Alexander Cockburn on Sontag and Said

Greetings,

Below is an excellent article by Alexander Cockburn on the different
treatment Said and Sontag have received by the literary community.  
In it, you'll learn about Sontag's past "political activism" (supporting
NATO bombing of Serbia) and even little tidbits about Nadine Gordimer
(who refused the Jerusalem Prize award) and many others. Past
recipients of the Jerusalem prize include Bertrand Russell, Jorge
Semprun, Isaiah Berlin, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Luis Borges.  
A very informative piece.

Khaldoun
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http://www.antiwar.com

March 20, 2001

Said, Sontag and the Laws of Intellectual Safety | Alexander Cockburn

Here's a story about what is intellectually respectable and politically
safe in this country, and what is not. It concerns two of this country's
best known public intellectuals, Edward Said and Susan Sontag.

Though the range of Said's intellectual interests is wide and his
writings on history and culture immensely influential in the
academies, his role as spokesman for the Palestinian national
cause is preeminent, never more so than in recent years since
the Oslo accords and subsequent agreements. Time and again
Said has issued acrid critiques of the evolution of the so-called
"peace process" and the relentless degrading of Palestinian
national aspirations.

First by the mere fact that he is an articulate Palestinian, then
by reason of his intellectual distinction and influential roost at
the University of Columbia, Said has, down the years, elicited
truly amazing onslaughts from the irreconcilables who tolerate
no questioning of the moral and political propriety of the Zionist
cause as applied against the Palestinians on the practical plane
by Israeli governments down the years, and as unconditionally
endorsed by Israel's claque in the United States.

It's a backhanded tribute to his effectiveness as spokesman for
the Palestinian cause that the attacks on Said have, across the
last couple of years, reached new levels of envenomed absurdity.
A couple of years ago the journal Commentary, a shoddy publication
sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, published an attack
on Said by an Israeli-American called Justus Wiener, with a desk at
an Institute in Jerusalem financed by the Michael Milken Foundation.

Wiener's appointed task was to seek to demonstrate that Said had
been mostly raised outside Palestine, therefore wasn't really a
Palestinian and thus had no standing as a tribune for his people!
In fact as I dragged myself through Wiener's interminable diatribe,
it was plain that Wiener was in effect trying to portray just the sort
of rootless intellectual with shadowy kinships spread across the
Levant that was beloved of anti-Semitic pamphleteers in the
nineteenth century.

Wiener's mad attack was given wide publicity. There's always
space in the US press for charges that Palestinian do not in
some complicated manner "exist", and that therefore by the
same token the Palestinian national cause has no merit. The
acme of this mode of abuse was a book accorded immense
deference a number of years ago, called From Time Immemorial.
Its author, Joan Peters, was wildly acclaimed in publications such
as the New York Times for her supposedly learned discovery that
by reason of hitherto unknown migratory eccentricities, Palestinians
had no secure claim upon the soil of Palestine. Then suddenly the
row died away as Peters' "scholarship" crumbled under scrutiny.

The latest storm over Said concerns a trip to Lebanon he took
last summer, in the course of which he and his family took the
opportunity to visit the recently evacuated "security zone" occupied
by Israeli forces. As did many Arabs, the Saids shuddered at the
horrors of Khiam prison, built by Israel and used for the incarceration
and (subsequently admitted) torture of Palestinian and Lebanese
captives.

Then the Saids drove to a deserted border post, abandoned by
Israeli troops, and now crowded with festive Lebanese throwing
exuberant stones at the heavily fortified border. In competitive
paternal emulation of his son, Said pitched a stone and was
photographed in the act of so doing. You can scarcely blame
him for being stunned at the consequences. Throw a rock at a
border fence and if you are a Palestinian called Edward Said
you'll be the object of sharply hostile articles about the infamous
stone toss in the New York Times, face a campaign to be fired
from your tenured job at Columbia and be disinvited by the Freud
Institute and Museum in Vienna from a long-standing engagement
to deliver the annual Freud lecture there in May 2001.

As with the efforts to prove Said was somehow not a Palestinian,
these assaults have a humorous absurdity to them. For decades
the Israelis wreak mayhem on Southern Lebanon, without much
commotion in the US press which is indifferent to UN resolutions
telling Israel to abandon its illegal occupation. Both the Israelis
and their hired Lebanese puppet force harass, torture and kill the
inhabitants and demolish their houses. Indifference and mostly
silence here. Then Said throws an innocuous stone at the border
in understandable exultation at the flight of the occupiers and all
hell breaks loose. To its credit, Columbia University stands by him
and says the calls for his removal are preposterous and offensive.

What, aside from being an articulate Palestinian, is Said's crime?
As he himself has written, while "I have always advocated resistance
to Zionist occupation, I have never argued for anything but peaceful
coexistence between us and the Jews of Israel once Israel's military
repression and dispossession of Palestinians has stopped."
Perhaps that's the problem. The problem is that Said makes a
reasoned and persuasive case for justice for Palestinians. He
doesn't say that the Jews should be driven into the sea. Such
men are dangerous.

Now, as a public intellectual, Said lends his name to a wide
variety of causes. He speaks out against injustice as a matter
of universal principle, not just for his own people. Bearing this
in mind, let us now contemplate the role of Susan Sontag,
another public intellectual of great reputation, known for a
variety of works down the years including the early books of
the Sixties, Against Interpretation and Trip to Hanoi, later works
on photography and disease, plus the more recent novel The
Volcano Lover and, in 1999, another novel, In America, given
the National Book Award the following year.

You can pretty much gauge a writer's political sedateness and
respectability in America by the kind of awards they reap, and
it is not unfair to say that the literary and indeed grant-distributing
establishment certainly deems Sontag safe. Aside from the recent
National Book Award, she got a National Book Critics Circle Award
in 1977, was appointed in 1979 a member of the American Academy,
and in 1990 received the liberal imprimatur of a five-year (and richly
endowed) "genius" fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, which
once contemplated giving a fellowship to Said but apparently
desisted after furious protests from one influential Jewish board member.

Now Sontag's been named the Jerusalem Prize laureate for 2001,
twentieth recipient of the award since its inauguration in 1963, and
the second woman to be so honored, the first being Simone de
Beauvoir. The award, worth $5,000, is proclaimedly given to writers
whose works reflect the freedom of the individual in society, and
is presented biennially at the Jerusalem International Book Fair.
Past recipients of the Jerusalem prize include Bertrand Russell,
Jorge Semprun, Isaiah Berlin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis
Borges, J.M. Coetzee, and rather bizarrely, Don DeLillo.

Sontag was selected by a three-member panel of judges,
comprised of the Labor Party's Shimon Peres and Hebrew
University professors Lena Shiloni and Shimon Sandbank.
Peres has been quoted as admiring Sontag's definition of
herself. "First she's Jewish, then she's a writer, then she's
American. She loves Israel with emotion and the world with
obligation." When notified of her latest accolade, Sontag's
response was, "I trust you have some idea of how honored
and moved, deeply moved, I am to have been awarded this
year's Jerusalem Prize."

Sontag is now scheduled to go to Jerusalem for the May 9
awards ceremony, which will be held within the framework
of the 20th Jerusalem International Book Fair. One news
report remarked that "According to book fair director Zev
Birger, events which have blighted tourism in recent months
have not adversely affected the publishing world. "It's business
as usual," he said, noting that checks and hotel reservations
were coming in.

Why dwell on the familiar currency of international literary
backslapping? I do so to make a couple of points concerning
double standards. American intellectuals will be brave as lions
concerning the travails of East Timoreans, Rwandans, Central
American peasants, Chechens. But for almost all of them the
Palestinians and their troubles have always been invisible. The
intellectuals know well enough that to raise a stink about Israeli's
appalling treatment of Palestinians down the years is to invite
drastic revenge.

Now it could scarcely be said that Sontag is a notably political
writer. But there was an issue of the late 1990s on which she
did raise her voice. Along with her son David Rieff, Sontag became
a passionate advocate for NATO intervention against Yugoslavia or,
if you prefer, Serbia. (To put in a good or even a balancing word for
the Serbs was of course another rare event in American intellectual
life, where almost all liberals became, like Sontag, enthusiastic
advocates of NATO's bombs.)

On May 2, 1999 Sontag wrote an essay in the New York Times,
"Why Are We In Kosovo?", urgently justifying NATO's intervention.
"Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it
is not happening to you," she wrote. " Or if you have not put yourself
where it is happening. Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no
expansionist ambitions but had simply made it a policy in the late
1930's and early 1940's to slaughter all the German Jews. Do we
think a government has the right to do whatever it wants on its own
territory? Maybe the governments of Europe would have said that
60 years ago. But would we approve now of their decision? Push
the supposition into the present. What if the French Government
began slaughtering large numbers of Corsicans and driving the
rest out of Corsica . . . or the Italian Government began emptying
out Sicily or Sardinia, creating a million refugees . . . or Spain
decided to apply a final solution to its rebellious Basque populations.
'Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars,
also known as 'age-old ethnic hatreds.'"

Now, Sontag is obviously not entirely unaware that there is a country
from which more than a million refugees have been expelled. In 1973
she actually made a film in Israel, "Promised Lands," made in October
and November of 1973 after the Egyptians crossed the Suez canal in
the Yom Kippur war. Back then, Nora Sayre gave it a politely damning
review in the New York Times: "Throughout the ideas and the people
and the machines of war are examined from a distance, as though
everything had been observed through some kind of mental gauze.
The Israelis - particularly those in robes - are filmed as if they were
extremely foreign or exotic. Also, Israel seems like a nearly all-male
country, since few women appear and none have been interviewed.
There are a few sympathetic words for the Arabs, but their existence
seems shadowy and abstract - almost as bloodless as the statues in
a wax museum devoted to Israeli history."

But surely now Sontag has had time to reflect more deeply on
real Israeli Jews, and on real Palestinians. Through the 1990s it
became a lot harder than in earlier years for American intellectuals
to claim that they did not know what was happening, or were in
ignorance of how Palestinians have been treated. The subject
became legal tender, even if the currency remained severely limited
in fungibility.

Sontag has always been appreciative of irony. Does she see no
irony in the fact that she, relentless critic of Slobodan Milosevic,
(upon whose extradition to face trial in its Hague Court as a "war
criminal" the US is now conditioning all aid to Yugoslavia,) is now
planning to travel to get a prize in Israel, currently led by a man,
Ariel Sharon, whose credentials as a war criminal are robust
and indeed undisputed by all people of balanced and independent
judgement. To resurrect a tired phrase, Sharon really does have the
blood of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese upon his hands.

Does Sontag sense no irony in getting a prize premised on the
author's sensitivity to issues of human freedom, in a society where
the freedom of Palestinians is unrelentingly repressed? To dramatize
her support for multi-ethnic Sarajevo, she actually produced a play
in the beleagured city a few years ago. Imagine what bitter words
she would have been ready to hurl at a writer voyaging to the Serb
portion of Bosnia to receive money and a fulsome scroll from Radovan
Karadzic or Milosevic, praising her commitment to freedom of the
individual, and poo-pooing "events that have blighted tourism."

Yet here she is, packing her bags to travel to a city over which Sharon
declares Israel's absolute and eternal control, and whose latest turmoils
he personally provoked by insisting on traveling under the protection of a
thousand soldiers to provoke Palestinians in their holy places. Can there
be a more flagrant and disgusting pretensions to all those invocations to
toleration and diversity Sontag and the others put forth, accompanied by
their strident demands for NATO to drop its bombs on the Serbs?

Does Sontag plan to raise the issue of Palestinians in her acceptance
speech? I would like to think so, but somehow I doubt it. She'll scurry
in and scurry out, probably hoping not to attract too much attention.
When the South African writer Nadine Gordimer was offered the
Jerusalem prize a number of years ago, she declined, saying she
did not care to travel from one apartheid society to another. But to
take that kind of position in the United States would be a risky
course for a careful (and by a less obliging token) a cowardly
intellectual. Of course, Said knows he lives in a glasshouse, yet
he had the admirable effrontery to throw his stone.


Alexander Cockburn, one of America's best-known radical journalists,
was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland. An Oxford graduate, he
was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Statesman,
before becoming a permanent resident of the United States in 1973.
Cockburn wrote on the press and politics for the Village Voice, and,
all through the 1980s, he was a  regular columnist for the Wall Street
Journal. He co-edits, with Jeffrey St. Clair,  the lively Counterpunch
newsletter, and is the author of several books, including Corruptions
of Empire and, most recently, Al Gore: A User's Manual. His column
appears fortnightly on Antiwar.com.

Read Alexander Cockburn's columns in: CounterPunch, New York
Press, NewsMax