April 18, 2010
Margaret Atwood's response to requests to reject the Dan David Prize
(Rebuttal from Trent University Prof. Michael Neumann follows.)
Dear
:
Since I accepted the Dan David Prize and it has been announced, I have
received several letters from different groups asking me to reverse my
acceptance and boycott this event. For some reason, Amitav Ghosh of
India, with whom the prize is shared, does not appear to be a target of
this campaign. He and I have been chosen to receive the Dan David Prize
for our literary work—work that is said to depict the twentieth
century. In my case, women and the environment also feature. Here is
the citation:
http://www.dandavidprize.org/index.php/laureates/laureates-2010/111-2010-present-literature-rendition-of-the-20th-century/276-margaret-atwood.html.
I sympathize with the very bad conditions the people of Gaza are living
through due to the blockade, the military actions, and the Egyptian and
Israeli walls. Everyone in the world hopes that the two sides involved
will give up their inflexible positions and sit down at the negotiating
table immediately and work out a settlement that would help the
ordinary people who are suffering. The world wants to see fair play and
humane behaviour, and it wants that more the longer the present
situation continues and the worse the conditions become.
As soon as I said that, in an earlier letter, I got yelled at for
saying there were two sides, but actually there are (or possibly more
than two). See:
http://www.islamidavet.com/english/2010/03/04/hamas-slams-arab-vow-to-resume-talks-with-israel/
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1126655.html
I certainly have no power to influence these events.
However, the Dan David Prize is a cultural item It is not, as has been
erroneously stated, an “Israeli” prize from the State of Israel, nor is
it a prize “from Tel Aviv University,” but one founded and funded by an
individual and his foundation, just as the Griffin Prizes in Canada
are. To boycott an individual simply because of the country he or she
lives in would set a very dangerous precedent. And to boycott a
discussion of literature such as the one proposed would be to take the
view that literature is always and only some kind of tool of the nation
that produces it -- a view I strongly reject, just as I reject the view
that any book written by a woman is produced by some homogeneous
substance called “women.” Books are written by individuals. Novels are
the closest we can come to experiencing human lives in particular
places as they unfold in time and space, and lyric poems are the
closest we can come to co-experiencing another human being’s
feeling-thought.
Another dangerous precedent is the idea of a cultural boycott. Even
those strongly endorsing a financial boycott, such as
www.artistespourlapaix.org, Artists For Peace, reject cultural
boycotts, which they see as a form of censorship. (See their December
22 posting, in their Israel-Palestine file.) Indeed, such boycotts
serve no good purpose if one of the hopes for the future is that peace
and normal exchanges and even something resembling normal living
conditions will be restored.
PEN International, an organization of which I am a Vice President, is
in favour of continuing dialogue that crosses borders of all kinds.
www.internationalpen.org.uk “International PEN, the world’s oldest
human rights organization and the oldest international literary
organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 to dispel national,
ethnic, and racial hatreds and to promote understanding among all
countries.” (See U.S. PEN’s recent New York Tariq Ramadan Cooper Union
event, for which they were attacked by extremists from all sides.)
Moderates who want to promote dialogue always get hammered twice as
much, as they get stones thrown at them from several directions at
once.
In this situation, threats to open discussion come from both sides of the wall: consider this report from IFEX: http://www.ifex.org/israel/2004/07/28/israel_palestine_journalists_pressured/
I realize that I am caught in a propaganda war between two desperate
sides in a tragic and unequal conflict. I also realize that, no matter
what I do, some people are going to disagree with my decision and
attack me for it. That being the case, I have chosen to visit, to speak
with a variety of people, and – as much as is possible -- to see for
myself, as I have done in other times and other countries many times
before, including several behind the Iron Curtain and Iran and
Afghanistan.
If I can go to the Occupied Territories, I will. After that, I will
write my own “Open Letter” – something that I would otherwise be unable
to do. Groups opposing my going to Israel, and to the region, should
bear that in mind.
In that letter, I am very likely to call attention to a hard truth
about the whole region: it is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
The Dead Sea is evaporating rapidly, and heat is increasing.
Unless some immediate and shared thought and work is done soon, there
will not be a Middle East to dispute about, because no one can live
there anyway. See the exemplary work being done by Friends of the Earth
Middle East, http://www.foeme.org/index.php , which brings together projects spanning Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.
See also this 350.org photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/4039198451
See also this Barn Owl Israel/Jordan/Palestine story:
http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2009/04/barn_owls_israel.html
These initiatives are examples of how people can live together
and work together for desirable common ends. And how – increasingly, around the
world – we will have to. Nature recognizes no national borders, and does not
negotiate. If the world were a basketball, the biosphere would be a coat of
varnish. Our ability to remain alive depends on that thin skin. At my age, I am
devoting much of my increasingly limited energies to the cause of bio-viability
– the ability of life to continue living on this planet.
Finally, I believe that those behind the choice for the Dan
David Prize acted awarely, and that they fully intend to hear something about
colonialism, unequal power, and in my case the subjugation of women and the
perils facing us because of environmental degradation. Otherwise, why would they
have invited me?
With respect,
Margaret Atwood
********
Michael Neumann - Response to Margaret Atwood
First, as a philosopher I must applaud Ms. Atwood's facility with fine
distinctions. Heaven forfend that someone should describe the Dan David Prize
as "from Tel Aviv University" when it is merely "endowed by the Dan David
Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University." (http://www.dandavidprize.org/index.php/about/about-the-prize.html)
She's
not so great on consistency, though. First she says that she's been asked to
"boycott this event", then that it would set a very dangerous precedent
to "boycott an individual". [my italics] Well, no matter. Is
the very dangerous precedent to "boycott an individual simply because of the
country he or she lives in"? That's unlikely. No one is suggesting, for
instance, that we boycott Israeli Arabs, or Uri Avnery. The idea is to boycott
a country because it kills and starves innocent people - not so dangerous a
precedent, perhaps.
Well, again, no matter. "Another dangerous
precedent is the idea of a cultural boycott." Why? Partly because some people
have seen it "as a form of censorship". A couple of things. First, it's an
odd form of censorship, given no one is being prevented from publishing or
saying anything. Second, censorship may be the lesser evil compared to, oh,
wimping out while Israel kills and starves innocent people.
But "such
boycotts serve no good purpose if one of the hopes for the future is that peace
and normal exchanges and even something resembling normal living conditions will
be restored." I don't get this. It seems to say, if we stop normal exchanges
now, we can't hope to have them later. Why? Is this what happened when there
was a boycott against South Africa? How does not having an exchange now make
future exchanges impossible or even more difficult?
We hear that PEN is
"in favour of continuing dialogue that crosses all borders of all kinds."
Well good for PEN. There's been an awful lot of dialogue in the 62 years since
1948, not to mention the 93 years since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Oddly
enough, Israel still starves and kills innocent Palestinians. It does so to
maintain racially Jewish sovereignty over Palestine, despite a lot of dialogue
about that. Good thing, then, that a cultural boycott will not prevent
Israelis from stating whatever they like - though perhaps not wherever
they like - and others from responding. That's dialogue, I
think.
Admittedly it's tragic that Ms Atwood is "caught in a propaganda
war between two desperate sides". I wonder who the war is between, because
Israel manifests a vanishingly small measure of desperation. It's precisely
because Israel is so obviously not desperate that it is disingenuous to hide
behind even-handed platitudes like: "Everyone in the world hopes that the two
sides involved will give up their inflexible positions and sit down at the
negotiating table immediately and work out a settlement that would help the
ordinary people who are suffering." No, not everyone-in-the-world's
hopes fit a description so deviant from the facts.
The Palestinians
have given up most of Palestine to accept a two-state solution in which they
will be left with a mere remnant of their own country. They have, at various
times, renounced violence, only to find that this simply encouraged Israel to
encroach even further on the Palestinians' bantustans. Israeli flexibility
consists of moving its de facto annexations ever further across the 1967 Green
Line. Moreover, the Palestinians are not simply fighting for land, much as
they need it. They are fighting the abhorrent arrangement in which Jews,
racially defined, hold the power of life and death over all others who live in
the area under Israeli control. In this matter, Israel has never budged an
inch.
In any case, by the end of Ms. Atwood's letter, we venture in to
the land of "oh please". We are told that "If I can go to the Occupied
Territories, I will. After that, I will write my own “Open Letter” – something
that I would otherwise be unable to do. Groups opposing my going to Israel, and
to the region, should bear that in mind." Actually, people have managed to go
to the Occupied Territories and write open letters without accepting prizes from
Tel Aviv (oops).
Not to worry. Ms. Atwood promises to alert us to the
dangers of climate change in the region. I admit that her closing paragraphs
render me speechless. I would have preferred to be told: "It's a million
dollar prize! Are you out of your mind?"
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