By ARUNDHATI ROY*
Acceptance speech for the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize, delivered on the evening of 10 October 2024
1.
I thank you, the members of English PEN and the jury, for honoring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage, whom I have chosen to share this award with.
My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, courageous writer and fellow award-winner. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be released at this time. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison, you wrote: “My words lost all power, and yet they kept pouring out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a few could hear me.” We are listening, Alaa. Very carefully.
Greetings to you too, my dear Naomi Klein, a friend of both mine and Alaa. Thank you for being here tonight. It means a lot to me.
Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well as to those who are perhaps invisible to this wonderful audience, but as visible to me as to anyone else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I am speaking to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, who has been in prison for three years, and to you, Irfan Mehraj, and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country, whose lives have been devastated.
When Ruth Borthwick, chair of English PEN and a member of the Pinter jury, first wrote to me about this honour, she said that the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define “the real truth of our lives and our societies” through “unwavering, unfailing and relentless intellectual determination”. This is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
The expression “not hesitant” made me stop for a moment, because I consider myself a person who is almost permanently hesitant.
I would like to dwell a little on the theme of “hesitation” and “non-hesitation”. This can be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself: “I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.”
“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the Nicaraguan state. I was part of a delegation that spoke on behalf of Nicaragua, but the most important member of that delegation was Father John Metcalf. The head of the United States delegation was Raymond Seitz (then the ambassador’s number two, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said, ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in northern Nicaragua. My parishioners have built a school, a health center, a cultural center. We have lived in peace. A few months ago, a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health center, the cultural center. They raped nurses and teachers, they killed doctors, in the most brutal way. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the United States government withdraw its support for this appalling terrorist activity.’”
“Raymond Seitz had an excellent reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was highly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused, and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was an icy silence. We stared at him. He did not hesitate.”
Remember that President Ronald Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A catchphrase he clearly liked. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who later became the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who now rule Afghanistan, after having fought a twenty-year war against the U.S. invasion and occupation.
Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the Vietnam War and the American military doctrine that had no qualms about ordering its soldiers to “kill everything that moved.” If we read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on the US war aims in Vietnam, we can enjoy some lively and unhesitating discussions about how to commit genocide—is it better to kill people outright or starve them to death slowly? Which would seem better?
The problem the compassionate mandarins at the Pentagon faced was that unlike Americans, who, they said, want “life, happiness, wealth, power,” Asians “stoically accept… the destruction of wealth and the loss of life”—and force America to carry its “strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.” A terrible burden to bear without hesitation.
2.
And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The unhesitating and ongoing genocide in Gaza and now in Lebanon, which is televised and in defense of a colonial occupation and a state of apartheid. The official death toll to date is 42.000, the majority of whom were women and children. This figure does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighborhoods, entire cities, and those whose bodies have yet to be recovered. A recent Oxfam study claims that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the past twenty years.
To assuage their collective guilt over their early years of indifference toward one genocide—the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews—the United States and Europe have paved the way for another.
Like all states that have carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, the Zionists in Israel – who consider themselves “the chosen people” – began by dehumanizing the Palestinians before expelling them from their lands and murdering them.
Prime Minister Menachem Begin called the Palestinians “two-legged beasts,” Yitzhak Rabin called them “locusts” that “could be crushed,” and Golda Meir said that “there were no such things as Palestinians.” Winston Churchill, that famous crusader against fascism, said, “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even if it has been lying there a long time,” and then declared that a “superior race” had the final right to the manger.
After these two-legged beasts, locusts, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed and ghettoized, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a “land without a people for a people without a land.” The nuclear-armed State of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural riches and resources of the Middle East for the United States and Europe. A delightful coincidence of aims and purposes.
The new state was readily and unhesitatingly supported, armed and financed, pampered and applauded, regardless of the crimes it committed. It grew up as a sheltered child in a wealthy home, whose parents smiled proudly as it committed atrocity after atrocity. It is no wonder that today it feels free to brag about openly claiming to have committed genocide. (At least the Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.)
No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood social media with depraved videos of themselves dressed in the lingerie of women they have killed or expelled, videos of themselves imitating dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, videos of themselves blowing up buildings while smoking cigarettes or listening to music on their headphones. Who are these people?
What could possibly justify what Israel is doing?
The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of Israelis. According to them, the story only began a year ago.
So this is the part of my speech where I am expected to equivocate in order to protect myself, my “neutrality,” my intellectual position. This is the part where I am expected to fall into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza, and their ally Hezbollah in Lebanon for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done, everything becomes easy, doesn’t it? Oh, well. They’re all terrible, so what can you do? Let’s go shopping instead…
I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me be very clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.
When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said: “I don’t believe you have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”
Unlike President Joe Biden, who considers himself a non-Jewish Zionist and who unhesitatingly funds and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I will not declare or define myself in a way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.
3.
I am fully aware that as a writer, a non-Muslim, and a woman, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for me to survive long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about their history and the circumstances in which they emerged. The point is that they are currently fighting an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can stand up to a genocidal war machine.
For when all the powers of the world are against them, to whom can they turn but to God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have detractors in their own countries, some of whom are also languishing in prison or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions—the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7 by Hamas—constitute war crimes. Yet there can be no equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, the West Bank, and now in Lebanon.
The root cause of all violence, including the violence of October 7, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on October 7, 2023.
I ask you, which of us sitting in this room would willingly submit to the indignity to which the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted – other than the one that forces them to crawl on their knees and eat dust?
Israel is not waging a war of self-defense. It is waging a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its defense apparatus. apartheid and to increase their control over the Palestinian people and the region.
Since October 7, 2023, in addition to the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has expelled the majority of the population of Gaza many times over the course of the year. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. An entire population is starving – it is trying to erase its history.
All this is supported morally and materially by the richest and most powerful governments in the world. And by their media. (This includes my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers). There is no distance between these countries and Israel. Last year alone, the US spent $17,9 billion on military aid to Israel.
So let’s once and for all dispense with the lie that the US is a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is supposedly on the far left of mainstream American politics) has said, “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.” A party to genocide cannot be a mediator.
Not all the power and all the money, not all the weapons and propaganda in the world can continue to hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound from which the entire world, including Israel, bleeds.
Polls show that the majority of citizens in countries whose governments allow the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with it. We have seen these marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have thought that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and charge them with anti-Semitism? Who would have thought that the US government, in the service of the Israeli state, would undermine its fundamental principle of freedom of speech by banning pro-Palestinian slogans? The so-called moral architecture of Western democracies – with a handful of honorable exceptions – has become a laughingstock to the rest of the world.
When Benjamin Netanyahu shows a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary working to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.
But when Palestinians and their supporters chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of the Jews.
Is that really so? Or is it a sick imagination that projects its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot tolerate diversity, cannot tolerate the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everyone else in the world does.
An imagination that cannot afford to recognize that Palestinians want to be free, as does South Africa, as does India, as does every country that has freed itself from the yoke of colonialism. Countries that are diverse, deeply, perhaps even fatally, imperfect, but free. When the South Africans sang their popular war cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? No, they were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the State of apartheid. Just like the Palestinians.
The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle the apartheid Israeli. The whole world will be much safer for everyone – including the Jewish people – and much more just. It will be like pulling an arrow out of our wounded heart.
If the US government were to withdraw its support for Israel, the war could end today. Hostilities could end this very moment. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. Negotiations with Hamas and other supporters of the Palestinians, which must inevitably lead to war, could take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. It is sad that most people consider this a naive and laughable proposal.
In closing, let me consider your words, Alaa Abd El-Fatah, from your book written in prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated [You have not been defeated yet]. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and about the political necessity of looking despair squarely in the eye. I have rarely seen writings in which a citizen separates himself from the state, the generals and even the slogans of the Square with such resounding clarity.
“The center is treason because there is only room for the general… The center is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they have pushed us back to the margins. They do not realize that we never left there, only got lost for a brief period. Neither the ballot boxes, nor the palaces, nor the ministries, nor the prisons, nor even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never seek the center because it has no place except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution took place outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.”
As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, rapidly escalates into a regional war, its true heroes remain outside the frame. But they keep fighting because they know that one day…
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
It will be.
Keep your eyes on your calendars. Not your clocks.
This is how the people – not the generals – the people who fight for their liberation measure time.
*Arundhati Roy is a writer and political activist. Author of, among other books, The God of Small Things (Companhia das Letras).
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
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