This column is not about anything in the news from the Middle East. My current views are well-represented by Rahm Emanuel’s blistering critique of the Israeli government.
I’m concerned with something simple: whether writers should be free to write, whatever their nationality or the conduct of the governments they live under.
Last week, the Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu resigned as president of PEN America, the prestigious writers’ group that helps imprisoned authors abroad and fights book bans and other threats to free expression in the United States.
Mengestu, a MacArthur Fellow recipient and professor at Bard College, is said to be a good novelist and journalist. Before I tell you why I think he represents the moral confusion, hypocrisy, ahistorical thinking, and, yes, anti-Semitism of so many of today’s anti-Zionist intellectuals, let’s quote what Mengestu said in an interview with The New York Times after he assumed the position late last year:
“If we lose awareness of how important our culture of literary and artistic production is, our understanding of free expression goes with it.”
Mengestu thinks “literary and artistic production” is important. So far, so good. And even though I disagreed with the boycott that shut down the 2024 PEN literary festival (a boycott that George Packer rightly called authoritarian in spirit), let’s stipulate Mengestu’s argument that it was “very fair for writers to ask us [PEN] to do more” to speak out on behalf of Palestinian writers.
And his next point always bears repeating:
“Writers are the ones who hold us accountable.”
So let’s hold Mengestu accountable for his “understanding of free expression,” as he put it. Sad to say, he doesn’t understand it at all.
Mengestu resigned because he objected to an article on the PEN website entitled “A Silent Moratorium” that detailed how hard it is nowadays for all Israeli writers and many Jewish writers to get published. Thanks to a boycott, the article said, “the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.”
The article shows how ever since October 7, Israeli and Jewish writers have been disinvited from conferences, harassed on social media, review-bombed on Goodreads, and “subjected to online calls not to be read, platformed, or engaged with if they had ever shown support for Israel or Zionism. Some writers described being ignored by agents, publishers, literary journals, and magazines.”
Mengestu considered the article “unethical” because it discriminated against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Here’s how he explained his reasoning that it’s BDS—not Jewish writers—now facing “discrimination”:
We have the responsibility to be conscious and aware of how our work can impact and influence those debates, and especially if that means producing work that might actually restrict or limit or suppress what is constitutionally protected speech.
Say, what? Mengestu’s point is incomprehensible and poorly argued because it’s lame. So let me translate: Boycotts are a form of free speech, and opposing them is a form of censorship.
So if an organization dedicated to fighting boycotts of writers decides to, uh, chronicle boycotts of writers, we’re supposed to believe that constitutes “suppressing speech”?
Somewhere, George Orwell is gagging. If you want to know why, read his essential essay, Politics and the English Language.
Speaking of Orwell: He was British at a time when Great Britain wrote the book on what is now called settler colonialism. So by Mengestu’s logic, if anti-imperialists had announced a boycott of British writers, it would be “unethical” to suggest that Orwell should be published in the United States or allowed to attend a conference here.
Would it be “suppressing free speech” to explain why American authors of the 1960s should not be blackballed even though the U.S. government was then killing nearly two million civilians in Southeast Asia?
Let’s bring it into the present and closer to home. As an American novelist whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, Mengestu would have good reason to feel aggrieved if foreign publishers suddenly said that, because Donald Trump is a menace, we won’t be publishing any books by you or other American authors.
In a similar vein, Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, father of the mayor of New York City, claims he draws a distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel, but he has called for boycotting academic conferences with Israeli attendees. How would he feel if he were disinvited to a conference abroad because he came from the country run by Trump?
Mengestu arrived in the U.S. in 1980 as a two-year-old when his family fled the Ethiopian Red Terror, a period of Marxist-Leninist political repression that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Let’s say he had stayed in Ethiopia. How would he feel if his books were boycotted and he was harassed for being Ethiopian? Would that be anti-Ethiopian racism? Seems so.
I’m still trying to get my head around the idea that the president of PEN can’t tell the difference between boycotting products and boycotting speech. Economic boycotts have a long tradition, even if BDS won’t admit that its own leaders break the boycott by using iPhones that contain Israeli parts. By contrast, boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning speech is just censorship with a trendy name.
It boils down to this: Mengestu is against book bans in red-state schools and for them in blue-state publishing houses.
I get the sense that Mengestu loves and respects writers as long as they aren’t Israeli. It doesn’t matter if they’re highly critical of their government. The fact that they are Israeli (and thus by definition “Zionist”) means that they and anyone else with a Z connection have relinquished their right to be protected by PEN.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Mengestu’s theatrical resignation is a way of saying not only that Israeli and Jewish writers don’t deserve attention, but that they must not be heard, and that this a matter of high constitutional principle.
In the end, Mengestu’s tortured logic grows out of the same exasperation that anti-Zionists feel any time someone brings up October 7 or the Holocaust.
They think that writing about Jewish suffering detracts from outrage over Palestinian suffering and thus must be silenced. And of course they’re certain that even poor Israeli writers scribbling in an attic somewhere are too rich and privileged to be “marginalized.” I guess being shunned everywhere in the world just because you’re born in a pariah state doesn’t rise to the level of marginalization.
There’s a long history of telling Jews to shut up about their misfortune and stop calling out discrimination against them. It’s a familiar feature of anti-Semitism. Dinaw Mengestu might not know that, but he should.
