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by Mohammad A. Auwal
I felt stunned at the disregard for moral principles and
international laws that the 1986 Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel
demonstrated in his piece "Jerusalem in My Heart" published in
The New York Time, January 24, 2001. I sent a letter to the editor of
NYT, exposing his deceptive arguments. But my letter was not published,
probably because it did not match their agenda of "manufacturing
consent" against Palestine. Anyway, here I analyze some of the
holes in Wiesel's largely passionate and irrational argument.
Wiesel lamented the handover of East Jerusalem to
Palestinians in a future land for peace deal. He questioned Jordan's
failure to welcome the Zionists in East Jerusalem during 1948-67. But he
never mentioned that this was a period of a state of war between Israel
and Jordan and that it was natural for Jordan at that time not to be
cozy with the Zionists who monstrously killed Palestinians in the
thousands and kicked 770,000 of them out of their homes in a sustained
terror campaign that culminated in 1948. And he never mentioned how the
Jews were welcomed, treated and protected (from European persecution) in
Muslim lands during the previous 13 centuries when Jerusalem was under
Muslim control. This is the crux of Wiesel's intellectual dishonesty.
Wiesel commented that the faces of the Palestinian youth
reflect hatred of the Israelis. But strangely he never questioned or
answered why. He never questioned why Jews from all over the world
should find ready-made, U.S.-funded mansions to live upon immigration to
Israel while the native Palestinians are not allowed to return to their
ancestral homes. With a little homework, he must have found that the
Palestinians "love" their Israeli plunderers as much as the
Jews "love" their Nazi destroyers. For details, he should
refer to the volumes written by people like Israel Shahak, the Jewish
Holocaust survivor who was formerly professor at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and chair of Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, and
other reports and books reflecting voices of human rights.
Wiesel parochially claims that Jews are worthier than
Muslims and Christians as inhabitants and stewards of Jerusalem. While
expressing his religious passion for the city, he failed to even refer
to the roots of Muslim passion for the holy city and its surroundings.
Muslims feel passionately attached to Jerusalem because Abraham, Moses,
David, Solomon, and Jesus who lived in and around the city are eminent
Prophets of Islam. In both letter and spirit, the Qur'an commands
Muslims NOT to distinguish between the Prophets of God. Jerusalem is
also the city to which Muslims were once commanded by God to turn to for
prayers and from which Muhammad, the last Prophet of Islam, made a night
journey to heaven. This is well documented in the Qur'an, contrary to
Wiesel's claims.
Wiesel undermines the universal human rights, principles
of justice and international laws as he endorses the Israeli position of
denying Palestinian refugees the right of return. Wiesel should note
that the international laws legitimize the creation and existence of
Israel in Palestine. It is absurd to accept international laws when they
legitimize the rights of Israelis and reject them when they defend those
of Palestinians. If one rejects international laws that grant
Palestinians the rights of return and establishment of an independent
state in territories including East Jerusalem, then by definition one
also rejects the right of Israel to exist as a nation state.
Wiesel claims that "In 1947 Israel accepted the
plan for the division of Palestine; the Arabs rejected it." But he
does not explain why. The reason was that Palestine was robbed from the
Arabs by terrorism and brute force. Later, this brutal occupation was
legitimized by the U.N. under the U.S. pressure, in violation of moral
principles and despite an earlier U.S. commitment to not endorse such an
injustice. The U.S. President Roosevelt too opposed the idea of creating
Israel in Palestine. President Roosevelt argued: a Jewish state in
Palestine could be established and maintained only by force, and the
U.S. should not be a party to it (Foreign Relations, 1945, Vol. III).
In an article titled "The Jews in Palestine"
published in 1938, Mohatma Gandhi, the renowned Indian leader and
philosopher of nonviolence and social/political justice, condemned the
ongoing scheming to dispossess Palestinians. While condemning the
treatment of Jews as untouchables in Europe, and asking Jews to consider
their countries of origin as their own homes, he said, "Palestine
belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the
English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the
Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be
justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction
but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to
reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews
partly or wholly as their national home."
Wiesel has finally failed to hide that he is a false
proponent of human rights and peace. Otherwise, like Israel Shahak and
Noam Chomsky (both Jewish), he would have recognized the moral and legal
legitimacy of Palestinian resistance to occupation, condemned Israel's
continued carnage and dispossession of the Palestinians and written
another classic titled "And the World Remains Silent" like the
one he wrote in 1956.
His tears over Jerusalem may be equally false, as well.
His claim to Jerusalem is imaginative, illegal and illegitimate, based
on mythology. The Paletinian claim to Jerusalem, in contrast, is
existential, legal and legitimate, based on the reality of their
existence. Palestine lives in the hearts, breaths and bloodstreams of
Palestinians who are waiting in refugee camps to return to their homes
and who are now living down there defying the brutality of Israeli Gestapo
and armed forces.
