This diary originated in discussions that ensued after Elie Wiesel was accosted by a Holocaust denier in a San Francisco hotel, but it at no time was intended to be a discussion of the attack. Rather, my purpose had always been to delve into the ambiguities of Wiesel's moral authority, and in particular how that authority has been undermined by his refusal to take a strong stand against well-documented crimes perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians.
Many of the comments in this diary relate to questions of the attack on Wiesel and the inartful way I handled it in introducing the meat of my analysis after the fold. Due to the many well-considered statements and the clear misunderstandings of my readers of my intent, I have decided to delete the original introduction. Those readers wishing to see how badly I handled this at first are invited to read the entire original version over at Evenhandeddems.
Wiesel, it turns out, is not so morally pure himself. [The original diary included here a quote from Daniel McGowan and a link to his website. Because McGown is outed in comments by LarryinNYC as a Holocaust denier and associate of David Irving, I have removed the cite and the link. Instead, I make a similar -- albeit softer -- point with a cite to Wiesel's biography at the jewishvirtuallibrary.]
In 1948, Wiesel enrolled in the Sorbonne University where he studied literature, philosophy and psychology. He was extremely poor and at times became depressed to the point of considering suicide. In time, however, he became involved with the Irgun, a Jewish militant organization in Palestine, and translated materials from Hebrew to Yiddish for the Irgun’s newspaper. He began working as a reporter and in 1949, traveled to Israel as a correspondent for the French paper L’Arche.
This sequence makes it unclear if Wiesel was actually working for the Irgun at the time of the Deir Yassin massacre, but there is no doubt he had an involvement with the organization which carried out the massacre. Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal describe the Deir Yassin massacre like this:
The sequence of events in Dayr Yasin is now scarcely disputed. The village's nonbelligerence pact with local Jewish forces did not spare it being swept into the Jewish offensive to break the Arab stanglehold on Jerusalem. Following an intense battle between Palestinian militiamen and Irgun forces with some Haganah mortar support, Palestinian forces departed and the Irgun entered the village on April 9. In brutal acts of revenge for their losses, the Jewish fighters killed many of the remaining men, women, and children and raped and mutilated others. Those not killed immediately were ignominiously paraded through Jerusalem and then sent to the city's Arab sector (Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 161.
To my knowledge, Wiesel has never offered any explicit statement of apology for what happened at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948.
Wiesel's biographer Mark Chmiel wrote in a 2002 article in Tikkun:
While Wiesel did express his existential empathy with Palestinian suffering he refused to examine the historical and political causes of their suffering, except to blame the Arab nations or the Palestinians themselves. In bearing witness, he instead expressed paeans to Israel (as after the 1967 war), or, when things got out of hand, confessed anguish and sadness (as after the Lebanon invasion and the intifada). As he desired that Israel be a land of poets and dreamers, he did not really reckon with Israel as a powerful state, enthusiastically backed by the United States, with the same capacity for realpolitik characteristic of other governments in the international state system. In his various defenses of Israel, Wiesel alleged that any assertion that the victim had now become the victimizer was tantamount to anti-Semitism, a useful rhetorical strategy for neutralizing criticism. The historical record and ample documentation of Israel's policies of exclusion, dispossession, and violence -- from the U.N., international human rights groups, and Israeli human rights groups -- could then be quickly dismissed as another expression of the world's contempt for the Jews. Wiesel may have been personally incapable or unwilling to penetrate the systematic distortions in the Israeli narratives and to criticize Israeli practices towards the Palestinians. But in his silence he opened himself to the criticism that his moral maxims -- for which he has been accorded respect both by powerful and powerless alike -- were suspended when it came to his own favorite state of Israel.
Wiesel often says that he will not criticize Israel "outside of Israel." Yet, as Chmiel points out, in his memoirs Wiesel cited Albert Camus to the effect that "not to take a stand is to take a stand." In other words, he is aware that his silence on Israel has a broader effect, an effect of endorsing Israel's actions towards the Palestinians.
Christopher Hitchens, writing in The Nation in 2001, has called Wiesel a liar and a denier of the Nakba:
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.)
The historical evidence available today is overwhelmingly conclusive: Israeli historians working independently of each other have confirmed time and again that Zionist* armies in 1948 systematically expelled hundreds of thousands of noncombatant Palestinian villagers from their homes. The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling and the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe have both argued that the cleansing was coordinated at the highest levels of Zionist leadership, in accordance with a worked plan of creating an ethnically pure Israel; Pappe in fact paints a portrait of a handpicked group of advisors meeting on a weekly basis with Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion to plot strategy and direct the cleansing operations on the ground. Benny Morris, whose Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem is probably the best-known work documenting the ethnic cleansing campaign, does not agree with Kimmerling and Pappe that the campaign was coordinated. Nevertheless, his book documents in chilling detail a brutal and horrific campaign punctuated by extrajudicial assassinations, massacres, rape, and other atrocities. In interviews granted in 2004, Morris indicated that he now believes Ben-Gurion himself was implicated in the cleansing campaign -- while he still insists there was no direct coordination from above, he spoke of an "idea in the air" in which the "entire officer corps understands what is required of them."
Morris believes 700,000 Palestinian noncombatants were expelled in this campaign, while Pappe sets the figure somewhat higher at 850,000. Everyone agrees that the approximately 4 million Palestinians living in refugee camps throughout the Middle East today are descended from these individuals initially expelled by the Zionist armies. The historical evidence is clear that Israel expropriated the real and liquid property of the refugees, which was then used to finance some of the initial expenses of organizing the Zionist state.
The point here is not to exculpate the Palestinians from any responsibility for bringing about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestinians clearly were hostile to the idea of an Israeli state from the beginning, and some Palestinians carried out attacks, and conducted atrocities, against Zionist settlers from the earliest stages of the conflict.
The intent of this diary, rather, is to insist that the MidEast conflict is a moral minefield. Neither side wears white hats, and the degree of historical culpability on the Israeli side is at least as great -- and perhaps even greater -- than that on the Palestinian side. As for those Palestinian noncombatants expelled from their homes, denied access to their livelihoods, and robbed of their property, it is hard to see them as anything other than innocent victims. Yet Israel to this day refuses to acknowledge any responsibility for the crimes committed by its armies in 1948, and still officially denies that any ethnic cleansing took place.
Wiesel is a solid brick in that Israeli wall of official denial. From him we get a restating of the Zionist foundation myth, that the State of Israel redeems the world of the Holocaust, and that therefore no public criticism of Israel is necessary. Even in his much publicized dialogues with Palestinians, Wiesel winds up -- in the words of his biographer Chmiel -- "blaming the Palestinians and averting his eyes from the political causes of their grievances."
Wiesel, in other words, "feels the pain" of Palestinian victims but refuses to acknowledge either his own or Israel's responsibility in causing their suffering. In a very real sense, his silence serves as a denial that the ethnic cleansing campaign even occurred -- even though he was employed by one of the principal organizations conducting cleansing operations.
He is a Holocaust exceptionalist -- he appears to believe that Jewish suffering trumps all other suffering. It is a very comfortable position for one, like Wiesel, in a position of power. One can hardly be surprised, however, that the powerless who suffer are enfuriated by such an attitude.
*The word Zionist is used here in place of Israeli, as the cleansing campaigns began, in some accounts, before the State of Israel came into existence. In any event, the creators of the State of Israel self-identified as the leaders of a Zionist movement, and believers in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state still call themselves Zionist (e.g. here) today.
NB: Folks keep playing with my tags, but these are the ones I think belong on the diary:
Elie Wiesel, Israel, Palestine, Holocaust Denial, Nakba, Nakba Denial