http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3290763,00.html

A Letter from 18 Writers

including three Nobel Prize recipients

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner–and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis–there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.

That this “kidnapping” was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources–most particularly that of water–by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

Today outrage follows outrage; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones. The latter usually find their target situated where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called Justice. Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly–who but field commanders can forget this for a moment?

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

This has to be said loud and clear, for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognized for what it is and resisted.

PS: As Juliano Mer Khamis, director of the documentary film Arna’s Children, asked: “Who is going to paint the ‘Guernica’ of Lebanon?”

John Berger

Noam Chomsky

Harold Pinter

José Saramago

Eduardo Galeano

Arundhati Roy

Naomi Klein

Howard Zinn

Charles Glass

Richard Falk

Gore Vidal

Russell Banks

Thomas Keneally

Chris Abani

Carolyn Forché

Martín Espada

Jessica Hagedorn

Toni Morrison

Neiln sounds like an anti-Semitic troll to me.

Please see if this can be substantiated–

FACT CHECK — 2 Israeli soldiers were IN LEBANON when captured, July 12, ’06, the incident cited by Israeli in its war against Hezbollah.

QUOTE Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon has not occurred because Hezbollah captured 2 Israeli soldiers (who were in Lebanon when captured) it was only the excuse to instigate a plan which had already been planned, by the Israeli Zionists, the US Neo-Cons and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Israel and the U.S.: What I Believe, Bobbie Christian, http://www.bushwatch.com/miscellanea.htm#bobbie

Thanks,

Neil

August 4th, 2006 at 6:52 pm

“Sorry to disappoint you though: unlike you, I’m not much of one for the preservation of particular cultures and heritages.”

I am noit dissapointed, au contraire. I expected that you would endorse a universalism of the moment.

You argue it very well and I hope you will at some point transpose your views into fiction.

I agree; works that transcend their particular moments may well be defined as “great.” Why that does not translate into “universal” eludes me, though; the concepts to me seem synonymous. Which is not to say that “universal culture” equals “greatness.” Indeed, I don’t think any culture in and of itself is great–only individual works of art from within a culture can be described thus.

Sorry to disappoint you though: unlike you, I’m not much of one for the preservation of particular cultures and heritages. They come and go; some are welcome, and some ought to be relegated to history’s dustbin. I guess I am something of a utopian, though one who lacks the more ridiculous notions of how to bring something like that about, and more to the point, I do not believe that even a utopia, once achieved, could last forever without becoming its opposite. As the great Russian writer Evgeny Zamyatin said (much to the consternation of the likes of Lenin and Stalin), “There is no final revolution.” Pipe dream? Sure. Bad fantasy? I would say it is fantasy, but not a bad one. Orders of magnitude better than our current mess, or its logical culmination, apocalypse–now there’s a bad fantasy … and the worst of realities. Christian and Islamic universalism, I would argue, fall into the apocalyptic fantasy–everyone has to be like me or else.

Thanks for the background on those writers.