From the Editorial
La Jornada Newspaper
Sunday, November 3, 2024, p. 19
Award-winning author Arundhati Roy strongly criticized the ongoing war between the United States and Israel against Gaza and Lebanon in her acceptance speech for the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize, which she won last June, at a ceremony in London earlier this month.
“For months we have been witnessing a televised genocide in Gaza and now in Lebanon. “Like every state that has perpetrated genocide and ethnic cleansing in history, the Zionists in Israel, who believe they are ‘the chosen people,’ began by dehumanizing the Palestinians before driving them from their land and murdering them,” he said. .
Arundhati Roy, who received the 1997 Booker Prize, said she is aware that Hezbollah and Hamas have detractors in their own countries, and that some of their actions constitute war crimesbut there can be no equivalence between it and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the reoccupied West Bank and now in Lebanon.
The Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. I’m supposed to fall into moral equivalency and condemn Hamas, and the people of Gaza who celebrated the attack they carried out. I am not going to tell the oppressed how to resist their own oppression, or who their allies should be.he added.
▲ Award-winning Arundhati Roy strongly criticized the war against Gaza and Lebanon.Photo taken from the PEN International page
Likewise, more than 5 thousand writers, editors and literary workers signed a letter assuring that they will not work with cultural entities in Israel as they are silent accomplices of the “violation of Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices, or by covering up and justifying the occupation, apartheid and the genocide of Israel,” the Palestinian Literature Festival reported in a statement on its website.
Among the signatories, Nobel Prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah and Annie Ernaux stand out, as well as Sally Rooney, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, Geo Maher, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli and Arundhati Roy herself.
The authors of the statement, which represents the largest boycott against Israeli cultural institutions, added that Israel has used cultural institutions to normalize injustices, obfuscating, disguising and artfully whitewashing the oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades.
