This was hardly the first award won by Roy (62). She has won many, the first being the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel The God of Small Things. Roy said:

“And here we are…more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state...Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be ‘the chosen people’ – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them. Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said, ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians.’

“[…] The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide.”

What can possibly justify the genocide that Israel and the US are perpetrating, she asks, then goes onto say:

“So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing… and condemn what Hamas did on October 7, 2023. But I do not have the right to tell an oppressed people how to resist their oppressors.”

Roy acknowledges that as a non-Muslim, woman and writer, it might be difficult for her to live under the rule of Hamas, Hizbullah or the Iranian regime. “But that is not the point here. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God?”

With this, Arundhati Roy delivers a powerful response to those who insist that fairness is served by condemning violence on “both sides,” as though there were some kind of parity between them. She also responds, perhaps without realising it, to those among us who have some concerns about the Islamist orientation of the resistance. And yet, have the Palestinians found anyone else to support them in this world?

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly