Beware of writers’ politics

Haruki Murakami may be a great novelist, but he is also a political buffoon. Most writers are. As the German novelist Daniel Kehlman said at the University of Göttingen not quite three years ago,My god, Hölderlin and Kleist embraced patriotism and the German Nation, Kipling the English Empire; Claudel and Yeats were half-fascists; Pound and Benn whole ones; Céline and Jünger I don't even want to talk about, and Aragon, Eluard, Brecht, Heinrich Mann and Feuchtwanger and many dozens of Europe’s premier intellectuals wrote letter or reverential submission to and hymns about Josef Stalin. Writers have two main traits: they dislike pragmatics and they are often opportunists.Murakami is the latter variety. Invited to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, he seizes the opportunity to stand with those who seek to destroy the Jewish State. Inscribed on the wall of his mind, he sighs, is the slogan: “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” He goes on, as if addressing schoolchildren:Yes, no matter how right the wall may be, how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will do it. But if there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?I dunno. Maybe the value of truth? What value the works of a novelist who candidly prefers to be morally muddled? Murakami presses on:What is the meaning of this metaphor, of the wall and the egg? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high wall. The eggs are unarmed civilians who are crushed, burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of this metaphor that is true.Now, Murakami began his school lesson by warning that he had come to Jerusalem as a “professional spinner of lies,” but even an admitted liar might think twice about uncritically passing on discredited Hamas propaganda about the Israeli use of “white phosphorous shells.” Even more telling is the refusal to make moral distinctions. Only the “unarmed civilians” of one side—the side of the infinitely fragile egg—earn the novelist’s tender mercies. True, terrorists launch rockets at unarmed civilians on the other side of “the wall,” and then courageously hide themselves among their own unarmed countrymen. Despite their rockets and their ambitions to murder as many Jews as possible, however, they are mere eggs. We must mourn the breaking of such precious eggs as Nizar Rayan and Abu Zakaria al-Jemal and Said Siam. It is equally imperative not to show any concern for residents of the wall, even if their schools are hit by the eggs’ rockets. They are only eggs, after all, and unarmed Israeli children—well, they belong to the wall.

The officials of the Jerusalem International Book Fair, who awarded their prize to Murakami, ought to have rushed the stage, wrestled the trophy out of his hands, and presented it to the nearest anonymous bystander, who could not possibly have been a bigger moral idiot than the Japanese novelist.