Other artists with principle: Indian writer Arundhati Roy and British actor Andrew Garfield speak out on behalf of the Palestinians

The unspeakable crimes of the Israeli military and Netanyahu regime, only made possible by the full support and complicity of the imperialist governments in Washington, Paris, London and Berlin, continue to outrage and horrify thinking and feeling world public opinion.

The infamous acts occur on a daily basis. The mass murder in Gaza has become a war of extermination extending to the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond. The Israeli attack dog is anxious to launch a major assault on Iran. Negotiations with the Biden-Harris administration concerning a vast expansion of the murderous conflict, about which both parties agree, only involve secondary, tactical issues.

Official cultural life in the US and Europe solidly lines up with the annihilation of the Palestinian population. Nothing can be expected from museum and other institutional figures, whose careers increasingly depend on the whims of billionaires.

However, the effort to suppress the truth comes up against the realities of the slaughter accessible to tens of millions. Important voices continue to make themselves heard against “the utter ethical bankruptcy of our bourgeois society,” ruled by a “depraved barbarian horde incapable of culture,” in Rosa Luxemburg’s words.

Essayist, award-winning novelist and human rights activist Arundhati Roy took the opportunity recently to denounce the war on the Palestinians.

Roy delivered her scathing remarks October 10 at the British Library in London, on the occasion of being awarded the Pinter Prize 2024—honoring the memory of playwright Harold Pinter—by English PEN. The Indian author is best known for her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Roy has recently been targeted by the right-wing Modi government for her opposition to India’s brutal occupation of Kashmir. She has also been outspoken about the Zionist regime’s crimes in Gaza.

In her address, the writer referred bluntly to the “ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state” carried out by the US and Israel. She continued,

The death toll so far is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.