whitebeard

Don't curse the darkness, light a candle.

Everybody is somebody's Jew

" And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis."

-- Primo Levi, cited in A Hard Case: The Life and Death of Primo Levi; The New Yorker, 17 Jun 2002.

But the more Levi shouldered his responsibilities as a Jew the more he got caught in the toils of the Holocaust culture. Like most Italian Jews, he believed in assimilation. And he did not consider the Jews to be heroes because Hitler had tried to exterminate them. As he saw it, they were merely human—Fascism's crime was to have deprived them of that status—and humanity was what we had to understand if we harbored any hope of a just world. Accordingly, he gave Israel no breaks. "Everybody is somebody's Jew," he told an Italian newspaper in 1982, "and today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis." After the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, he said that Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon were bringing down shame on the name of the Jews, and he called for their resignation. This brought a flood of letters accusing him of giving comfort to the enemy. In sum, Levi, the greatest soul, the greatest artist, of the "witness" writers, was not usable the way the others were. It was not Levi but his friend Elie Wiesel who got a Nobel Prize.

 

posted by: Whitebeard at 10:54 | link | comments |
israel, palestine