Lebanon is mentioned in a few places in
The Complete Works of Primo Levi and this is one of them... He takes a moral/ethical stand more so than Elie Weisel? But after reading
Fateful Triangle by
Noam Chomsky it feels like
Primo Levi fell for some illusions also.. Maybe the "founding fathers" were not as free of "bloody arrogance" and avid for "equlibrium" as he had hoped...
.> Summer[1982]: Israel invades Lebanon. Massacres take place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. Levi takes a position in, among other places, an interview in La Repubblica on September 24.
.> .> There are two arguments that we Jews of the Diaspora can oppose to Begin, one moral and the other political. The moral argument is the following: not even a war justifies the bloody arrogance that Begin and his men have demonstrated. The political argument is equally clear: Israel 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. Help Israel find its European origins, or rather the equilibrium of its founding fathers, of Ben Gurion, of Golda Meir. Not that they all had clean hands, but who of us does? ^43
^43.Giampaolo Pansa, “Io Primo Levi, chiedo le dimissioni di Begin,” in Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni. In English, “Primo Levi: Begin Should Go,” in The Voice of Memory.
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