by Giulio Meotti
The “Alhambra Decree,” which ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Spain, was signed by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella on March 31, 1492, inside the Alhambra palace in Granada.
534 years have passed, and another Jew must leave Granada.
What happened is this: the Jewish writer Ariana Harwicz, shortlisted for the Booker International Prize, has been excluded from the International Festival of Art and Literature at the University of Granada.
Harwicz was due to take part on September 26 in an event devoted to her work. The invitation was withdrawn after protests by activists and university students who discovered something they considered extremely serious: Harwicz is a pro-Israel Jew (yes, it sounds strange, doesn’t it? How dare she.).
“There is great fear, not only on the part of those who are expelled, but also among the others,” Harwicz told El País. “You feel a great loneliness, and you fear they will send your books back and stop inviting you.”
She does not hesitate to accuse them of antisemitism.
“If I belonged to another minority, no one would have done this to me. In the cultural sphere, the cancellation of Jews is justified.”
In Spain, as in the case of the carnival in Andorra, that antisemitism can take the form of an effigy representing the State of Israel, subjected to a public “trial,” shot, and set on fire during festivities in which local officials also took part. The figure is symbolically tried, sentenced to death and hanged.
Or it can take the form of the three elderly Israeli Jewish women wearing the Star of David who were expelled from the famous Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid. The women, one of them a Holocaust survivor, were attacked by visitors shouting “child killers” and “murderers!” Instead of removing the aggressors, museum staff asked the Jewish women to leave.
They speak of Zionism.
“Zionist is the demonized, instrumentalized form used to discriminate against Jews,” Harwicz says. “And they like the Jews who want to annihilate the State of Israel. They punish me for being the bad Jew. Why should they get to decide who is the good Jew and who is the bad one? I was the only person at the festival whose articles were all checked to see whether I would be allowed through or not.”
Six women writers had also signed a letter demanding her head from the authorities. Five hundred figures from the cultural world responded with a counter-letter of protest denouncing Harwicz’s cancellation, signed. among others. by the celebrated Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater and former French prime minister Manuel Valls.
The prize-winning Irish writer John Banville, a Booker Prize winner and the headliner of the festival, was meant to close it. Instead he left with a single sentence: “My cancellation was my statement.” He did not explain. He did not negotiate. He withdrew his prestige from a stage. A rare gesture, because it costs something. But it is almost all that, in an age of signatures and fear, a writer can still do. The same logic has already consumed other names.
In June, a famous far-left Israeli director, Nadav Lapid, winner of the Berlinale (and of the jury prize at Locarno and Cannes), was excluded from the Marseille Film Festival, which revoked his invitation to sit on the jury because of pressure from pro-Palestinian Arab actors and directors who had threatened to withdraw their films if Lapid took part.
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” the Monty Python declared in 1970.
The pro-Palestinian Inquisition, however, they should.