Anti-Israel Animus Seeps Into the Publishing Industry

Elder of Ziyon has posted a piece on the American publishing industry, where the animus to Israel is such that novels that depict Israel favorably have little chance of being published. More on this latest development in the multi-pronged war on Israel can be found here: “Publishers now refusing to accept pro-Israel novels,” Elder of Ziyon, April 10, 2024:

I received this from a trusted source:

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A friend is querying their [sic] literary agent about their [sic] novel which has a pro-Israel element and got this response:

Dear xxx,  

Thank you for sending me the manuscript for XXXXX. You write incredibly well and I really enjoyed what you sent me. While the subject is matter is incredibly timely, books that are sympathetic to Israel in any way at the moment are just not selling at acquisitions- I can say this because I have another client with a manuscript we’ve been out on submission with since Oct. 7 and it’s not been going well. I really wish things were different, but feel obliged to let you know the reality of the landscape, in my experience currently. If you get similar feedback and would like to hold off for a little while and resubmit my way, I’d be open to that.

Thank you for the opportunity to read your work, and good luck on this journey.

Sincerely,
xxxxx

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There is explicit censorship, and there is implicit censorship. Refusing to consider publishing novels (!) “that are sympathetic to Israel in any way” is the latter.

These tales of boycotts of anything favorable to Israel evoke Nazi Germany, circa 1933. So a book that contains some pro-Israel sentiment would today have a slim chance of being published? The thin, practically nonexistent line between anti-Israel animus and just plain antisemitism is close to disappearing. But if an author wants to flog his wares about the “suffering Palestinians” and the vicious “settlers” who make their lives hell, or another writer has ready for its close-up a manuscript that tells the story of an insidious lobby in Washington that – thanks to large donations it makes to politicians – has managed to secure support for weapons flowing to Israel, both will get a sympathetic hearing in publishing circle. Israel is no longer seen as the little permanently imperiled state facing a host of Muslim enemies. Arab propagandists, ably assisted by Western antisemites, have managed to convince too many that Israel is a nasty little Sparta on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, its people living on stolen land. 3500 years of history have been forgotten. A few decades ago, we had admiring histories of Israel’s rebirth, and its war for independence, with books such as Leon Uris’s Exodus and such movies as Cast A Giant Shadow. But that was then, and this is now, and the war in Gaza — or rather, the hideous misreporting of the war in Gaza — has had devastating effects on Israel’s image. That negative image has had consequences, we now learn, even in the publishing industry, where manuscripts expressing pro-Israel sympathies, no matter how small a part of the story, have little chance of being considered for publication. The people – many of them young — who most need to be provided with accurate information about Israel and the Palestinians — chant “From the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free,” but they often have no idea which “river” or which “sea”  is meant. It is they who will continue to be dreamily misinformed if publishers now proleptically censor what is published so that pro-Israel material does not appear in book form.

Of course, even fiction from the past will have to be removed if it contains material deemed too favorable to Israel. George Eliot’s Zionist novel, Daniel Deronda, will have to be pulled from bookstores and library shelves. So will Our Mutual Friend, because of Mr. Riah, the saintly and honorable Jew whom Dickens carefully included, some think, to compensate for Fagin, whose creation Dickens always regretted. Mark Twain’s description of the Holy Land, which he included in The Innocents Abroad, as “a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land” of “desolation and waste” where one could travel for miles without encountering another living soul, is obviously “Zionist propaganda,” so that, too, should be pulled from circulation. And Joyce’s Ulysses, where an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom, is one of the two protagonists, also expresses sympathies for Jews and for Zionism, too. Joyce spent 16 years in Trieste, a cosmopolitan city with many Jews, some of whom were Joyce’s tutees. His closest friend there was a Jewish writer, Ettore Schmitz (in arte Italo Svevo).The city’s Jews were ardent Zionists, and Joyce picked up from them an abiding interest in the Jewish return to Eretz Israel, that was just beginning, to rebuild a Jewish commonwealth. Joyce had read quite deeply into the subject of Zionism and owned such books as Herzl’s The Jewish State and Sacher’s Zionism and the Jewish Future. So in order to make sure that Zionist sympathies harbored by Joyce don’t affect the minds of American college students, the Irish writer’s Ulysses will also have to removed from college syllabi, and libraries, and professors’ memories.

But the most dangerous author of all — for those who support the Palestinian cause — is the philosemitic Vladimir Nabokov. His closest boyhood friend, and classmate at the Tenishev School, was Samuil Rozov, who made aliyah and became an architect in Haifa. In his seventies, Nabokov — then living at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland — became friendly with Aryeh Levavi, Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland. During the Yom Kippur War, Nabokov gave Levavi a check and asked him to make it out to whatever Israeli institution he deemed could best use it. Levavi invited Nabokov to visit Switzerland, but Nabokov’s work kept interfering, and the visit kept being postponed, and then Nabokov’s death, on July 2, 1977, prevented that visit from ever being made. How one would have liked to have read Nabokov’s impressions of the Jewish state.

Nabokov’s novels and stories are full of sympathetic and tragic Jewish characters and themes. Such short stories as “Conversation Piece 1945” and “Breaking the News” and “Signs and Symbols,” or the Jewish boy in the class list in Lolita — “Irving, for whom I am sorry,” notes sympathetic Humbert Humbert — and these will all have to be removed from libraries and bookstores, to make sure sympathies stay firmly fixed on the Palestinians.

But the most dangerous, because most heartrending paragraph about Jews in all of Nabokov’s oeuvre is a single paragraph in his novel Pnin, where the title character remembers his early, possibly his first, love, who was murdered by the Nazis. It goes thus:

In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin—not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance), but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget—because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.

This bewitching paragraph’s evocation of one victim of the German murders must be suppressed, and that means Pnin itself must not be available, for those who read those lines will think again about the murder of Mira Belochkin, and about all the millions of other Jews, persecuted and murdered through time and space, and begin to understand why Israel must be allowed to continue to victory in what, rightly understood, should be considered the Jewish state’s fourth war for its very survival. For too many now appear willing, judging by their words and acts, to see the Jewish state disappear, and replaced by a twenty-third Arab state. It is with such people in mind that American publishers no longer will accept manuscripts sympathetic to Israel. This proleptic censorship, of course, has to stop.