Elie Wiesel’s blood libel

“Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn.”

Elie Wiesel long ago lost the moral compass that led him to write and speak about the destruction of European Jews by Nazi Germany (and the acquiescence of the world), but this ad, dutifully printed in major American newspapers, is more than pathetic and solipsistic. It is repellent.

It revives the blood libel that was wielded for centuries against Jews in Europe (whereas Jews had lived fairly peacefully in Muslim lands for those same centuries), now to cover for a pogrom of non-Jewish Palestinians — by Jews in the name of Judaism.

As if that will stop hatred of and violence against Jews?!

Israel is a threat not only to the people whose land the country has taken and continues to take more of, but also to Jews around the world.

In the past month, it has been the insistently “Jewish” state of Israel killing children. By the hundreds. Along with their mothers and the rest of their families. Along with destroying their homes, their playgrounds, schools, hospitals, and farmland.

What are people to make of this?

Israel must be stopped. It seems to be deliberately fomenting antisemitism to justify its own aggressive land grab and ethnic cleansing: Act violently and nationalistically in the name of Judaism, which inspires violence against Jews, which proves the necessity of an ethnically pure Jewish state for refuge. This is not only self-rationalizing circular reasoning, it embraces a ridiculous cycle of violence. It can not end well, neither for Israel nor for Jews around the world.

Nor, of course, for the people whose land Israel claims for itself.

“Never again” does not mean that anything is excused in the name of defending Jews. “Never again” means for all.

It can no longer be denied that Israel has become what it most invokes to justify its founding as a Jewish state: a perpetrator of ethnic cleansing, the destroyer of a people.

One state: Palestine, with equal rights for all, not just for racists.

human rights