Mr. Wiesel,
I read your statement about Palestinians, which
appeared in The New York Times on August 4th. I cannot help feeling that your
attack against Hamas and stunning accusations of child sacrifice are really an
attack, carefully veiled but unmistakable, against all Palestinians, their
children included. As a child of
Holocaust survivors—both my parents survived Auschwitz—I am appalled by your
anti-Palestinian position, one I know you have long held. I have always wanted
to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing
Israel as an occupier and themselves as its nearly defenseless victims?
Resisting a near half century of oppression imposed by Jews and through such
resistance forcing us as a people to confront our lost innocence (to which you
so tenaciously cling)?
Unlike you, Mr. Wiesel, I have spent a great deal of
time in Gaza among Palestinians. In that time, I have seen many terrible things
and I must confess I try not to remember them because of the agony they
continue to inflict. I have seen Israeli
soldiers shoot into crowds of young children who were doing nothing more than
taunting them, some with stones, some with just words. I have witnessed too
many horrors, more than I want to describe. But I must tell you that the worst
things I have seen, those memories that continue to haunt me, insisting never
to be forgotten, are not acts of violence but acts of dehumanization.
There is a story I want to tell you, Mr. Wiesel, for
I have carried it inside of me for many years and have only written about it
once a very long time ago. I was in a refugee camp in Gaza when an Israeli army
unit on foot patrol came upon a small baby perched in the sand sitting just
outside the door to its home. Some soldiers approached the baby and surrounded
it. Standing close together, the soldiers began shunting the child between them
with their feet, mimicking a ball in a game of soccer. The baby began screaming
hysterically and its mother rushed out shrieking, trying desperately to extricate
her child from the soldiers’ legs and feet. After a few more seconds of “play,”
the soldiers stopped and walked away, leaving the terrified child to its
distraught mother.
Now, I know what you must be thinking: this was the
act of a few misguided men. But I do not agree because I have seen so many acts
of dehumanization since, among which I must now include yours. Mr. Wiesel, how
can you defend the slaughter of over 500 innocent children by arguing that
Hamas uses them as human shields? Let us
say for the sake of argument that Hamas does use children in this way; does
this then justify or vindicate their murder in your eyes? How can any ethical
human being make such a grotesque argument?
In doing so, Mr. Wiesel, I see no difference between you and the Israeli
soldiers who used the baby as a soccer ball. Your manner may differ from
theirs—perhaps you could never bring yourself to treat a Palestinian child as
an inanimate object—but the effect of your words is the same: to dehumanize and
objectify Palestinians to the point where the death of Arab children, some
murdered inside their own homes, no longer affects you. All that truly concerns
you is that Jews not be blamed for the children’s savage destruction.
Despite your eloquence, it is clear that you believe
only Jews are capable of loving and protecting their children and possess a
humanity that Palestinians do not. If this is so, Mr. Wiesel, how would you
explain the very public satisfaction among many Israelis over the carnage in
Gaza—some assembled as if at a party, within easy sight of the bombing,
watching the destruction of innocents, entertained by the devastation? How are these Israelis different from those
people who stood outside the walls of the Jewish ghettos in Poland watching the
ghettos burn or listening indifferently to the gunshots and screams of other
innocents within—among them members of my own family and perhaps yours—while
they were being hunted and destroyed?
You see us as you want us to be and not as many of us
actually are. We are not all insensate to the suffering we inflict, acceding to
cruelty with ease and calm. And because of you, Mr. Wiesel, because of your
words—which deny Palestinians their humanity and deprive them of their
victimhood—too many can embrace our lack of mercy as if it were something
noble, which it is not. Rather, it is something monstrous.
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