A week or so ago, I was invited, along with hundreds of other writers, to sign a letter that was to be published in The Guardian condemning Israel’s war in Gaza. The word that kept coming up in the letter was “genocide”. That, together with “genocidal”, appears 11 times in the letter, and it is not a long letter. “This is not only about our common humanity and all human rights; this is about our moral fitness as the writers of our time,” it said at one point.
In the end I didn’t sign it. My arm was sore. I had got Repetitive Strain Injury from signing similar letters about the situations in Chad, Jordan, Sudan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, and a few other places where bad things were happening to innocent people. I was worried whether we writers were at risk of eroding our brand as the moral arbiters of the world. And who can forget the letter written on October 8, 2023, calling on the world to condemn Hamas and demand the return of the hostages? I imagined their exiled leaders, frowning over The Guardian in a luxury hotel suite in Qatar, and the regretful shaking of heads as the senior representative, Khalil al-Hayya, announced to the others: “I’m sorry to break it to you, lads, but we’ve lost Ian McEwan.”
I’m sorry to break it to you, lads, but we’ve lost Ian McEwan
Actually, I wasn’t invited to sign any of those other letters; possibly because they were never written. But the one about Gaza – not the one about Hamas – certainly was. I genuinely wonder why writers should care about the one atrocity rather than the others; perhaps that is a mystery we will never be able to unravel.
Still, we should pay attention to writers because they know about words, and therefore morality, better than anyone. I know this because I am a writer.
So, if they say it’s genocide, then genocide it is, and if you look at the UN’s somewhat elastic definition of the term, you just have to accept that common usage means the word has shifted its meaning, just like “disinterested”, “decimate”, and – to pluck an entirely random example from thin air – “Zionist”. “Genocide” now very specifically means “bad things done by Jews, I mean Israelis.” You may recall the case of Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who was the UN’s special advisor on the prevention of genocide, who explicitly said that Israel’s reaction to the October 7 massacre was not genocide. She received a large number of death threats as a result, and her contract with the UN was not renewed.
Anyway.
The writers of the letter are very careful to distinguish between the acts of the Israeli government and military, and the wishes of the people. In fact, they go further: “We assert without reservation our absolute opposition to and loathing of antisemitism, of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli prejudice.” And it is in the same spirit that I say, without reservation, that I hate Netanyahu and his coalition of right-wing zealots, and think that his current policies are not only causing direct harm to the entire population of Gaza, but enormous harm to Israel’s international reputation, such as it is, alas, and also to Jews around the world who are going to be subject to attacks from people who have not stopped to ask them their position on Netanyahu’s war.
I wonder, though, if I would have signed the letter had it not used the g-word. Possibly, especially since it also calls for the return of the hostages. But on the whole I am not a letter-signer, because my father told me always to be very careful to read something before I signed it, and also because there is something about the words “we, the undersigned” that makes my heart sink a little bit, whatever the cause is that the undersigned are endorsing. These letters have a language and tone all of their own, that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger one of irreproachable righteousness, and I never feel irreproachably right, even though I am a writer.
In 1937, the Left Review invited authors to take sides on the Spanish Civil War. As it happens, two of my favourite writers contributed: Evelyn Waugh, Catholic and arch-traditionalist, spoke up for Franco; Samuel Beckett, at the time almost completely unknown, replied with a one-word telegram: “UPTHEREPUBLIC”, i.e. the opposite position to Waugh’s. Scholars have since debated the sincerity of his reply, but the general consensus is that its style was dictated not by sarcasm but by economic necessity (he was broke, and telegrams were charged by the word). I think it is better for writers to choose their own words, than fall into step behind words written for them by someone else.
