Ten years ago, my father left us.
I stand with you where the names of our people are kept, so they will not be lost. And I speak to you today so that my father’s voice will not be lost.
Last week, Rahm Emanuel stood in Tel Aviv and told Israel it has become a pariah, that it has lost the world. That – in his words – “you cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight.”
Emanuel is embarrassed by Israel. He is proud of that embarrassment. He should be ashamed.
American Jews and Israeli Jews are family. Have you ever had a family member who embarrassed you? Maybe you don’t introduce them to your friends. But do you want them consumed by their enemies?
Can you imagine handing those enemies ammunition – telling your own family it is their fault their enemies want to destroy them? Then be embarrassed by yourself, not by them.
My father could never understand the Jews of America who, in the 1940s, kept celebrating their weddings and bar mitzvahs while Europe’s Jews were led to the flames. Were they embarrassed by their weak European cousins?
Today, too many American Jews are embarrassed by the opposite: that Israel is strong enough to defend Jews under attack.
Are some genuinely troubled by the deaths of Gazan civilians? It’s understandable. Somewhere between 3% and 5% of Gaza’s civilians have died since October 7. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy.
But do you know where else that same share of civilians – 3% to 5% – died in a war that should never have been started? Among the civilians of Nazi Germany, the people who started it.
My father offered consolation to the children of the Nazis. In his address to the German parliament, he said: the children of killers are not killers, but children. He could say that only because the evil their fathers built had been defeated. Grace was the reward of a victory – not a substitute for one.
Emanuel knows all this. He knows that Hamas vowed it would repeat October 7 again and again.
In 2009, former US president Barack Obama visited Buchenwald, from which my father was liberated, and asked him to speak. My father warned that the world had not learned its lessons – that its approval could never be counted on. My father’s moral vision refutes Emanuel’s.
The world’s approval was never the measure of a Jew’s right to live. To make it our test is to unlearn Buchenwald.
Many might have made that mistake in innocence, but Emanuel is not one of them. As the president’s chief of staff, he organized that visit and heard that speech.
Asking the difficult questions
My father told his hard truths to the strong, on behalf of the weak. Rahm scolded a nation of ten million from the safety of an American passport, knowing his audience back home would applaud a Jew scolding the Jewish state.
He says we should punish settlers who commit violence. Of course I condemn them, too. But he widens the circle fast – to every bank and every construction company that finances a settlement in Judea and Samaria.
There is a question underneath it we are not supposed to ask. Look at the map. Iraq – a Jewish community 26 centuries old – all but gone. Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen – gone. Over 850,000 Jews were driven out, and an entire region was made Judenrein.
Israel, west of the Green Line, is one-fifth Arab – with Arab towns, mixed cities, and Arab members of parliament. The demand is that Judea and Samaria become one more place with no Jews left in it: the final piece, the map completed. Why does the reflex run only one way?
Is a Jewish presence there a historic claim or a security buffer? Is it a bargaining chip or an obstacle to peace? These are not America’s questions to settle. They belong to the Israeli people, who send their sons and daughters to defend Jewish lives and far too often bury them for it. They have earned the right to decide.
If Emanuel wants problems to solve, let him answer the questions plaguing America. We lurch between denying that migrants are human and denying that a country needs a border. American Jews hide the symbols of their faith, and have been murdered on our own streets by killers who called it anti-Zionism.
Our primaries are captured by extremists, leaving us the terrible choice between those who would abolish the police, and those who shrug when the state’s own armed agents shoot citizens dead in the street.
Those questions are hard. It is easier to take shots at Israel.
Emanuel said we cannot fight a world unconvinced of our right to fight. But our right was never the world’s to grant. It did not come from the Holocaust, or from the world’s guilt. And it does not wait on the world’s permission.
I am not a child of the Holocaust. I am the grandchild of Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel, who raised my father with a love of learning, a yearning for Jerusalem, and the moral grounding that made him, in Obama’s words, the conscience of the world.
And Israel is not a child of the Holocaust. Its citizens are the grandchildren of Theodor Herzl, a man who looked at a world that offered Jews nothing but second-class citizenship and decided we deserve the same rights as everyone else. Not by permission. By right.
The Jewish people do not wait on the world’s belief. For over 3,000 years, we have made profound contributions to the world through values, knowledge, and culture. We refuse to exist conditionally on the world’s approval. We hope that the world will accept our existence someday, but in the meantime we resolve to live.
My father carried both that hope and that resolve until the day he died. So let the last embarrassment be the world’s – and never, ever ours.
Thank you.
The writer is the chairman of the Elie Wiesel Foundation. He is the only son of Marion and Elie Wiesel.