The fraught relationship between Wiesel and his Arab contemporaries is characterized by a disheartening lack of compassion in the context of a conflict that often feels profoundly existential. Both Wiesel and his Arab detractors and antagonists all too often bought wholesale into tribal narratives, patterns of psychic and historical exclusion, and implicit, or even explicit, assertions of priority or privilege over their national and tribal rival.
This does not, or at least should not, undermine, tarnish or invalidate Wiesel’s humanist legacy, given the singular enormity of the Holocaust. It’s unreasonable to expect Wiesel, or his Palestinian counterparts for that matter, to have “risen above” the ethnic and nationalistic identifications that define the modern era.
From: Elie Wiesel’s Moral Imagination Never Reached Palestine | Foreign Policy
