by Elie Wiesel
Our last meeting took place in the early eighties. At first, of course, I heard a detailed account of his visit to Waldheim, who, this time, escorted him all the way to the lobby. Again we discuss Mengele. He then tells me all about his current whereabouts, in Paraguay, when in fact the killer doctor had died in Brazil some time before.
We move to a more serious topic: Whom should we remember? He preaches the universality of suffering. More precisely: Since Hitler exterminated not six but eleven million human beings in his death camps—Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, and others—my guest considers it our duty not to forget any of them. And here Wiesenthal uses a striking image: Since Jewish blood was mingled with their blood in Auschwitz, all victims should be “reunited” within the same remembrance.
I answer him that I don’t know where he obtained the figure of eleven million. To my knowledge, no historian has ever cited such a figure. Indeed, the only place I can remember seeing that figure was in Eichmann’s report on the Wannsee Conference, where leaders of the Third Reich decided on the Final Solution. But even there, Eichmann referred to eleven million Jews, only Jews—those of Europe and elsewhere—all of whom were targeted. Moreover, did he, Wiesenthal, really believe that there were five million non-Jews brutalized, killed, and burned in the camps? If that is what he believes, let him bring proof… whereupon he accuses me of Judeocentrism: “You think only of Jews…. For you they were all saints…. As for me, I can prove to you that among them there were the worst kind of scoundrels, worse than the non-Jews….” I am stunned by this outburst, and saddened. His face is red; he apologizes. He didn’t express himself properly, he didn’t mean it. In fact he wanted to say something else, but … So be it. I explain my position to him, the very same I set forth before President Carter and Congress: Not all the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, but all the Jews were victims.
Still, I address him courteously. After all, he is a man who has inspired fear in the archenemies of the Jewish people. To dispel the tension I change the subject. Just then, my son, a small boy at the time, comes running into my study. I introduce him to our visitor. Is it because my son does not show much interest that Wiesenthal becomes angry? “Leave us,” he says. “We have important matters to discuss!” Elisha leaves the room. I admit: I did not appreciate this. I don’t like to see children humiliated, and certainly not my own. There is no further contact between Wiesenthal and me.
During the years that follow—and that precede my Nobel Prize, which he covets—Wiesenthal makes derisive, derogatory public comments about my “nationalism” and “chauvinism,” my alleged contempt for the Gypsies, the Poles, and the others, all the others. He repeats these remarks tirelessly to Jewish visitors to Vienna, to Jewish leaders in America, in interviews, and even in Penthouse.
In Penthouse, Wiesenthal says: “He [Elie Wiesel] is the greatest opponent of my position, namely, that there should be true brotherhood between the victims, all the victims.” To a journalist’s question: “Why does Elie Wiesel not agree with you?” he answers: “Because he is a chauvinist and I’m not.” In 1980 his diatribes reach the point where the journalist Herb Brin, who is actually an admirer of his, writes an editorial urging him to halt his injurious attacks. “Wiesenthal,” he writes, “has a fixation on Elie Wiesel and by it, he dishonors himself.” It seems Wiesenthal has two obsessions: the World Jewish Congress (which he hates) and me (whom he detests).
Later I see Wiesenthal on Larry King’s show discussing Eli Rosenbaum’s book Betrayal. The director of the Office of Special Investigations has bluntly criticized Wiesenthal for his friendship with Waldheim. I am astounded to hear Wiesenthal’s outrage; he can’t understand how a Jew could attack a survivor. I feel like sending him a note: Am I not, like you, a survivor? Why do you, a Jew, persist in slandering me? But I don’t. As Saul Lieberman used to say: “To begin a friendship, it takes two. To end a quarrel, it takes only one.” I choose to end the quarrel because I have simply lost all respect for the man.
I react only once, with a detailed refutation, in an American-Jewish weekly, of his distortion of facts. Accusation: I did not invite him to a survivors’ gathering. Fact: I was not one of the organizers. Accusation: I participated in a boycott against him. Fact: To my knowledge there never was one. Accusation: I prevented the nomination of a Gypsy to the Holocaust Memorial Council. Fact: The White House retains this privilege; my various recommendations frequently went unheeded. Beyond this response, I swallowed hard and kept silent. But I wondered: Why did Albert Speer, the last Nazi minister in charge of arms production, call him his “best friend” in a PBS program televised in the United States? Why did Helmut Kohl suppress a rather unfavorable Austrian documentary on Wiesenthal?
Ever since I was awarded the Nobel Prize for which he campaigned by denigrating me, he has gone further: He frequently states in his books as well as in his private conversations that the prize was his by right and that I am his enemy. When reporters query me on the motives of my alleged hate for him, I always refuse to engage in polemics. Let his advocates and public relations men show me a single newspaper, a single publication, containing a single derogatory remark about him. Until now.
Poor Wiesenthal. How is one to comprehend his rage and hate? Our sages have an explanation: ambition, jealousy. In The Ethics of Our Fathers we read that jealousy “excludes man from this world.” Let us say that, in Wiesenthal’s case, it blinds him.
I feel sorry for him.
Open letters … I have written a few: to a young Palestinian, to a young German. I have also received quite a few. Almost all deal with Israel and the Palestinians. Some ask me to support the hawks; others express a wish to include me among the doves. A crude open letter by the owner of the German magazine Der Spiegel attacks me because I dared articulate some concerns about German reunification. I am urged to issue statements against one or another policy of one or another Israeli government. I seldom respond.
In July 1967 I entrust an article to Jean-Martin Chauffier, editor in chief of Figaro Littéraire and a former comrade from Buchenwald. In it I say that we should have expected that people would be envious of Israel’s victory, resent it for having carried out in too spectacular a manner its lightning campaigns against four armies and some twenty Arab nations, or perhaps simply for having waged these battles at all. Israel victorious does not correspond to the image some people like to have of its destiny among the nations. They prefer to see it defeated, on its knees, which permits them to come to its aid and console it afterward. But a Jew triumphant over death? That is a difficult concept, even for some who are not the Jew’s enemies, and surely for those who resent the Jew for having cheated the world: The promised second holocaust did not take place. The lamb dared to refuse the slaughter. And worst of all, the Jew, not content with escaping the enemy, even found a way to humiliate him. That was going too far. The most virulent among the critics are the very same who just yesterday were ready to forget their commitment to come to Israel’s defense.
In that same article I mention another disappointment: A great Catholic writer whom I admire and respect and to whom I owe much also criticizes Israel, not from a political but from a theological point of view. For him, the nation “evolves in a universe devoid of God” and uses its genius “for purposes of possession and domination that are purely material and to satisfy its craving for power.”
Does he really believe that the Jews have chased God from their land, which is also His? Does he earnestly believe that the Holy Land has lost its holiness since the Jews returned to it? My response:
I have seen Israel at war; therefore I can bear witness. I have seen, in the Old City of Jerusalem, barely reconquered, hardened paratroopers pray and weep for the first time in their lives; I have seen them, in the midst of battle, overwhelmed by a collective and ancient fervor, kiss the stones of the Wall and commune in a silence as unbelievable as it was pure. I have seen them, as in a dream, jump back two thousand years to renew a bond with memory and the God
of Israel. Don’t tell me that they were moved by a will for power or material domination; their will was drawn from the spirituality of their past. Their experience was mystical. Even the nonbelievers felt transcended by their own acts and by the accounts they gave of them later. Their words, on their lips, render a strangely fiery and faraway sound. Their “will to dominate” seems to target only their own pride. And they did succeed in muting their pride. Mankind has never known less arrogant victors. You begrudge them their victory, you are wrong. They needed it not to live but to survive.
I wrote this plea for Israel not in 1988 during the Intifada, but in 1967 just a few weeks after the potentially fatal threats that Egyptian and Syrian armies had posed to the Jewish state.
Less than three years later I felt compelled to publish, once again in Figaro Littéraire, a new plea: To a Concerned Friend. A few excerpts follow:
You are concerned. That is what you told me when last we met. Worried about the Middle East, of course. I told you that I, too, am worried and frequently depressed. I look at Israel’s future with foreboding. Cease-fire violations, exchanges of artillery fire, sabotages and reprisals, assaults and bombings. Too many mothers, on both sides, are mourning. Too many young people, on both sides, are sacrificing their lives before living them. Will this curse never be revoked? I thought that since you and I are friends, and share the same belief in friendship, we undoubtedly share the same fears.
Only you went on to say: “I would not like for Israel to become a power defining itself through its conquests—yet that is what will happen.” And you added, “I would not like the Jewish youth, over there, to develop the mentality of an occupying force—yet if things continue as they have, it will inevitably acquire such a mentality, if it hasn’t already.”
And so, since we are friends, I want to reassure you. You are wrong to worry. A Jew will not disappoint you in victory: The change in his condition will not change him ontologically. Though no longer the victim, he will not be the torturer. In the Jewish tradition, victory is not linked to the adversary’s defeat; above all, it is a victory over oneself. That is another reason why Jews have never been executioners and almost always victims.
… You fear that what you call the Jewish soul, molded by suffering and used to persecution, might cease to be Jewish. You fear that it might become evil. Just like the world it confronts. Well, rest assured. The Jewish soul has been able to resist so many onslaughts of hatred, an ageless and multi-faceted hatred, that it surely will resist the ephemeral fascination with military glory. Give it your trust; it has given its measure. One’s soul does not change so quickly. One does not acquire an occupier’s mentality, a conqueror’s instinct in a few months, or even in a few years. That requires the work of generations and implies a tradition the Jews do not have. The Jew has not changed in the course of his millennia-old history. Do you believe that he will deny himself, or change because of a few military exploits? …
The “concerned friend” was my great and wonderful friend and benefactor François Mauriac, who surely was an ally and defender of the state of Israel and even more so of the people of Israel. How is one to explain his skeptical attitude after 1967? Perhaps it was the good Christian in him, the ideal and idealized Christian feeling tenderness and compassion toward a victim but not toward a victor. This does not mean that the church, at various periods, has not preached respect for power, or has not quite often succumbed to its attraction.
Mauriac remains for me a great humanist, a great conscience, a loyal friend of my people. And I have quoted from these two articles only to confirm a thesis, namely, that Israel has needed to be defended for a long time.
Does this mean that I consider it my duty to plead the Jewish state’s cause unconditionally, and in every circumstance, even when its policies appear to transgress certain boundaries?
Question: Does a Diaspora Jew have the right to criticize what goes on in Israel? My answer is an unequivocal yes, on condition that this person has previously demonstrated his or her attachment to Israel. In other words, someone who has been on Israel’s side when it was at risk and alone has unquestionably the right, or even the duty, to say what is on his or her mind when Israel forgets its own ethical imperatives. But those who have never loved Israel, never uttered a word on its behalf, never spoken out in its defense, do not have this prerogative.
After the Gulf War, I asked a Jewish activist for peace in the Middle East whether he still believed that he did the right thing when he went to see Arafat in Tunisia. “Yes,” he replied, “after all, Moses went to see Pharaoh in Egypt.” His response made me smile. Arafat may well have thought of himself as Pharaoh. “The problem is,” I told my interlocutor, “you are not Moses.”
Does this mean that I do nothing without Jerusalem’s approval? Let’s say that I will do nothing that might harm Jerusalem. When I feel that I must raise my voice, I do it in Israel. During the Intifada, I told the Israeli authorities that I wished to meet with the Palestinians and went to Gaza. The government did not oppose it. The Palestinians I met were known to have ties to the PLO; one of them was close to Yasir Arafat. At that time I also met the young Israeli soldiers who were battling the rebellious Arab adolescents. I asked both sides direct questions about hate and its consequences, about the legitimacy and efficacy of violence. I then published my impressions in the New York Times. But I must confess that at that time, I did not tell everything I had learned. At one point, Israeli soldiers had used deplorable psychological punishments; they would catch one of the stone-throwing young Arabs, take him to his home, and … beat his father. By humiliating the father, they hoped to teach the son discipline and respect. True, this reprehensible method was used by only a small number of soldiers, and only briefly. Of course, I reported it, but not publicly. I should have. But I was ashamed.
When I discussed these deplorable incidents with military and political leaders, I was given to understand in no uncertain terms that, as a Jew from the Diaspora, I had better mind my own business.
Nonetheless, I declare openly that the collective punishments meted out routinely under both governments leave me aghast. The sight of an Arab house demolished by the army just because a young Palestinian has been caught carrying a weapon does not leave me indifferent. And I consider all fanatical groups dangerous and evil. Less than a week after the massacre of some thirty Palestinians as they prayed in the Patriarchs’ cave in Hebron, I voiced my outrage in a speech given before the European Council in Strasbourg.
There can be no justification for the murderous act of a religious man, a physician whose calling it was to save lives. What was it in Israel’s political climate that made this criminal act possible?
And what can one say about Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin?
I think of the reproaches Israelis used to heap, and still do sometimes, on Diaspora Jews disinclined to make aliyah, to immigrate to Israel. Baruch Goldstein made aliyah. And Yigal Amir was born in Israel. And yet …
How often have I been on the receiving end of friendly and not-so-friendly advice to come and settle in Israel? There are those who resent my living in the Diaspora and “loving Israel from afar.” Since I have written on the Holocaust, they claim, I should have drawn the only possible conclusion and declared publicly that the place of every Jew, and especially of every Holocaust survivor, is in Israel. Had Israel existed in 1939, they say, there would have been no Holocaust. For them, Israel constitutes the unique answer to Auschwitz. For me, Auschwitz remains a question mark.
The real problem? I think it is one of human relations, first between Jews in Israel and then between Israelis and Diaspora Jews. I only realized this during the Gulf War and then again during the international conference titled “The Anatomy of Hate” that our foundation convened in 1990 together with Haifa University, on Mount Carmel. I remember flying home with a heavy heart, with an anxiety that has never left me.
I know that what I am about to say will displease many in Israel. There will
be those who say: “Why is he meddling in our affairs? He doesn’t live here, he is not a citizen of our country. If he wants to be heard, to take part in our national debates, let him come and live among us, share our fears and our goals, our mistakes and our successes.”
Oh yes, I know the formula, having used it myself at times: A person who does not live Israel’s ordeals and challenges has no right to criticize its decisions. Never mind. I shall speak out, because the situation is too serious and the stakes too high for me to remain silent. An ancient philosopher said: When truth is in danger, silence equals guilt.
As for me, I may well be guilty of idealizing the land of Israel, which is now the State of Israel, a human laboratory of dreams and nostalgia that successfully turned itself into a structured and pragmatic nation. For many years, moved by a love older than I am, I have been going to Israel. Granted, it has always been as a visitor. I have delighted in walking through the narrow streets of Jerusalem, meeting colleagues and friends. I instantly felt at home in places I had never set foot in. For me, the people of Israel and the land of Israel were one and a Jew could be loyal to Israel even from outside its borders. I still believe that. But … what has changed? I’m not sure. I feel that the mood in the country is charged with rancor and hostility toward us, the Diaspora Jews. And let no one tell me that it was always so. Sure of their superiority, some Israelis’ attitude toward Diaspora Jews is that they, the Israelis, are entitled to everything. They demand money and then deride those who have collected and offered it.
Ezer Weizman, the former defense minister and proponent of peace with the Arabs, now president of Israel, once asked me publicly why I did not move to Israel. The only answer I could think of was: “What is more important for a Jew: to be a Jew or to be Israeli?” I was wrong; I should not have opposed “Jew” to “Israeli.” But as far as certain Israelis are concerned, one can be Jewish only in Israel. According to them, the most creative Jews in the Diaspora are less Jewish than a Jewish scoundrel in Tel Aviv.