I was walking with the writers and saw the mothers, the women’s chorus of Greek tragedy, trying to protest to these foreigners, in a language they didn’t know, against the cruelties of loss and the continuous repetition of killing.

In an interview with a radio station, Saramago said,

All the information I thought I had concerning the situation in Palestine has been destroyed. Information and pictures are one thing and reality is another. You have to put your feet on the ground to really understand what is happening there. All the world’s bells have to be rung so that it can know that what is happening here is a crime that must stop. The Palestinian people are being subjected to unforgivable things.

But the world leapt to its feet — and still hasn’t sat down again — in protest at Saramago’s comparison in this interview of the crimes of the Israeli occupation with those of the Nazis, when he said that the Palestinians were living in a big concentration camp and compared Ramallah to Auschwitz.

Breyten Breytenbach was comfortable in comparing the situation to his experiences under the apartheid regime in his own country of South Africa, and the American novelist Russell Banks was angered by the fact that the soldiers of the Occupation looked like well-turned-out teenagers. “Look,” he said, “that boy is doing his work more thoroughly than he needs to.” (The well-turned-out soldier is examining the writer’s IDs at the military checkpoint, his features empty of all expression.) What really got people worked up, though, was José Saramago and his comparison of Ramallah to Auschwitz.

Israeli politicians and literary figures, such as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshuah, along with most Israeli intellectuals (peace advocates until such time as their government makes war on us, when they become war advocates) went on the attack and accused him of anti-Semitism and ‘moral blindness’ while, far away, the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz popped his head up to add his voice, crowned with the laurels of the Nobel Prize, to that of those who had decided that Saramago was a “mediocre and failed” writer to begin with and anti-Semitic to the core. Some demanded the removal of his novels from the library shelves and a boycott of his publications, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry said that “Mr. Saramago has fallen victim to cheap Palestinian propaganda.”

What was Saramago’s response?

Saramago said,

“I’d rather fall victim to cheap Palestinian propaganda than to Israel’s extremely expensive propaganda!”

Later, a few days after the writers’ visit, when the Israeli army invades Jenin camp, and because of the presence of a limited number of Palestinian resistance fighters inside it, it will be bombed by Apaches and F-16s, which will succeed in wiping it off the face of the earth and the earth-movers and bulldozers will move in to demolish its houses over the heads of those inside.

The whole world will leap to its feet to protest the Jenin massacre but the moment America tells it to sit down, it sits.

The Security Council decides to send an international committee of investigation to uncover what happened in the camp.

The committee members reach Geneva on their way to Israel.

Israel announces it will refuse to receive them.

Things stop there. Just like that. It’s over. And the delegation goes back home.

We go to Birzeit to visit the university. We cross the Surda checkpoint on foot, like the faculty and students of the university and the government employees, craftsmen, merchants, and sick of the neighboring villages. At the university we meet with the faculty members. After the meeting, the president asks us to write a few words and sign our names on a commemorative whiteboard. I’m standing next to Saramago, waiting for him to finish writing his contribution so that I can write mine. I see him draw a rose and under it, in Portuguese, “The Palestinian State.” Beneath that he writes, “A drop of water for this rose.”

He signs it “José Saramago.”

Dinner passes as big dinners do: side conversations that are never completed because they are interrupted by polite handshakes, words of introduction, and compliments, comments on the food, and a fair amount of gossip, including anecdotes concerning the behavior of this or that writer. The following day a meeting is organized at short notice with Yasser Arafat at his besieged headquarters in the Muqata‘a building. Nothing new comes up, but the delegation notes the simplicity of his office and his frequent use of metaphors in his answers to their questions.

The office of the ‘Palestinian President’ is oblong and contains a number of seats, with an ordinary wooden desk to the right as one enters. This is piled with papers, files, medicines, and pens. Behind the desk is a plain wooden safe, on top of which numerous objects have been untidily thrown.

This is the third time I have entered a headquarters in which Yasser Arafat was living. The first was about a quarter of a century before, when I did so simply to perform a social duty: I was in Beirut and had to go with friends to offer condolences to Abu Lutf on the death of his brother. Arafat had opened his house for the occasion as a gesture of respect to his fellow PLO Executive Council member. The second time was when I came from Budapest to participate with the poets of the Arab countries in the Shaqif Poetry Festival in Beirut, held to salute the anniversary of the liberation from Israeli occupation of the fortress of al-Shaqif in southern Lebanon by the Lebanese-Palestinian Joint Forces — a truly heroic operation, in which the young men overran the towering citadel from their positions in the valleys and on the mountainsides. Among the writers invited were Sa‘di Yusuf, Amal Dongol, Mamdouh ‘Udwan, Elias Khoury, Lami‘a ‘Abbas ‘Amara, Yahya Yakhlif, and Radwa ‘Ashour, who came from Cairo accompanied by Tamim, who was less than three. We were all invited to have lunch at Arafat’s house. We took Tamim with us and Abu ‘Ammar kept him on his lap the entire time; to this day, Tamim has the photo of him on his lap with poets Amal Dongol and Sa‘di Yusuf and other Arab writers and Palestinian and Lebanese political leaders on either side. Today is my third visit.

This might seem normal were it not for the fact that Arafat kept open house for cadres of the PLO, Fatah, and other factions and parties. His house was also open for genuine fighters and people with serious political issues besides those who always sought financial help, a loan, an air ticket, money to cover the costs of a wedding, or an installment of a son’s or daughter’s university fees, all of whom wanted at the same time to gossip, slander, and tell tales. One of the main reasons for visiting him was to present financial requests and get them signed. Everyone knew his most famous expression, used when signing off on requests for assistance: “To be paid,” above his signature.

Arafat liked to be asked for things and he liked those who asked. He suspected anyone who didn’t want something material. I never attended an internal election that wasn’t ‘cooked,’ openly, in front of my eyes and those of others, before it took place, always in order to arrive at a result that would please the president. When such electoral cookery was to take place, the president would know which cadres he could rely on; he gave to you and didn’t forget, knowing that one day he would be able to count on you.

To this may be attributed the care he took to maintain his grip on the financial portfolio in any Fatah or PLO cabinet, in addition to being president of both organizations. I didn’t approve of many of his policies, of his swapping kisses with the Arab rulers and his tendency to carry out their dictates, or of his reliance on bad elements to serve a cause that deserves the service of the best elements of our people. Despite all that, though, I, like the rest of the Palestinian people, viewed his mistakes not as those of a criminal but of a victim. He faced difficulties that would have crushed mountains.