All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [222]
It is strange to note to what extent Israel’s fighters do not feel joy. They seem to be closed to joy. Some try to show gaiety, but their heart is not in it. Others do not even feel like trying, for they have seen not only glory but the suffering that goes with it. They have seen their closest comrades fall bloodied and maimed.… But that isn’t all. The price paid by the enemy also weighs upon our soldiers. Conditioned by its past, the Jewish people has never been able to feel a conqueror’s pride or victor’s exaltation.…
In A Beggar in Jerusalem I echo Rabin’s reflections on the sadness felt by the Israelis in the face of the vanquished Arabs, especially the children who saw them as victors and therefore as capable of doing them harm. I saw such children in the Old City, encountered them in Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus. They were afraid of us, of me. For the first time in my life, children were afraid of me.
From my travel diary:
The war is over, and in the turmoil I seek joy but do not find it. I encounter only beings with grave faces and wounded eyes. Shaken by the experience they have just lived, they seem unable to grasp its implications. It seems the stuff of legend rather than history. The accumulated anguish and anger before the fury, the reversal of roles: it all happened too fast, too suddenly. Victors and vanquished will need time to catch their breath and absorb the meaning of the event. David has vanquished Goliath and now wonders how he did it. No one knows, he less than anyone else. His astonishment, more than his victory, should arouse admiration and hope alike.…
… The victors, in fact, would have preferred to forgo battle. Saddened, they returned to their homes without hate or pride, disconcerted and withdrawn. The world has never seen such victors as these.
… This event has had a moral and perhaps a mystical dimension. I understood that the day I found myself in the Old City of Jerusalem and saw thousands of men and women parading before the Wall, sole vestige of the Temple. I was struck by how awed and contemplative they looked. Suddenly I thought I saw, intermingled with the living, the dead converge from the four corners of exile, from all the cemeteries and all memories. Some seemed to emerge from my childhood, others from my imagination. Mute madmen and dreaming beggars, masters and their disciples, cantors and their allies, the Righteous and their enemies, drunks and storytellers, children dead and immortal, all the characters of all my books—yes, they had followed me here to manifest their presence and to testify like me, through me! Then they left, and I had to summon them back.
The war was over, and I went home via Paris, where I took part in a highly popular television program called “Dossiers de l’écran.” Every week the program featured a film followed by a debate. That week the film Exodus was shown and the debate was devoted to the Six-Day War. The moderator, Armand Jammot, had invited four Arabs (not yet called Palestinians) and four Jews (three of them Israeli), to take part in a dialogue. To our surprise, the Arabs refused to sit at the same table with us, insisting instead on speaking from a neighboring studio. We decided to withdraw from the program in protest, but before leaving, I made a statement which went something like this:
I came to this broadcast without hatred, hoping to reach out. But now I find myself treated like an object.
Tonight my existence as a man is being denied. My Arab fellow guests on this program refuse to talk or listen to me. I find this humiliating and unacceptable, for as a Jew and a writer, I still believe in the power of words.
Tonight I had hoped that human beings on both sides, setting aside feelings of bitterness and injustice, would look at one another and rise above what separates them. I was wrong. And that saddens me.
It saddens me because it reminds me of a time when our enemy turned us into statistics.