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Budapest Times
7 days ago
- Politics
- Budapest Times
Hungary maintains a zero-tolerance policy against anti-Semitism
Upon the announcement that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has tasked EU affairs minister János Bóka with coordinating action against anti-Semitism, the EU affairs ministry said Hungary maintains a zero-tolerance policy against anti-Semitism. Minister Bóka will present proposals to curb alarmingly growing anti-Semitism in Europe and liaise with the relevant European and international players and EU institutions, the statement said. He will also 'use his experience in the EU to promote the fight anti-Semitism with active and conscious communication, and with domestic and international initiatives,' the ministry said. Hungary's government has maintained a zero-tolerance policy against anti-Semitic phenomena and actions for a long time, it said. 'The Hungarian government guarantees the safety of the varied and robust Jewish community in Hungary and supports its activities. [The government] feels responsible for the security and prosperity of all European Jewish communities, because European Jewish life is part of our shared European heritage,' it said. Later on Sunday, Minister Bóka told an event marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel organised by the MERKAZ Hebrew and Israeli Cultural Centre in Budapest, that Hungary had a responsibility to fight anti-Semitism and promote 'Jewish life'. As the coordinator of action against anti-Semitism, Minister Bóka said he was preparing to perform 'visible, pro-active work based on partnerships'. 'We have a zero-tolerance policy against all forms of anti-Semitism, including anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism and as opposition to Israel,' he said.
New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
There is no contemporary fiction
I write contemporary fiction. Sometimes it's more contemporary than some people find entirely decent: I published a lockdown novel during lockdown and was bemused to find that for some critics and readers it was 'too soon', as if the major global event that had dominated everyone's lives for two years needed to be put away to mature like wine or cheese before we were allowed to make art with it. Who would ring the bell, I wondered, when it was time? Where are the gatekeepers of contemporaneity? I have just published a novel with a subplot about European Jewish intergenerational trauma. The narrator is an Englishwoman living in the west of Ireland; I was interested in the literature of guilt and complicity, a major strand of post-colonial and postwar fiction but not much developed within these islands. My move from England to Ireland five years ago had made me more conscious of my Englishness than I had ever been, even though I was born in Scotland and grew up in a household divided between Russian-Jewish-American and Yorkshire allegiances. I wrote my PhD on British voyages of exploration in the 18th century, and so knowledge of imperialist art and colonial land-grabbing has been part of my thinking for decades. But I had not felt so personally implicated until arriving in Ireland. My immediate love for particular places and landscapes – often geologically familiar from my Scottish and northern-English childhood – had complications, because English people's admiration of Irish land has, historically, not gone well. I wanted, of course, to do the right thing, to think the right thoughts, to school my desires and pleasures in moral ways, but it wasn't clear that goodness and Englishness could be compatible in Ireland. Even the self-laceration and abnegation that come easily to me didn't meet the case, because the self-loathing oppressor is if anything more malignant than one with healthy self-esteem. I'd read and written about plenty of English people playing out their masochistic dramas on other people's territory and that wasn't good either. These cultural legacies were not about me and still there I was, here I am, living with them. Uncomfortable, intriguing: let's write a novel about it. I made my central character half-Jewish partly because I am and the half-ness is interesting, partly because her ambivalent status opened my theme of belonging. In the weirdly binary popular history of oppressed and oppressors, goodies and baddies, for most of my life the Jewish identity – at least in western Europe – felt like one of victimhood. I spent my teenage summers on exchange in West Germany, where grandparents at the neighbourhood pool sometimes tried to apologise to me for the Holocaust. My Old Testament name and stereotypical appearance were enough to trigger guilt, and – especially in my half-ness – I felt an imposter. Broadly mainstream feelings about Judaism in Europe changed while I was writing the book, as Israeli violence in Gaza escalated. I want to add 'unimaginably' to that last clause, but there's nothing unimaginable about a well-armed state's elimination of a weaker neighbour, and the horrible familiarity of that event is part of the point of my novel, Ripeness. Down the generations, descendants of survivors and of perpetrators, we all live with the consequences. Violence breeds violence. No such thing as an innocent bystander. Is there an innocent passport? Trauma passes down the family, and what about guilt? What if most of us carry complications? I set Ripeness at more or less the same time I started writing what became the final draft, in the spring of 2023, six months before the events of 7 October, though far enough into the war in Ukraine that I could include the presence of Ukrainian exiles in Ireland. As I wrote, of course, events continued to unfold, as they do, and so sometimes I could nod over the page to the reader's and my shared knowledge of what would happen later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe A different set of characters in different circumstances would have had more concern for Middle Eastern politics in spring 2023, but Ripeness is interested in the decline of my parents' and teachers' generation, in the last years of the European postwar sensibility and in its bequests, in its visions and blind spots, of which one might argue that Palestine was often one. Even a politically engaged woman in her early seventies living in County Clare might not have been preoccupied with Palestine in those months. From the beginning, I imagined the novel as an elegy for the flawed, Eurocentric and fundamentally optimistic ideas of the world that shaped the (flawed, Eurocentric) postwar liberal consensus. That idea of the world order was always – but coyly – rooted in violence and repression. We all always knew that our gadgets ran on rare minerals produced by the forced labour of children far away, that our food and clothes were produced by underpaid workers at the cost of poorer nations' land and water. We knew that there were wars and famines and droughts about which our governments, liberal and conservative, were not concerned, and indeed from which they and we benefitted. We guarded our social security and healthcare systems against undeserving outsiders. We have known for decades that our abuse of our planet is accelerating towards our own obliteration, killing poorer people before richer people, and we know how to slow down, but it's too much hassle, someone else's problem. There's no point in listing large-scale and ongoing examples of human inhumanity in which almost everyone not personally involved is uninterested, because you already know about them. With the destruction of Gaza and the election of Trump, the fictitiousness of the postwar 'rules-based order' is patent. But those rules always applied to some and not others. The old world order has come to an end. I set my novel in its final months, at the latest possible point where a reasonable person could have believed that the liberal European world-view would prevail. There will be novels about what has happened in the Middle East in the last two years, as there will be novels about Trump's re-election and whatever happens next in Ukraine. They will be written by people who have, through experience or research, an understanding of the intimate, material detail of individual lives in those times and places, because fiction runs on intimate, material detail. Other people living other lives, including me, will continue to write about other matters, all of which continue to be related to each other. But to an extent there is no such thing as 'contemporary fiction', because however fast a book might now or in the future travel from writer to reader, the process of writing – in which I include much of the work of literary publishing – does and should take time, sometimes a lot of time, and also, crucially, because a fundamental promise of fiction is that there will be an ending. It is in the writer's invitation to the reader, the handshake on which the reader's suspension of disbelief is based. Comic, tragic, neither or both: I will make meaning for you. I will offer you a pattern. And this means that the writer must make an ending, not merely an end, which means that the events of the novel are concluded. Endings are the hardest part of realist fiction because they are where reality diverges most from realism: in reality there are ends, not endings. Reality is a mess, realism makes meaning. I cannot write well or honestly about real-life events ongoing at the time of publication because I write at the time of writing. All narrative is retrospective, because of the ending. I am startled that I feel the need to say that the durations of art are not those of the internet. There is an interesting question about a novelist's responsibility to portray 'current events', whether that currency relates to the time of writing or the time described. It's a compelling idea that it's outrageous to write about anything but war while war is ongoing, but one might also reasonably write about the way people living out of sight of war do, mostly, continue to go about their business, to attend meetings and send emails and weed their gardens and recycle packaging and celebrate birthdays and indeed read novels exactly as if thousands of people were not being murdered over the horizon, or even down the road. Very few of us not personally affected down tools and stop everything until the killing ends, and in my experience those individuals who do are often not especially kind or pleasant in personal life. Our inclination to keep calm and carry on is at least as worthy of attention as the rarer and perhaps better tendency to stop and howl. Art is not activism. If your sole desire is to stop genocide, writing a novel – or making music or dance or painting – does not rank highly among ways of achieving that aim, and only partly because by the time it is published the war may well be over. I do not mean to exonerate artists from politics, much less morality. Shelley's claim that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' has always been true, but only in the loftiest sense. As totalitarian regimes continue to demonstrate, in the short term at least, the police, or ICE or the IDF, have a far stronger case. There may be case for war reporting as an art form, but the difficulties are plain and the obverse – that art is war reporting – is plainly untrue. Even if we consider such readily located examples as Picasso's Guernica or Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, what makes them important and enduring is precisely their truth beyond a particular time and place. Guernica speaks to massacre and civil war, not just a particular town in Basque country in May 1937. Badenheim 1939 is about the human capacity to ignore, to uphold routine, to deny accumulating evidence of both ascendant evil and imminent personal danger. That is why they are still interesting nearly a century later, when we might also note that massacre, civil war and the ability to deny accumulating evidence of ascendant evil remain current. It is a delusory narrative of 'progress' that insists on the power and obligation of art to make people better. Art is as old as people – the making of art is a plausible definition of humanity – and we are not better. There are many ways of making contemporary fiction contemporary. So I may, I think, write about the intergenerational effects of genocide and forced migration without betraying an obligation to write about the particular genocide taking place just after the novel is set. I may let the shadow of contemporaneity hang over a story that becomes historical as fast as I write. I hereby make unacknowledged legislation. I ring the bell. Sarah Moss's 'Ripeness' is published by Picador [See also: The dark reality behind Trump's embrace of white South Africans] Related
Middle East Eye
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
The West made us pay for its guilt - and now watches as Israel delivers the final Nakba
As Israel reaches its 77th year of existence, its endgame for the Palestinians looks closer than ever. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Jewish state is moving steadily towards emptying Gaza and the West Bank of their native inhabitants - a Palestinian eradication from the land it has pursued since before its inception. This horrific prospect, which the world watches without lifting a finger, evokes for me vivid memories of the 1948 Nakba, when Israel carried out the first mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Then, as now, no one intervened. I was a child at the time, but I remember thinking the world had come to an end. My fellow Palestinians and I spent the rest of our lives recovering from that cataclysmic shock. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Never did I imagine that, so many decades later, something far worse could happen. Final ethnic cleansing If this final ethnic cleansing of Palestinians does take place - through direct killing or mass expulsion - it will not have been the result of Israel's military capacity alone. Far more, it will be due to the unstinting and uncritical support of its western backers, and their immoral complicity in this genocide. If this final ethnic cleansing takes place, it will not be due to Israel's military power alone - but to the West's unstinting support and immoral complicity Many Palestinians are perplexed by this western permissiveness towards Israel's crimes. But the indulgence shown to Israel over the Gaza genocide goes back a long way. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration, which introduced Zionism into Palestine, set the stage for a Zionist-centred politics that has dominated the West ever since. At the time of Balfour, Palestinians were a largely agrarian people living peaceably in a small corner of the Ottoman Empire, before Britain's conquest in 1918. They had no knowledge of - or interest in - Europe's so-called Jewish problem. Their country was a place whose people had no cultural understanding of Zionism or the European Jewish history that created it. My grandfather, born in 1850, was a farmer in the West Bank town of Tulkarm and a local notable. The only Jews he knew were those he lived with amicably and called "Arab Jews" - native Palestinian Jews who at the time made up 3 percent of Palestine's population. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage for all the latest on the Israel-Palestine war How could he have understood the intricacies of European antisemitism, and how it would lead to the creation of Israel in his homeland? By the time he died in 1935, still uncomprehending, British colonialists ruled Palestine and Zionism had taken hold. His naivety in the face of this alien ideology has persisted to a large extent among Palestinians to this day. A majority still lack an adequate understanding of the subtleties of European Jewish history, the Nazi Holocaust, and the guilt it has engendered in western people. Western cover I grew up knowing that, for the West, we Palestinians were of little importance in the greater enterprise of Israel's creation and development that they favoured. It took the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 to show us just how little we meant - and, by contrast, how precious Israel was to its western supporters. Following the Hamas operation, the United States and its allies went into overdrive to mobilise their military, political, economic and diplomatic forces to defend Israel as if, for all the world, they themselves had been attacked. Non-stop western military aid has been supplied to Israel since then, enabling it to destroy Gaza and the West Bank. US diplomatic support at the UN has shielded Israel from censure. International organisations like the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have been treated with contempt, and international law undermined to protect Israel. Palestinians - and anyone who speaks up for them - are increasingly censured and at risk of punishment, as if they, and not Israel, were engaged in genocide. Today, we see deliberately induced mass starvation take hold in Gaza, while the West Bank is ransacked to create a second Gaza. Israel's backers look on passively throughout, and there are plenty of politicians prepared to do business as usual with a state under investigation for genocide. A 'problem' transferred The message from all this should always have been clear to Palestinians. For the West, the so-called conflict was never about Palestine or its people, but always about Europe's unresolved relationship with its Jewish communities. Historically, this expressed itself predominantly as antisemitism, sometimes as philosemitism, or nowadays as both. Why is Israel so vital to the West? Read More » The "Jewish question", as it was known, was hotly debated and agonised over in Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This is where we, Palestinians, were made to come in. In trying to resolve their Jewish problem, the West quite simply transferred it to us. Although we had no role in Europe's Jewish question, Israel was created to solve it in our corner of the Arab world. In what has remained primarily a Jewish story, we have become mere obstacles to be removed. And the irony is that we have become known through the western world's preoccupation with the Jewish question. In the words of the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, "If our war had been with Pakistan, no one would have heard of me." Indeed, if our adversaries had not been Jews, who would have heard of us? Who would have known or cared if people from Pakistan or anywhere else in the Third World had come into our country in 1948 and pushed us out and taken our place? For western imperialists, it would have gone down as no more than a regional skirmish among backward natives invading each other. But unhappily for us, the "people from Pakistan" were Jewish Europeans with a troubled history, seeking retribution for their suffering. If only they had taken their revenge on their European persecutors, not on us. Then we might have remained obscure and unknown, but living in our homeland. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
USA Today
27-01-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Auschwitz was built on lies. They still haunt Israel and our world today.
Elisha Wiesel Opinion contributor Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago Monday. Its lies still imprison us today. It was with lies about work abroad that the Nazis persuaded the Jews of Europe to get on the trains, and it was with lies about showers that Jews were greeted when they got off. There are the lies the world told itself as these atrocities unfolded. That they were doing all they could − even as the railroad tracks to Auschwitz were not bombed; as the St. Louis ship, full of Jewish refugees, was turned back from Florida to Europe; as Britain froze European Jewish immigration to the British Mandate for Palestine, preventing the escape of hundreds of thousands who could have been saved. And finally there are the lies told in the following decades because they were convenient. 'They were victims,' President Ronald Reagan said in 1985 of the Wehrmacht soldiers buried at Bitburg cemetery, where he intended to visit, 'just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.' Elie Wiesel confronted Reagan on national TV It was too late to stop this last lie, but my father, Elie Wiesel, was determined to try. His response made headlines around the world. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. 'The issue here is not politics,' he told Reagan on national TV, 'but good and evil. And we must never confuse them, for I have seen the SS at work, and I have seen their victims.' My father was unsuccessful. Reagan paid his respects at Bitburg anyway, and the line between the perpetrators of evil and their victims continued to blur. Today, only 40% of people under 35 recognize the Holocaust as historically accurate. That number is even worse in the Middle East, where only 16% of Israel's neighbors accept the facts. Opinion:My father, Elie Wiesel, survived Auschwitz. He'd ask these questions about Israel-Hamas war. But the problem is worse than ignorance. Many in the younger generation, reliving Reagan's moral confusion, see today's Hamas fighters as victims just as surely as the Israelis they kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023. To them, Hamas is the underdog hero. My father spoke out against indifference. What we now face is something else. Nobody is indifferent; everyone has an opinion on the Israel-Hamas conflict. Is it mass gullibility? Good intentions gone wrong? Surely many Christians who slaughtered Jews in the Middle Ages believed that they were protecting their families, that the Jews had in fact poisoned the wells. Had they not seen the dead body of a child, produced as the blood libel's evidence? It is hard to look evil in the face. To see the jihadists in Gaza fire rifles in the air as 90 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for only three Israeli women. One of the terrorists set to be released by Israel is Abu Warda, who was responsible for killing 45 civilians in the 1996 bus bombings in Jerusalem. Does he occupy the same moral universe as these women? Hamas wants to eradicate Israel It is easier to believe that this militant mob wants their own state than to hear, really hear, what they shout: that their mission, as the Hamas charter states, is the eradication of Israel. Since this ceasefire, Hamas has retaken the Gazan streets − and we'll watch them wreak further destruction on the people of Gaza. My father, in his Bitburg speech, quoted the great New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal. He had visited Poland and wrote a piece in 1990 called 'Forgive them not, for they knew what they did.' Opinion:Peace in Israel isn't possible until Palestinians stop paying terrorists to kill The Christian desire to forgive and move on is a powerful one in the American psyche, especially when the terror being forgiven was visited on others. But Americans must not forgive Hamas. We must confront evil when and where we see it. There is no time to lose. Good intentions are not enough. My grandfather Shlomo Wiesel, who perished at Buchenwald a week after the liberation of Auschwitz, was also the son of an Eliezer. My great-grandfather was killed as a medic in World War I, drafted into service for the Kaiser. And now I see my father's rebuke of Reagan drafted into service by those who hate Israel, who shout that to fight indifference is to blindly support the eradication of a democratic state. It is terrifying to confront a mob, especially when it contains our own − our friends, coworkers, even our children, swept up in that deep moral confusion laying waste to college campuses. But on this anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we must ask ourselves these questions: Will we continue explaining away the images of non-uniformed Palestinian civilians celebrating − and actively aiding Hamas − in the Oct. 7 attacks, much as a previous generation sought to explain away the SS, the Wehrmacht and the civilians who kept them in power? Will we continue confusing the concepts of perpetrator and victim, of terror and a just war, losing the distinction between Hamas, who hide behind human shields, and the Israel Defense Forces, who do more than any army ever has to avoid loss of life while bombing the tunnels built to facilitate the next Holocaust? Will we continue giving moral credibility to voices who say that the tiny nation of Israel is the villain for refusing to die? To differentiate good from evil, one must begin by choosing between truth and lies. Forty years ago, President Reagan had not learned this lesson. Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz − have we? Elisha Wiesel is the son of Marion Wiesel and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel.
