Journalism

It is vanishingly rare for a writer to both confront the ugliness of humanity and still search for its beauty. Roy is that rare writer.

There are few activities I enjoy more than praising Arundhati Roy, who has been awarded the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize. Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to recall favourite characters in her gorgeous novels and some of her greatest one-liners.

And no, I’m not talking about the ones about “another world… breathing” that were the italicised email signatures of half the people you knew in the early 2000s. I’m not even referring to “the pandemic is a portal” – those words that pierced the early shock of Covid-19 and helped so many of us to grasp that this cataclysm was going to take us somewhere new and different, and that we had urgent choices to make about what we wanted to bring on that journey.

I’m talking about deeper cuts, lesser-known framings that also helped us get our bearings and keep our wits when history suddenly started moving in fast-forward.

A year later, memorials to the 7 October attacks use art, virtual reality and dark tourism to stir support for limitless violence. But there is a different way to remember.

A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show of collective sorrow and military resolve.

That is how the Israeli government hoped to mark the passing of one year since Hamas’s surprise and bloody attacks last 7 October. But little has gone according to plan.

Reprinted from a speech at the Emergency Seder in the Streets in Brooklyn on April 23, 2024.

I’ve been thinking about Moses, and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.  The ecofeminist in me was always uneasy about this story: what kind of God is jealous of animals? What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself? But there is a less literal way of understanding this story. It is about false idols. About the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.  What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.

That false idol is called Zionism.

Reprinted from a speech virtually delivered on February 24, 2024 to the And Still We Rise festival in the UK.

When my dear friend Asad Rehman asked me to help close this gathering, his specific instructions were to speak about the political situation today and to do it in a way ‘filled with hope’. A bit of a tall order and I’m not entirely sure I can deliver. Let’s see what we can do instead….The last time I was in London, it was late September. Just five months ago. But five months that feel like a hundred years. One hundred years of Palestinian parents wailing over their murdered and maimed children. One hundred years of bombed schools and raided hospitals and desecrated mosques. One hundred years of Israeli soldiers making TikToks of their war crimes.  One hundred years of teens trained in fascism blocking trucks filled with food.  One hundred years of open calls to annihilate more than two million captive, occupied, ghettoized people. One hundred years of giddily expressed plans to turn Gaza into a parking lot. An Israeli beach town. A museum. A slaughterhouse. A buffer zone.

If Jonathan Glazer’s brave Oscar acceptance speech made you uncomfortable, that was the point

It’s an Oscar tradition: a serious political speech pierces the bubble of glamour and self-congratulation. Warring responses ensue. Some proclaim the speech an example of artists at their culture-shifting best; others an egotistical usurpation of an otherwise celebratory night. Then everyone moves on. Yet I suspect that the impact of Jonathan Glazer’s time-stopping speech at last Sunday’s Academy Awards will be significantly more lasting, with its meaning and import analyzed for many years to come.  Glazer was accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as “non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors”, people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.

In 2005, Palestinians called on the world to boycott Israel until it complied with international law. What if we had listened?

Exactly 15 years ago this week, I published an article in the Guardian. It began like this: Enough. It’s time for a boycott.

Back in January 2009, Israel had unleashed a shocking new stage of mass killing in the Gaza Strip, calling its ferocious bombing campaign Operation Cast Lead. It killed 1,400 Palestinians in 22 days; the number of casualties on the Israeli side was 13. That was the last straw for me, and after years of reticence I came out publicly in support of the Palestinian-led call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights, known as BDS.

In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun…True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied.

This past July, Merriam-Webster announced on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that “‘doppelgänger’ is currently one of our top lookups.”

Big corporations, golf courses and hotels have been taking water from locals for years. Now the fire may result in even more devastating water theft

Given the strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum. Ignoring him is not an option