Why have Western writers and public intellectuals been so feeble and belated in their response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza? The general public can be forgiven for needing photos of children visibly starving to death to sympathise with the plight of Palestinians but writers should be better than that. The tens of thousands of women and children killed by Israeli bombardment, the systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and universities, the killing of medical personnel, the targeted killing of journalists, the children singled out and shot by snipers should have stoked writers in London and New York into a performative fury.
But this didn’t happen, not until the photos of emaciated children gave these experts on the human condition a Bob Geldof cue. Children are the archetypal innocents; it’s hard to cast them as members of Hamas’s evil repertory, cosplaying pathos. The IDF-induced famine in Gaza became a Live Aid moment; weirdly, starvation depoliticised the genocide, bleaching it into a humanitarian cause that writers could get behind.
At the end of May, some twenty months after the slaughter set off by Hamas’s butchery, three hundred and more writers from the United Kingdom and Ireland collectively signed a letter condemning Israel’s genocidal war. Welcome as this was, it is reasonable to ask why it needed fifty thousand dead Palestinians for this collective writerly conscience to stir because this has a bearing on the kind of action that will likely be proposed to address the horror of Gaza and the cause of Palestine.
The letter had the writers refusing “... to be a public of bystander-approvers. This is not only about
our common humanity and all human rights; this is about our moral
fitness as the writers of our time, which diminishes with every day we refuse to speak out and denounce this crime.” It ended rather grandly: “This genocide implicates us all. We bear witness to the crimes of genocide, and we refuse to approve them by our silence.”
The lack of self-awareness here is notable. With some honourable exceptions, the majority of the signatories had been ‘bystander-approvers’. By not writing about or speaking out against the genocide, they had, in effect, acquiesced in it. The letter
was written more than a year after the International Court of Justice issued its preliminary orders on the question of genocide. What took these writers so long?
One answer to that question, supplied by one of the letter’s signatories, was that silence was the only possible response to the war in Gaza. Sam Leith, writer and literary editor of The Spectator, wrote a column ten days after the war began which reflected on the impossibility of finding a coherent moral position on the Israel-Palestine conflict and ended by recommending silence as an honest response: “… whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Free speech, in this context, can and sometimes should, I think, mean the freedom to keep your trap shut.”
Leith took his own advice and wrote nothing on Gaza till he put his name to the letter. The one time he mentioned Gaza was in passing; he wrote a piece scolding an activist group for pressing the sponsors of a literary festival to disinvest in Israel. This writer, who recommended silence as the moral choice on Gaza, broke his silence nine months into the slaughter to mock campaigning activists for their hubris in thinking they could make a difference.
Another signatory, the British novelist, Zadie Smith, wrote an essay in May 2024 in The New Yorker where she criticised Columbia’s campus sit-ins for ignoring the sensibilities of Jewish students who might have felt intimidated by the protestors and their encampments. In a word salad that argued that every take on the conflict was inadequate and partial, she affirmed her right not to be pinned down to any position at all. Like Leith, Smith broke her silence on Gaza nine months into the war to chide student demonstrators for their certainties and to flaunt the philosophical superiority of her fence-sitting. A year after this essay, she slotted silently (like Leith) into the letter’s list of signatories, a ‘bystander-approver’ no more.
Smith offered no explanation for her pivot. The likeliest explanation is that as the genocide became unavoidably visible on our screens, Leith and Smith changed their minds and/or felt isolated and embarrassed by their silence. Everyone is entitled to change their minds and more support for the Palestinian cause can only be a good thing. But when this change of heart fits neatly into the new politically correct consensus, we should ask whether this is a preliminary to fobbing Palestinians off with some token, infinitely deferred, ‘solution’.
A ceasefire and the ‘two-state’ solution is now a mantra, a kind of incense sprinkled on a decaying project to keep it from smelling. Even a durable ceasefire is unlikely given Israel’s impunity and the United States of America’s willingness to indefinitely arm a genocidal state. The world should be wary of a post-war settlement that presents Palestinians with a reworking of the open jail status of Gaza before the war and a West Bank ‘Palestinian entity’ which amounts to something less than South Africa’s notorious ‘bantustans’.
As night follows day, if matters ever advance to the discussion of this ‘two-state solution’, the Palestinians will be presented with a set of faits accomplis: the surrender of Jerusalem, ‘land swaps’ designed to entrench Israel’s massive illegal settlements on the West Bank, and borders wholly controlled by Israel. The writers and public intellectuals who chose to be bystanders before their damascene conversion will cheer this ‘pragmatic’ arrangement because for them the two-state solution never amounted to more than a political gambit, a form of deflection.
The lead that Palestine’s supporters should follow comes not from public intellectuals and policy mavens in the West but from within Israel. Last week, thirty-one public figures from Israel, including writers, academics, film-makers, scientists, Israel Prize recipients and former officials, wrote a letter to The Guardian asking for “... crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire”.
Realists will argue that Israel is immune to such sanctions. They are wrong. The campaign that Israel and its supporters in the US stomped on with real ferocity was the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement because they understood its power. South Africa, the original apartheid state, was once a powerful, nuclear country, hegemonic in southern Africa and enthusiastically supported by the US, Great Britain and almost the entire Western world. Sanctions and boycotts delegitimised it. All the military hardware in the world couldn’t make up for the loss of legitimacy. Beleaguered, South Africa was forced to negotiate in good faith with the anti-apartheid movement to make real concessions.
The only way that Israel will negotiate in good faith with Palestinians is when Israelis come to realise that apartheid threatens to make their country a pariah amongst nations. Just as the cricketing boycott of South Africa was psychologically more wounding than hard-nosed realists had imagined, the exclusion of Israel from Eurovision, Fifa and other organisations that give it the status of an honorary Western country will get its ruling class’s attention.
Cultural and sporting boycotts are low-hanging fruit; economic and military sanctions will be much harder. But they constitute a beginning just as the sporting boycott of South Africa did in the face of Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s political intransigence. It was the start of a process that transformed South Africa. The world should sanction Israel to test its willingness to make a peace that produces a Palestinian state.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com