The Israeli press attacked the 82-year-old French writer, Annie Ernault, after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, and the Jerusalem Post described Erno as one of the "strongest supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement."
The Israeli newspaper said that the Nobel writer - known for her left-wing inclinations - opposed cultural cooperation between France and Israel in 2018, and signed a letter along with about 80 other artists in which they expressed their anger at the establishment of the "French-Israeli cultural season" by the two governments.
The letter said that the season helped "whiten" Israel's image, adding that "the moral obligation dictates that any person of conscience refuses to normalize relations with Israel."
The newspaper added that Ernault signed a letter calling for the release of the Lebanese fighter, detained in France since the eighties, George Abdullah, and described him as co-founding the Lebanese armed revolutionary factions in 1980, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1982 for the assassination of the American military attache, Lt. Col. Charles R. Ray, and an Israeli diplomat. Jacob Bar Simantov.
According to the Israeli newspaper, the letter signed by Noble described the American military attache and the Israeli diplomat as “active agents of the Mossad and the CIA,” while describing Abdullah as “committed to the Palestinian people and against colonialism.”
In 2021, Erno signed a letter entitled "Speech against Apartheid", in which she denounced the Israeli war on Gaza.
"Framing (the events) as a war between two equal parties is wrong and misleading. Israel is the colonial power. Palestine is a colonized. This is not a conflict: this is apartheid," according to the Jerusalem Post.
In its French-language version, the Times of Israel website said that the French writer has over the years been "known for her commitment to the extreme left, particularly through her anti-Israel activism."
The magazine said that with the support of French politician and parliamentarian Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the "France Proud" party, Ernault joined the "Parliament of the People's Union", which mobilized personalities from the union and intellectual world behind Melenchon's candidacy for the 2022 presidential elections.
On June 19, 2017, the Israeli magazine stated that the French writer signed an article published in Le Monde newspaper, in support of activist Houria Boutelja, the official spokeswoman for the Indigènes de la République movement, which denounces the colonial past and opposes discrimination against the descendants of the colonial population. racism.
In 2019, the French writer signed a call, published in the online magazine Mediapart, to boycott the Eurovision 2019 competition in Tel Aviv, according to The Times of Israel.
And the Israeli "ynetnews" website said that the French writer participated with 100 artists and intellectuals from different countries in signing the petition calling for a boycott of the competition, stating that "From 14 to 18 May, French television channels intend to broadcast the Eurovision Song Contest for the year 2019 will be held in Tel Aviv, in the Ramat Aviv area, which is built on the ruins of the village of Sheikh Mons, one of hundreds of Palestinian villages that were emptied of their residents and destroyed in 1948 when the State of Israel was established.
The petition added, “This message appears hollow in its attempt to distract us from the human rights violations of Palestinians. Discrimination and exclusion are deeply entrenched in Israel, where the law: Israel is the state of the Jewish people was adopted… on July 19, 2018, which declared that only Jews are from They have the right to national self-determination, and therefore apartheid is officially enshrined in law,” according to the Israeli website.
French writer Annie Ernaux – awarded the 2022 #NobelPrize in Literature – was born in 1940 and grew up in the small town of Yvetot in Normandy, where her parents had a combined grocery store and café.
Her path to authorship was long and arduous.
pic.twitter.com/OZAfyPJZ9Z
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2022
pursuit of justice
In an interview on Swedish television immediately after the Nobel Prize was announced, Erno described the win as a "very great honour", and at the same time a "great responsibility" was given to her to continue bearing witness to "a form of fairness and justice in relation to the world".
The French writer is known for her easy and realistic style devoid of any structural exaggerations, and she moved away from the novel to work on a new style of genealogy stories and create an "objective biography".
A professor of literature at Cergy Pontoise University defines herself as "a mere woman who writes", and through her works primarily inspired by her life, she has created an accurate portrait of the feelings of women that have developed with the turmoil of French society since the post-World War II period.
Erno has more than 20 books, many of which are school texts in France for decades.
Explaining its selection for the award, the academy said that Erno "constantly and from different angles studies a life marked by strong disparities in terms of gender, language and class".
Ernault became the 17th woman to receive the prestigious award, out of a total of 119 winners in the literature category since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901. She also became the 16th French winner in the Nobel history, 8 years after Patrick Modiano won it.
Ernault also became the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after all of her citizens who preceded her to achieve this were men, including Anatole France, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined to receive it.