A Jew, an Arab, both Maestros

The speech that Elie Wiesel gave before President Bill Clinton and his wife at the White House on April 1999 was to become one of world’s most famous speeches. Its power laid in the combination of phenomenal rhetoric, shocking historical truths, a call for political and social action, and of course, the unique stirring personal story of the speaker. It has been named “The Perils of Indifference” and appeared on October 18, 2017. An abbreviation follows.

Eli Wiesel was born 89 years ago to an orthodox Jewish family. His parents had a small grocery store in the city of Sighet in north Romania, at the bottom of the Carpathian Mountains, not far from “Goethe’s beloved Weimar.” During the prosperous year of the community, the Jews left their mark on every aspect of the town’s life: shops, markets, and fairs were all shut down on Shabbat. Prayers could be heard from over 30 synagogues throughout the town.

In April 1944, the mass of population was sent to the accursed death camp of Auschwitz. Hi mother and younger sister were murdered right upon their arrival to that “other planet”. Elie and his farther, a simple man who taught his son the love of mankind and the devotion to his fellow Jews, were taken the forced labor camp at Auschwitz III, where they exhausted themselves day after day, side by side, under the whimsical watching eyes of the most diabolic evil ever demonstrated by mankind.

As the Red Army was approaching Auschwitz, Elie and his farther were walked the Death March, evacuating the camps westwards to Buchenwald, Germany. Elie’s father died within a few days. Elie survived the march and 3 more months in Buchenwald, until the camp was liberated by the allies on April 11, 1945. He then had a full, fascinating life and career until his death in July 2016, at the age of 87.

When the war was over, Elie Wiesel sought for revenge. However, it wasn’t a brutal wish to kill murderers or to abuse the abusers. His was a different kind of revenge—the battle against indifference. His accusation towards the nations who kept silent or “neutral” he expressed in over 40 books. In 1986 he was awarded the peace Nobel Prize.

Wiesel’s named speech; one of the greatest speeches of all times is a harsh indictment against the worst of human traits: indifference.”The opposite of love is not hatred, its indifference ——Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end” [like the Talmud’s “Sins of Omission”.

Delivered on 12 April 1999 at the White House, Washington, D.C. he commences with “I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. “Gratitude” is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being.

He commenced with questioning the legacy of this vanishing century. How would it be remembered? He expects it to be judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. “These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations—so much violence; so much indifference.” He defines indifference as a strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. —–For the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence.—-Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.

Wiesel says that to be abandoned by G-d was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust G-d than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by G-d was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of his anger. Man can live far from G-d—not outside G-d. G-d is wherever we are. Even in suffering.

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor—never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.

And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil. In the place that I come from, society was composed of 3 simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. We are now in the Days of Remembrance—but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.

We felt that had our leaders known they would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just railways. Just once. And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader—and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death—Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945.

Despite his accomplishments, his image in Jewish history—I must say it—his image in Jewish history is flawed. The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo—nearly 1,000 Jews—was turned back to Nazi Germany. This happened after Kristallnacht and subsequent tragic events in concentration camps.—And that ship, which was already in the shores of the US, was sent back!! Why didn’t Roosevelt allow a 1000 people to disembark?

And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century. Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human?

The Hoover Daily Report published Fouad Ajami’s “From 9/11 to the Arab Spring” on September 8, 2011. The current uprising is directed not against foreign demons, but against cruel rulers who robbed their people of a decent life—

When the Twin Towers fell in 2001, there was plenty of glee in Arab lands—a sense of wonder, bordering on pride, that a band of young Arabs had brought soot and ruin onto American soil.

The symbols of this mighty American republic—the commercial empire in NY, the military power embodied by the Pentagon—had been hit. Sweets were handed out in East Jerusalem, there were no tears shed in Cairo for the Americans, more than 3 decades of US aid notwithstanding. Everywhere in the Arab world—among the Western-educated elite as among the Islamists—there was unmistakable satisfaction that the Americans had gotten their comeuppance.

The observation of the noted historian Bernard Lewis that there were pro-American regimes with anti-American populations and anti-American regimes, with pro-American populations.

Mohammed Atta, who led the death pilots, was a child of the Egyptian middle class, a lawyer’s son, formed by the disappointments of Egypt and its inequities. But there was little of him said in Egypt. The official press looked away.

There was to be no way of getting politically conscious Arabs to accept responsibility for what had taken place on 9/11. The pathology that mattered was that of otherwise reasonable men and women who were glad for America’s torment. Now the terrorism, like a magnet, drew them into Arab and Muslim lands. Now they were near, and they would be entangled in the great civil war raging over the course of Arab and Muslim history.

The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the Arabs. The spectacle of the Iraqi despot flushed out of his spider hole by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and futility of radicalism.

In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life. In the aftermath of 9/11, a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face and truly for the 1st time, with the harvest of their own history and their world is what they make of it.

Moving now to the Wall Street’s “9/11 and the ‘Good War’” by Fouad Ajami on Sept 11, 2009. It was the furies of the Arab world, not Afghanistan that struck America 8 years ago.

The road that led to 9/11 was never a defining concern of President Barack Obama. But he returned to 9/11 as he sought to explain and defend the war in Afghanistan. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Ariz. 17. “The insurgency in Afghanistan didn’t just happen overnight and we won’t defeat it overnight, but we must never forget; This is not a war of choice; it is a war of necessity.

Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda could plot to kill more Americans.”

The distinction between a war of choice [Iraq] and a war of necessity [Afghanistan] has become canonical to American liberalism. But we should dispense with that distinction, for it is both morally and intellectually muddled. No philosophy of just and unjust wars will support it. It was amid the ferocious attack on the American project in Iraq that there was born the idea of Afghanistan as the “good war”.

During March 1998 Commentary published “The Dream Palace of the Arabs” by Fouad Ajami. His attempt to explain the seemingly perverse attraction of Arab intellectuals to failure is sobering:

In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could not be done. The political culture of nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.

The recurrent theme of the book is hope mistaken, faith misplaced. The remarkable final chapter, “The Orphaned Peace” is where Ajami addresses what went wrong in the Arab-Israel negotiations.

“No sooner had the peace of Oslo” been announced in the Arab world, he writes in that chapter, “than the new battle began, the fear of Israeli military supremacy now yielding to the specter of Israeli cultural hegemony.” Although a few Arab intellectuals stood against the tide, the great majority of the educated elite saw in Oslo “not their peace but the rulers’ peace.”

In fact, the peace process had the surprising effect of making Arab writers, journalists, and professors even more implacable in their enmity toward Israel, for that enmity remained the “one truth that could not be bartered or betrayed, the one sure way back to the old fidelities.”

If Fouad Ajami is right, Arab intellectual life will continue to exalt irrationality and to honor aggression for some time to come. We may not like this, but having read the book, we can at least begin to understand it.

New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2016, 283-89, is titled, “Fouad Ajami Goes to Israel.” The introduction, “In a curious way, my exposure to Israel was essential to my coming to terms with Arab political life and its material.” [Fouad Ajami]

He did not write much about Israel per se, or claim any unique insights into its complexities. And yet, at a certain point in his life, he decided he would discover Israel for himself—not only by reading and meeting Israelis abroad, but by visiting the place. A passage written in 1991:

“At night, a searchlight from the Jewish village of Metullah could be seen from the high ridge on which my village lay. The searchlight was a subject of childhood fascination. The searchlight was from the land of the Jews, my grandfather said—In the open, barren country, by the border, that land of the Jews could be seen and the chatter of its people heard across the barbed wire.

In 1978, he still wore his Palestinian sympathies on his sleeve. Many will have seen a YouTube clip from 1978 of an exchange between one Ben Nitay, a 29 year old economic consultant known today as Benjamin Netanyahu, and a 33 year old Fouad in a jet-black beard. In the encounter, which took place a scant 2 years after the IDF’s dramatic rescue of Jewish hostages held by Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe [an operation in which Jonathan Netanyahu lost his life], Fouad is very much the angry Arab, peppering an unflappable Bibi with aggressive questions about Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

From 1980 on, he began to pay fairly regular visits to Israel, and to fly directly. Here is Fouad’s 1991 description of these visits:

I knew a good many of the country’s academics and journalists. I had met them in America, and they were eager to tutor me about their country. Gradually the country opened to me. I didn’t know Hebrew; there was only so much of Israeli that was accessible to me. But the culture of its universities, the intensity of its intellectual debates would strip me of the nervousness with which I had initially approached the place.

The Palestinian story was not mine. I could thus see Israel on its own terms. I was free to take in the world that the Zionist project had brought forth. Above all, I think I had wanted to understand and interpret Arab society without the great alibi that Israel had become for every Arab failing under the sun. In a curious way, my exposure to Israel was essential to my coming to terms with Arab political life and its material.

Fouad was a hard-bitten realist who believed that the dreamy denial of Israel’s permanence was crippling the Arabs. Fouad accused Arab elites, and especially Arab intellectuals, of failing in their most critical responsibility: to grasp the power of Zionism and later Israel, and so pursue an urgent accommodation with the new reality. Instead they had done the opposite; feeding Palestinian refugees and Arab publics with the cruel illusion that history could be undone.

Fouad told truths about the Arabs to America. But perhaps his greater legacy will prove to be the truths he told about Israel to the Arabs.