The Lie of Separating Art from Politics...

When Indian writer and director Arundhati Roy announced her withdrawal from the Berlin International Film Festival in protest against the jury's calls to "separate art from politics," the scene seemed like a new chapter in an old debate... Can art breathe outside the air of politics and the public sphere?

Arundhati Roy, known for her human rights positions, intellectual courage, and empathy with Palestinians as victims of occupation, did not see the statements calling for the neutrality of cinema from ongoing conflicts in defense of beauty as something positive, but rather a form of false neutrality. It is silence at the moment when one should shout. She deserves respect for refusing to close the window of art in the face of pain and its cause, and for rejecting the idea of turning the silver screen into a moral isolation curtain under the pretext of artistic purity.

Can art be separated from politics at all? Was the Berlin Festival itself, which was born in 1951 amid the Cold War between the communist and capitalist camps, neutral? Since its inception, it has been a cultural platform with a clear ideological significance.

Films about wars, dictatorships, and refugees have been screened on its screens, and it has turned over decades into a space for debate and public discussion. Therefore, the talk about "pure innocence" of art seems selective; art is great when directed against specific regimes or particular ideologies, but it becomes a problem when it is directed against the Israeli occupation and condemns its crimes.

In this context, the call from the "Palestinian Film Foundation" to boycott the festival in protest against this stance comes as a coherent moral step aligned with the idea that art cannot be a false witness. Some filmmakers responded to this call and withdrew their works, with the festival's management confirming the withdrawal of the films "The Sad Song of Toha" by the late Egyptian director Atiyat Al-Abnoudi and "The Extraction of Amber" by the late Sudanese director Hussein Sharif. The creators of this decision deserve respect for preferring to align with conscience rather than settling for a picture on the red carpet.

Since I am not a filmmaker, I raise the idea from the perspective of the art of storytelling. What remains of Latin American literature if we remove the colonialism, military coups, and economic hegemony from the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Amado? And what remains of Palestinian literature and arts in all its fields if we isolate it from the Nakba and its aftermath, the ongoing occupation, settlement, and land confiscation that continue and are worse than ever? Even Palestinian football cannot be separated from politics, nor can environmental pollution or any detail of daily life.

The question is: Is all great art political? Of course not. Propaganda can corrupt art when it reduces it to a slogan.

But artistic greatness is born from the friction of the work with its time, from its ability to transform the wound into language and the shock into a metaphor, and history into a multi-voiced narrative. Great art does not dissolve into politics, nor does it flee from it; rather, it reshapes it and reveals its contradictions.

Arundhati Roy's withdrawal from the Berlin Festival is not a fleeting event; it is a signal of a permanent tension between the desire to protect art from crude exploitation and the recognition that art does not live in an isolated room away from politics and the causes of human tragedies!

All arts emanate from people living in cities, villages, towns, and environments under some authority, and within conflicts. All attempts to separate arts from the contexts in which they originated do not grant them greater purity but rather strip them of their depth and truth.

Similarly, the violent crimes that occur daily in our society cannot be separated from the polluted political context in which they grow.

When we strip politics from literature and cinema, we do not get purer art but rather poorer art. Undoubtedly, art is neither a party statement nor an ideological slogan, but it is also not silence, ignorance, or turning one’s back on the pains of people and their causes!

The life of a Palestinian person, wherever they are, cannot be separated from the ongoing Nakba of their people, whether they are in Gaza, the West Bank, inside the 48 areas, or in exile, even if they become the largest businessman in the world! There are entities trying to silence free voices in various ways, sometimes through direct funding, and sometimes under the pretext of purifying art from politics. The current position of the Berlin Festival committee falls under the pretext of art purity from politics, a stance that supports the German government that has colluded with the occupation and the genocide war.

Attempts to exclude works that address genocide under the guise of artistic purity are not an aesthetic stance; rather, they are a moral bias and a disguised political position. Neutrality between the killer and the victim is not a virtue but a clear choice that favors the killer, no matter how much it tries to adorn itself with garments of beauty.