By Jenerali Ulimwengu
Leafing through a New York Review of Books
recently, I stumbled upon an open letter written by one Jewish
intellectual to another, both of them clearly elderly at the time of
writing. It was in 1988.
The writer was Arthur Hertzberg, and the addressee
was Elie Wiesel. Reading the letter, I gathered that both had had a
personal experience of the Holocaust in which some six million Jews
perished at the hands of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen as they sought a
“final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”
Herzberg is reminding Wiesel of their first
meeting some four decades earlier, and of how they had shared their
varied though connected pasts linking them to the suffering of the
Jewish people in World War II Europe.
Hertzberg’s immediate family had been spared the
full force of the genocide because his parents had emigrated from Poland
to America in the 1920s; nevertheless, his mother’s father and all her
brothers and sisters were murdered in the gas chambers of Poland.
It would appear that the writer was carrying with
him a heavy dose of survivor’s guilt, the feeling that somehow, via some
undeserved good fortune, one escaped the fate that one’s likes
suffered. It is clear therefore that Wiesel had had the misfortune of
being a more direct witness of the Holocaust.
The letter was written at the time of the
Intifada, the uprising of Palestinians against Israel’s occupation, and,
of course, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails was the only means of
resistance available to the youth thus involved. And, of course again,
the Israeli military used tanks to counter the stones and Molotov
cocktails.
Apparently Wiesel had written somewhere suggesting
that these youngsters would do better if they stopped throwing stones
and employed words instead, no doubt mindful of the preponderant power
of thought and word when pitted against the sheer futility of pieces of
rock and hand-propelled bombs. Hertzberg was reminding his old friend
that he had neglected to tell Israelis to stop using tanks and artillery
against unarmed civilians and try negotiation instead.
At issue was, and still is, whether those who
support Israel’s right to existence – there are those who don’t – can
afford to criticise Israel when it goes overboard without risking
“splitting the Jewish community.” This obviously begs the question of
whether support precludes critical appreciation of what those we support
may choose to do at any given time, a sort of carte blanche.
It is dangerous, Hertzberg suggests and I agree,
because a real danger inhabits any demarche that seeks to attribute any
criticism of Israel to the soft-bellied weaklings among the Jewish
Diaspora and the implacable enemies of Israel. This would mean, in
effect, that no one should say a word about Israel unless that word is
of unconditional support.
Hertzberg reminds us of the principle that in some
cases “silence is interference,” signifying that in the face of certain
realities no one has the right to keep quiet.
We have once again been treated to images of the
carnage going on in Gaza, with the Israeli military carrying out wanton
murders of unarmed women and children, and the arrogance of Binyamin
Netanyahu as he seeks to lay the crime of these killings at the doorstep
of Hamas.
Because Hamas was elected into power by the
Palestinian people, what Netanyahu is really saying is that the
Palestinians have brought these deaths upon themselves.
That is okay, because the world is used to this
doublespeak out of Jerusalem. Another form of doublespeak we have to get
used to is the one coming out of world leaders.
Such as the one the other day by British Foreign
Secretary Philip Hammond, who stated in Jerusalem recently that his
country recognised Israel’s right to defend itself and its people, but
was only concerned over the “ongoing heavy level” of violence.
In other words, tone down the killing, but
otherwise well done. Silence is interference, sure, but doublespeak is
noisy interference because it seeks to say something without saying it.
No comments :
Post a Comment