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Friday, February 15, 1985
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THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
BROTHE
KEEPERS
Ethiopian Jews and
the meaning of Zionism.
BY LEON WIESELTIER
There is no greater obligation than the re-
demption of captives, for the captive is like
the hungry and the thirsty and the naked,
and stands in danger for his life.
—Maimonides, Laws of Gifts to the P.or,
VIII, 10
Leon Wieseltier is Literary Editor of The
possibility of action seems always remote.
Instead there is talk—fine talk, pained
talk, true talk, endless talk, most of it in
the international institutions of talk And
all of it—the bureaucrats' position papers
and the writers' historiosophical reflec-
tions on the limits of_human powers—
amounts to a patience with suffering. And
so we stand prepared for the next horror,
prepared, that is, for its success and our
failure; we stand ready with our guilt
before the fact or after the fact, ready
with our words. There is something a lit-
tle sickening about this talent for sorrow.
For this reason Operation Moses con-
stitutes a kind of moral and political
epiphany. The Israeli airlift of the. Jews of
Ethiopia has brilliantly exposed the sorry
state of contemporary humanitarianism,
and embarrassed it. And it has exposed
and embarrassed some of the world's
favorite lies, which are its lies about
Zionism and the meaning of the Jewish
state. Operation Moses is an essential
event, in that it discloses essences: the
essence of the obligation to assist, and the
essence of the national movement of the
Jewish people.
First the facts. There are now 12,500
Ethiopian Jews in During the past
two months 7,500 of them arrived on 35
flights from Europe, to which they had
been brought from Sudan, to which they
had trekked on foot through the wilder-
New Republic..
C'ontinued on Page 26
The thwarting of conscience is an old
story, but the twentieth century has
thwarted it especially keenly. It has pro=
vided instruments of rescue and relief
without precedent; but the masses of the
suffering, whose torments, too, are
without precedent, are rarely rescued and
relieved.. Technology has served the evil
more efficiently than the good. Inhumani-
ty has been modernized; humanity less so.
Thus we experience a historic frustration.
By now the lament is familiar; there exists
already a tradition of lament. "Our sense
of impotence," William Shawcross wrote
in his study of the inadequacy of the
world's mercy for Cambodia, "seems to
grow in direct proportion to the spread of
our knowledge." He proceeded to docu-
ment the extent to which the wretched
Cambodians were trapped between the in-
difference of public opinion and the in-
terest of certain states in the political uses
of disaster. Indeed, after Cambodia, after
Biafra, after Auschwitz, the helplessness
of the bystander has become as much a
commonplace of the benevolent conscious-
ness as the helplessness of the victim. The
Marnam Cramer Ring