Leafing through a New York Review of Books recently, I stumbled upon an open letter written by one Jewish intellectual to another, both of them clearly elderly at the time of writing. It was in 1988.

The writer was Arthur Hertzberg, and the addressee was Elie Wiesel. Reading the letter, I gathered that both had had a personal experience of the Holocaust in which some six million Jews perished at the hands of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen as they sought a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

Herzberg is reminding Wiesel of their first meeting some four decades earlier, and of how they had shared their varied though connected pasts linking them to the suffering of the Jewish people in World War II Europe.

Hertzberg’s immediate family had been spared the full force of the genocide because his parents had emigrated from Poland to America in the 1920s; nevertheless, his mother’s father and all her brothers and sisters were murdered in the gas chambers of Poland.

It would appear that the writer was carrying with him a heavy dose of survivor’s guilt, the feeling that somehow, via some undeserved good fortune, one escaped the fate that one’s likes suffered. It is clear therefore that Wiesel had had the misfortune of being a more direct witness of the Holocaust.

The letter was written at the time of the Intifada, the uprising of Palestinians against Israel’s occupation, and, of course, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails was the only means of resistance available to the youth thus involved. And, of course again, the Israeli military used tanks to counter the stones and Molotov cocktails.

Apparently Wiesel had written somewhere suggesting that these youngsters would do better if they stopped throwing stones and employed words instead, no doubt mindful of the preponderant power of thought and word when pitted against the sheer futility of pieces of rock and hand-propelled bombs. Hertzberg was reminding his old friend that he had neglected to tell Israelis to stop using tanks and artillery against unarmed civilians and try negotiation instead.

At issue was, and still is, whether those who support Israel’s right to existence – there are those who don’t – can afford to criticise Israel when it goes overboard without risking “splitting the Jewish community.” This obviously begs the question of whether support precludes critical appreciation of what those we support may choose to do at any given time, a sort of carte blanche.

It is dangerous, Hertzberg suggests and I agree, because a real danger inhabits any demarche that seeks to attribute any criticism of Israel to the soft-bellied weaklings among the Jewish Diaspora and the implacable enemies of Israel. This would mean, in effect, that no one should say a word about Israel unless that word is of unconditional support.

Hertzberg reminds us of the principle that in some cases “silence is interference,” signifying that in the face of certain realities no one has the right to keep quiet.

We have once again been treated to images of the carnage going on in Gaza, with the Israeli military carrying out wanton murders of unarmed women and children, and the arrogance of Binyamin Netanyahu as he seeks to lay the crime of these killings at the doorstep of Hamas.

Because Hamas was elected into power by the Palestinian people, what Netanyahu is really saying is that the Palestinians have brought these deaths upon themselves.

That is okay, because the world is used to this doublespeak out of Jerusalem. Another form of doublespeak we have to get used to is the one coming out of world leaders.

Such as the one the other day by British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who stated in Jerusalem recently that his country recognised Israel’s right to defend itself and its people, but was only concerned over the “ongoing heavy level” of violence.

In other words, tone down the killing, but otherwise well done. Silence is interference, sure, but doublespeak is noisy interference because it seeks to say something without saying it.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu will continue killing, and the glib talk will increase.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]