On Being Good Victims
“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 be-longings, 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 Pales-tine. It appears uncharacteristic. Now, no
one would accuse Mr. Wiesel of re-serving his humanitarian work only for Jews. Indeed, according to his own tes-timony,
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 Palestini-ans.
This is how he enunciated this principle many years ago: “I support Israel – period. I identify with Israel – period. I
never attack, I never criticize Israel when I am not in Israel.” Those words suggest that the commitment to Israel is
visceral; he believes in 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 any-thing 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’ peo-ple 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 eth-nic
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 strat-egy 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 Palestini-ans.
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 victo-ries – 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 ex-traordinary. 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 hi-erarchy of races, where the higher races
have rights and inferior races are des-tined 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 ver-sions this superiority is divinely
ordained: God made his covenant with Israel-ites 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 expro-priated 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 toi-lets.’
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 under-stand
how any people could reject their claim to Palestine. But that is what the Palestinians have chosen to do – exactly what
any other people in their condi-tion would have done. It is this humanity of the Palestinians, ordinary yet
in-controvertible, that is so galling to those raised in the logic of Zionism.
As the Zionist project has unfolded through wars, through ethnic cleansings, through expropriations, through an
occupation that has involved an entire soci-ety in the relentless destruction of another people, how many Zionists can
assert in sincerity – despite the military successes of their project – that their human-ity 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 devise new stratagems, produce new lies, invent
new traps, and build new walls to imprison another people who by their will to resist continue to challenge and
frustrate their plans to expropriate them. 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 all Israeli atrocities
suffer a similar loss in their humanity. I suppose Mr. Elie Wiesel knows this all too well in the inner sanctums of his
conscience. 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 a university in Boston, is the author of Is There An Islamic Problem (IBT Books, 2004). He may be reached at: alqalam02760@yahoo.com. © M. Shahid Alam