Readers will recall that José Saramago is the 86-year old Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998 and who, at least on two occasions - during a visit to Ramallah and in an article in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, made remarks inciting hatred of Israel and Judaism.
Six years later, antisemitism is on the rise in Europe (notably in Spain where Saramago lives: a staggering 46% have an unfavourable opinion of Jews (including 18% of very unfavourable opinions)) where such comments have gained legitimacy in some quarters and are still being made by "educated people".
Paul Berman's devastating critique in Forward (May 2002 issue) is more pertinent than ever: .
"Saramago was part of an international group of writers who traveled to Ramallah to observe the Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat's compound. [...] The situation at Ramallah, in Saramago's estimation, was "a crime comparable to Auschwitz." To the Israeli journalist who asked where the gas chambers were, Saramago gave his much-quoted reply, "Not yet here." But he also explained himself more seriously and at length in the April 21 issue of El Pais, a Madrid newspaper read and respected all over the Spanish-speaking world.
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Israel, in Saramago's view, has pursued immoral and hateful policies during its entire history. And why has Israel done so? Perhaps for the same reasons that other countries have pursued hateful, immoral, expansionist policies? Not at all. Saramago traced Israel's policies to biblical Judaism. He pointed to the story of David and Goliath, which, though commonly pictured as a tale of underdog triumph, is actually the story of a blond person (David's blond hair seemed to catch Saramago's attention) employing a superior technology to kill at a distance a helpless and presumably non-blond person, the unfortunate and oppressed Goliath. Today's events, in Saramago's fanciful interpretation, follow the biblical script precisely, as if in testimony to the Jews' fidelity to tradition. He writes:
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"The blond David of yesteryear surveys from a helicopter the occupied Palestinian lands and fires missiles at unarmed innocents; the delicate David of yore mans the most powerful tanks in the world and flattens and blows up what he finds in his tread; the lyrical David who sang praise to Bathsheba, incarnated today in the gargantuan figure of a war criminal named Ariel Sharon, hurls the 'poetic' message that first it is necessary to finish off the Palestinians in order later to negotiate with those who remain."
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Saramago must have been ablaze, writing these lines:
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"Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.' Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will."
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Israel, in short, is a racist state by virtue of Judaism's monstrous doctrines - racist not just against the Palestinians, but against the entire world, which it seeks to manipulate and abuse. Israel's struggles with its neighbors, seen in that light, do take on a unique and even metaphysical quality of genuine evil - the quality that distinguishes Israel's struggles from those of all other nations with disputed borders, no matter what the statistics of death and suffering might suggest.
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Saramago […] did condemn the suicide bombers. He did so in two throwaway sentences at the end of his essay, sneeringly, with his own expressive ellipsis:
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"Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists.... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb."
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And so, the deliberate act of murdering random crowds turns out to be the fault of the murdered - or, rather, of the monstrous and racist doctrines of their religion, which is Judaism."
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- The Road to Tehran, Polite society helped pave the way for Iran's Holocaust conference, Brett Stephens, WSJ
- Portuguese Nobel Laureate's Remarks on Jews and the Holocaust Are "Incendiary and Offensive", ADL press release
- Writers on the Borders, film review by Ricki Hollander and Steven Stotsky, Camera
- De las piedras de David a los tanques de Goliat, José Saramago, El Pais
- Writers on the Borders, film review by Ricki Hollander and Steven Stotsky, Camera
- De las piedras de David a los tanques de Goliat, José Saramago, El Pais
5 comments:
What can I say - I still love Saramago the writer, ignoring this hateful crap. Strange, isn't it?
If this man is a writer then come back Mein Kampf all is forgiven. He is not just anti-Israel he is a Nazi.
A great cruelty; the capture of the bird song; a crime. Symbol of the freedom and the song. Her spirit is connected in the history of a man, one that she loved, and to whom she was friendly, but who locked her in such a small structure, sending her to the lowest point.
The skylark, more in front of than behind her loss, under freedom to not have suffered, her little song not being sung in this unhomely cage; more than she did not have, null approximately, happiness for being in. The man, he had redefined cruelty, not like that called by my grandfathers, in hope that the songbird he had would give the song he likes, of her, he demanded: the outside had chantingly disappeared, the end he will change, for the particular requirements he so desires, to that which he wished, because advisably, he pleaded for his preferences.
The dejected lark and the violent man who came to disturb her and began to regulate the bird, under duress to sing, but unavoidably did not receive a result. Therefore, he griped that the energy he eats is being tested and is failing. He covered the source in black, with fabric, and robbed the bird the light of the day. The hunger died and left as payment, the end hoping to ignite change, which the bird always rejected.
The man assassinated her; the spirit of freedom and resistance were the bird song’s spirit; she would want enthusiastically to be exempt and inoperative in the man, before an altered Tyranni, of that he had attempted, to modify her with torture and capture. Creed; that in the communal track, this bird has him and his torture, the capture and conclusion of the murder. She had a spirit, one that is not, generally, between us of the higher beings, to be humanly presumptuous.
She makes a test of the normal prisoner. The general mission must be the other way around; to end the periods of simple capture, therefore, and to taste comfort, as it is possible. The prisoner of the normal school jeopardizes a day of his, only to benefit, is that not the case? Also some strap, remove and inform on other prisoners, the end to accelerate his time. They change for their own particular requirements, the desires of their kidnappers and, the difference with the skylark, she sings, if to know where it is and honour highly, her freedom, she will have been known as the movement.
If the normal prisoner destroyed his freedom, not by going to extremities that still reclaim his humanity, but to protect the diffusion; he balances the calculation to shorten the date of his version, looking ahead, in sufficiently obstructed longitudinally periods inside, becoming institutionalised, a type of machine, he does not think, he does not stop, he is kidnapping himself, this one is the controls and the control. It was the destiny of the leaves, their schedule, to fall; but of the song in history; the song bird that had the necessity not to change, nor would she want to change and, absolutely, giving her this form of spirit.
In a common field of spirits, something is shared with this bird. My position is in contrast as a prisoner of writing; as from the general: they are unaware of the politician of the prisoner, one that is a combatant of his freedom. Like the lark, I fought unconditionally for my freedom, not only in capture, on whose hour I languish, more during, it has left the Outside, where it considered me, she protects me. It had been ignited and obstructed from inside, but, like the bird, I saw on the other hand the outside source, to which I am moored. I have broken free of the sustentation which results from a change inside, for the people of torture, this oppression, I torment myself and they try in vain to disenlighten me. Because the skylark does not have to alter; this ideology is mine and is my base, one that would want to change the kidnappers of mine.
On receiving a paper, a normal prisoner, in case of the necessity of a small wage, attends to me, knowing that to change; I myself tell them the attitudes of the institution. I destroyed more, to introduce two years more, approximately. I will not worry. They had been eliminated of my time and they had arrived to be closed; in an altered cell, and its emptiness, where I, impressively was robbed and tormented and as the fear of the lark, to which I know it was since assassinated. But, she says to the challenge, similar to my friend’s, she has the spirit of freedom, which equals not extinguishing the incarceration process, but making it more terrible. I can by all means be assassinated, but, when she continues being, I too continue being alive; I, of which I am, a politician and nobody can change this.
The false man’s history arrived, that he was obstructed, trapped in his own trap, and tormented, the assassinator of the bird song. The fact that was ascertained that not one body, when tested, would help him, to give him liberation. The people possessed scorn and gave him his dues, to face him, and to later shut him down. At the point of reconciliation, the man died, the end to die of his own process, that which had disturbed the spirit. The birds had come to abstract from him revenge, and outside they selected his eyes, and the songbirds that had sung, during this, and after had never emitted such a song so freely.
How is saramago a Nazi? Is it that anyone who disagrees with the Israeli state is a Nazi? This is quite harsh. Besides, this also seems to show some ignorance of his literature and his political stances on other issues. The man is one of the most critical writers of tyranny. What you're understanding is what you want to understand. You need fuel, and without it you would burn your books or the clothes on your back. This is desperation.
Just like Bobby Fisher.
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