Irish author Sally Rooney recently made the decision not to have her latest novel published by an Israeli publisher. The Normal People author said that she could not “accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”.
All we needed was a pair of eyes to see what is there: the indignity and brutality of the checkpoints, the settlers shouting and waving their guns, the wall, the barbed wire, the refugee camps
Last month, 70 writers, poets, playwrights, booksellers and publishers, including myself, signed a letter endorsing her decision. It struck me that over a third of those who signed have attended the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest). The letter was also signed by PalFest’s co-founders, Ahdaf Soueif and Brigid Keenan.
PalFest was founded in 2008, with patrons including Chinua Achebe, John Berger, Mahmoud Darwish, Seamus Heaney and Harold Pinter. They were later joined by Philip Pullman and Emma Thompson. It was formed “in the hope … that the experience of visiting Palestine with PalFest expands authors’ vocabulary and imagination, that they will draw connections between their own work and the various processes of control ongoing in Palestine”. The number of signatories to the letter is evidence that this has worked.
One of those who signed the letter supporting Rooney was the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan.
He attended PalFest in its first year and wrote in the London Review of Books: “In the week that Israel celebrated its 60th anniversary, I had come as one of the writers attending the first-ever Palestine Festival of Literature… everywhere we went the wall seemed a shadow, a heavy ornament of Israeli aggression and a horrible reminder to those of us who grew up to see the wall come down in Berlin and the end of apartheid in South Africa. Even in those infamous places, merely mentioning the problem did not invite hatred the way trying to say anything at all about Israel does. Discussion lacks traction in a land scarred from end to end with barriers to progress.”
Indignity and brutality
I first went to Palestine with PalFest in May 2009. We crossed over the Allenby Bridge and were kept waiting for eight hours while the Arab writers among us were detained until the last possible moment.
I stood in the sunshine, in a small group including Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, Rachel Holmes, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Claire Messud, Henning Mankell and others, little realising that the aggression we were shown was a mild foretaste of what was to come.
That evening, in Jerusalem, we assembled at the Palestinian National Theatre for the opening of the festival. The Israeli army descended with their guns and forced us out. We picked up large platters of food and trooped down the road, into the garden of the French Cultural Institute, where the show went on.
It was a week that changed the lives of every one of us. All we needed was a pair of eyes to see what is there: the indignity and brutality of the checkpoints, the settlers shouting and waving their guns, the wall, the barbed wire, the refugee camps and, in some ways saddest of all, the old city of Hebron.
As Messud wrote: “The agonising descent into darkness that was our visit to the glorious city of sandstone and carved trellis work, an ancient city was being depleted of its inhabitants.”