Boualem Sansal urges all writers and Arabs to visit Israel to promote… “peace”
“Israeli novelist David Grossman and Algerian writer Boualem Sansal have launched a so-called “writers’ appeal for peace” at the World Forum For Democracy held in Strasbourg earlier this week. This came in the aftermath of Sansal’s untoward decision to visit occupied Jerusalem in broad daylight last May triggering off a bitter outcry in the Arab and Muslim world.
- Algerian writer Boualem Sansal outrageously accepted an Israeli invitation to attend the 2012 International Writers Festival in occupied Jerusalem.
- He announced publicly that he would visit Israel. Three weeks before the start of the festival (which took place in mid-May), The Palestinian resistance Hamas movement strongly denounced Sansal’s decision. For Sansal to go to Israel, the Gaza-based militant organization said, was “a crime against a million and a half glorious Algerian martyrs who gave their lives for freedom and independence.”
- Unashamedly, Boualem Sansal found his visit to Israel “an enchanting and stunning experience” as he put it. Immediately afterward, he published a short item on the Huffington Post website’s French-language edition under the headline, “I went to Jerusalem − and returned joyful and enriched.”
- The text, which appeared toward the end of May, a little more than a week after the end of Sansal’s journey to occupied Jerusalem and back, generated fierce outrage across the Arab and Muslim world.
- The execrated writer received an “unimaginable number” of adverse and fiery comments in reaction to the post, which relates how he went to Paris to obtain shamelessly a visa at the Israeli consulate, flew to Tel Aviv and went on to occupied Jerusalem to kowtow to the hawkish leaders of the Zionist entity.