[Prefatory Note: A slightly modified text of an opinion piece that was published as an editorial on Oct. 21st in TMS (Transcend Media Service). If you unfamiliar with TMS, I highly recommend it. I find it the best source of intelligent and progressive commentary on a wide range of peace and justice related concerns. TMS is circulated on a weekly basis free of charge to subscribers. The weekly selections are expertly and sensitively selected by Antonio C. S. Rosa.]
When Is It ‘Politically Correct’ to Be Politically Correct?
Only a day after I published ‘In Praise of Kamila Shamsie,’ the Nobel Committee in Stockholm awarded their 2019 Prize in Literature to Peter Handke, the Austrian novelist and playwright widely known for his public support of ultra-nationalist behavior, including even a veiled endorsement of the crimes of Serbian leaders during the Bosnian War. PEN America wasted no time overcoming its institutional reluctance to criticize the literary prizes given by other organizations, issuing this statement of condemnation:
“We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide, like former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. PEN America has been committed since the passage of our 1948 PEN Charter to fighting against mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood, and distortion of facts. Our Charter further commits us to work to ‘dispel all hatreds and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace and equality.’ We reject the decision that a writer who has persistently called into question thoroughly documented war crimes deserves to be celebrated for his ‘linguistic ingenuity.’ At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this. We deeply regret the Nobel Committee on Literature’s choice.”
Yet, this half begs the question—should PEN America mix political sentiments (that I share) with their appraisal of literary achievement? It is a question for which there are no obvious answer better than ‘it depends,’ which is never satisfactory except as an admission of failure.
I read the PEN statement as an expression of their bitter disappointment, but it contained no hint of a suggestion that the Nobel Committee should reconsider, even withdraw the prize, and returning to drawing board in search of a more deserving candidate. When rightest pressures were mounted against the Nelly Sachs Prize awarded a few weeks earlier to Kamila Shamsie for her wonderful Home Fire, the Dortmund prize jury not only reconsidered, but reversed its decision. In the Handke case, the Austrian celebrated author had a history of supporting reactionary views, including chauvinistic, anti-immigrant, quasi-fascist nationalism that is currently posing virulent threats to humane forms of political governance in many countries, as well as creating a distinctly illiberal international order.
In effect, this advocacy of such political behavior should have been abhorrent enough to color Nobel’s committee’s overall assessment of Handke’s qualification for a prize that carries a large enough monetary amount as to enable him to devote additional funds potentially in furtherance of these pernicious political projects. It would seem also relevant to take account of Alfred Nobel’s intention when establishing the prize to do more than celebrate literary excellence, but also to promote cultural ideals of an uplifting character (“en idealisk riktning” – in an ideal direction or direction of an ideal; see Eli Vuillamy, The Guardian, Oct.12, 2019).
By contrast, in Shamsie’s case her sin was to honor her conscience by supporting the nonviolent BDS-Boycott Divestment Sanctions Campaign that seeks an end to the violation of the basic rights of the Palestinian people. Thirty years ago, BDS was a widely applauded tactic of those championing human rights, credited with mounting pressures on Apartheid South Africa. It was seen as nonviolent yet effective as an expression of solidarity with those seeking to overcome the oppressive policies of a racist regime. It was sometimes criticized as a tactic, but never were its militant activists subject to punitive responses or personally discredited. Yet recently, the image of BDS has been transformed for many ‘good people’ into a disguised, yet virulent form of anti-Semitism, even held by some, responsible for the recent rise in violent anti-Jewish incidents in Western liberal democracies. Such an accusation is absurd and malicious, yet that doesn’t mean it’s harmless. In response to Zionist activism and Israeli propaganda, BDS is increasingly being condemned, even criminalized, or used to justify a variety of punitive moves of extreme disapproval such as this withdrawal of a literary prize.
The African-American superstar Angela Davis received a taste of similar toxic medicine when the Birmingham City Council reacted to community Zionist pressures by retracting a human rights award in 2018 from her birth city recognizing extraordinary lifetime human rights contributions. At least in Birmingham there was a pushback to the pushback, leading the award to be restored and received by Davis. Yet, lots of hurt and damage done in the process. Anyone who cares to examine the realities would know that the BDS Campaign is directed at Israel and has nothing whatsoever to do with hatred or hostility to Jews or the Jewish people. BDS would disappear the day the government of the State of Israel announced its abandonment of apartheid and committed itself to respecting the Palestinian people as their legal, political, and cultural equal. I believe that day will come, maybe not tomorrow or the day after, but it will come as the tides of history will prevail over this last major stronghold of European colonialism.
My conclusion: when Dortmund withdrew the prize from Shamsie it acted shamelessly; when Nobel Committee in Stockholm gave Handke its coveted prize it acted problematically, but arguably sufficiently within its mandate to validate a decision, at least to the extent of not reversing its decision. In this sense, American PEN struck mostly the right note. It would have been pitch perfect in my view had they condemned Handke’s view, and then contrasted their approach with the disgraceful Dortmund capitulation to analogous regressive forces that had prompted their dismissive response to learning that Handke had been given a Nobel Prize.
In this sense, creating moral distance from Dortmund by their silence illustrates the political inadequacy of liberalism as practiced in many Western countries, equivocally acknowledged by a flippant admission—‘progressive except for Palestine, or PEP.’ Maybe PEN America would retort, what Dortmund does is too trivial to matter, but this sidesteps the prestige of this German award that in the past has been given to such prominent literary figures as Milos Kundera, Margaret Atwood, and Nadine Gordimer among others; as well, the prize honors Nelly Sachs, ironically a Jewish poet who literary work against the crimes and wrongs of Nazism, not so dissimilar to opposing the crimes and wrongs of apartheid in our era..
PEN America might have justified crossing the line of customary restraint by calling for more than criticism in this particular instance. It could have asked the literary overseers in Stockholm to reconsider, and revoke their award, and surely, they should have widened their net to take account of Dortmund’s behavior. As Israel’s crimes against humanity are ongoing and severe, the moral and political incorrectness of the unwarranted slur on Kamila Shamsie’s character and reputation is particularly reprehensible. It may be that condemning BDS has become politically correct in Western democracies but objectively viewed such a posture is morally incorrect and will eventually be so judged as will the double standards evident in relation to Handke and Shamsie. I doubt that there was any backlash against the award to Kundera despite his intense anti-Soviet perspective, certainly inconsistent with peace and accommodation during the dangerous days of the Cold War. Double standards, especially by arbiters of political correctness, are themselves politically correct in the worst possible sense of conforming to the political fashions of the moment. This kind of ‘correctness’ sends morally incorrect messages that look away from certain forms of wrongdoing while proclaiming righteous indignation in response to others.
We are left hanging with the title question: When is it ‘politically correct’ to be politically correct? My answer is that it is normally desirable to be politically correct only when it is morally correct to be so. Even such a moral criterion can produce divergent responses. Someone like Handke can produce moral rationalizations about preserving the coherence of national political communities, alleging their dependence on ethnic and religious coherence as well as on the exclusion of strangers who would dilute national traditions and identity. As Dortmund did by implicitly acknowledging that BDS generates ethnic tensions rather than promotes reconciliation and peace.
In other words, we cannot escape from taking responsibility for our decisions and choices, an unavoidable leap into frying pans of uncertainty. To be human and humane is make that leap with eyes as widely open as possible. When we do this, I am confident that more and more of us would see our human species as surviving only if we can feel, think, and act in a cosmopolitan spirit that affirms human equality and exhibits particular solidarity with all who are desperate or vulnerable. If we do this in a forthright way with access to the salient realities, I believe we will be led toward embracing Shamsie’s worldview and rejecting Handke’s. At least that is my abiding faith, my moral compass.
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Global Justice in the 21st Century 
The Enigma that was Shimon Peres
29 SepResponses to Interview Questions on Shimon Peres
(from Rodrigo Craveiro of Correio Braziliense, Brasilia)
[Prefatory Note: the text that follows is derived from an interview yesterday with an important Brazilian newspaper. I have retained the questions posed by the journalist, but expanded and reframed my responses. The death of Shimon Peres is the last surviving member of Israel’s founding figures, and in many ways a fascinating political personality, generating wildly contradictory appraisals. My own experience of the man was direct, although rather superficial, but it did give me greater confidence to trust my reservations about his impact and influence, which collides with the adulation that he has inspired among American liberals, in particular.]
Shimon Peres leaves behind a legacy of a long public life of commitment to making Israel a success story, economically, politically, diplomatically, and even psychologically. He is being celebrated around the world for his intelligence, perseverance, and in recent decades for his public advocacy of a realistic peace with the Palestinians. I believe he lived an impressive and significant life, but one that was also flawed in many ways. He does not deserve, in my opinion, the unconditional admiration he is receiving, especially from the high and mighty in Europe and North America. Underneath his idealistic rhetoric was a tough-minded and mainstream commitment to Zionist goals coupled with an expectation that the Palestinians, if sensible, would submit graciously to this reality, and if not, deservedly suffer the consequences of abuse and harm. He was never, contrary to his image, a supporter of an idealistic peace based on recognizing the equality of the Palestinian people, acknowledging the wrongs of the nakba and the Palestinian ordeal that followed, and in creating a sustainable peace that included realizing Palestinian rights as defined by international law.
* 2) Do you believe Peres was ever close to obtaining a definitive peace deal with Palestinians? What did it get wrong?
In my view, Peres never even wanted to reach a sustainable peace agreement with the Palestinians, but he fooled many people, including the committee in Oslo that selects the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was unyielding in his refusal to grant Palestinians dispossessed in 1948 any right of return. He early favored, in fact helped initiate, and never really confronted the settlement movement as it encroached upon the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He consistently pretended to be more peace-oriented than he was except when it served his purposes to seem war-like. I share the assessment made by Marc H. Ellis, the highly respected and influential dissident Jewish thinker, that aside from the exaggerated praise he is receiving, Peres will be more accurately remembered, especially by Palestinians, as an enabler of “a narrative of Jewish innocence and redemption that was always much more sinister from the beginning.” When Peres’ political ambitions made it opportune for him to be militarist, he had little difficulty putting ‘peace’ to one side and embarking on hawkish policies of destructive fury such as the infamous attack on Qana (Lebanon) in April 1996, apparently with the design of improving his electoral prospects, which in any event turned out badly. What seems generally accurate is the view that Peres believed the Israel would evolve in a more secure and tranquil manner if it achieved some kind of peace with Palestine, thereby the conflict to a negotiated end. Yet the peace that Peres favored was always filtered through a distorting Zionist optic, which meant that it was neither fair nor balanced, and was unlikely to last even if some such arrangement were to be swallowed in despair at some point by Palestinian leaders. To date, despite many attempted entrapments, the Palestinians have avoided political surrender beneath such banners of ‘false peace’ that have adorned the diplomatic stage from time to time. The Oslo diplomacy came close to achieving a diplomatic seduction, yet its ‘peace process’ while helpful for Israel’s expansionist designs never was able to deliver, as it promised, an end to the conflict in a form that met Israel’s unspoken priorities for territorial gains, a legitimated Jewish state, and a permanently subordinated Palestinian existence.
I had small dinners with Peres on two separate occasions, and attended a couple of larger events where he was the guest of honor. Both of these dinners took place in New York City more than twenty years ago. I was impressed by Peres’ intelligence and social skills, but also by his arrogant and insensitive Israeli nationalism and his unanticipated interest at the time in promoting a strategic alignment with US global and regional policies in the Middle East, which he expressed in think tank militarist terms when he regarded himself as among friends. I remember, in particular, his advocacy, then way ahead of unfolding events, of the feasibility of achieving close strategic partnerships among Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. His premise, which has proved correct, was that these three political actors shared common interests in regional security and the political established order that would take precedence over supposedly antagonistic ideological goals and ethical values. Peres believed that these countries were natural allies bound by mutual interests, an outlook that exhibited his geopolitically driven political mentality. Peres also seemed always to make it clear in private settings that he was not seen as naïve, and frequently made the point that the Middle East was not Scandinavia. I heard him speak in 1993 one time at Princeton shortly after the famed handshake on the White House lawn between Rabin and Arafat. On that occasion he made it clear that the ‘Palestinians’ were ‘Arabs,’ and accordingly it would be appropriate for the 22 Arab countries to absorb the Palestinian refugees rather than expect this burden to fall on Israel’s shoulders. Beyond this, he indicated his hopes for normalization in the Middle East that would benefit both Israel and the Arab countries, which he visualized by a metaphor I found racist at the time: Israel would supply the brains, while the Arab would supply the brawn, and the combination would be a productive regional body politic.
* 4) Do you think Shimon Peres was one of the most dedicated Israeli leaders to achieving a two state solution? Why?
I am not sure about the true nature of Peres’ commitment to a two state solution, although I felt his public offerings were often manipulative toward the Palestinians and were put forward in a disarming manner as if responsive to reasonable Palestinian expectations. Underneath the visionary rhetoric, Peres acted as if Israel’s diplomatic muscle gave it the opportunity to offer the Palestinians a constrained state that would end the conflict while leaving Israel with indirect and no longer contested control of a disproportionate share of historic Palestine. As is typical for political realists, Peres exaggerated the capacity of military might to prevail over political resolve. He has been so far wrong about attaining Israel’s goal of a controlled peace ever being achievable, underestimating Palestinian nationalism and its insistence that peace be based on the equality of the two peoples. Part of why Peres was so appreciated internationally is that his language and vision tended to be outwardly humanistic, and thus contrasted with the far blunter approaches associated with many recent politicians in Israel, and most notably with Bibi Netanyahu. Only by such a comparison can Peres be genuinely considered as ‘a man of peace.’ But this image, however much polished, does not capture the essence of this complicated, contradictory, and talented political personality. As suggested earlier, Peres is probably best understood as a geopolitical realist who believed in maximizing Israeli military power, and not only for defensive purposes, but to give the country the capacity to impose its will on the outcome of the conflict, and to exert unchallenged influence over the entire region. It should not be forgotten that Peres initially became prominent decades ago as a leading overseas procurer of weapons for Israel and later as the political entrepreneur of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which included persuading France to give assistance that violated its commitments as a party to the Nonproliferation Treaty. As well, on occasion, for the sake of his political ambitions when in or aspiring to high office, Peres supported and was responsible for very aggressive military retaliatory strikes against Palestinian communities that caused heavy casualties among innocent civilians.
Peres was always very useful for the West: an ally and someone who presented a hopeful, moderate, and peace-oriented outer look that was presented as exhibiting the soul of Israel, a moral energy trying forever to free the country from the birth pains of its violent emergence. The Economist unintentionally illustrated Peres’ witty cynicism that also came across in personal encounters: “There are two things that cannot be made without closing your eyes, love and peace. If you try to make them with open eyes, you won’t get anywhere.” The august magazine offered this to show off Peres’ wisdom, but I take it as summarizing his deeply suspect view of real peace, or for that matter, of real love.
It is not surprising, yet still symbolically disappointing, that President Barack Obama unreservingly exalts Shimon Peres, and is making the symbolic pilgrimage to Israel to take part in the funeral service honoring his life. If Peres’actual political impact is taken into account, his words of excessive tribute to Peres should haunt Obama if he were exposed to the other side of Peres, the so-called ‘father of the settlement movement,’ ‘the butcher of Qana,’ ‘the man behind Israeli nuclear weapons’: “A light has gone out, but the hope he gave us will burn forever. Shimon Peres was a soldier for Israel, for the Jewish people, for justice, for peace and for the belief that we can be true to our best selves – to the very end of our time on Earth and to the legacy that we leave to others.”
As with Obama’s recent disturbingly positive public statement of farewell to Netanyahu at the UN, the departing president seems overly eager to create a final, formal impression of unconditional solidarity with Israel, an attitude reinforced in these instances by showing only the most nominal concern for the ongoing Palestinian ordeal. One can only wonder what became of the outlook contained in Obama’s much heralded 2009 speech in Cairo that viewed Israel/Palestine in a more balanced way and promised to turn a new page in relations between the United States and the Middle East. It does not require a historian to remind ourselves that Israel wasted little time in mobilizing its lobbying forces to pour scorn on such a revisioning of policy inducing Obama to back down in an awkward and politically costly manner. Perhaps, this ‘reset’ can be justified as a practical move by Obama in the interest of governing, but why now when the tides of political pressure have relented and after so much experience of Netanyahu, does Obama want to be regarded more than ever as Israel’s staunch friend rather than as someone who was so often obstructed by the Israeli leadership?
Such a posture is distressing, in part, because it overlooks the outrageous and undisguised effort by Netanyahu to favor Romney for president in the 2012 American elections and his later belligerent circumvention of White House protocol by speaking directly to the U.S. Congress to register intense opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. If Obama behaves in this craven way, what might we expect from a Clinton presidency? Clinton has already committed her likely forthcoming administration to the absurd goal of raising even higher the level of friendship and solidarity between the two countries higher than it was during the Obama years. She has provided tangible evidence that this pledge is genuine by making gratuitous and unacceptable avowals of intense opposition to the BDS Campaign, and hence of subordinating the constitutional rights of American citizens to the whims of pro-Israeli extremists.
Tags: Netanyahu, Nobel Prize, nuclear weapons, Obama, Oslo diplomacy, Shimon Peres