http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20010219s=hitchens
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Wiesel Words:
Minority Report
Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose
there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes
as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions. Look, if you will,
at his essay on Jerusalem in the New York Times of January 24.
As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to
intervene in Israel's internal debates My critics have their conception
of social and individual ethics; I have mine. But while I grant them their
right to criticize, they sometimes deny mine to abstain.
Such magnificent condescension, to grant his critics the right. And it is not
certain from when Wiesel dates his high-minded abstention from Israel's
internal affairs; he was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun in the 1940s,
when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was more
than ready to use it against Jews. At all events, his dubious claim above is
only a pompous preface to discarding nonintervention in the present because
Jerusalem is at stake, and "the fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is
secondary; Jerusalem lives within me." (Again the modesty.) There are, sad to
say, serpents in Wiesel's internal Eden, and they too must be patronized:
That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any
other is understandable. Although its name does not appear in the Koran,
Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews, it remains the
first. Not just the first; the only.
"Might wish." "Ties." "Understandable." "Third holiest." Even these lordly
and dismissive gestures clearly cost Wiesel something. After all, he
announces that the city is "mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible,"
which (assuming for a moment that one ought to think like a religious
fundamentalist in the first place) would give a Christian Arab--these being
at least 15 percent of the Palestinian population--quite a strong claim on
the old place. (Incidentally, let me ask any reader how often the city is
mentioned in the Torah.) But for Wiesel all Arabs are Muslims, and even if
they happen to live in Jerusalem, this is nothing to the way that Jerusalem
dwells within Wiesel. Indeed, it would evidently dwell more comfortably
within him if they did not live in it at all. Do I exaggerate? I don't think
so. In a propaganda tour of recent history, he asserts that in 1948, "incited
by their leaders, 600,000 Palestinians left the country convinced that, once
Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home."
This claim is a cheap lie and is known by Wiesel to be a lie. It is
furthermore an utterly discredited lie, and one that Israeli officialdom no
longer cares to repeat. Israeli and Jewish historians have exposed it time
and again: Every Arab broadcasting station in the region, in 1947 as well as
1948, was monitored and recorded and transcribed by the BBC, and every Arab
newspaper has been scoured, and not one instance of such "incitement," in
direct speech or reported speech, has ever come to light. The late historian
and diplomat Erskine Childers issued an open challenge on the point as far
back as the 1950s that was never taken up and never will be. And of course
the lie is a Big Lie, because Expulsion-Denial lies at the root of the entire
problem and helps poison the situation to this day. (When Israel's
negotiators gingerly discuss the right of return, at least they don't claim
to be arguing about ghosts, or Dead Souls.)
In a brilliant reply to Wiesel published in Vesti, Israel's largest
Russian-language paper, Israel Shamir compares him rather leniently not to
Jabotinsky but to the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and his mad quest for
purity:
Be reasonable, old man. Stay within the frame of the story and within the
bounds of common decency. Don Quixote did not drive his jeep into Toboso to
rape his old flame. OK, you loved her, and thought about her, but it does
not give you the right to kill her children, bulldoze her rose garden and
put your boots on her dining-room table.
Shamir speaks of the beautiful city that Palestinians centuries ago "adorned
with a magnificent piece of jewelry, the Golden Dome of Haram al-Sharif,
built their houses with pointed arches and wide porches, and planted
cypresses and palm trees." He's wasting his time on Wiesel, who says that
Palestine was a desert before he arrived there as one of Begin's thugs, and
who slanders the people he helped dispossess, first by falsely saying that
they ran away from their beloved ancestral hometown and second by disputing
their right even to feel nostalgia for it.
In 1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and
Shatila camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with
another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to
comment on the pogrom, he was
