British novelist Ian McEwan has accepted an Israeli literary prize in Jerusalem while criticising Jewish 'settlements' in the West Bank, despite widespread grumblings about the importance of observing the Boycott, and not only from British and Palestinian writers. In his lecture on Sunday, McEwan defended his visit to Israel, saying it encourages dialogue. Having inserted himself into Israeli academe, he revealed himself as a bit of a Trojan horse.
At an acceptance ceremony with Israeli president Shimon Peres and the mayor of Jerusalem, for the Jerusalem Prize, McEwan praised Israel's technological and artistic advances but asked: "Where is Israel's political creativity?"
He criticized Israel's 1967 annexation of east Jerusalem, legally outside "Israel" and the part Palestinians claim as the capitol of a future state in the fiction that would be the Two-state Solution.
McEwan is the author of the best-selling Atonement and Comfort of Strangers, and has won numerous literary prizes for his books.
While in the country, on Friday the 18th he joined Israeli author David Grossman at an anti-demolition demonstration in the Sheikh Jarrah district.
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