CHABON, Michael: "This [the Occupied West Bank] is the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice"

Michael Chabon (Pulitzer Prize-winning, anti-racist Jewish American writer and author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”) (2016): “Once you see [the Occupied West Bank] for yourself, it is pretty obvious, I think, to any human being with a heart and a mind, it is pretty clear what to feel about it. It is the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life… As a Jew and someone who has felt connected both to Israel and also to the Old Testament narratives, it actually does mean something to me to be in Hebron, to be where supposedly Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca and Leah are all buried. From my point of view, to see that place being dishonored and made less sacred and less holy by the presence of this incredibly cruel and unjust machinery, some literal machinery and figurative machinery of oppression, it offends me…I have seen bad things in my own country in America. There is plenty of horrifying injustice in the U.S. prison system, the "second Jim Crow" it is often called. Our drug laws in the United States are grotesquely unjust. I know to some degree what I am talking about. This is the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice. If saying that is going to lose me readers, I don’t want those readers. They can go away and never come back” (Oren Ziv, “Q&A - Michael Chabon talks occupation, injustice and literature after visit to West Bank”, Forward, 24 April 2016: https://forward.com/culture/books/339119/qa-michael-chabon-talks-occupation-injustice-and-literature-after-visit-to/ and David Palumbo-Liu, “Backing BDS: another Pulitzer winner comes out for Palestinian rights”, Salon, 22 June 2016: https://www.salon.com/2016/06/22/backing_bds_another_pulitzer_winner_comes_out_for_palestinian_rights/ ).