Ian McEwan Criticizes Israel

Receiving the Jerusalem prize for literature Sunday night, novelist Ian McEwan criticized Israel in front of an audience that included Israeli President Shimon Peres. McEwan attacked Hamas’ “nihilism,” but said that Israel shared it: “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." He also referred to “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."