"Arafat is not a man of vision"

I have always felt myself to be an Arab of mixed cultures. My education was European, Western primarily, but my culture is Islamic. As a child, I was always in schools that were very mixed — full of Jews, Muslims, Armenians, Greeks, and so on. So I think that since that time there has been a very disappointing tendency towards fragmentation and a kind of local nationalism where Syria is for the Syrians, and Jordan is for the Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians, and I hate that.

Then, I am also a citizen of the United States. My education was there, all my professional life has been there, and there I feel completely at home. But I always retained a double perspective, that of an American, who is a dissenter and that of an Arab. Identity, as such, doesn’t interest me at all, because I think one is made up of many identities.

I have been really in exile all my life since I was 12, when we left Palestine. And you can be miserable that way. But after a while you can feel partly at home everywhere.

If you look at the very last pages of the book, I pose the question: is there a human way of looking at the world through labels like race, Orient, Occident, Black, White, and still survive? And the answer to that is no. I think it is dehumanising to try to understand people just as symbols of one sort or the other. Of course, race is there, nobody will deny that.

Well, it was very emotional obviously. There were certain things I realised I couldn’t break through. For instance, when we went to see my family home, where I was born, we stood outside. The house was virtually unchanged. I remember the trees in the garden — we had a palm and an orange tree — it was a lovely garden. I showed my children where my room was, where I was born, where we used to play. But then when my daughter said to me would you like to go in, I said no. I have never been able to enter.

Then, it was interesting to discover how much I remembered, I was only 12 when we left. I remembered places, the school I went to, the church where I was baptised and where my family used to worship — St George’s Cathedral in East Jerusalem — and then various villages and towns. What impressed me was the total transformation. I mean Tiberius, which is a town on the Sea of Galilee, which was mostly an Arab town, doesn’t have a single Arab now.The final impression that hit me was that every empty space inside Israel was surrounded by barbed wire. You get the impression of a country that is under siege, I mean swimming pools, schools, playgrounds, all surrounded by barbed wire. And I wondered, was it worth it to do all this?

I think we probably have the hardest fight of all before us. We have no strategic allies. The Arab countries around us are very, very shifty. A country that might support you at one time may a week later massacre your people, as happened in Syria. Same with Jordan. Same with Egypt. I am not saying that they have all massacred us, but they can turn on and turn off.

So we have no steady support in the region. Second, the alliances we built no longer exist. Third, we are fighting Israel — you couldn’t find a worst enemy, because they are the people who went through every kind of tribulation, they have an instinct for survival that is ruthless. Fourth — the most important — Israel has the support of the United States.

As against that, we are about 7 million. Our greatest enemy is geographical dispersion, we don’t have a base. Unlike the South Africans, or the Vietnamese. We have also not been blessed with good leaders. Yasser Arafat, with whom I was very close for a long time, is a genius at survival. But although at a certain point of history he did manage to unite the people, he is not a man of vision. He is not like Nelson Mandela, who through his years in jail held on to the principle of one person, one vote. Arafat hasn’t provided the kind of moral leadership that we need. The last straw was the Oslo negotiations. After it was done, he lied and said that we had won, and that it was the peace of the brave.

The only work in which Rushdie looks at Islam is The Satanic Verses. Second, I feel that nothing should come in the way of the right of an author to express himself. Third, there is a tradition within every major world religion, including Islam, of this sort of fun, play, mockery, you can call it blasphemy, you can call it — like I do — irreverence. You could call it comic overstatement. I knew Rushdie before he wrote this book, I knew him from the time he wrote Midnight’s Children. He was always the champion of the non-White, he always took the right side. His record is so unblemished. Lastly, I think the trouble with most of the people who attacked him see the book as a doctrinal statement. It isn’t. It’s a novel, and as a novel it can do certain things that doctrinal statements cannot do.

Absolutely. I have no interest in the cultures of appropriation or a proprietory view of culture, which says that this is my culture, and that isn’t. The most exciting thing to me as a writer is to discover new books, new writers, the new is the value of the time. This year, for instance, I found two books outstanding. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and the Irish writer John Banville’s The Untouchable, an account of the Anthony Blunt story.

I like New York. It is the least American, most cosmopolitan city in the USA. I couldn’t live anywhere else. Also, I also have a very fruitful and rich relationship with my university — Columbia — for 35 years. It is the only job I have ever done. Secondly, I am quite ill and I have a very excellent doctor — an Indian, incidentally.

I have become more productive. I don’t know if that is the right word, but certainly I have produced more things.

I think I have won. It’s a battle. With an ailment like leukaemia, when you hear the word for the first time it is difficult. It took me a few months to get over that. But it is a matter of discipline. You have to die anyway. Before you go under, you might as well live in the best way you can.