/The Silence of Elie Wiesel/
How to be a /Good/ Victim
By M. SHAHID ALAM
(www.counterpunch.org)
"Captain Gordon Pim stated in his speech that it was a philanthropic
principle to kill natives; there was, he said, "mercy in a massacre."
Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate the Brutes (1996)
At last Mr. Elie Wiesel has spoken of the 'dispossessed' in Palestine.
It is ap-propriate that he should do so; that is what the world has long
come to expect of him. A holocaust survivor and Peace Laureate, Mr.
Wiesel has dedicated his life to preventing another holocaust, acting on
the conviction that "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest
sin of all..."
And so Mr. Wiesel speaks of the grief of dispossession in words that
convey his deep empathy for the victims. In a /NYT/ column of August 21,
2005, he writes about the "heart-rending" images of dispossession. "Some
of them are unbearable. Angry men, crying women. Children led away on
foot ." The victims are "obliged to uproot themselves, to take their
holy and precious belongings, their memories and their prayers, their
dreams and their dead, to go off in search of a bed to sleep in, a table
to eat on, a new home, a future among strangers."
Some of you may be surprised at Mr. Wiesel's grief for the victims /in/
Pal-estine. It appears uncharacteristic. Now, no one would accuse Mr.
Wiesel of reserving his humanitarian work only for Jews. Indeed,
according to his own testimony, he is not only a "devoted supporter of
Israel," he has "also defended the cause of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua's
Miskito Indians, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the
Kurds, victims of famine and genocide in Africa, of apartheid in South
Africa, and victims of war in the former Yugoslavia." In Mr. Wiesel's
world, however, the Palestinians do not qualify as victims.
Rightly, Mr. Wiesel accuses the world of indifference and silence as
the Nazis worked to exterminate the Jews. Yet, he too has chosen and
as a matter of principle to maintain a deafening silence about the
suffering of Palestinians. This is how he enunciated this principle many
years ago: "I support Israel period. I identify with Israel period.
I never attack, I <http://www.islamicity.com/rd.asp?s=03046-4764>never
criticize Israel when I am not in Israel." Those words might suggest
that the commitment to Israel is visceral; it is a strictly monogamous
relationship.
It is not only that Mr. Wiesel will not criticize Israel when he is not
in Israel. Israel can never do anything that could merit his criticism.
"Israel didn't do anything except it reacted.... Whatever Israel has
done is the only thing that Israel could have done I don't think Israel
is violating the human rights charter. War has its own rules." Israel is
not only above criticism: it has always been the victim of Arab and
Palestinian wars. Israel is utterly innocent.
Sadly, there is no surprise in Mr. Wiesel's column; nothing to celebrate
here. Mr. Wiesel has not renounced his high principle. The
'dispossessed' people in his column are not Palestinians: they are the
illegal Jewish settlers in Gaza. Instead of commiserating with the
Palestinians, Mr. Wiesel is engaging in a new game of blaming the
victims and calling attention to a new form of Jewish victimization.
Implicitly, this is his message: 'There never was any ethnic cleansing
of Palestinians in 1948, 1967 or later. All this is a lie, an
anti-Semitic slur. But look at what is real. It's happening right before
your eyes: the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Palestine. You can see it
everywhere, on /Fox/, /CNN/, /CBS/, the /Washington Post/ and the /NYT/.'
This is merely the latest, most ingenious move in the splendid Zionist
strategy to paint Israel and Israelis as victims. Israelis never
dispossessed anyone. But Israelis are being 'dispossessed' today in
their promised land, in their own country. How tragic: they are the only
Jews to be ever dispossessed by their own army. If there were ever any
misgivings about Israeli intentions towards Palestinians: the expulsion
of Jews from Gaza should dispel them. Look, the Israeli government will
even dispossess Israeli Jews to accommodate Palestinians.
In this new role as the 'dispossessed,' the Israelis have new
opportunities too for blaming the real victims the Palestinians. What
is the Palestinian crime now? Faced with "the tears and suffering of the
[Israeli] evacuees," the Palestinians have chosen /not/ to "silence
their joy and pride " Instead, they have organized "military parades
with masked fighters, machine guns in hand, shooting in the air as
though celebrating a great battlefield victory." Mr. Wiesel is telling
the Palestinians that they cannot enjoy even their hard-won little
victories for which they have paid over the last eighty years in blood
and tears.
The logic by which the Zionists have blamed the Palestinians is quite
extraordinary. They demand that the victim must empathize with his
tormentor; he must understand his tormentor's grief, the grief that
drives him to torment his victims, and the terrible grief he feels even
as he torments his victims. In other words, the victims of Israel must
show saintliness that is even beyond saints. If the Palestinian hates
his tormentors, he is anti-Semitic. If he resists his tormentor, he is a
terrorist. If he celebrates his little victories, he is insensitive.
This is the language of racial superiority the doctrine that believes
in a hierarchy of races, where the higher races have rights and inferior
races are destined for extinction or a marginal existence under the
tutelage of higher races. Under the Zionist doctrine, the Jews are a
higher race. According to some versions this superiority is divinely
ordained: God made his covenant with Israelites not with the
Ishmaelites. This superiority is also empirically established: the
Zionists wanted to take Palestine from the Palestinians and they made
it a fact.
The Israelis are not only superior in their strength. They are superior
in their magnanimity. The Palestinians still live: don't they? Isn't
this proof of Israeli magnanimity. The Israelis merely pushed the
Palestinians out of their lands; they did not incinerate them in ovens.
They blow up their houses, but generally give them time to get out of
the way. Aren't the Israelis incomparably kinder than the Nazis?
Let the Palestinians celebrate their extraordinary luck: they were /not/
expropriated by the Germans or Anglo-Saxons. The Herero in Southwest
Africa, the natives in the United States, or the Tasmanians were not
half as lucky. 'Give up your futile terrorism,' the Zionists tell the
Palestinians. 'Take the Bantustans we have created for you: and be
grateful. We have both power and money: we can reward your gratitude. If
you behave we might even give you passes for day jobs in Israel. You
could make a good living scrubbing floors and washing toilets.'
The Zionists are incensed when the Palestinians reject this 'generous
offer.' 'This is not in our script,' they scream. The outrage is
understandable. They don't expect such insolence from inferiors. The
Zionists find it hard to understand /how/ any people could reject their
claim to Palestine. But that is what the Palestinians have chosen to do;
any other people in their condition would have done the same. It is this
humanity of the Palestinians, ordinary yet incontrovertible, that is so
galling to those raised in the logic of Zionism.
As this project has unfolded through wars, through ethnic cleansings,
through expropriations, through an occupation that has involved an
entire society in the relentless destruction of another people, how many
Zionists can assert in sincerity despite the military successes of
their project that their humanity is still intact, that Israelis today
are better exemplars of the highest values of Jewish traditions than the
generations of Jews who preceded them?
Israel has fashioned itself into a society whose primary vocation is to
invent new stratagems, new walls, and new traps for imprisoning another
people who by their will to resist continue to challenge and frustrate
their will to expropriate. The Palestinians have stretched thin the
ability of Israelis to retain their humanity in their role as occupiers.
Those who have made it their life-long vocation to defend Israeli
atrocities suffer a similar loss in their humanity. I suppose Mr. Elie
Wiesel knows this all too well. Or is he so far advanced in this malady
that he has become blinded to his own affliction?
*M. Shahid Alam*, professor of economics at Northeastern University, is
a regular contributor to CounterPunch.org. Some of his CounterPunch
essays are now available in a book, /Is There An Islamic Problem
<http://www.islamicity.com/rd.asp?s=03046-4764>/ (Kuala Lumpur: The
Other Press, 2004). He may be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
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