by Giulio Meotti
“Hating Israel doesn’t make you woke”, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told the UN General Assembly just recently. He is in the minoirity. Yes, especially in the literary world, wokes flirt with those who want to cancel the Jewish State.
Sally Rooney, one of the best-selling and most acclaimed writers in the Anglo-Saxon world – and who calls herself a “Marxist” – refused the publication of her new novel in Hebrew due to the boycott of Israel, which she supports. The Israeli publisher of Rooney’s first two books, Modan, told media that Rooney bans any release in Israel.
Booker Prize-winning novelist John Berger asked colleagues to refuse to publish in Israel. The English writer Iain Banks announced that his novels would never again be published in the Jewish State. Another British novelist, Kamila Shamsie, awarded and appreciated, told the Israeli publisher Keter: “I would be very happy to be published in Hebrew, but I do not know any Hebrew publisher who is not Israeli”. And so in Germany the Nelly Sachs Prize, named after the famous Jewish writer, was withdrawn from her. At least that.
Alice Walker, author of the famous book, The Color Purple, also refused the Hebrew translation.
Deborah Harris, the agent of David Grossman and Meir Shalev, said many foreign publishers are boycotting Israeli authors. “Books that I could have easily placed with major publishers ten years ago have been politely rejected”, she told Time.
Eshkol Nevo, whose books have been translated into English, Italian and German, says that “I have not been translated in the Scandinavian countries and the people I work with have told me that the boycott is the reason”.
It is not only in Europe that we should remember when the Reichinstituts für Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands, the Institute for the History of the New Nazi Germany, searched Europe for Jewish books to confiscate and destroy.
It should also be remembered that there are no Western authors who have ever rejected the publication of their novels in Turkey, where the writer Ahmet Altan has spent four years in prison for criticizing Erdogan, or in China, where a Nobel Prize Laureate, writer Liu Xiaobo, died behind bars.
Today’s writer is labelled trendy and woke by targeting the only open society from Casablanca to India.