http://www.irishleftreview.org/2012/04/24/acceptable-racism/#more-6411
Acceptable
Racism
By
Raymond Deane
Apparently the 84-year-old American novelist Cynthia Ozick is
favourite to win the “Orange Prize for excellence in fiction written by women”
for her novel Foreign Bodies.
In an article in the UK Guardian's series My Hero (20th
April), Ozick chose George Eliot, the great 19th
century English novelist. She singled out Eliot's final novel Daniel Deronda,
something of an ugly duckling among her masterpieces not so much because of its
advocacy of Zionism as because this is conveyed by means of endless
speechifying - “high oratory, not novelistic art” (Ozick).
The great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, who also profoundly
admired Eliot, wrote in his seminal book The Question of Palestine (Vintage,
USA, 1979/1992) that by paying no attention to the effect Zionism would have on
those people already living in Palestine “Eliot is no different from other
European apostles of sympathy, humanity, and understanding for whom noble
sentiments were either left behind in Europe, or made programmatically
inapplicable outside Europe.” In this she resembles Marx and Mill who “seemed
to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representative government, and
individual happiness must not be applied in the Orient for reasons that today
we would call racist.” (p.65) Eliot shared the Gentile and Jewish Zionist “view
of the Holy Land as essentially empty of inhabitants, not because there were no
inhabitants... but because their status as sovereign and human inhabitants was
systematically denied.” (p.66)
There is no echo of such a critique in Ozick's encomium to
the novel; instead, Eliot is described without qualification as “morally
serious, historically judicious and passionately just”.
This blinkered advocacy needs to be read in the context of
earlier articles by Ozick.
In a 2006 review of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie (based on the
diaries and letters of a young American activist crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer) she refers to “the
culpable Palestinian origins of the current fighting” and “the brutal cynicism
of Rachel Corrie's handlers, eager, for propaganda value, to bait bulldozers
and tanks with the lives of their young recruits.” Corrie's engagement with the
oppressed is described as “slumming” and her espousal of Gandhian ideals
dismissed as “neo-Marxist paraphernalia and hate-America jargon” (for a
celebrated novelist, Ozick writes execrable prose). The play itself is “a show
trial. And there are Jews in the dock.”
On 30 June 2003 Ozick published an Op Ed for the Wall
Street Journal entitled Where Hatred Trumps Bread:
What does the Palestinian nation offer the world? This was
conceived as a diatribe against the so-called “Road Map for Peace” drawn up by the
“international quartet” (USA, EU, Russia, UN) in early 2003. Although there is some
consensus nowadays that this process was
inherently flawed because overly influenced by the USA (and hence by Israel)
and lacking meaningful mechanisms for enforcement, for Ozick it represented “an anti-history wherein cause and effect are reversed,
protection against attack is equated with the brutality of attack, existential
issues are demoted or ignored--'cycle of violence' obfuscations all zealously
embraced by the State Department and the European Union.” In other words, the
USA and EU were ganging up on poor little Israel, which had a right to a monopoly
of violence in the Middle East.
But Ozick went further, and launched a vicious attack on
the Palestinian people themselves. “By replacing history with fantasy, the
Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps
bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from
ordinary norms and behaviors... What has been the genius of Palestinian
originality, what has been the contribution of the evolving culture of
Palestinian sectarianism? On the international scene: airplane hijackings and
the murder of American diplomats in the 1970s, Olympic slaughterings and
shipboard murders in the 1980s. And toward the Jews of the Holy Land, beginning
in the 1920s and continuing until this morning, terror, terror, terror, terror.”
There is a word for such language: racism. And it is racism
of a particularly vicious and unadorned variety.
Now, one would hardly suggest that Ozick should be excluded
from consideration from the Orange or any other literary prize because of her repulsive
views. What is astonishing is that (to the best of this writer's knowledge) not
one single media outlet has raised the issue of Ozick's anti-Palestinian
racism. What this tells us, once again, is that such vile attitudes are not
deemed worthy of mention when mere Palestinians are their object. One would
hardly imagine that the anti-Semitic historian David Irving
would be deemed an acceptable candidate for the Wolfson History Prize, but the
vilification of Palestinians and the negation of their history that are
Ozick's ideological stock-in-trade raise no critical eyebrows.
Raymond
Deane is a composer and political activist.
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