British novelist Ian McEwan has rejected anti-Israel activists’ demands to reject the Jerusalem Prize. He explained that although he opposes a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, the prize “is from the Jerusalem Book Fair, not the Israeli Foreign Ministry.”
McEwan told the London Guardian, I would urge people to make the distinction – it is about literature. I certainly will accept the prize. It is a highly distinguished award and I am honored to join the backlist of writers who are previous winners."
The Jerusalem prize, worth $10,000 in cash, is awarded to authors whose writing deals with individual freedoms. Among McEwan’s works are The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent and Atonement.
His decision to accept the prize spells a defeat for anti-Israeli groups that urged him to turn it down. “His acceptance will be used as a public relations exercise by the Israeli government,” said Palestine Solidarity Campaign official Betty Hunter.
The British Writers in Support of Palestine, in a letter to the Guardian on Monday, argued that the Jerusalem Book Fair is organized by the municipality, which the writers called “a key institution of the Israeli state and a major instrument in the illegal colonization of East Jerusalem,” the general term for Jewish neighborhoods in southern, northern and eastern Jerusalem where approximately 250,000 Jews live.
One supporter of McEwan is British Member of Parliament Sarah Ludford, who said she also favors a freeze on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria but that it is “patently absurd” to say that accepting the prize is an act support for Israel.
“Having McEwan in town talking to a bunch of intellectuals, inter alia, about his opposition to settlements, may on the contrary cause that government some discomfort,” she wrote in a letter to the London newspaper..