Across the literary pages | 21 February 2011

Ian McEwan accepted the Jerusalem Prize from Israeli President Shimon Peres and the Guardian reports that he used the ceremony to launch an incisive critique of Israel’s domestic policy, branding it a ‘great injustice’. In fact that’s barely half the story. McEwan was balanced: he unequivocally denigrated the ‘nihilism of the suicide bomber and the nihilism of the extinctionist policies of Israel’. He acknowledged and praised the ‘precious tradition of the democracy of ideas in Israel’ and attacked the captive minds on both sides that are perpetuating ‘a great and self-evident injustice’.

McEwan devoted the rest of his speech to the novel, which he argued:

‘Has become our best and most sensitive means of exploring the freedom of the individual, and such explorations often depict what happens when that freedom is denied.’