Monty Python in Granada

This article was originally published in Spanish in Revista Seúl on September 27, 2026. You can read the original piece here. 

By ANDRÉS ROSLER · September 27, 2026

The International Festival of Art, Literature and Humanities, Cultur-ALH, held at the University of Granada, last week “deprogrammed” the writer Ariana Harwicz, who was scheduled to take part in a talk whose title turned out to be as apt as it was prophetic: “Opposing the World.”

The reason festival officials gave for the deprogramming was that, in the face of complaints from student groups and pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Granada, they could not guarantee the writer’s peace of mind or her safety, given that Harwicz has made it quite clear that she refuses to believe Zionism is a criminal conspiracy. Harwicz, for her part, maintained that she was excluded for being Jewish, probably because at least one gentile author—John Banville—was not deprogrammed, even though he makes no secret of his sympathy for the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. At this point it should be added that Banville ultimately decided to deprogram himself in response to the festival’s decision to exclude Harwicz.

Shortly after the festival announced that Harwicz had been deprogrammed, a group of seven writers invited to the festival (Rita Laura Segato, Lina Meruane, Sabina Urraca, Gabriela Wiener, María Fernanda Ampuero, Ángelo Néstore and Brenda Navarro) felt compelled to state publicly that the reasons the festival had given for excluding her leave much to be desired: “We regret that the festival’s organizers did not consider Harwicz’s problematic position beforehand and that, once the invitation had been confirmed, they did not explain to her, with due honesty and due courage, the reasons for this cancellation.”

The group of seven has a point: it is dishonest and cowardly to cite security concerns to exclude someone when the real reasons lie elsewhere—not to mention that the stated reasons make the student groups and pro-Palestinian activists look like savages. According to the Magnificent Seven, Harwicz should never have been invited in the first place. Now, it is truly striking that the chosen ones, on the one hand, accuse Harwicz of being an apologist for genocide and, on the other, refer to “Harwicz’s problematic position.” Since defending genocide is a far cry from a “problematic position” (genocide being, after all, the gravest crime anyone can commit), their use of the phrase suggests either that not even the Magnificent Seven really believe it is a genocide or, at any rate, that they have serious difficulty expressing themselves in the language they write in.

Those who invoke dialogue and inclusion the most are the least interested in actually engaging with people who don’t think like them—which is why they end up excluding them.

It is also rather surprising that the heptagonal group concedes that “Harwicz’s literary work” is “a provocative exploration of human complexity,” which in turn represents “one of the central concerns of literature,” to which they themselves have “devoted” themselves, and whose “public discussion” strikes them as “of the utmost relevance. That is not in question.” Moreover, the group acknowledges that “freedom of expression is a central value of life in society,” and the festival’s website states that it “is committed to a broad and plural conception of contemporary creation” and aims “to address some of the great debates of our time.”
So far, the events described seem straight out of a Monty Python sketch in which the organizers of a free-speech festival decide to exclude someone they had invited, and some of the festival’s other participants join in the cancellation—with one big difference: not even Monty Python’s legendary surrealist imagination ever came up with a sketch like this.

The episode that really was the unforgettable product of the peerless English troupe’s creativity was the superb “Argument Clinic”—that is, the exact opposite sketch, one of whose central theses was that to argue with someone, as John Cleese immortally puts it, you have to take the contrary position. At this festival, by contrast, as has become normal in recent years, the much-invoked discussion or dialogue takes place among those who already agree. It tends to be the case that those who invoke dialogue and inclusion the most are the least interested in actually engaging with people who don’t think like them, which is why they end up excluding them.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, then, to realize that although the Magnificent Seven claim that “freedom of expression is a central value of life in society,” they would never even have invited Harwicz, because—while, as they themselves admit, she is a good writer—she doesn’t think like them. The group of seven believes that it only “has any value and is ethically correct to share a public space” with those who think like them. Those who don’t “hinder or exceed the limits of freedom of expression.”

The middle ages? I wouldn’t be so optimistic

Having tried to explain elsewhere—following in the footsteps of Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde (currently vice president of the International Court of Justice)—why Israel has not committed genocide in Gaza, I would now like to clear up a couple of confusions stirred up by the Granada episode.

The first has to do with the natural comparison we draw with the Middle Ages when, for instance, a Jewish person is deprogrammed from a festival. That is a mistake. Compared with the Cultur-ALH Festival in Granada, the Middle Ages were a festival of debate—or, at the very least, Jewish people were not deprogrammed from disputations. To come back to Monty Python, “nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition” at a medieval debate.

There were several medieval debates between Catholic and Jewish scholars on religious truth, but the most famous took place in Tortosa; it began on February 7, 1413, and went on for nearly two years. In his book The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Valeriu Marcu recounts that the debate was opened as follows by Pope (or rather, antipope) Benedict XIII: “Know, Jewish sages, that I am not here to dispute which of the two religions is the true one…; here we shall discuss only the arguments of Jerónimo de Santa Fe, who is prepared to prove, on the basis of the Talmud, that the Messiah has already come; and you are to give your opinion on this question alone.”

Compared with the Granada Festival, the Middle Ages were a festival of debate—or, at the very least, Jewish people were not deprogrammed from disputations.
Marcu explains that “Jerónimo de Santa Fe, the pope’s close friend and physician, is the first speaker, the chief accuser, the prosecutor of the faith; for the rest of his life he will be the pious hero of the Tortosa sessions.” Before his conversion to Catholicism, Jerónimo de Santa Fe had been an Orthodox rabbi named Joshua ha-Lorki. Marcu further recounts that “his new name [Jerónimo de Santa Fe] was a solemn vow to be as pious, to devote himself as wholly to God, as Saint Jerome,” and that he “was most zealous in converting the Jews.” Indeed, in his book Scourge of the Hebrews, Jerónimo de Santa Fe “sets out to convince the Jews of their perfidy (convincendam perfidiam judaeorum).” Jerónimo de Santa Fe’s writings are not limited to insulting the Jews; they also try to win them over: “He exhorts them to break through the wall that separates them from Christianity, so as to become, at last, ‘people.’” When I was a kid, people used to say (a nod to the name of the old magazine): “They call him Siete Días, because from a distance he looks like Gente.”

Back in the Middle Ages, quite a few Catholics had trouble understanding the tenacity of Jews who refused to accept the validity of the scholastic interpretation of Judaic texts. And the ones this Jewish obstinacy infuriated most, Marcu says, “were the Jewish renegades,” to the point that “the disputations almost always became contests between converted and unconverted Jews. From the dawn of the twelfth century, the renegades incited the popes and all of Christendom against the Jews.”
Admittedly, the conditions of the debate were not the best for the Jews—at least for the old-guard Jews, that is, those who stubbornly kept to their ancient faith. And the Edict of Granada of 1492, which finally ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, shows that the debate did not produce the expected result. Still, until the expulsion from Spain, the obstinate Jews could at least debate with the renegade Jews, if only to be persuaded to give up their obstinacy and convert. At the Granada Festival, by contrast, Harwicz was not given even that chance, despite having been invited. In the best medieval style, for example, the Granada Festival could have staged a debate between Jews—like Harwicz—who still refuse to believe that Israel has committed genocide and anti-Zionist Jews who are convinced that it has, with the aim of having the latter persuade the obstinate former of the need to convert to anti-Zionism.

Selective jewish infallibility

This brings us to a second confusion. Harwicz claims she was excluded from the festival for being Jewish. Quite a few people, however, have argued that this is a mistake. After all, there are other Jews who—at least as of this writing—are indeed going to take part in the festival. So, as Colonel Gonorrea explained to me so well, the problem is not being Jewish per se but how one is Jewish—what the Jew in question is like. I will come back to this.

Admittedly, this criticism of Harwicz isn’t completely off base.  She was not excluded for being Jewish but, if anything, for being a Zionist Jew. But that is precisely the point. As we have also seen elsewhere, for Jews, anti-Zionism is considerably worse than antisemitism—at least worse than the original antisemitism. It is worth recalling that old-guard antisemitism wanted Jews to leave Europe and establish their own state in Israel, whereas today’s anti-Zionists want Jews to be expelled from Israel, that is, “from the river to the sea.” As the saying goes, they don’t make antisemites like they used to.

That is why, referring to the old-guard antisemites, Theodor Herzl—considered the birthing person of Zionism—wrote in his diary on June 17, 1895: “The antisemites are right. If we grant them that, then we too will be happy.” Five days earlier, Herzl had written in his diary that the creation of a Jewish state would make every form of antisemitism disappear: “The antisemites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies.” Deep down, Herzl was too optimistic.
It is worth recalling that old-guard antisemitism wanted Jews to leave Europe and establish their own state in Israel.

Speaking of Zionism, one of the best books on antisemitism—one that nevertheless has yet to receive the recognition it deserves—is Antisemitism as a Group Phenomenon, published in German in 1926 by Fritz Bernstein, who, after arriving in Israel, Hebraized his name to Peretz Bernstein and became one of the 36 signatories of the Declaration of Independence.

In this book, Bernstein explains even more clearly than Herzl in what sense antisemitism “is right”: “All groups are exclusive; they are closed to outsiders and make the admission of strangers dependent on meeting various more or less difficult conditions.” This is because “internal homogeneity is maintained by exclusivity.” Even “the noblest, most charitable and most honestly altruistic of men draw a line between humanity as a whole and an always comparatively small number of individuals who, within this sphere of friendly feeling, enjoy preferential treatment.” In other words, there is no such thing as an all-inclusive political community. Unfortunately,

Bernstein adds, “the progressive will not be much inclined to undertake a precise investigation of relations of enmity, since he is convinced a priori that they ought to vanish before his ethical postulates.”

Even the champions of all-inclusive political communities end up acknowledging the need for exclusion, since they would hardly be willing to include, say, National Socialists. The problem, if anything, arises when the exclusion is unjustified—when, for example, we make up the claim that someone is far-right in order to exclude them: we don’t want to exclude them because they are far-right; rather, it turns out that someone is far-right because we want to exclude them. That is exactly what happened to Harwicz.

We don’t want to exclude them because they are far-right; rather, it turns out that someone is far-right because we want to exclude them. That is exactly what happened to Harwicz.

Although they are a rather small minority, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews remains striking. Some Jews believe that Zionism is the problem, not the solution. Hence the argument that Harwicz was really excluded from the festival for being a Zionist. There are other Jewish writers who have not had to be deprogrammed, since they are not Zionists.

At this point, what we might call the thesis of selective Jewish infallibility comes into play. If a Jew criticizes Israel, then he is right because he is Jewish (hence the popularity of certain Jews in anti-Zionist circles). But if a Jew defends Israel, then he is wrong for that very same reason—namely, because he is Jewish. The Jewish infallibility thesis, then, tellingly serves only to criticize Israel. In reality, being Jewish should be no guarantee either of being wrong or of being right.
Finally, anti-Zionists (Jewish or not) believe the Jewish state is a problem because, deep down, hostility toward Jews either does not exist or is caused precisely by the existence of the State of Israel. The assumption is that once the only Jewish state disappears, the world—or at least the Middle East—will finally live in peace, without exclusion and without enmity. As it happens, in Germany in 1933 the share of non-Zionist Jews was at least 95 percent. The lessons of the Holocaust, however, have turned those proportions upside down. And what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023—along with its extraordinary repercussions, among them Ariana Harwicz’s exclusion from the Granada Festival—should consolidate the sharp rise in Zionism’s stock, especially among Jews. I hope I’m not being too optimistic.

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Andrés Rosler has a PhD in Law   (Oxford). Professor of Philosophy of Law (UBA). Researcher at CONICET. His most recent book is Estado o revolución [State or Revolution] (Katz).

Source: Revista Seúl

Original: («Monty Python en Granada. Para el festival que dejó afuera a Ariana Harwicz, la comparación medieval es un elogio. En la Edad Media, al menos, los judíos podían discutir»).