Above Politics
For all those involved in the publication and dissemination of ideas, freedom of _expression_ is the foundation on which our work depends. Like many writers, I have campaigned to defend it, writing letters, speaking at public events, and participating in protests and meetings. So I was not best pleased to find myself named by The Atlantic (a monthly magazine) as an authoritarian bully who has participated in a “merciless” campaign to intimidate other writers into silence.
The journalist George Packer was writing about a controversy that has engulfed the American branch of PEN, a century-old global organization of writers whose charter states:
Members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of _expression_ in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world wherever this is possible.
This past spring, many writers, including me, elected to withdraw from PEN’s annual literary festival in protest of what we saw as PEN America’s failure to support our Palestinian colleagues. I didn’t take this action lightly. I’ve often worked with PEN America in the past, and for many years, I had served as the deputy president of English PEN. In my opinion, the organization was falling short of its universalist principles and was indeed succumbing to pressure, though from a different direction—and perhaps of a different kind—from that identified by Packer.
PEN is far from the only NGO to have been split by arguments over the right way to respond to Hamas’s murderous attacks of October 7 and Israel’s brutal war of revenge, but the divisions in the American literary community are particularly acute. While there’s a case to be made that a literary organization should not stray outside its remit and offer opinions on, say, Palestinian statehood or whether the Israeli invasion constitutes genocide, there are no universities left in Gaza, and Israeli soldiers have photographed themselves wantonly destroying schools and burning libraries. Many Palestinian writers are dead or trapped, the international press is excluded from the territory, and Gazan journalists have been killed in such numbers that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are being deliberately targeted. In the United States, meanwhile, Israel has created at least one bot-powered influence campaign and has poured millions into a coordinated effort to target critics and shape policy. Cultural destruction and attacks on civil society are undoubtedly proper matters for a literary organization to address. As PEN America’s CEO, Suzanne Nossel, could have said, but did not:
Cultural obliteration is both a motive and a tactic of Israel’s war on Palestine. The international community must consider not just cultural preservation, but also cultural fortification, continuity, and resilience as key elements of Palestine’s defense and its ability to endure and thrive as an independent nation. The question of whether Palestine can survive and reemerge as a vibrant unified country will depend significantly on investments in the culture that underpins it, including the safety and livelihoods of those who create, inspire, and develop culture in all of its varied forms.
In reality, this fiery language is borrowed from Nossel’s statement introducing a 2022 report called “Ukrainian Culture Under Attack.” The substitution of “Israel” and “Palestine” for “Russia” and “Ukraine” is the most succinct way I can find to demonstrate the question that has arisen about PEN America’s commitments. Whatever your opinions about the causes or conduct of the war, one has to ask why, if the right to freedom of _expression_ is universal, one national culture should be worthy of such a passionate defense while another is not.
Around the world, other PEN centers have responded robustly to the destruction visited on Gaza, even as they have acknowledged the plight of the Israeli hostages who, as of this writing, remain in captivity. As early as October 25, 2023, PEN International called for a ceasefire. Other PEN centers signed on to this call. PEN America has mostly restricted itself to a generalized lamentation about the loss of life. So lackluster was its public position that, in March 2024, PEN South Africa took the highly unusual step of writing to its sister organization to express concern. Only in response to the growing wave of protest did PEN America call for a ceasefire or offer any dedicated funding to affected Palestinians. As far as I know, no report entitled “Palestinian Culture Under Attack” is in preparation.
Packer’s piece is symptomatic of a larger issue. He casts himself as an embattled voice of sensible centrism, making “halting appeals to reason” while he and his cohort are attacked on both sides by authoritarians, the left a mirror image of the right. This familiar horseshoe model is used to make the rather scurrilous allegation that terms like “decolonization,” “imperialism,” and “marginalization” are rhetorical equivalents of “libtard,” “groomer,” and “hoax.” In lieu of an analysis of how any of this might have arisen, Packer invokes something called the “authoritarian spirit,” which lands where it will, currently settling upon the American literary scene. Fear of criticism on social media has, he claims, led to a fundamentally irrational stampede that risks trampling a cherished and valuable organization; in other words, here was yet another eruption of what some commentators have drolly called the Great Awokening—just a bunch of rational dudes, surrounded by holy rollers.
The trope of a small band of evidence-based individuals facing down the woke mob is a staple of internet discourse, a sort of 300 for the terminally online, but beneath the culture-war name-calling there may be something useful to be excavated from this spat. What does it mean to say that freedom of _expression_ should be “above” politics? This is not the same as saying that freedom of _expression_ is above politics. Were this a truth universally acknowledged, there would be no need for an organization to defend it.
PEN was founded in London in 1921. Its early inspiration was the Renaissance humanist notion of a Republic of Letters, a country of the mind that knows no national or linguistic borders. In the turbulent interwar years, the organization attempted to sequester itself from political partisanship, a position that foundered on the rocks of fascism. In “PEN International and Its Republic of Letters 1921–1970,” an unpublished Columbia Ph.D. thesis, Megan Doherty describes the reluctance of PEN to acknowledge what had happened to its German chapter after the Nazi takeover in 1933. That year, PEN International held a congress in Dubrovnik. The German group agreed to attend only on the condition that “no mention of politics be made.” This was problematic, to say the least, because many Jewish and leftist writers had been expelled, and PEN members were among those who had just had their books burned on Unter den Linden. Yet, amazingly, the organization’s leadership, under H. G. Wells, decided that it was inappropriate to intervene. Eager for PEN to appear nonpartisan, Wells promised the newly Nazified German branch that none of this would be discussed.
Wells’s attempt at appeasement was blown up by a radical Jewish writer named Ernst Toller, who stood up to speak at the event. Knowing what was coming, the German delegation threatened to leave. After a vote was taken, the Germans walked out, and Toller received permission to ask all the difficult questions about book burning and expulsion. “Insanity dominates our age,” said Toller at the podium,
and barbarity drives humans. The air around us is becoming thinner. Let us not fool ourselves. The voice of the spirit, the voice of humanity, will only become powerful if it serves a larger political agenda.
Contemporaries considered Toller’s speech a turning point, exposing one version of the “apolitical” as a capitulation to forces that were on a trajectory toward genocide. Nevertheless, PEN maintained a position that was distinct from that of “engaged” Communists. Its aspiration was still to assert a set of universal principles that were not in service to any particular political party. PEN began to think of itself as an organization that was concerned with politics, but only with the aim of protecting what one PEN official called in 1951 “the inalienable human rights of the individual.”
During the Cold War, PEN’s flimsy firewall between politics and humanitarianism fell repeatedly. The organization’s attempts to straddle the Iron Curtain failed, and in 1965, the election of the playwright Arthur Miller as president—over Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Guatemalan magic realist—was interpreted by many members as a sign of the ascendency of American liberalism over more internationalist and leftist currents. The feeling that PEN was becoming a tool of American interests was reinforced when, in 1967, it was exposed as one of many cultural organizations that had received funding from the CIA, chiefly through an agency front called the Farfield Foundation. Members of French PEN wondered whether Miller was working for the agency. Though there’s no evidence that Miller was an asset, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the anticommunist body set up by the CIA to fight the cultural Cold War, certainly had a presence within PEN in this period.
All this has relevance for recent arguments over the war on Gaza. Suzanne Nossel is a former State Department official with a history of advocacy for Israel. The organization has received persistent criticism that it is most comfortable when its campaigning aligns with American foreign-policy preferences. When I first came to the United States, I was surprised to discover the revolving door between government service and the management of humanitarian NGOs. This is emphatically not the culture elsewhere, and the problems with the arrangement are clear. If your career path is in government, and you perhaps hope for a job in a future administration, you may take into consideration the consequences of alienating people on whom you depend for professional advancement.
PEN America has become a large and rather opaque organization, with a Washington lobbying arm and a reliance on wealthy donors. While PEN America may operate in the name of writers, it is certainly not the organization of writers that used to exist and still exists elsewhere. Professionalization and expansion have obvious benefits, but elite capture is one of the dangers. It doesn’t take conspiratorial thinking or anything more than basic common sense to understand the pressures brought to bear by funders and peers in the Washington foreign-policy “blob” as political pressures. Labeling an opponent’s position as political and one’s own as apolitical “reason” is, as every undergraduate poli-sci major knows, a fundamentally ideological move. So I can’t accept Packer’s premise. It seems to me that his position is just as political as any other and that mine is truer to PEN’s fragile, often compromised universalism.
When it comes to Palestine, many people, self-appointed guardians of reason included, have emotional commitments that run very deep and are more or less impervious to persuasion. One common limit to the “apolitical” grant of universalism is that of reciprocity. Maybe you can accept rationally that Palestinian writers—and Palestinian lives—have the same value as others, but you still feel an intuitive antipathy to them. They’re all fanatics, right? Would they hesitate to murder the naïve defenders of human rights along with all the others?
I would ask you to go online and find a video of the poet Refaat Alareer lecturing on John Donne to a class at the Islamic University of Gaza. Alareer was killed by an Israeli air strike in December and became posthumously famous as the author of “If I Must Die” (If I must die . . . let it be a tale), a poem that has become a staple of protests around the world. Bespectacled, bearded, and slightly balding, Alareer speaks in English, translating the difficult words for his class. He explains intertextuality. They discuss extended metaphors. Listen to him express his love of language, his pleasure at the metaphysical twists and turns of the seventeenth-century poet’s thought, and remember that he is gone, the room in which he’s lecturing has been demolished, and every one of his eager, attentive students is either dead or displaced. Listen and ask yourself whether he, too, was not a citizen of the Republic of Letters.