The Nation has published “A Letter from 18 Writers” on the Israel/Palestine conflict — the signatures were far fewer when I first mentioned this document, some weeks ago. The initial signers were Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn and a few others, who declared that Israel’s “political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.” The Nation reproduces something close to this language on its homepage.
By this point, Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal and quite a few others have added their names to this demagogic and irresponsible statement. Vidal has lost all coherence — he’s written sympathetically of Timothy McVeigh and mouthed isolationist rhetoric that is hard to distinguish from Pat Buchanan’s. Chomsky and Roy have reduced themselves to acting as megaphones for Hezbollah.
But I digress. The letter seems an attempt to validate the Zionism=Nazism trope while slickly avoiding the actual words. The term “liquidation” is an underhanded reference to the Jewish ghettos of WWII. Propagandistic, demonizing rhetoric of this sort is all too prevalent; recently we heard it spouted by Hugo Chavez, self-proclaimed ally of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. José Saramago, one of the new letter-signers, has made his famous contribution as well. For someone of Toni Morrison’s stature to lend this stuff credence is damaging, quite frankly, to the cause of peace in the Middle East. Well done.
Jonathan Edelstein has an exemplary four-part series on “the language of the Israeli-Arab conflict.” The posts are from 2003, but Edelstein’s closely argued remarks on terms like “genocide,” “apartheid,” “terrorism” and even “Zionism” remain all too relevant. “[P]ublic discourse on the Middle East conflict increasingly operates according to Lewis Carroll rules,” he writes. The “liquidation” letter is better understood with this in mind.
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