The Silence of the Intellectuals

Would Gore Vidal (who was called antisemitic in his day) remain muffled? What is happening in Gaza right now is genocide in real time. U.S.-produced weapons are massacring and blockading starving Palestinians. And yet it takes an Indian-British intellectual -- Pankaj Mishra -- to call this Israeli atrocity what it is. A defamation of the Holocaust, the moral authority that Israel has increasingly wielded as a weapon against those who are weaker.

In "The Shoah After Gaza," his remarkable essay that London Review of Books emblazoned on its current cover, Mishra writes: "Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built. But these universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist."

Mishra goes on to invoke Jewish intellectuals like Primo Levi and Jean Amery -- both survivors of Auschwitz -- who began to question how Israel's militaristic leaders were exploiting the Shoah to slaughter Arabs and steal their land. Both men committed suicide. But before he died, Amery -- a strong defender of Israel -- pleaded with Israel's leaders to "acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him."

Levi, for his part, also felt an emotional bond with Israel, but warned that the Jewish state "is rapidly falling into total isolation... We must choke off the impulses toward emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel's current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class."

By 1969, Mishra notes, the Jewish theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz -- who won the Israel Prize in 1993 -- was already decrying the "Nazification" of Israel.

It's the duty of U.S. intellectuals and artists to speak out against this crime against humanity. But, besides a few, they have allowed themselves to be silenced. Speak up now, or forever hold your tongue.