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By ROGER PULVERS

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. . . . Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. . . . Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell."

Though many of his compatriots criticized him for accepting Israel's Jerusalem Prize for 2009, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami nonetheless went to Israel to accept it. In his moving acceptance speech, delivered in English on Feb. 20, Murakami identified with the Palestinian victims, the eggs, against what he called "the System" that Israel has created in various physical and psychological forms to contain and isolate Palestinians.

"The System," said Murakami in this speech, "is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically."

In his reference to the wall, Murakami meant not only the structure that Israel is erecting, presumably to afford it security, but also a slew of Israeli actions, including the use of illegal weaponry, unleashed on their Palestinian neighbors.

The wall itself, scheduled for completion next year, comprises imposing, vertical slabs of concrete, as well as watchtowers, electrified fences and razor-coil wire. Its $2-billion cost includes the leveling of Palestinian land and the felling of more than 100,000 trees to guarantee the wall's "integrity."

Can Israelis sit back, once this wall is finished, and feel secure? Or has the Israeli government, with its wall and its oppressive measures against Palestinians, become the very architect of the nation's insecurity?

Walls are built to be torn down, as is this one which offers sham protection. U.S. President Barack Obama, who on June 4 delivered a moderate speech in Cairo to the Muslim world, would have made a greater impact had he paraphrased the words of another president (Ronald Reagan) about another "great wall": "Mr. Netanyahu, tear down that wall!"

Murakami generally shuns the limelight and rarely makes political statements. It took personal courage on his part to denounce Isreal's apartheid-like policies while there.

A similar stance was taken recently by U.S. scholar Herbert Bix, whose "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Writing this month in the online newsletter, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Bix brilliantly analyzes Israeli intentions and deeds in his essay titled "The Israeli-U.S. Gaza War and its Aftermath." (I add here that I am an associate of the journal.) There, he reminds us that the wall is an utterly illegal manifestation of a broad policy of intimidation and aggression against Palestinians.

"In July 2004," Bix writes, "Israeli jurists on the High Court of Justice deliberated on Israel's separation wall in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague had just determined, by a vote of 13 to 2, that the 30-foot-high (10-meter) wall was part of Israel's policy of building settlements on stolen or confiscated Palestinian land, and had condemned it as an illegal land grab which other states should not recognize. The U.N. General Assembly almost immediately called on Israel to comply with the ICJ advisory opinion and end its illegal wall-building, whose real aim was the defense of settlements, not Israel itself."

But everyone, as Murakami suggested in his acceptance speech, relates to great issues in a personal way; and I, too, see Israel from the standpoint of my own upbringing and education.

I grew up in a thoroughly Jewish household and can trace my ancestors, on my mother's side, back through the 400 years they lived in Krakow, Poland. Though my parents spoke no foreign languages, I made it a point to study Russian and Polish and, thanks to that knowledge, was able to find out more about my roots than my parents could have known. I have read and studied every major Jewish author who came from East-Central Europe, cook a blintz as light as a dirigible, and can tell so many Jewish jokes it isn't funny.

I open that window on myself neither to boast nor to establish a pedigree. I just don't want any schmendriks writing in and calling me an anti-Semite just because I don't believe Israel should be a Jewish state. (A schmendrik is half fool, half jerk.)

I am also not a philo-Semite. If we Jews are the chosen people, we have been chosen to be like anybody else. And if Israeli policies toward Palestinians are wide open to criticism, as Bix suggests in his essay, then it just goes to show that when Jews establish their own state, they end up acting much like the Japanese did in their period of expansion (roughly the half-century from 1895 to 1945): Take what you can get and blame it on persecution past and present.

When the state of Israel was founded 61 years ago, it was recognized immediately by the United States, whose support has been the linchpin of Israeli geopolitics ever since. The second nation to recognize Israel was the USSR, ensuring that, at least in the initial stage, Israel's national integrity was protected from Cold War posturings. Recognition by Arab states and Iran one day is desirable and inevitable.

I have every reason to believe that, once Israeli citizens renounce the definition of their country as "the Jewish state," Israel can exist securely as a multicultural democracy in peace with a Palestinian state and its other Arab neighbors.

In the long history of the Jewish people, there have been, on the whole, harmonious relations with Muslims in their societies. Jews in the Middle East, in Turkey and in Iran lived for centuries in harmony with Muslims, experiencing little or no persecution. It has been the Christians who have given Jews a hard time; and it is ironic that countries such as the United States, overwhelmingly Christian as it is, now bend over backward to demonstrate support for Israel as a Jewish state. Is this association by guilt?

The issues between Muslims and Jews are geopolitical, not religious, though fanatics on both sides are wont, for their own aggrandizement, to couch them in terms of the latter. This is why I am hopeful for the future of the Middle East, insofar as the problems there relate to Israel. History is on the side of Muslim- Jewish harmony.

Murakami was right to go to Israel and say his peace. His eloquence, I believe, will someday resound throughout the Middle East:

"We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you."

Source: The Japan Times

Haruki Murakami Acceptance Speech:

Always on the side of the egg

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies – which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true – the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came.

The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens – children and old people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me – and especially if they are warning me – "don't go there," "don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

This is not to say that I am here to deliver a political message. To make judgments about right and wrong is one of the novelist's most important duties, of course.

It is left to each writer, however, to decide upon the form in which he or she will convey those judgments to others. I myself prefer to transform them into stories – stories that tend toward the surreal. Which is why I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political message.

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories – stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the war.

He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong – and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.