“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the
oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the
tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are
endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”
Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences
“My loyalty to my people, to our people, and to Israel comes first
and prevents me from saying anything critical of Israel outside Israel…
As a Jew I see my role as a melitz yosher, a defender of Israel: I
defend even her mistakes… I must identify with whatever Israel does –
even with her errors.”
Elie Wiesel, Against Silence (AS)
In the end, whether Israel’s penchant for serial atrocities
encounters an effective obstacle will hinge on two types of resistance,
elicited not from the fictitious “international community”, but from the
active opponents of Israel’s ongoing projects, and from the withdrawal
of moral and financial support for the ongoing reproduction of Israel as
an apartheid Zionist State.
Among the first type of response are the increasingly visible
efforts, which gained momentum in the wake of the May 2010 flotilla
murders, to promote sanctions, boycott and divestiture. A broad range of
individuals and groups -rock stars Elvis Costello and The Pixies, the
actor Meg Ryan, Britain’s largest union, Unite, the United Methodist
Church, the cosmetics firm Lush, the University of London Union,
Deutsche Bahn, the German railway operator, large supermarket chains in
Italy, dockworkers in many cities around the world refusing to unload
Israli cargo- has either actively called for or effectively engaged in
actions in support of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel’s
occupation and in support of Palestinian resistance. (For an up to date
list of such actions see www.bdsmovement.net.)
The second kind of response includes refusals to any longer make
excuses for Israeli abominations, willingness finally to speak out in
public protest, and the cessation of financial support for the rogue
State. An especially powerful development would be the readiness of
American Jews to announce loud and clear that Israel does not speak for
them, to distance themselves from the agenda of the politically powerful
Israel lobby, and to cross over into solidarity with the Palestinian
people. None of this, I will suggest below, is as far-fetched as it
might have seemed fifteen years ago.
Among the key habits of thought, feeling and action that must be
defeated is what we might call the Wiesel Doctrine, as expressed in the
second passage at the head of this article, which pledges to “defend
even [Israel’s] mistakes… [to] identify with whatever Israel does – even
with her errors.” The Doctrine saturates the political consciousness of
too many older (an important qualifier) liberal American Jews. These
are the Jews most likely to contribute to AIPAC and for whom their
perception of a given Senate, House or presidential candidate’s
friendliness to Israeli policy is sufficient to determine support.
The Doctrine’s stalwarts have been marinating in a political-ethnic
milieu largely formed since the early 1950s by the self-promotional and
political-marketing zeal of Elie Wiesel, the world’s leading holocaust
entrepreneur. The man has been adroit in milking Western guilt over the
holocaust in the service of making it virtually impossible for
soi disant
humanitarians to dissent from Israeli propaganda. He has also helped to
create an atmosphere in which the likes of Alan Dershowitz can thrive,
and the jobs and reputations of both politicians and university
professors who challenge the Israeli line can be jeopardized on the
spurious grounds that they peddle anti-semitism. Wiesel has contributed
hugely to the mystified ideological settlement that invites a well
heeled and ardently motivated entity like AIPAC to win enviable gains
for Israel on Capitol Hill and to prevent critical issues from being
raised in the US media, even as these same issues are put forward and
contested in the more democratic Israeli press.
Wiesel and his Doctrine are to the typical American Jewish apologist
for Israel as the standard meter is to the meter stick in your workshop.
Wiesel is the Platonic Form made flesh in every Zionist apologist.
Listen to the argumentss of your Zionist friends. They channel the
teachings of St. Elie.
It beehooves us, then, to review what Wiesel is about.
Wiesel as Archetype of the Soul of Zionism
Elie Wiesel is in a class by himself. Take his word for it. The man
promotes himself with unflagging persistence as the living embodiment of
Jewish humanitarianism. This makes him, he’d have us believe, the -not
‘a’, but ‘the’- humble representative and wounded spokesman of the
community of holocaust survivors, the preeminent guardian of Jewish
memory and witness to Jewish suffering. What this comes to is granting
Israel carte blanche to treat Palestinians as it chooses and to
habitually lie about its political intentions.
In Wiesel’s stance we find a paradigmatic expression of the
apologetics that has become the party line for so many older American
Jews for whom nothing Israel does warrants open opposition.
Wiesel pulls no punches. In the second citation at the head of this
article he announces that facts and evidence are irrelevant to his
assessment of Israel’s behavior. Thus, Wiesel misled when he remarked,
regarding his assessment of Israel’s May 2010 flotilla raid, “I don’t
know enough. ..For me to say anything now would be irresponsible.” (June
2, 2010) We are to believe that Wiesel is open to evidence of Israeli
wrongdoing. But he has made it clear that he is not. When pushed to the
wall on Israeli misbehavior, Wiesel’s tactic is patented: he changes the
subject to the holocaust. Moments after the above remark Wiesel
whimpered “Holocaust denial today – what it does to the children of
survivors,” he said. “I believe Holocaust denial should be illegal.”
There followed a philosophical debate on freedom of thought and the
limits of censorship. Mission accomplished: the original issue, the
assessment of Israel’s murders of noncombatants in international waters,
has been forgotten.
It is essential to Wiesel’s agenda that he depict his categorical
refusal to criticize Israel as more than a merely individual decision.
He is merely acknowledging a moral obligation binding everyone,
everywhere, to eternal silence regarding Israel’s abominations. That’s
the Wiesel Doctrine: “The nations that kept silent during the Holocaust
ought to keep silent now as well. The world that then condemned itself
by its silence has lost all rights to judge Israel now.” (AS, 2, 191.)
The holocaust is made into political plastic carrying an unlimited line of exculpatory credit.
In his speech to the United Nations last September Benjamin Netanyahu
began by conflating Nazi Germany, contemporary Iran, al Qaeda (a Sunni
tendency foreign to Shiite Iran), and global terrorism. The word ‘Nazi’
appeared five times in the first thirty paragraphs. This kind of
nonsense is made possible and certified by the Wiesel Doctrine.
The Doctrine also rules out solidarity with the Palestinian people.
As a holocaust survivor, Wiesel must accept whatever claims Israel makes
about its relation to Palestinians: “Do not ask me, a traumatized Jew,
to be pro-Palestinian. I totally identify with Israel and cannot go
along with leftist intellectuals who reject it.” ( AS, 1, 223) These two
sentences are packed with Israel-serving dogma: the fact of the
holocaust permits open season on Palestinians, speaking the truth about
Israel is an inherently “leftist” prejudice, and criticizing Israeli
policy is the same as “reject”ing Israel, whatever that may mean.
Wiesel As Terrorist and The Requirement of Hypocrisy
In his essay “To a Young Palestinian Arab” (1979) Wiesel intones “I
feel responsible for your sorrow, but not for the way you use it, for in
its name you have massacred innocent children, slaughtered children.”
(‘sorrow’ is a favorite word of Wiesel’s, which he deploys almost as
frequently as you and I use ‘the’) Wiesel’s claim to feel “responsible”
for Palestinian “sorrow” (Why not refer to Palestinian
deaths?
Why not indeed.) is disingenuous. He refuses to acknowledge the death
and destruction visited upon Palestinians by Israel except in the
context of blaming Palestinians. He acknowledges no responsibility to
do
anything as an expression of his professed responsibility, nor does he
acknowledge that this responsibility stems from wrongdoing by Israel.
And he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the occupation as a
political matter, preferring “sorrow” as the required non-political
“moral” attitude.
Wiesel goes on to anticipate the young Palestinian’s response that
these acts were performed by “extremists”, not typical Palestinians. He
rejoins that “they acted on your behalf, with your approval, since you
did not raise your voice to reason with them. You will tell me that it
is your tragedy which incited them to murder. By murdering, they debased
that tragedy, they betrayed it.” Wiesel goes on to contrast
Palestinians’ insidious political response to their suffering to
holocaust survivors’ humanistic “moral” response to their brutalization.
Here we have a typical case of the hypocrisy that is a leitmotif in
Wiesel’s repertoire.
Wiesel is surely not ignorant of European Zionists’ response to
persecution by pioneering innovations in the art of terrorism. Zionists
crusading in Palestine prior to the establishment of Israel created a
range of modern terrorist tactics. In 1938 the Zionist terror outfit
Irgun executed attacks against Arab civilians, including placing bombs
in milk cans in a Haifa market, killing twenty three Arab shoppers. In
1947 the Zionist group the Stern Gang was the first to use letter bombs,
mailed to British Cabinet members. The Gang assassinated high-level
British diplomats and the chief UN mediator attempting to negotiate a
two-state solution for Palestine.
Irgun, then under the leadership of
Menachim Begin, planted bombs in Arab East Jerusalem, killing civilians
in an effort to drive Palestinians out. As the British mandate was
coming to an end in April 1948 and a civil war between Arabs and
Zionists was beginning, Irgun and the Stern Gang attacked the village of
Deir Yassin, killing over a hundred unarmed villagers, including women
and children. The villagers had not been involved in any violence prior
to the attack. In 1954 Israel became the first country to hijack an
airplane for political purposes, seizing a Syrian civilian plane in a
botched effort to trade hostages for Mossad intelligence agents captured
by the Syrians.
When the Deir Yassin occurred Wiesel was on the payroll of Irgun’s
newspaper Zion in Kampf, having offered his services as a translator in
Paris. This makes Wiesel, by his own standards, a terrorist.
Accordingly, he has never denounced these massacres. Might not a Deir
Yassin survivor charge Wiesel with his own words: “they acted on your
behalf, with your approval, since you did not raise your voice to reason
with them. You will tell me that it is your tragedy which incited them
to murder. By murdering, they debased that tragedy, they betrayed it.”
Zionist terrorist attacks against Palestinians and others, which
intensified between 1945 and 1949, including the kidnappings and hanging
of British soldiers in 1947, were accomplished for political purposes.
But the Wiesel Doctrine requires that Palestine never be understood in
political terms. In 2003 Pope John Paul II proposed that “what the
Middle East needs is bridges, not walls.” Wiesel’s attack immediately
followed: “From the leader of one of the largest and most important
religions in the world, I expected something very different, namely a
statement condemning terror and the killing of innocents, without mixing
in political considerations and above all comparing these things to a
work of pure self-defense. To politicize terrorism like that is wrong.”
(
The New York Times, 11/17/2003) Wiesel no doubt associates the
political in this context with the culpable exercise of power by the
powerful against the powerless. This kind of thing, Wiesel seems to
concur, would require action in resistance, including the exercise of
counter-power by the oppressed. But for Wiesel, Israel must never be
blamed, nor must any actions, such as boycott, sanctions and divestment,
much less forceful resistance by Palestinians, be taken against Israeli
power. Hence, Israeli policy must not be seen as political. At most,
Wiesel permits a moral response, typically expressed as “sorrow” and
never requiring one to get off his political ass. Consistency was never
this gasbag’s forte.
Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who is the Zionest of Them All? Wiesel As Co-Recipient of Requited Self Love
Wiesel moved to New York in 1955, where he continued to work as a
correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ah’ronot. In was then
that he set upon the task of establishing himself as the self-appointed
spokesperson for all holocaust victims and survivors (the latter group
treated erroneously by Wiesel as monolithic and homogenous). In 1956 he
was struck by a taxi near Times Square. Given to grandiose
self-description by nature, he later claimed: “I flew an entire block. I
was hit at 45th Street and the ambulance picked me up at 44th. It
sounds crazy. But I was totally messed up.” (NYT, March 5, 1997) The
story is preposterous, but Wiesel has covered himself: “Some events do
take place but are not true; others are true although they never
occurred.” (
Legends of Our Time, viii.) Telling a “true lie” in the name of making a legend of oneself is, as one says nowadays, “no problem” for Wiesel.
In this story Wiesel appears to possess superhuman powers, much like a
cartoon Superhero. He’s hit by a taxi and bo-o-o-oing! he flies through
the air, landing a city block away. Wiesel’s megalomania takes many
forms. He has criticized every notable holocaust survivor/commentator,
notably the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, as less authentic and profound
than he. His case is characteristically self serving. Rival
commentators are rejected on the grounds that they are among “the
intellectuals”. What’s wrong with that? Intellectuals analyze, they
bring intellectual discourse to bear on our comprehension of the
holocaust. But Wiesel insists that the holocaust is a sacred and
spiritual phenomenon, and hence a mystery.
As such it transcends
mundane, normal boundaries of language and conceptualization. It’s like A
Kantian noumenon – it’s “out there” but none of our human categories
are remotely adequate to capturing its reality. The best we can do is to
exhibit the kind of doleful, agonized visage Wiesel sports 24/7. If
someone points to our countenance and asks “What’s that?”, we just say
“sorrow”.
Note that this puts Wiesel beyond challenge. Critical analysis is
expressed in language, and is analytical in form. But language and
analysis are foreign to the mystical nature of Jewish suffering. As
Wittgenstein once remarked, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must
be silent.” That suits Wiesel just fine. Like Israel, Wiesel is
unassailable.
The fact is that many Jewish liberals have ingested and digested this
political serving. Little wonder that they cannot be counted on to call
a Zionist spade a spade. But strong evidence indicates that this may be
changing. As Israeli Jews are moving ever rightward, young American
Jews are moving in the opposite direction. Let’s have a look at this.
Decline of Nationalist Zionism Among Young American Jews
There is ample evidence that younger American Jews are decreasingly
identifying with the Zionist State. A number of independent studies
indicate that younger Jews are less likely to experience criticism of
Israel as an assault on their identity. Peter Beinart has recently
discussed a number of important studies confirming younger Jews’
indifference to criticism of Israel. His essay and book (2) also issue a
call to moral arms to American Jews.
Several surveys have revealed, as Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union
College and and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis
report, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less
attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a
near-total absence of positive feelings.” Although the majority of
American Jews of all ages continue to identify as “pro-Israel,” those
under 35 are less likely to identify as “Zionist.” Over 40% of American
Jews under 35 believe that “Israel occupies land belonging to someone
else,” and over 30% report sometimes feeling “ashamed” of Israel’s
actions. A paradigm case is the 2008 rejection by the student senate at
Brandeis University -the only nonsectarian Jewish sponsored university
in America- of a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversity of
the Jewish State. (3)
This development has been troubling prominent members of the Jewish
establishment since the mid-1990s. In 2003 several of them commissioned
the pollster Frank Luntz to find out what younger Jews thought about
Israel. The underlying aim of the poll was to explain why Jewish college
students are not on the whole inclined to defend Israel against campus
critics.
Luntz’s findings were distressing to his employers. “Six times we
have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their
Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported, and “Six times the
topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these
Jewish youth used the word ‘they’ rather than ‘us’ to describe the
situation.”
The attitudes Luntz found most consistently expressed were a
resistance to the kind of “group-think” the young Jews saw as
suppressing “open and frank” discussion of Israel, a “desperate” desire
for peace and, in some cases, empathy with the plight of the
Palestinians. The students come across as broadly “liberal” in the sense
in which American Jews have always been perceived as liberal. The
“trouble” with these students was that their liberalism is traditionally
Jewish, and
consistent: if Israeli policy contravenes basic canons of liberalism, then so much the worse for Israeli policy.
Among American Jews there are plenty of liberals and plenty of
Zionists. What these studies indicate is that these two groups share
fewer and fewer members. Younger Jewish Zionists are decreasingly
likely to be liberal, and younger Jewish liberals decreasingly likely to
be Zionists. This portends the American Jewish establishment’s further
movement to the right. As Beinart observes, “As secular Jews drift away
from America’s Zionist institutions, their orthodox counterparts will
likely step into the breach.” Thus, the distance between largely secular
American Jews and the Zionist establishment is likely to widen. But
this will weaken the political power of the Israel lobby -inextricably
linked, of course, to the Jewish establishment- only if American Jews
as a whole are prepared to announce unambiguously their antipathy to
their soi disant representatives. The political and moral responsibility
this places on American Jewish liberals cannot be overestimated.
Intensification of Zionist Nationalism in Israel
American Jewish liberals and Zionism in Israel are moving in opposite
directions. While the studies mentioned above indicate that a
decreasing percentage of American Jews will feel sympathetic attachment
to Israeli Zionism, some of the most unsavory forms of Zionism are
growing in Israel.
A 2008 survey reported in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ah’ronot found
that 40 percent of Jewish Israelis would deny the vote to Arab
Israelis. More recent surveys found 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high
school students sharing this sentiment. A survey conducted by Professor
Camil Fuchs from the Statistics Department of Tel Aviv University found
that half of Israeli teens don’t want Arab students in their class. Most
Israeli teens aged fifteen to eighteen don’t think Arabs enjoy equal
rights in Israel, and most of those don’t think Arabs deserve equal
rights. The survey also revealed that 96 percent of the respondents want
Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state, but 27 percent believe that
those who object should be tried in court, and 41 percent support
stripping them of their citizenship. In answer to a question whether
they would be willing to learn in a classroom with one or more students
with special needs, 32 percent answered in the negative. When the
question was asked regarding Arab students, 50 percent of respondents
answered in the negative. In addition, 23 percent said that they
wouldn’t want gays or lesbians in their class.
These findings are disturbingly consistent with the Netanyahu
coalition government’s reflection of the worst elements among
contemporary Israelis: the growing extreme-Orthodox population, the
increasingly radical settler movement, which has come to occupy an
increasing percentage of both the Israeli political establishment and
the army, and the conspicuously anti-Arab Russian immigrant community.
Netanyahu himself is a Palestinian-State denier. In his 1993 book
A Place Among the Nations
he explicitly repudiates the notion of a Palestinian State. Like Golda
Meier he denies that there are Palestinians, and he argues that to
support Palestinian statehood is equivalent to endorsing…. you guessed
it, Nazism! His Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman would revoke the
citizenship of Israeli Arabs who refuse to swear loyalty to the Jewish
State, deny citizenship to Arab nationals of other countries who marry
Arab citizens of Israel, execute Arab Knesset members who meet with
Hamas representatives and imprison Arabs who dare to publicly mourn on
Israeli Independence Day. Holy Moses.
Beinart’s reflections on these abominations are a lamentation of the
refusal of the “leading institutions of American Jewry” to openly
challenge Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. (The
NYR
essay was written three weeks before, and published two weeks after, the
May 31 attack on the Mavi Marmara.) And Beinart is no one-stater.
“Saving liberal Zionism in the United States,” he writes, “so that
American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel, is the great
American Jewish challenge of our age.”
Bienart sees that as an American Jew he bears a special
responsibility to act on the words, hypocritically penned by Elie
Wiesel, cited at the head of this article: “We must always take sides….
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must
interfere.” I say he’s right.
(1) AS is a three-volume collection of the most representative of Wiesel’s lectures, articles, op-eds, letters, etc.)
(2) See “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”,
The New York Review, June 10, 2010, further developed in his book
The Crisis of Zionism, Henry Holt, 2012.
(3) See Cohen and Kelman’s “Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and Their Alienation from Israel” at
http://www.acbp.net/About/PDF/Beyond%20Distancing.pdf.
