We must remember Elie Wiesel

We must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, the man who suddenly became an adult at 15 years, when he was put on the cattle train, to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister were taken to the gas chambers. He was sent to be a slave labourer. He witnessed hangings, endured hunger, beatings and torture. And later he wrote “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed….Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

We must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, the Shoah survivor, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as “a messenger to mankind” and “a human being dedicated to humanity”. We must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, the DP (displaced person), the orphan child, who in 1945 tried to immigrate to then Palestine and like many other Jewish children, orphan children, was forbidden to do so. We must remember that the same Allies who defeated the Nazis, then turned into friends of the Arab nationalists and once again betrayed the Jews, after having promised to them, to us, the right to a State.

We must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, the Zionist militant, who in 1948 joined the Irgun, yes: the bad guys, the Revisionists, the nationalists, those who understood that the Arab societies were not ready for peace. We must remember that the young Elie Wiesel was a radical Zionist, and nurtured no illusion on the Arab societies. Elie Wiesel, the survivor, knew too well how whole populations can be brainwashed, can be taught to hate the Jews, and rather than accepting compromises and peace, they chose to move an unending, suicidal war. Yesterday against the Jews. Today against the Jewish State.

That was the political belief of Elie Wiesel; that was his place in the Zionist spectrum. Few people want to remember it, now. But we must.

We must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, the author of “The Jews of Silence”. The book was published in 1966; it was a report on the sufferings of the Russian Jews, three million people at the time. They were forced to be silent. They were living in fear of the KGB, facing the risk of being deported for performing a bris, they were put under arrest for celebrating Simchat Torah, they were tortured if discovered speaking Yiddish… It is impossible to underestimate the impact of that slim book on a whole generation of Jews. American and European Jewish lay leaders, a few months after the publication of that book, started the mass movement advocating for the rights of the Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel.

“What torments me most is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today”, wrote Wiesel. And let’s be honest, not everybody was enthusiastic about such a movement. The most influential Jew in America, Henry Kissinger, was busy engaging diplomatically with the Soviet Union, the main goal was to limit its nuclear weapons (sounds familiar?) and he famously commented: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Not the most inspiring page of American Jewish history. But we must remember Elie Wiesel, who had the courage to stand up for the Russian Jews.

Then the gates opened, and the mass migration to Israel begun, and what a successful aliyah it had been: nowadays one in every seven Israelis is from a Soviet Union background. But yet, and we must remember that more than an eyebrow was raised when they started to settle in. They were reputed to be too nationalist, too Zionist, and their very own existence, perhaps in the so-called Occupied Territories, was portrayed as a threat to peace. Russian immigrants were caricatured: not by Elie Wiesel, who had witnessed their anguish under the Stalinist rule.

We must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, who in the 1970s put all his energies in the struggle against the South African apartheid regime. We must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, who delivered food to the starving population in Cambodia in 1980. And we must honour the memory of Elie Wiesel, the Zionist. Especially nowadays, when sadly we hear, once again, the call for a boycott of Jewish activities.

It had been a constant motif of anti-Semite propaganda, in Nazi Germany, in pro-Soviet Arab Countries, in Communist Europe. Elie Wiesel never tired himself to warn the world about the real goal of those who call for boycott, who talk of bi-national State, of overcoming Zionism, of “co-existence” between Jews and Palestinians. Nice words. But under the nice words lays the ambition of getting rid of Jewish self-determination, of pushing back the clock of history to 1948, or even before. Nowadays anti-Semites talk about peace with the Palestinians. The real goal is to weaken Israel and the Jewish people, all of us, to deprive us of a place to call home, of a shelter in the time of persecutions.

It is too easy to think of Elie Wiesel merely as a witness of the most horrendous episode of human history. A personality who derives his moral authority by the mere fact of having managed to survive the Shoah. To make a monument of him and pretending he has nothing to say regarding anything else.

The most obtuse and stupid self-appointed Jewish Voices for Peace have already twitted, or should I say quacked, about the alleged indifference of Elie Wiesel toward the suffering of the Palestinians. Which is, of course, is rubbish, because Elie Wiesel, like the absolute majority of the Jews and the Israelis, had been in favour of the establishment of a Palestinian State, ever since the Oslo accords, and he never stopped supporting such a vision in public. But at the same time, Elie Wiesel never stopped to denounce the real obstacles to peace: the Arab regimes willing to keep the Palestinians as refugees, and cheap workforce for terrorist enterprises. And, first and foremost, the toxic anti-Semitic propaganda which still poisons the minds in the Arab world and unfortunately in Europe too.

That was always denounced clearly by Elie Wiesel, zichrono livracha. And this is the reason why we must continue to honour his memory.