Et Tu, Murakami-San?

I swear, there must be some provision in the average creative person's publishing contract requiring them to make anti-Israeli pronouncements. What else would have caused Haruki Murakami to give a speech decrying Israel? The Blindness of the Israeli Intellectual Left

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, who accepted the 2009 Jerusalem Prize for foreign writers, delivered a reception speech implicitly comparing Israel to a wall and Palestinians to eggs broken against it. In this tidy, fabricated scenario, Murakami, apart from churlishly insulting his benefactors whose award he should honorably have refused, forgot that there were 20,000 “eggs” in Sderot broken against a “wall” of Palestinian rocket fire and that thousands of Israeli “eggs” were smashed post-Oslo. He emerged from this simple-minded fiasco with egg on his face, plainly unable to differentiate truth from fiction.

I am not going to stop "liking" Murakami's books over this. But, there is absolutely no reason - outside of an attempt to curry favor with western leftists - for him to take any position on Israel. Whatever happens in Israel has absolutely no effect on Japan. There isn't even a cultural connection like the one that underlies America's connection to Israel. Murakami would be better off looking in his own back yard - has he ever had anything to say about Burma? - than looking to the Middle East for material for his portentious Serious Man Of Letters Pronouncements.