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JOHN BERGER’S ESSAYS ON LANGUAGE, THE MIDDLE EAST STILL RESONATE 20
YEARS LATER  
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Eli Recht-Appel
May 12, 2025
The Indypendent
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_ That chasm between language and reality, “the ravine between
declared principles and real aims,” obscured both the atrocities of
the war and the real motivations for the invasion. _

, Art critic and novelist John Berger.Creative Commons

 

When Verso Books first released John Berger’s _Hold Everything
Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance_ anthology in 2007,
George W. Bush was in his second term as President; the United States
and the United Kingdom, Berger’s native country, were embroiled in
catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the Second ­Intifada
in Palestine had recently come to a close. 

_Hold Everything Dear_, reissued by Verso in March, has come off the
bench in a moment when Berger’s reflections on war, poverty, art,
and language have only grown more resonant. “The visionary political
vocabulary of three centuries has been garbaged,” he writes in
“Wanting Now,” the opening essay. “The economic and military
global tyranny of today has been established.” 

Throughout the 16 essays in the collection, Berger returns frequently
to the notion that language is a casualty of our warped politics. In
“Ten Dispatches About Endurance,” he says the words democracy,
liberty and productivity “have been rendered meaningless.”
However, this is not primarily a linguistic issue, but rather a
political one. The loss of meaningful language obscures reality and
justifies the unjustifiable. 

In the 2003 essay “Let Us Think About Fear,” Berger confronts how
the Iraq War was sold to the American people. The claim that it was
necessary to protect the United States from “weapons of mass
destruction” turned out to be a cynical lie. And what did
“liberating” the people of Iraq from ­Saddam Hussein look like?
“Baghdad has fallen,” Berger wrote shortly after the U.S.
invasion. “The city has been taken by the troops who were bringing
it freedom. Its hospitals are wailingly overcrowded with burnt and
maimed civilians, many of them children, and all of them victims of
the computerized missiles, shells, and bombs launched by the city’s
liberators.” 

That chasm between language and reality, “the ravine between
declared principles and real aims,” obscured both the atrocities of
the war and the real motivations for the invasion. To Berger, those
aims were to “seize control of one of the world’s richest oil
reserves, to test out new weapons,” to enrich weapons manufacturers
and war profiteers, and above all, “to demonstrate to the present
fragmented but globalized world what ‘Shock and Awe’ is!” 

Perhaps no topic covered in _Hold Everything Dear_ is more resonant
today than the several essays that discuss Israel and Palestine.
Whether or not Berger — who died in 2017 in France, where he spent
most of his life — could have anticipated ­Israel’s transition
to all-out colonial massacre as a response to the Hamas-led slaughter
of Israeli civilians in October 2023, his analysis of the asymmetry of
the so-called conflict is devastatingly pertinent today. “Any
comparison between the weapons involved in these confrontations
returns us to what poverty is about,” he writes of the Second
Intifada. “On one hand Apache and Cobra helicopters, F16s, Abrams
tanks, Humvee jeeps, electronic surveillance systems, tear gas; on the
other hand catapults, slingshots, mobile telephones, badly used
Kalashnikovs and mostly handmade ­explosives.” 

Berger admits that “a gap between declared principles and
realpolitik may be a constant throughout history.” However, he sees
something new and disturbing about how the gap is constituted today,
with “small words and evasive silence.” Berger quotes an Israeli
“refusenik,” someone who has refused to serve in the Army, Sergio
Yahni, on why the name “Israel Defense Forces” is a misnomer:
“This army does not exist to bring security to the citizens of
Israel: It exists to guarantee the continuation of the theft of
Palestinian land.”

In his closing essay, “Looking Carefully — Two Woman
Photographers,” Berger discusses the work of Ahlam Shibli, a
Palestinian photographer of Bedouin descent, and Jitka Hanzlová, a
Czech photographer who lives in Germany. Reading Berger’s analysis
of Shibli’s work, which he says is concerned with “the impact of
an event on a life,” it is difficult not to think of the late
Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna. 

Hassouna was the subject of Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s
documentary _Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk_. The film, which
chronicles the genocide in Gaza through video conversations between
the two, was selected to debut at ACID, a parallel section of the
Cannes film festival. On April 16, 24 hours after its selection was
announced, Hassouna, who was in her mid-20s, was killed along with 10
members of her family by an Israeli airstrike on the Al-Touffah
neighborhood of Gaza City. Hassouna would have gotten married just
days after she was killed. Her 18-year-old brother described her as
having “big dreams” and wanting “to travel and participate in 
international photography exhibitions.” The young photographer saw
her documentation of the genocide as a form of resistance. The Israeli
government, as it often does, claimed the target of the strike that
killed Hassouna and her family was a Hamas combatant but provided no
evidence of such. Therein lies the gulf between claims and aims.

Berger, despite his constant recognition of the inhuman horrors of
imperial war, reveals himself to have had a stubborn belief that human
creativity and tenderness are inextinguishable — and it is instead
the masters of war and capital who “are alone on this planet.” He
ends “Ten Dispatches on Endurance” with the sentence “Trace with
a finger tonight her (his) hairline before sleep.” “Another Side
of Desire” concludes with “the sirens wail down the street. As
long as you are in my arms, no harm will come to you.” 

This desire for tenderness might have something to do with Berger’s
frequent turns to the arts to develop an understanding of world
politics. While he was a painter, a poet, a critic, and a storyteller,
it’s not so much that his only way of understanding politics was
through the prism of art, but rather that there is something
indispensable about what art can communicate, even under unspeakable
conditions, about longing and ­survival. 

It is in eulogizing his late friend Eqbal Ahmad, the Pakistani
political scientist and activist, that Berger most potently brings all
this together: 

“Eqbal learnt early on that life inevitably leads to separations
… . knew and accepted the tragic. And, consequently, he spent much
prodigious energy on forging links — of friendship, political
solidarity, military loyalty, shared poetry, hospitality — links
which had a chance of surviving after the inevitable separations. I
still remember the meals he cooked.”

Berger beckons us to forge links that may guide us through our tragic
separations. And in his call to hold everything dear, he asks that no
people — including those in Palestine and Iraq — be robbed of the
right to sustain those bonds.

• • •

_Hold Everthing Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
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By John Berger
Verso Books, 160 pages

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* language
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* Iraq War
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* Palestinians
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