Das Blog

May 18, 2010

Satadru Sen

A letter to Amitav Ghosh re the Dan David Prize

Dear Amitav-da,

After much hesitation, I'm going to write you a few lines about your decision to accept the Dan David prize. Please understand that I'm writing not only as somebody who cares deeply about the issue, but as a colleague, admirer and friend.

I've read what you and Margaret Atwood have written in response to criticism of your decision.  I am very troubled nevertheless, because I do not see how traveling to Israel to accept a lucrative award from a private foundation is different from going to South Africa thirty years ago to play cricket or music and arguing that the game/concert was not organized by the South African government.

I agree with you about the importance of maintaining ties with dissidents within repressive political entities. I have some ties to the Israeli group Gush Shalom, which Deputy PM Moshe Ya'alon recently described as a "virus." But as far as I know, the Dan David foundation is not a dissident organization, let alone a virus. Nor has it taken a position rejecting the occupation, protesting the treatment of Arabs in Israel, or condemning the savagery that is periodically visited upon the Palestinians and Lebanese. It is at best apolitical, and to be apolitical in such circumstances is a disingenuous posture. This is, I think, especially true of democracies, where complicity is easy, anonymous and masked in majoritarian virtue. Since you have obviously made up your mind to accept the award, please consider donating the money to UNHCR's fund for Palestinian refugees or the Gaza Relief Fund, and do it publicly.

The question of whether Israel is doing something "uniquely" reprehensible is not, I think, particularly relevant. It's not Nazi Germany, as the cliche goes, but the South African analogy is not so far-fetched. When does a state reach a level of criminality - and a society a level of complicity - when outsiders need to stop conducting business as usual? I could point out that the Israeli position vis-a-vis the Palestinians, which claims a land but rejects the inhabitants and their humanity, is worse than the Indian position on Kashmir, which at least claims both land and people. I could also point out that the official ideology of Israel as a "Jewish state" - which effectively reduces non-Jewish citizens to the status of contingently tolerated residents - is quite similar to Savarkar's vision of India or Jinnah's relatively benign vision of Pakistan. I presume we both reject Savarkar and even Jinnah.

As to whether novelists/writers/artists/academics/intellectuals inhabit a privileged space where it's possible to ignore the elephant in the room and suspend the need to take a political position, perhaps I misunderstood your point. But it seems to me that writers, artists and intellectuals are not the oppressed group in question here, and do not deserve some special sympathy or license. The best news I saw today was Elvis Costello canceling a concert in Israel, citing his conscience. And I'm sure you saw the piece by Peter Beinart in today's New York Times. Israeli artists, intellectuals and citizens can and should be our allies, partners, hosts and guests when they come out in opposition politically even as they remain within Israel - like Nadine Gordimer did in South Africa, and Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy and many others have done in Israel. But it is important, I think, that we be choosy about not only what to boycott, but what not to boycott.

Please forgive me for speaking my mind so bluntly. I say these things to you because we share a background in place, time, class and education that makes us sensitive - sometimes hypersensitive - to situations of racism and colonialism. As you have remarked, we have no armies. That makes it all the more important that we do what little we can.

Warmly,

Satadru

Response from Amitav Ghosh, May 19, 2010

Dear Satadru

Thanks for your thoughtful message. The situation is of course a
complicated one. And it becomes even more complicated when you
consider that there is no clear horizon of actions that would lead to
a withdrawal of the boycott. In the case of South Africa we knew that
it was only a matter of repealing the apartheid laws - here there is
no such horizon. This is probably one reason why Noam Chomsky opposes
the boycott.

http://pulsemedia.org/2010/01/15/chomsky-bds-and-the-elephant-in-the-room/

As regards Elvis Costello, I can perfectly understand why he would
wish to just stay away. Unfortunately, we were in a position where we
would have had to make a case against all Israeli foundations, civil
institutions, universities etc; this case would have amounted to an
attack on the legitimacy of the Israeli state itself. This I was not
prepared to do.

Since you invoke the circumstances we have in common, I would like to
say that if I had boycotted an Israeli university and private
foundation because of the actions of the state, I would have been hard
put to answer why I should not also boycott similar institutions in
India. In the West the Middle Eastern conflict may appear to have a
particular salience: from where I stand it does not. I think this is
also the case for Goenawan Mohammad, the Indonesian poet and activist
who accepted the same award.

I am attaching my answer to a letter that was sent to me by some
California activists.

Best wishes

Amitav Ghosh

On the response

A few points can and should be made in response to the response. Let me begin by echoing what a historian colleague - and Canuck, I should note - said upon reading it: Amitav-da's reasoning is stronger than Atwood's bizarre and self-pitying reaction to the criticism she has faced. (I presume she is aware, by now, that she has not been singled out for criticism.)

The lack of a clear horizon that might guide a boycott is  perhaps undeniable. But it is not the case that the South African boycott had cut-and-dried targets that were always obvious. Also, there is in the Israeli case quite a bit of shared ground when it comes to a serious definition of "success":  the end of settlement expansion, two sovereign states based roughly on the 1967 borders, an agreement on sharing the city of Jerusalem. Beyond that the consensus is weaker and disagreement is rife - within Gush Shalom, within J-Street, among critics of Israeli policy in general, or even among proponentsboycott - about just what should be boycotted and what the eventual political arrangement might be.  Some of us would like to see a binational state, others would be satisfied with a limited Palestinian sovereignty, some are more prepared than others to "give away" Jerusalem or the right of return. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing conversation, there is negotiation, there are experiments and false starts: in other words, there is a serious and valuable process of fumbling, in which we, as I said, do what we can to articulate and implement some programs. Most of us have no "map" for a boycott of Israel, only a series of more or less ad hoc responses. The elusiveness of a clear horizon, however, only makes it important that we try to create one; it cannot be an excuse for inaction or complicity. And it is vitally important that writers and intellectuals play a role in the imagining of that horizon, and not leave it to the politicians. It is utterly inadequate to leave the issue in the hands of Barack Obama, who, for all his good intentions, is a captive of numerous handicaps and expediencies and whose political limits are already glaringly evident. It is startlingly akin to the expectation that Ramsay MacDonald would decolonize the British Empire. of a

The "we don't do cultural boycotts" position rests on the assumption that culture exists in a morally autonomous zone uncontaminated by the governmental and corporate worlds. The reality, of course, is that culture draws upon the state and the private sector for funding, facilities and protection, and in return delivers profit and prestige. That, after all, is why Shimon Peres will present the Dan David prize. The involvement of the President of Israel in the award ceremony cannot be dismissed easily; the President, as Amitav-da points out, is a ceremonial  emblem of the Israeli state, although Shimon Peres is hardly a political innocent. He cannot wash his hands of the behavior of the state: in any case, in that moment when he presents the award, he is the state. But rejecting a ceremony over which he presides is not a nuance-free act; it does not automatically imply a rejection of the legitimacy of Israel as a nation-state. After the Amritsar massacre of 1919, Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the King, not to the Prime Minister. By doing so, he did not reject the legitimacy of Britain as a state or its right to exist, but the legitimacy of the British state in a particular political mode (empire) over which the King presided. The notion that Israeli civil society automatically warrants an exemption from a boycott is not entirely sustainable, because in a democracy, the lines between state, civil society and individual citizen are necessarily blurred.  It is important that we examine critically the particular institutions and cultural links with which we might engage.

Amitav-da raises the issue of whether boycotting Israeli civil society would also obligate one to boycott its Indian counterpart. This problem should  reasonably be extended to American civil society in the aftermath of Iraq and in the light - or shadow - of the "War on Terror." There are, of course, several ways to approach the issue, beginning with practicality: short of emigration, it is impractical to boycott the country one lives in. Second, when one is a citizen of the state in question, then one has direct means of influencing policy: voting, lobbying, political organizing, donating, activism,street demonstrations.  General or broadly-aimed boycotts become less necessary under such circumstances. Third, the situation in Israel-Palestine is arguably different from those of India or the United States, because of the explicit element of racially based disenfranchisement and dispossession. (One may point to Sudan, but I doubt that Amitav-da would travel to Sudan to accept a literary award.) Fourth, if a non-Indian writer or academic genuinely believes that the political conduct of the Indian state is comparable to that of Israel, then he or she arguably has a duty to boycott Indian civil society institutions unless the institution has taken a position opposing the actions of the government. I do not boycott Indian universities generally, but I do boycott Gujarat, including Gujarati civil society, and will continue to do so as long as Narendra Modi keeps getting re-elected in that state. I would make an exception for institutions or individuals openly opposed to the Modi government. I no longer travel to Arizona for pleasure, but I wiould not refuse to attend a conference at the University of AZ (unless Jan Brewer was chairing the panel), because the malevolence of that situation is not sufficiently diffuse or pervasive. It may be that ultimately it boils down to such assessments and to one's own ideological and ethical priorities. But in the case of Israel, as in the case of India or the US, it is certainly possible to boycott and patronize selectively.

Satadru Sen