Toni Morrison. Photo: Angela Radulescu.

Novelist Toni Morrison, recently announced by Barack Obama as one of 13 recipients of the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom, once signed a letter accusing Israel of being an apartheid state that commits genocide against the Palestinians.

According to the open letter published by Morrison and 17 other writers in 2006, Israel’s aim “is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.” The letter lamented public “outrage” over Hamas’s kidnapping of Gilad Shalit while there were “approximately 10,000 [Palestinians] in Israeli jails.”

“That this ‘kidnapping’ was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources—most particularly that of water—by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last 70 years,” the letter signed by Morrison stated.