‘They Deserve Our Contempt’: Literary Heavyweights Lambast West For Support Of Israel In Fiery Festival Appearance

Three bestselling authors united to condemn the West’s support of Israel at packed-out event held on Saturday at the Hay Festival of literature in Wales.

Speaking to a crowd of some 1,800 people at Hay’s Global Stage, essayist Pankaj Mishra, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Benjamin Moser and historian and broadcaster William Dalrymple described the world's response to Israel’s actions in Gaza as "the great moral litmus test of our time."

Informing the audience that several venues around the UK, including London’s Barbican Centre, had refused to host the event, Dalrymple said: "Six million [Palestinians] stand to be ethnically cleansed unless we get, in this room today, our MPs to react to this. We need all us to do something about this, to have our voices heard."

The event was held to discuss Mishra’s book The World After Gaza, which covers Israel’s ongoing razing of the territory, and dissects the West’s continued support of the Israeli state in the face of what the author describes as a campaign of "political evil" against the Palestinian people. 

Benjamin Moser, whose German Jewish grandparents fled the Nazis in 1938, told the crowd: "I think this is the biggest calamity in the history of the Jewish people. The Holocaust killed people’s bodies. But it didn’t sully the soul of the Jewish people."

Moser, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Susan Sontag in 2020, said: "What I never thought, growing up, seeing people whose lives had been shattered … that [they would use] the instrumentalisation of that memory and horror to inflict a horror on people that were not involved in any way with the Nazi Holocaust. I believed that having gone through this, that was enough to immunise us against similar actions and sentiments."  

He went on: "I had no idea that at this point in my life I would be discovering that many people I know I thought were, quote unquote, fine human beings are not. They are racist. They look at these images that we look at, and they think 'great.'"

"I think that any rights Israel has earned for itself over the last decades, they have been absolutely destroyed by this," he added. "I don’t think that states who commit genocide have any right to anything.” 

Discussing the 1948 Nakba, in which Israel expelled some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, Mishra said that there insufficient understanding in the West of "the fact that Israel was created on the basis of massive ethnic cleansing," and noted the historical proximity to the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan.

“What I find most problematic is this instrumentalisation of the memory of the Holocaust and the undermining of the Holocaust as an immensely important moral reference point in all our lives,” Mishra told the crowd. "The fact that this happened means we should all devote our energies, all our efforts to ensuring politically that this never happens again. And yet here is this nation state that … invokes that memory to justify violent expansion."

Mishra discussed India’s ruling BJP and a Hindu nationalist movement that regarded Israel with a "surreptitious romance" bound to "admiring the brute force it [the Israeli state] would unleash against Muslims." Hindu supporters of Narendra Modi, Mishra said, were Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s "biggest fans." While Hindu nationalists did not know much about the history of Zionism, Mishra said, they felt that Indian political parties "had been far too timid to do what the Israelis were doing already on a daily basis."

All three speakers stated that their visits to the Occupied Territories had been revelatory, with Mishra saying: “It had made us not just see but experience for ourselves firsthand the daily degradations of real life for Palestinians in the West Bank,” adding that “a special kind of disgust and horror overwhelms you when you’re there.” 

Detailing how Palestinians were subjected to routine brutalisation, and were forbidden to use the same roads or infrastructure as Jewish Israelis, Moser said his own visits had shown him that the Israeli occupation is "a microcosm of what imperialism is, what racism is, what apartheid is."

"Nothing prepares you for the brutality," Dalrymple added.

Unlike other atrocities being carried out, Moser said: “the difference is that we as Americans or as Brits are paying for this, supporting it tooth and nail.” Dalrymple drew attention to a May 14th event at the British Museum to celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's independence day, at which Maria Eagle, Labour's minister for defence procurement, "spoke openly about how our taxpayer’s money is being used every day, even now, to give RAF surveillance to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to help them bomb Gaza." He went on: "there [are] now twice as many weapons leaving this country for the IDF than under the Tories. So it’s getting worse, rather than better." Dalrymple exhorted the packed-out venue to "write to their MPs and make their voices heard if you do not like what is happening."

Referring to British constituents’ relationship with their MPs, Moser said: "Don’t be polite. These people are trash. They deserve our contempt. They know this is happening, and they’re doing it, and they’re forcing us to be for it, and to pay for it, as we will for generations."

"This is a matter of life and death for millions of people, the great moral litmus test of our time," he repeated. "Nothing you can do is enough, but you still have to do it."