Ian McEwan, in a speech given in Jerusalem upon receiving the 2011 Jerusalem Prize for Literature:
"Hamas has embraced the nihilism of the suicide bomber, of rockets fired blindly into towns, and the nihilism of the extinctionist policy towards Israel."
"But it was also nihilism that fired a rocket at the home of the Gazan doctor, Izzeldin Abuelaish, killing three of his daughters and a niece during the Gazan war. And it is nihilism to make a long-term prison camp of the Gaza Strip. Nihilism has unleashed a tsunami of concrete across the occupied territories."
"... continued evictions and relentless purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the process of the right of return granted to Jews but not to Arabs, the so-called facts on the ground of hardening concrete over the future, over future generations of Palestinian and Israeli children who will inherit the conflict and find it even more difficult to resolve than it is today."
"... deeply, deeply touched to be awarded this honour that recognises writing which promotes the idea of the freedom of the individual in society". "Here, for both Israeli and Palestinian novelists, 'the situation' is always there ... It's a creative struggle to address it and a creative struggle to ignore it." He referred to the Shoah, or Holocaust, as "... that industrialised cruelty which will remain always the ultimate measure of human depravity, of how far we can fall, and acknowledged "the precious tradition of the democracy of ideas in Israel".
He singled out three celebrated Israeli authors – Amos Oz, AB Yehoshua and David Grossman – as "writers who love their country, and made sacrifices for it and have been troubled by the directions it has taken". They had opposed the settlements, he said, and had become the country's "conscience, memory and above all hope". In recent years these three writers had felt "the times turning against their hopes", he said.
The question, said McEwan, was Lenin's: what is to be done? Israel, he said, needed to harness the creativity of its writers, artists and scientists, and not "retreat to a bunker mentality".
"The opposite of nihilism is creativity. The mood for change, the hunger for individual freedom that is spreading through the Middle East is an opportunity more than it is a threat."
The author said he was donating his $10,000 (£6,155) prize to Combatants for Peace, an organisation of former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters.
