cheap blackmail

When you desire something, you will be keen to please the one who has it. The unbridled soul will not attain tempting things without making concessions, and the greatest loss is for a person to give up his position or cheat in it for the sake of an interest, or in order to win some interest for an indefinite period.

Standards are made to domesticate attitudes. This is what happens when we talk about literary prizes and other prizes related to areas that influence public opinion - for example, prizes for activities that stem from writing: literature/thought/journalism/cinema... and other arts of a popular nature. The more famous the prize, the greater the possibility of domestication.

Thus, under the influence of the Booker Prize, a novelist tries to write a work, hoping for the prize and submitting to its undeclared standards, and is forced to live in a gray area, and not adopt positions on issues related to human destiny, such as the Palestinian issue, and thus the voice of the creative or talented person is lost, either in hope of the prize or fear of its withdrawal. However, there are many who refused to submit to cheap blackmail, including writers who won Nobel Prizes such as García Márquez and Saramago.

More than twenty years ago, García Márquez wrote: “Forgive me if I say that I am ashamed to have my name associated with the Nobel Prize. I declare my unlimited admiration for the heroism of the Palestinian people who resist genocide, despite the denial of its existence by the superpowers, the cowardly intellectuals, the media, or even some Arabs.” This is how the great Colombian writer commented on the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinians during the Intifada, more than twenty years ago, when the media did not publish the crimes of the Zionist entity as it does now in the era of citizen journalism and alternative media.

What is striking about Marquez’s position – in addition to his condemnation of the superpowers, the cowardly intellectuals, the media, and some Arabs – is his declaration of his shame at having his name associated with the Nobel Prize, the highest and most famous international award on earth. Marquez wrote: “I declare my disgust at the massacres committed daily by the modern Zionist school, and I do not care about the opinion of professional communists or professional anti-communists. I demand that Ariel Sharon be nominated for the Nobel Prize for murder. Forgive me if I also say that I am ashamed to have my name associated with the Nobel Prize. I declare my unlimited admiration for the heroism of the Palestinian people who are resisting genocide, despite the denial of its existence by the superpowers, the cowardly intellectuals, the media, or even some Arabs.”

In his book “From the Intifada to the Palestinian Liberation War” - a study parts of which were published in the Emirati newspaper Al-Ittihad at the beginning of the new millennium - the late thinker Abdel-Wahhab El-Messiri believes that “one of the most important fruits of the Intifada that goes beyond the Zionist bloc is its penetration of the media blackout imposed on the Palestinian people and their struggle and resistance, so the message reached all the peoples of the world.” El-Messiri conveys to us a number of positions of international writers and intellectuals, including Marquez and Saramago. According to El-Messiri at the time: “Among the most prominent angry ones was the Colombian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote saying:

The Zionist theory of living space was based on the idea that the Jews are a people without a land, and that Palestine is a land without a people. This is how the illegitimate Israeli state was established in 1948. When it became clear to them that there is a people and that in Palestine there is a people living in its land, it was necessary, in order for the theory not to be wrong, to exterminate the Palestinian people, which has been happening systematically for more than fifty years.

“There are undoubtedly many voices all over the world who want to express their protest against these ongoing massacres, if not for fear of being accused of anti-Semitism or obstructing international consensus. I do not know if these people realize that they are selling their souls in the face of cheap blackmail, which should only be met with contempt. No one has truly suffered as much as the Palestinian people, so how long will we remain speechless?”

Al-Masry also quotes the position of the great Portuguese writer Saramago - who is also a Nobel Prize winner - who stated, as Al-Masry quotes, that “the Ramallah he saw under siege reminded him of the Nazi Auschwitz camp, so some accused him of being a victim of ‘cheap Palestinian’ propaganda, but Saramago did not waver like others in the face of the ready-made accusation of anti-Semitism. Rather, his response was overwhelming and sarcastic when he said: ‘I would rather be a victim of cheap Palestinian propaganda than an agent of expensive Israeli propaganda! ’ He elaborated on what he saw, saying: ‘I did not know that it was normal for a Palestinian child whose home was destroyed to search for his books and toys amidst the rubble. I did not know that it was completely normal for Israeli bullets to adorn the walls of Palestinian homes. I did not know that to protect a minority of people, farms must be confiscated and crops destroyed, or that providing security for this minority required detaining hundreds at checkpoints and roadblocks before allowing them to return to their homes exhausted, if not killed. Is this civilization? Can we call these things democracy?

In other words, the policy of cheap blackmail carried out by Zionism on workers and influencers in all areas of life continues, in light of the crimes of genocide that the world is witnessing, which are denounced by peoples and supported by the systems of the advanced world.