Award of Israel Prize for Literature to Arab Sparks Controversy

In the 1960s, an Israeli education minister pronounced that the Palestinians failed to qualify as a distinct people, and as proof he pointed to their supposed lack of home-grown literature. In the parliamentary audience sat Emile Habibi, a Communist legislator, fuming.

“It was there and then that I decided to write,” he recalled. “I wanted to create something that would live beyond me.”

On Thursday, another Israeli education minister will do something that’s never been done before: award the prestigious Israel Prize for literature to an Arab. The recipient is Habibi, for his work as a novelist.

The prize will mark a moment of unique irony: Two years ago, Habibi won an award from the Palestine Liberation Organization for his writing. Now, he will get one from the PLO’s archfoes, the rightist Likud government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the State of Israel.

“They will look good together hanging on my wall,” Habibi said with a sly laugh.

Although a source of pride to the 70-year-old activist and writer, the prize has inflamed controversy on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide. How can the Jewish state award a cultural prize to an Arab, even one who is a citizen of the country? How can an Arab accept an award from a government that is suppressing 1.7 million rebellious Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and that censors Arab-Israeli and Palestinian writing alike?

“It took me time to decide whether to accept it,” Habibi said. “I consider it a new platform from which to defend Arab rights.”

Habibi has long been a maverick, and the controversy perhaps tells as much about Arab politics and resentments as about Israeli attitudes toward its own minority Arab population. In his writing, Habibi defends the Arabs who after the 1948 creation of the State of Israel stayed to live under Israeli rule. The collective decision made the Israeli-Arabs suspect in the eyes of Palestinians abroad, who felt a need to justify their own forced refugee status as a form of pure rejection of Israel.

“They said we paid a political price by staying, that we had become Zionized. We say we are here in our homeland, where we should be,” Habibi argued.

In deciding to accept the award, Habibi admitted to having a difficult time wrestling with the issue of Israeli censorship and the bloodshed in the West Bank and Gaza. Habibi has been accused of giving the Shamir government a propaganda victory at a time when the prime minister is under pressure to produce results in Middle East peace talks.

Palestinian poet Sameh Qassem called the award “frivolous . . . at a time when blood is being spilled and houses are being destroyed in the occupied territories.”

An Arabic newspaper wrote: “Habibi . . . will find himself in front of people and give his hand to Shamir and take the prize and say farewell to the past. He has lost his memory.”

Acceptance will whitewash Israeli censorship practices, critics say. Shafik Habib, an Israeli-Arab poet, faces up to four years in jail for penning a banned book on the Palestinian uprising.

“I hope the award will give me voice to fight against these wrongs,” Habibi said. “It is said that this is not the right time to accept the prize. Well, I hope that I can help bring about the proper time. To refuse is the worst option.”

Habibi has asked to be given time to speak at the awards ceremony, but his request has not yet been granted.

Habibi was a Parliament member for almost two decades and an advocate of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The notion of dividing the land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River is now the fashion among Palestinians, including the PLO, but it wasn’t always that way. “I think now that some of the attacks on me are really an attack on compromise,” he said.

His best-known work is the novel “Strange Events in the Disappearance of Said Abu al-Nahs al-Mutashael,” in which he coined the word “pessoptimist” to describe the Arab-Israeli condition of citizenship, yet exclusion from society.

There is still one hurdle left for Habibi: the question of shaking hands with Shamir, if it comes to that. “Perhaps it will be easier for both of us if he does not attend. He is not obliged to, after all,” Habibi said.