On the Palestine Question: Roald Dahl, Harold Pinter, and others

On Saturday, February 15, 2003, I was part of a 15-coach convoy from Portsmouth to London, UK. Under the leadership of the late John Molyneux, we made the trip to join the anti-war rally in London's Hyde Park which, according to the BBC, was attended by a million, and according to the organisers, by two million people. As a student of English literature, I was especially enthusiastic about the speech at the rally given by Harold Pinter, whose play The Birthday Party (1958) I had read during my student days at the University of Dhaka.

A few years later, in 2006, Pinter was among a group of prominent writers, including Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Toni Morrison, who had signed a letter to expose a blatant media hypocrisy during a flare-up of tensions between Israel and Palestine. It included the following message: "Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation."

On June 24, 2006, Israeli forces had kidnapped two Palestinians—a doctor and his brother—from their home in Gaza. The day after, on June 25, 2006, the Palestinians abducted the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in a cross-border raid, which prompted Israel to launch airstrikes and push into Gaza. The signatories of the letter pointed out that dominant media outlets regarded the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit as "an outrage", whereas the day-before abduction of the two Palestinians was "scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press".

The current flare-up of troubles in Israel and Palestine began with Hamas' October 7, 2023 attacks on the former. In disproportionate retaliation, Israeli air and ground forces have violated all international norms and have so far killed more than 14,000 Palestinian men, women, and children, and demolished innumerable infrastructures in Gaza, including residential blocks, hospitals and schools. As a result, Gaza is littered with dead bodies and burdened with unclaimed orphans whose parents and near relatives have been murdered. Needless to say, Israeli settler violence and killing in the West Bank have gone unabated.

The Israeli government failed to protect its citizens on October 7, 2023 and, perhaps in order to divert public attention from that failure, it has gone on a long and genocidal bombing and killing spree in Gaza. The common understanding of the term "self-defence" involves protecting oneself and others in one's own territory. However, Israel's decades-long belligerent actions have conflated defence with offence—often with genocidal consequences in Palestine. It kills Palestinians and demolishes their houses and other infrastructures with abandon and impunity, violating all rules of engagement (ROE).

Israel and many of its supporters have kept reiterating the condemnable Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. They want the rest of the world to ignore the deaths and destruction in Gaza perpetrated by Israeli forces and to believe that the problem started on that date. In order to delve deeper into understanding when and how this problem first started, I took to the pages of literature and came across works, including Roald Dahl's memoir Going Solo which was published in 1986.

Earlier in January 1983, another book titled God Cried was published. It is co-authored by the Australian journalist Tony Clifton and the late French war-photojournalist Catherine Leroy. Both of them covered the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and recounted in the book the siege of West Beirut, and how Palestinians and their Lebanese allies gave their lives to defend it.

Towards the end of the invasion, in September 1982, Israeli forces besieged the Palestinian refugee camp Shatila and the adjacent neighbourhood of Sabra in southwest Lebanon. They provided cover for the Lebanese Maronite militia group Phalange to carry out massacres, mainly against Palestinian refugees who had fled death and ethnic cleansing in 1948 when Israel was established in the land of Palestine. According to an Al Jazeera report from September 16, 2022, in "43 hours, from 6pm on Thursday 16 September, until 1pm on Saturday 18 September", the Israeli-backed militia killed between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians.

The first Arab-American US senator, the late James G. Abourezk, wrote a review of God Cried which was published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs on October 3, 1983. In his review, Abourezk states: "Clifton makes a significant point, which I happen to agree with, and which I have made a number of times in discussing the Israeli invasion. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila drew attention away from the larger crime committed by the Israelis in its grossly inhumane butchery all during the summer [in 1982]."

Abourezk regards God Cried as "a document which will rekindle the anger of those who read it—anger toward the Israeli war machine and all those who supported it and made excuses for the horrendous slaughter which it wrought on the people of West Beirut. Everyone will find a page or a story or a photograph in God Cried that will adhere in his or her brain forever, and there is practically no limit to those in this book."

The "anger" to which Abourezk alludes had found expression in an earlier review of God Cried. Written by Roald Dahl and published in the August 1983 issue of the British magazine Literary Review, the essay titled "Not a Chivalrous Affair" begins with these sentences: 

"In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the mass slaughter of the Jews was beginning. Our hearts bled for the Jewish men, women and children, and we hated the Germans. Exactly 41 years later, in June 1982, the Israeli forces were streaming northwards out of what used to be Palestine into Lebanon, and the mass slaughter of the inhabitants began. Our hearts bled for the Lebanese and Palestinian men, women and children, and we all started hating the Israelis. Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion."

Months before his death in November 1990, in an interview with the British newspaper Independent, Dahl stated that his anger against Israel "began in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon. They killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut. It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned. I'm certainly anti-Israeli and I've become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism."

It is true that parts of Dahl's statement quoted above smack of anti-Semitism; and I am aware of the controversy surrounding his views about Israel and the Jews and of the charge of anti-Semitism against him. Some of his comments can be interpreted as anti-Semitic and hence are indefensible. But there should be a clear distinction between anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel's apartheid and racist policies. Regrettably, many supporters of Israel are culpable for conflating anti-Israeli opinions with anti-Semitism, as they (mis)use the discourse of anti-Semitism to prevent criticisms of Israel's human rights record.

I must make it clear that I have not come across any anti-Semitic pronouncements in Going Solo. Conversely, in the book Dahl regards the "persecution of the Jews in 1938 and 1939" in Hitler's Germany as "the greatest mass murder in the history of the world." He was living in East Africa during those years and regrets that the "local newspaper, which was all [he] got to read, had not mentioned anything about" the holocaust. Dahl blames that lack of information on the "parochial and isolated" nature of British colonies. 

In 1934 at the age of 18, Roald Dahl started working for the oil company Shell in London. In 1938, he was posted to Dar es Salaam in what is now Tanzania. Once World War II broke out in 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), fought in Africa and "survived only by the skin of [his] teeth."

Later, war efforts took him to "Haifa [now in Israel] in northern Palestine in the last week of May 1941." One morning he flew thirty miles from Haifa to an interior area – "a small secret hideaway" for the RAF – behind the mountain range of Carmel. In such a remote place, to his utter astonishment, Dahl met dozens of children and "a tall bearded man who strode among the children and ordered them to stand away from [Dahl's] plane." With a German accent, the man said to Dahl: "Welcome to our little settlement." (Later in the book, Dahl informs readers: "The name of that tiny settlement … was Ramat David" in what later became Israel.)

Noticing bewilderment on Dahl's face at the existence of humans in such a location, the man adds: "We cut down the corn ourselves and helped to roll out the strip. This is our cornfield."

Dahl said: "But who are you and who are all these children?"

The man replied: "We are Jewish refugees. The children are all orphans. This is our home…. We are everywhere. We are all over the country."

The man added: "The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food."

At one point, Dahl said to the man: "Then you will all become Palestinians. Or perhaps you are that already."

The man replied: "I do not think we will become Palestinians…. We need a country of our own."

Earlier landmark dates and events in the Israel-Palestine conflict include: al-nakba or the catastrophe of 1948 when Palestinians were expelled from their lands and Israel was established; the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that resulted in Israel capturing "the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, thus seizing all of the remaining territory that had been allocated for a Palestinian state in the 1947 United Nations (UN) partition plan" (Jerome Slater); and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The 1941 story that Roald Dahl narrates in Going Solo shows that the occupation of Palestinian land had started much earlier than 1948.

Recently, I have read a journal article titled "The Struggle against Jewish Immigration to Palestine" (1988) written by Arieh J. Kochavi, Professor of Modern History at the University of Haifa. It states: "From 1933 to 1936, more than 130,000 Jews arrived in Palestine. During this period the Yishuv, or Jewish community in Palestine, grew by about 80 per cent, the high point for immigration coming in 1935, when 62,000 persons entered Palestine."

Other studies suggest that the arrival of Jews in, and the displacement of Palestinians from, Palestine started much earlier than the 1930s. So, Hamas' 7 October 2023 attacks were not the beginning of the problem. The origin of the problem goes much further back than this.

In this discussion, I have mentioned writers who have sought justice for Palestinians. Most of these writers are non-Muslims. Two of them – Chomsky and Pinter – are of Jewish background. This shows that the question of justice for Palestinians is a humanitarian, and not a religious one. There are also writers who are vocal when perpetrators of wrongdoings are identified as Muslims but are quiet about Israel's grisly violations of human rights. Perhaps, their silence speaks loud about the bias and prejudice inherent in their intellectual outlook.

Md. Mahmudul Hasan, PhD is Professor of English and postcolonial literature at International Islamic University Malaysia. He edits the Scopus-index journal Asiatic.