Answer:
Elie Wiesel’s searing prose and testimonial eloquence made him a living symbol of the Holocaust that he survived and the moral obligation to never forget what happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II. As he passes away, most of the world will simply remember him as a beacon of hope that decency and humanity can survive and overcome the darkest abuses people are capable of at their worst.
For many Arabs, though, the legacy of their encounter with Wiesel is far more complicated. Tribal suspicions, on both sides, stemming from the Arab-Israeli conflict, trumped the very humanitarian impulses Wiesel sought to exemplify.
Wiesel and the Arabs viewed each other across an impassable moat of mistrust and ultimately exclusionary group identification. Wiesel did not, and could not, ever really speak critically of Israel, which he saw as the embodiment of the Jewish people, and frequently expressed a refusal to criticize Israel. He did not see himself as a nationalist, but his identification with Israel was couched so strongly in ethnic and religious terms that one is obliged to conclude he was mistaken about this. The Arab resistance, and in some cases aversion, to the symbolic resonance attributed to Wiesel stems from an equally nationalistic affect.