Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ and Gaza

The great writer only provides some of the answers to the historical conflict

President George W. Bush, joined by the Dalai Lama and Wiesel, October 17, 2007, to the ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., for the presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama — Public Domain

The Jewish People

I read Elie Wiesel’s timeless novella, Night, this past weekend. It is the definitive work of literature on the Holocaust and what happened on an individual level to the Jewish people. We all know the by-product of what happens in Wiesel’s biographical novella. The Jewish people, persecuted, oppressed, exploited, and targeted for extinction by Adolph Hitler, are scattered to the world. It is a horrific tragedy. Millions of them settled in historical Palestine wound up in other parts of the world. The Jewish people built a diaspora. Some came to Palestine, home of the Palestinians, and a land ruled once by the Ottoman Empire and then the British. Disaster ensued.

The Jewish people would eject 750,000 Palestinians from their historical homelands in 1948, and a violent and geopolitical conflict has raged ever since. It has reached an existential crisis now as we all know. The United States is complicit.

Israel & the personal struggle

When Wiesel’s famous novella (Night) was published, in 1960, Israel was 12 years old and the Six Day War had not happened yet. The current struggle was in its early stages.