, he embarked on a long career teaching Black studies at California State University in Long Beach and, most famously, developed the African-inspired holiday Kwanzaa, which became popular among many African Americans nationwide. [Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, p. 68-71.] 

SOME NOTES ON PALESTINE & THE WORLD

African Americans who embraced the creation of the State of Israel in the wake of World War Two—W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson among them—were likely enthusiastic supporters of the promise of Diasporic politics culminating in the formation of a homeland. In order to understand why most African-American radicals embraced the creation of the State of Israel, one must consider how African American political struggles have been rooted within and against notions of the national and international. As Nikihl Singh shows in Black is a Country, Black Americans have waged struggles that have been shaped by the desire for international and Diasporic movements and by the desire for redress within the framework of the nation-state. When the modern State of Israel was created in 1948, African-American radicals were committed to a civil rights strategy in the United States that looked to the nation-state’s logic of inclusion as a rubric for the movement; this may have led some African Americans to see the formation of a Jewish state as the most appropriate means to challenge anti-Jewish anti-Semitism. Ralph Bunche, for example, a communist internationalist during the 1930s, was the United Nation’s representative in charge of administering the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel. Bunche’s role in the creation of Israel illustrates the complexities of African-American anti-colonial politics that were themselves operating against and within the logic of empire.

— Alex Lubin, "Locating Palestine in Pre-1948 Black Internationalism" (2007)

Between 28 July and 5 August 1973, hundreds of thousands of students and young people filled the streets of East Berlin as part of the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students. Organized with considerable support from the communist bloc, the event had the feel of a large American rock festival as the city's central district was transformed into a giant pedestrian zone and vendors selling everything from German pilsner to fried chicken and bitter lemon took positions on along the street corners. as part of the celebration, Yasir Arafat, Angela Davis, and representatives from the Vietnamese NLF, the PRC, Warsaw Pact states and African liberation movements were presented to the thousands in attendance. Arafat's visit coincided with the opening of a PLO office in East Berlin (making East Germany only the second socialist country after the PRC to allow the opening of such a facility) and marked a general warming in the organization's relationship with Moscow and the socialist bloc. It also demonstrated that operations such as those at Lod and Munich had not undermined international support for the PLO and the Palestinian cause. After the event's conclusion, Arafat announced that in East Berlin the PLO had been invited to take up "the banner of global struggle" from the Vietnamese revolution. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish described the significance of the visit as the final transformation of the Palestinians from refugees to resistance fighters: 

There was a time when the world had a well-defined role to play towards us; namely to send us parcels of cheese, bread and clothing, parcels which became the motif or our nation. We were well behaved children....The world came to us—we were not allowed to go to the world....Our duty was to be refugees....We have changed a great deal and so has the world...what sustains us vis à vis the world is that we are fighting a battle for national liberty which has a progressive intellectual foundation....The world is neither a single integrated unit, nor is it true that East is East and West is West. But we are part of an international revolutionary movement which has branches in both East and West. Crawling on our knees so as to gain the sympathy of official Western quarters will do nothing to diminish our alienation from the world....Palestine is no longer a pawn in anyone's hands....A cause may have justice on its side but remain struggling in thin air until it provides itself with muscle. 

Echoing Arafat, Darwish proclaimed: "In the conscience of the people of the world, the torch has been passed from Vietname to us." A question remained, however: "Can we live up to that heavy responsibility?"

— Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (2012)

I have no doubt that what I say here will have no effect on the ongoing peace process, nor on the thinking of the current leadership. I write in order to be heard by other Arabs and other Israelis, those whose vision can extend beyond the impoverishing perspectives of what partition and separation can offer. We know that trying to draw lines between peoples whose cultures, histories and geographical proximity cannot be separated will not solve the basic problems of conflict between them. Political separation is at best a makeshift measure. Partition is a legacy of imperialism, as the unhappy cases of Pakistan and India, Ireland, Cyprus, and the Balkans amply testify, and as the disasters of 20th-century Africa attest in the most tragic way. We must now begin to think in terms of coexistence, after separation, in spite of partition. And for this, as I said above, the only solution is a politics of the local, people on the ground who tackle injustice and inequity on the ground, far away from the misleading summits with Clinton, and the treacherous secret channels of Oslo. Those leaders are far from the real long-term interest of their people, but they do what they have to do. They can do no more.

So let us see these new partitions as the desperate and last-ditch efforts of a dying ideology of separation, which has afflicted Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, both of whom have not surmounted the philosophical problem of the Other, of learning how to live with, as opposed to despite, the Other. When it comes to corruption, to racial or religious discrimination, to poverty and unemployment, to torture and censorship, the Other is always one of us, not a remote alien. These abuses recognise only the victims of unjust power, and these victims must resist all efforts to cause their further suffering. That is the platform of the future.

— Edward W. Said, "What can separation mean?" (1999) 

SAID, SONTAG, & THE DISHONOR OF ISRAELI HONORS

 

In a recent editorial, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) outlined its appeal to Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, who disregarded PACBI's call to boycott and will receive the Jerusalem Prize on February 10th. PACBI reiterated its call to artists who find themselves honored by Israel cultural institutions: "We appeal to them once more, as the indigenous oppressed people, to respect our strategy of resistance in the form of boycotts and moral pressure and not to accept the dishonor of Israeli honors." Two years ago it was Ian McEwan who ignored the boycott and was feted by the settlers in al-Quds, in 2001, it was the late Susan Sontag. Below, the story of an exchange between two giants: 

At least since the famous controversy over the 1963 publication of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a furor that was fueled by the moralizing of the storied “New York Intellectuals” and the hysterics of the Anti-Defamation League, the American intelligentsia has mostly shied away from publicly expressing any disappointment in Israel’s ongoing murder and dispossession of Palestinians.¹ Nevertheless, a few intellectuals in the United States—such as Eqbal Ahmed, Angela Davis, and perhaps most notably, Edward Said—have been prepared to confront Israel’s fraudulent representation in the United States and expose the lives and political ambitions of Palestinians.

Like Arendt, Edward Said admired the role of the conscious pariah (though he himself never used the term which Arendt borrowed from the French anarchist Bernard Lazare), writing in Humanism and Democratic Criticism that Spinoza, Freud and other Jewish thinkers, “were in, and at the same time renounced, their tradition, preserving the original tie by submitting it to the corrosive questioning that took them well beyond it, sometimes banishing them from the community in the process.” Like Arendt, Spinoza, and Freud, Said faced criticism not only from his clear enemies, but also from Arab intellectuals and in the community that he had fought so tirelessly to defend: his books were removed from Palestinian bookshops in the mid-1990s by the Palestinian Authority because of Said’s critical stance against their regime.² Given his affinity for outcasts and exiles like himself, Said was always conscious of the importance of dissident Jewish voices in the public debate on the question of Palestine. In his first published essay on the Middle East, “The Arab Portrayed,” Said contrasted the critical interventions of Issac Deutscher and Maxime Rodinsion in the New Left Review and Les Temps Modernes, respectively, with Michael Walzer and Martin Peretz's infamous liberal apologia for Israel in Ramparts magazine, “Israel is not Vietnam." “Peretz’s and Walzer’s main point,” Said wrote in 1970, “is that, unlike America’s presence in Vietnam, Israel’s presence in the Arab World is neither colonial nor oppressive: it merely is, by force of historical legitimacy and necessary strength.” Said exposed the Orientalist trope—of the static, ahistorical Arab—that Walzer and Peretz’s relied on to make their case for the state of Israel’s legitimacy.

Said was out-raged at the seeming double standard that prevailed when it came to intellectuals in the United States voicing their dissent against Israel’s injustices in historic Palestine. Said wrote in his The Question of Palestine, “Any self-respecting intellectual is willing today to say something about human rights abuses in Argentina, Chile, or South Africa, yet when the irrefutable evidence of Israeli preventive detention, torture, population transfer and deportation of Palestinian Arabs is presented, literally nothing is said.” The case of Susan Sontag is particularly revealing. She was a towering literary figure in her time. A prolific author of critical essays, monographs and novels, Sontag in some ways resembled the intellectual figure of Arendt: independent and unclassifiable. Sontag was nonetheless conventional in her engagements with the state of Israel. In April 2001, Said wrote to Sontag urging her not to accept the Jerusalem Prize (for the Freedom of the Individual in Society): “I’ve finally decided to write to you because calling would have risked (on my part) incoherence and emotionalism of a kind that wouldn’t have been useful or even clear.”* Culture is of course central to Israel’s propaganda machine. Poet and critic, Ammiel Alcalay writes that for Israel the awarding of the Jerusalem Prize “takes on enormous political, cultural and public relations significance. Without directly saying it, the event itself gives the world a message: culture is triumphant, despite what you read in the newspapers, Jerusalem is under our control.”   

 ~ ~ ~ ~

So Said made his case to Sontag: “Israel is in its 33rd year of brutal military occupation, the longest (except for Japan’s 35 year occupation of Korea) in the 20th & 21st centuries…This is not a war between two states, but a colonial military action by one state against a stateless, dispossessed, poorly led people.” Said singled out Shimon Peres, who was on the jury for the prize, for he was then serving “as foreign minister in a deeply reactionary government led by a war criminal.” To the letter, Said attached a photocopy of an article from Middle East International by the Israeli journalist Haim Baram that outlined Peres’ criminal role in the Israeli occupation. Said was kind and honest in his argument, writing, as he was, to a peer. Said wrote, “You know, of course, how highly I think of you and how for many years you’ve seemed to me to be of the essential writers of our time.” But he was nonetheless adamant, “Thus, your charismatic presence for the Prize and your acceptance of it is, for the Israeli government, a badly needed boost to its poor international standing, a symbol that the greatest talents in the end subscribe to what Israel is doing.” He reminded Sontag that the struggle in Palestine was part of an international fight against injustice that she was already a part of, not a unique case. Said wrote to her saying, “You have such an exceptional record of opposing similar barbarism in South Africa, Vietnam, and Bosnia, that it would be entirely consistent with that record were you publicly to state your dissent by refusing to go to Jerusalem at this time.” He ended his impassioned plea by reasserting their friendship: “I hope you’ll take my comments not as interfering with what you do, but rather as those of a fraternal supporter and admirer.”

Said, in fact, was not the only person who wrote to Sontag not to accept the prize. Journalist Alexander Cockburn urged Sontag not to go to Jerusalem in an essay published online where he contrasted her actions with the activism of Said and noted that Nadine Gordimer had previously refused to accept the Prize. He wrote that unlike Sontag, Said “spoke out against injustice as a matter of universal principle, not just for his own people.” Human rights activist Yehudit Keshet wrote an open letter to Sontag on behalf of the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace. Founded in 2000, the organization represents a number of Israeli and Palestinian women’s rights groups. The letter had a similar ethos as Said’s own, it read: “We would like to draw your attention to the fact that your acceptance of the prize, and your presence in Jerusalem at the ceremony, is a tacit legitimization of the occupation, and of Mayor Olmert's brutal policies against Palestinian residents of this city.”  

An hour before leaving for her flight to Israel, Sontag replied to Said’s letter. She was not going to refuse the prize. “Edward,” she wrote, “if I thought that accepting the Prize made me an endorser of the present Israeli government and its policies, of course I would not go.” Strangely, logistics were one of her concerns: “Wouldn’t refusing the Prize—and how do I make that known? Hold a press conference? Write an op-ed piece for the Times?—be a lot less serious as a gesture than my going there and speaking out.” Surely Jean-Paul Sartre was not concerned with such matters when he refused the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, famously saying that a “writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.” In her letter, Sontag ascribed to the old argument that she was not involved enough, that she was too disconnected from the conflict to take a moral position on it. She wrote to Said, “I sincerely believe that grandstanding—which is what my refusing the Prize would amount to—is a glib response on the part of someone who barely knows the place at first-hand (I’ve been there once twenty-eight years ago!) and who knows how to look and ask questions and learn and speak out and write.” Needless to say, Sontag did not heed Said’s message. 

~ ~ ~ ~ 

At the award ceremony in Jerusalem, Shimon Peres honored Sontag on the stage before Ehud Olmert handed her the prize himself. The acceptance of the prize could now serve as proof of allegiance, “Sontag is one of us,” the nation could say. Regarding Sontag, Peres said that, “First she's Jewish, then she's a writer, then she's American. She loves Israel with emotion and the world with obligation.” Nevertheless, in her acceptance speech, Sontag condemned Israel’s practice of collective punishment and argued against the growing settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. She said, “I also believe that there can be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in the territories is halted, followed by the eventual dismantling of these communities, these settlements." She followed those political statements thus, “There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion mongering.” With those words, Sontag silenced herself; her critical comments—pointing out the most straightforward of Israel’s injustices towards the Palestinians—were mediated by her injunction that public protest by artists is futile; the Israeli state got its cultural reward.

Sontag could now be listed among the distinguished recipients of the Israeli prize: Borges, Naipaul, DeLillo—the list is long. The Jerusalem Post quoted Sontag as having said that Olmert was "an extremely persuasive and reasonable person," though, without any evidence otherwise, she later contested the quotation. In an essay in the New Yorker, published shortly after September 11th, Sontag, like Said had always done, castigated the establishment media for ignoring reality, “the voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” In Sontag there is a certain paradox that is widespread amongst the intellectual class in the United States, the intellectual who speaks truth to only some power—the intellectual who exceptionalizes Israel. Such intellectual cowardice precludes an honest debate of the facts and normalizes Israel’s daily assault on Palestinian lives and livelihoods. The lack of courage demonstrated by American intellectuals in their refusal to criticize Israel and defend Palestinian rights continues to impede the reception in the United States of popular Palestinian attempts towards real systemic change—like BDS—by occluding real movements towards justice in favor of the preservation of the status quo. Today Sontag’s publisher’s biography lists the Jerusalem Prize next to other international accolades she received, the “Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature [awarded by the Spanish monarchy] and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.” This is precisely Israel’s desire—which Said had time and again revealed in his dissections of the colonial imagination—for the cultural world to ignore its racist, settler-colonial administration and see it as any other—European—state.

~ ~ ~ ~  

The letters between Said and Sontag are stored in the Susan Sontag Papers, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles

¹. For an account of the American response to Arendt's book see Peter Novick's indispensable The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).  

². “Censored in Palestine," New York Review of Books (October 17, 1996) see: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/10/17/censored-in-palestine/