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.”
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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.
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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.
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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/
