Johannesburg — RONALD Suresh Roberts guesses that his account of Nadine Gordimer's three-way disputes with US writer Susan Sontag and the late Palestinian author Edward Said over Middle East policy are probably among the most sensitive to her.

In No Cold Kitchen he criticises her for refusing "to equate Israeli policies with apartheid" and says that if Gordimer had had her way, she, Sontag and Said would appear to be "of one mind on the matter, which is absurd".

He believes she also felt uncomfortable with his views on her relationship with Israeli writer Amos Oz who, he writes, "was openly part of the cultural apparatus of the Israeli state, as Gordimer herself noticed".

Agreeing with Oz, Gordimer felt that "Israel's status as a Jewish state must legitimately be preserved".

Suresh Roberts argues that she is oblivious to the contradictions in her friendships with both Oz and Said, one of the most formidable intellectual champions of the Palestinian cause, to whom Suresh Roberts spoke about Gordimer before Said's death in September.

To her (alleged) disavowal, Suresh Roberts writes that, "Gordimer insists, implacably and implausibly, that her true friends need only open their eyes to their true kinship; she insistently casts herself as the one-eyed sage to the blind man of them both".

Her attempt to be "critical of all sides" is "a recognisable catchphrase of the liberal politics that Gordimer herself rejected, wherever she found it, in apartheid South Africa", he says.

By refusing to speak out more strongly on behalf of Palestinians, "Gordimer commits rare disservice to the logical afterlife of the anti-apartheid cause itself".