And the Sea Is Never Full (15 page)

At the last moment, we encounter a major hurdle. Under pressure from Turkey, the Israelis urge me to revoke our invitation to the Armenians. I refuse. It would be too humiliating. And to humiliate is to blaspheme. The pressure increases. I am given to understand that even if a single Armenian participates in the conference, Israeli-Turkish relations will suffer. And that there would be consequences for Jews in certain Arab countries. Jewish emissaries from Istanbul confirm this to me with documents. No matter. I will not offend our Armenian guests. I resign as chairman. To Richard Eder, the
New York Times
correspondent in Paris, I explain why: “A human life weighs more than all the books written about human life.”

The war in Lebanon breaks out a week before the conference opens. I suggest moving the conference to Paris or Amsterdam. “But what about the Armenians?” ask the organizers. I say: invite them, of course. Now that the venue has changed, Israel cannot interfere. Unfortunately, my suggestion is not accepted. The conference,
chaired by Professor Israel Czarny and Professor Shamai Davidson, takes place with the Armenians—but without me and some other participants.

I know that Israel had to heed Turkish threats and that the ethical demands on Jews in the Diaspora are not necessarily those imposed on Israelis. Still, I am left with a sense of failure.

The war in Lebanon brings increased hostility toward Israel throughout the world. Passing through Paris in mid-June, I am invited to appear on the one o’clock news. I am meant to help restore some balance to the news commentaries on the Middle East. At the end of the program I ask: Why doesn’t anyone ever speak of the sadness in Israel? As I leave the set, I am accosted by an angry reporter who says: “Today, you shouldn’t have …” “Shouldn’t have what?” “You shouldn’t have defended Israel. Today it was your duty to denounce Israel and to support the cause of its Arab victims!” Back in 1967, this same journalist—Julien Besançon—was considered an admirer of Israel. He had written a powerful book on the Six-Day War.

In America too, the campaign against Israel has become mean. Arthur Hertzberg, a Conservative rabbi, chooses the day before Yom Kippur to publish a violent attack in the
New York Times
headlined: “BEGIN MUST GO.” He condemns the prime minister and Israel as if it had been the Israeli army, and not the Christian militia, that perpetrated the terrible massacre of the Palestinians.

It is a time of celebration for our enemies. They exploit the Lebanon war to their own ends. A synagogue in Copenhagen is bombed. The monstrous
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
is distributed in Stockholm. Anti-Semitic statements appear in the German press. In the past, anti-Semitism flourished in the ranks of the extreme right; today, it is found as well in the extreme left.

After World War II, some of us really believed that anti-Semitism too had died in Auschwitz. We were wrong. Hitler is dead, but anti-Semitism is alive and well. It just goes by other names—most frequently, that of anti-Zionism.

South Africa, 1975. My first journey to this land, my first encounter with apartheid—the racial and racist hatred, the arbitrary arrests, the daily killings; the evil determination to jail entire peoples because of their color; the misery of Soweto. The original crime of apartheid is to have legitimized hatred in the name of racial superiority. To hate under the apartheid regime does not constitute a violation of the law;
it is the law. But once unleashed, hatred knows no boundaries. Hate begets hate.

Back then, South Africa was a region without hope. Day after day: riots, repression, funerals. With ancestral dignity families carried their dead to their final resting places. Those armed policemen who surrounded them, had they no respect, no decency, as they faced a community in mourning?

Another subject that does not let go of me: the excluded, the rejected, the marginalized.

In 1985 in Arizona, I participate in the first conference to explore statutes of political asylum or “sanctuary” for the illegal “economic refugees” from El Salvador and Guatemala. Another conference on refugees, in Washington, deals with the larger problem. I remained stateless too long not to be concerned with the fate of those without a land. Long after refugees have been accepted, they remain uprooted.

For the refugee, distances are meaningless. Though one may live a single kilometer from the border, it might just as well be the other end of the world. On one side there is life and happiness; on the other, misery or even death.

The notion of sanctuary has changed over time. In the Bible, the term is
ir miklat
, or the city of refuge. In those days, only someone guilty of involuntary homicide could take refuge there.

The tradition I claim for myself places the sanctuary not in space but inside man. Every human being is a sanctuary, for God resides there. And nobody has the right to violate it.

In certain countries, refugees are called “illegals.” That word is offensive. A human being is never illegal. His deeds can be, but not his essence.

Another preoccupation: terrorism. We must put an end to it to save democracy. During the French Revolution, the regime of terror lasted less than a year, and those who were responsible for it ultimately became its victims. Are we to infer that only terror can do away with terror?

Terrorism has but one goal: to reduce the adversary to a state of slavery. Terrorism targets the anonymous citizen as much as the political rival. Terrorism does not attempt to convince but to dominate, subjugate, crush.

In a terrorist regime, man is no longer the unique creation with infinite possibilities, but a cipher or puppet. But then how is one to explain the attraction that terrorism exerts on certain minds? Is there a romantic element in the terrorist adventure? What comes to mind are the revolutionary Russians of the early twentieth century, the anarchists, the nihilists.

In Dostoyevsky’s
The Possessed
, the terrorists refrain from attacking the governor when they see that his children are with him. Today, Hamas does not hesitate to attack defenseless children. The hijackings, the massacre of schoolchildren in Maalot, the assaults on buses in Jerusalem…. And elsewhere—in India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Northern Ireland—the goal is always the same.

In the Middle East, the terrorists’ aim is to sabotage peace. One day an international tribunal will condemn them not only for having assassinated innocent people, but for having committed “crimes against peace,” to use the words of the Nuremberg tribunal.

One cannot speak of suffering or terror, of evil and disaster, without evoking the destructive demons unleashed in Hiroshima. Auschwitz and Hiroshima: One evokes the end of mankind, the other the apocalypse of our planet. Both symbolize the curse that, more than fifty years later, continues to weigh upon us. From now on, we will live with the frightful knowledge that the impossible has become possible. Evil has been unleashed, and nothing seems able to contain it. Shimon Peres spoke without hesitation of “the two holocausts” of the twentieth century: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He shouldn’t have. Hiroshima was a cruel, inhuman decision, but it was part of a response to Japanese aggression and a global military strategy. It was intrinsically linked to the war in the Pacific. Auschwitz was conceived as an operation that carried its own justification: genocide. True, the death camps had been built during the war, but they functioned independently of the war. One can even say with certainty that, from a strictly military point of view, Auschwitz impeded the Nazi war effort. Thousands of soldiers employed in the concentration camps could have been more useful on the battlefields. The trains that transported Jews from all corners of occupied Europe were needed by the Wehrmacht for their troops. But the Final Solution was, for Hitler, an absolute priority rooted in his deadly and perverse philosophy rather than in his military strategy.

Auschwitz implies the past, whereas Hiroshima announces the future. And it was Auschwitz that made Hiroshima possible. Hitler’s
Germany had decided to exterminate an entire people, and the world did not object. Both end and beginning, Auschwitz marks a turning point in history. As does Hiroshima. The bomb that annihilated Hiroshima has become a kind of divinity; it is written with a capital letter: the Bomb. Its shadow falls over the entire planet, leaving no place to hide.

In 1987 Marion and I go to Hiroshima. At a meeting with high Japanese officials I feel compelled to say: “I shall never forget Hiroshima, but you in turn must never forget Pearl Harbor.” Our hosts are clearly unsettled by this remark.

We meet
hibakusha
, survivors of history’s first nuclear bombardment: men and women with ravaged memories, wounded souls. I ask an old man: “Where were you when …” “Not far away,” he says. Just far enough. “And you, Madam, where were you when …” She was home with her children, who were torn from her by a storm of ashes. I empathize with the survivors’ sadness. And their determination. All are committed to the struggle against atomic weapons. Like them, I feel the weight of the threat. There are too many rockets, missiles, and bombs stockpiled in too many arsenals. How is one to protect oneself against a military Chernobyl? How is one to prevent small nations from collecting weapons that the major powers should be destroying?

We leave this haunted city with the image of a shadow on a stone step. At the moment of the explosion, a woman was entering a bank. Only her shadow remains, imprinted on the stone. If by some accident we miscalculate, the same fate may be in store for us. And we may not even leave a shadow.

In December 1995, in cooperation with the prominent Japanese daily
Asahi Shimbun
, the foundation that bears my name organized an international colloquium in Hiroshima. Some fifty men and women, politicians and thinkers, gathered for three days of intense debate on the theme “The Future of Hope.”

The question remains open.

On March 5, 1985, I am invited to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is debating the ratification of the Genocide Treaty. Filled with apprehension, I think of the past and its shadows. Had there been such committees to inquire into the tragedy of European Jewry?

When I find out that Jesse Helms is chairing the session, my
instinct is to turn around and head back to New York, for this southern senator and I clearly have few ideas in common. As I wait for my turn, I notice that he hardly listens during the early testimonies. And when he introduces me to the committee I realize that he has no idea who I am. He reads a text evidently prepared by his aides: Everything in it sounds false, even my name. To my surprise, when I begin to speak, he actually seems to listen.

I plead for ratification, which means placing genocide outside the law. We owe it to our children. It is up to us to protect them from the dread that inhabits our nightmares. Yes, I know this treaty will not bring back our dead, I say; for them it is too late. But at least by signing we would be remembering. Not to remember would mean to betray them. And if we forget them, we too shall be forgotten.

Senator Helms remains silent for a long moment. He then thanks me in such flattering terms that the entire committee takes notice. Is it the first time he has heard a Jew expressing himself as a Jew? Or is it just a display of southern courtesy? After my testimony, Helms and other members of the committee including Christopher Dodd and Rudy Boschwitz put me through a friendly but intense interrogation. Helms: “Aren’t you afraid that, one day, the State of Israel will be accused of genocide of the Palestinians?” “I accept the challenge,” I tell him, “I have faith in Israel.” Amazingly, at the conclusion of my testimony, Helms interrupts the session to escort me to the door.

Buenos Aires, December 1996. A small gathering in a central square of the capital, opposite the courts. Dozens of men and women meet here every week, holding candles and photographs. They come together to demand justice, or simply to weep. These are the relatives of the Jewish victims of recent terrorist attacks. Expressing their sadness and anger, they come here week after week. They ask: “How is it possible that the assassins remain at large?” The prosecutor in charge of the cases claims to know their identity but to lack proof. President Carlos Menem speaks of logistical problems. He tries to explain, but is not convincing.

Does the writer need to go to the end of the world to testify when he does so in his writings? This is a question that preoccupies me as I struggle to find more time for my literary work. What am I to do, become a recluse? Sleep less? Limit the traveling? Learn to say no? Marion’s reaction to my good intentions? She laughs.

On Learning and Teaching

T
O QUOTE A TALMUDIC
sage (Rabbi Hanina, according to the Tractate of Taanit, or Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi, according to the Tractate of Malkot): “I have learned a great deal from my masters, but I have learned much more from my colleagues, and above all I have learned from my pupils.”

This statement reflects my own feelings about teaching.