What Can Lessing's Legacy Teach Us About Justice?

Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing was no ivory tower writer and no detached observer of local or global events. She was a perceptive social critic and an engaged intellectual. She dared to defy the political establishment and dived straight into political hot water by speaking truth to power.

According to a 2015 report by The Guardian, British intelligence service MI5 targeted "Lessing for 20 years, listening to her phone conversations, opening her mail and closely monitoring her movements."

In 1956, Lessing's views against racism, apartheid and other inhuman and degrading practices led to her being "declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa." The ban on entering Southern Rhodesia (where she grew up) was lifted in 1980 when it was renamed Zimbabwe after the collapse of the old order. Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994, and Lessing visited the country in 1995 on a book tour to promote the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin.

On a few occasions, Lessing appeared remarkably prescient about political trends and social issues. For example, in her 1957 essay "The Small Personal Voice," she wrote, "We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us; and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman does not destroy us all, our children may be born deformed or mad."

Aggression, land grab and forced eviction, mass murder, genocide and other gruesome events in the world-as well as the challenges of artificial intelligence that we are grappling with-resonate with the fears that Lessing visualised more than half a century ago.

When Tony Blair was elected British prime minister in 1997, Lessing said, "This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems." Her assessment of the politician who came to power in the US a few years later was no less unflattering. She commented, "As for Bush, he's a world calamity. Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever."

Both men led their countries for years after Lessing made these remarks. Given their deadly legacies and the catastrophes that they brought to the world, we can safely say that her foreboding about Blair and Bush proved true.

Lessing's words are pertinent to the Israel-Palestine issue too.

Israel has been launching protracted assaults on the Palestinians and other Arabs at least since 1948. As regards its ongoing genocidal actions in Gaza and indiscriminate killings and evictions in the West Bank and Lebanon, some of Lessing's words may sound like trumpets to our ears.

In a 2001 interview with Australian journalist Jennifer Byrne, Doris Lessing made the following observations, "I think there's a new generation who's only seen war in television programmes and war films... I don't know why war always looks glamorous... And it makes my blood run cold because I've lived through it more than once... And this is what's so frightening about it... Oh... we love powerful people, unfortunately. We do. We do."

Given Israel's predilection for what political theorists call "escalation dominance" and the backing it receives from its powerful allies, Lessing's statement rings true. The Israeli government has normalised cruelty and denial of basic human rights to children, women and men in Palestine and beyond. It counts its success on killing, maiming and humiliating them.

The Zionist state has made violence and brutality so glamorous in the eyes of the young men and women of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that they film their persecution of Palestinians and share it on social media. They gloat and revel in the impunity they enjoy and the crimes they perpetrate against indigenous Palestinians. Even pro-Israeli British journalist Piers Morgan found it revolting that IDF members filmed their own human rights violations. On January 15 this year, he took to X (formerly Twitter) and asked, "Why do Israeli soldiers keep filming themselves doing this kind of crass, insensitive thing? Why don't their commanders stop them? Makes them look callous when so many children in Gaza are being killed."

During the 2001 interview, Jennifer Byrne asked Doris Lessing, "Is it getting harder to speak your mind, or easier, do you think?" Lessing replied, "Easier. No one's going to put you into prison at the moment, for speaking your mind... or banning you. Luckily, I am not a Muslim in this country-they're having a bad time."

The US and other Western governments take pride in their ostentatious support for free speech, freedom of movement and press freedom. But, on the question of Palestine, they seem to be ready to ignore such values and give Israel free rein to trample them all.

Israel has manifested its disregard for press freedom by carrying out targeted assassinations of journalists in Gaza and by restricting Al Jazeera's coverage of its human rights violations. According to a Democracy Now report titled "Meet Maha Hussaini," published in June this year, Israel up until then killed about 150 Gaza-based journalists during the ongoing spate of violence. As of October 2024, the number has reached nearly 200. Sadly, the silence of self-declared advocates of free press over Israel's killing of journalists is simply deafening.

In the US, students have been harassed, abused and assaulted on their own campuses and in the streets of their own cities for demanding justice for Palestinians. What Lessing said about Muslims in Britain is true with regard to these anti-Zionist and anti-genocide protesters. Western governments and pro-establishment media organisations have been caricaturing them and trying to silence them by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

One possible explanation for the disregard for Palestinians' right to life and dignity and for contravening democratic norms at home is, as Lessing said, a love for powerful people. Since Israel and its Western backers are powerful nations and their Palestinian victims are a poor and vulnerable population, many people rally around Israel unconditionally.

Many of us have been demanding justice for Palestinians for decades. Conscientious people in the world have been protesting against the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza since early October 2023. Did Doris Lessing leave a message of hope for us?

Yes, she did.

After she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, Lessing said in an interview with BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, "When I was growing up, there was Germany and Hitler, and Stalin and Russia, and Italy and Mussolini, and the British Empire and all the other European empires, and race hatred in Africa and in America, and all... have disappeared like clouds in the sky... I'll tell these young people you look out (for) what you see, terrifying things. They are going to disappear before you know it. They might not disappear pleasantly, but they will disappear."

Lessing was referring to young anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigners and was giving them hope that the structures of oppression would cease to exist and better days would come. This message rings true for young anti-Zionist protesters who have been assaulted, arrested and subjected to police brutality as well as media smear campaigns.

We all cling to this hope that, one day, Israel's brutal apartheid and colonialism will end and Palestinians will gain freedom and human dignity.

Dr Md Mahmudul Hasan is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Malaysia. He can be reached at [email protected].