Dawn takes place in British-ruled Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, when a group of young Holocaust survivors are attempting to overthrow British rule in order to establish a safe Jewish homeland. These freedom fighters are referred to simply as “the Movement.” In the story, the Movement has begun exacting revenge for the British government’s execution of Jewish soldiers. In retaliation for the execution of a fighter named David ben Moshe, the Jewish soldiers plan to execute an English captain named John Dawson. Elisha, an 18-year-old, is the soldier ordered to carry out the execution at dawn. Haunted by memories of the concentration camps, Elisha accepts the justifications that more seasoned fighters give him for committing this act of murder, yet he also searches in vain for assurance that the Movement’s actions have an enduring purpose: can death and killing really be the means to a just end? By exploring Elisha’s personal struggle to find meaning in terroristic actions like Dawson’s execution, Wiesel suggests that even “justified” violence only perpetuates suffering and revenge and therefore can’t secure peace and justice.
The terrorists justify their actions on the basis of having been terrorized in the past. In their efforts to secure a new Jewish homeland, the Movement accepts the label of terrorist—their “goal was simply to get the English out; the method, intimidation, terror, and sudden death.” In the Movement fighters’ minds, this method is justifiable because of what they’ve suffered in the past. The Jewish Holocaust survivors, who are used to being terrorized, are now the terrorizers. Gad, the soldier who recruits Elisha to the Movement, tells him that the Jewish freedom fighters strike fear into the hearts of the British occupiers of Palestine: “The Holy Land has become, for [the British], a land of fear. They don't dare walk out on the streets at night […] or stroke the head of a child for fear that he may throw a hand grenade in their face. They dare neither to speak nor to be silent. They are afraid." The Movement inflicts fear—fear of doing ordinary things like walking down the street or even speaking—equivalent to the fear that’s been inflicted on them in the recent past, even though the British weren’t responsible for that.
Despite the lack of direct British culpability, the fighters believe that the ends justify the means. Gad tells Elisha, “If we must become more unjust and inhuman than those who have been unjust and inhuman to us, then we shall do so. We don't like to be bearers of death; heretofore we've chosen to be victims rather than executioners. The commandment Thou shalt not kill was given from the summit of one of the mountains here in Palestine, and we were the only ones to obey it. But that's all over […] We shall kill in order that once more we may be men…” Gad believes that although Jews do not wish to cause death and are even commanded not to, they will now break the commandment as everyone else has done, in order to secure the freedom to live a peaceful human life. At the time, Elisha accepts Gad’s reasoning.
But when Elisha is forced to execute a British soldier in simple retaliation, Elisha is no longer satisfied with the justifications he previously accepted, and he questions whether terror can really achieve a peaceful goal. The night before the execution, Ilana, the Movement’s radio broadcaster, is the only comrade who will talk openly with Elisha about whether terroristic actions are truly justifiable. She tells Elisha, “We say that ours is a holy war […] that we're struggling against something and for something, against the English and for an independent Palestine. […] But these are words; as such they serve only to give meaning to our actions. And our actions, seen in their true and primitive light, have the odor and color of blood.” Ilana confirms what Elisha has begun to suspect: that no matter what justifications the fighters use to describe their actions, that doesn’t change the cold-blooded nature of their actions.
Later, when trying to offer Dawson a justification for killing him, Elisha finds that his words fall flat. Elisha initially claims that the Jewish people’s “tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate. Otherwise, John Dawson, our future will only be an extension of the past[.]” In other words, hatred is merely a tool that’s necessary to secure a new future for his people.
But, moments later, when Dawson presses Elisha as to why he hates him, Elisha admits that he tries to hate “in order to give my action a meaning which may somehow transcend it." In the end, Ilana’s warning unsettles Elisha’s certainty, forcing him to admit that, underneath his words, his actions might not be justifiable and might not achieve the meaning which the freedom fighters have attributed to them.
Elisha’s struggle with executing Dawson suggests that, both in his individual case and in the Movement more generally, fighters seek justifications for actions that cannot ultimately be justified. No matter what words are used or how just their reasoning might appear, Wiesel argues, the fighters cannot redeem their own suffering or secure peace by committing further violence.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Revenge, Terrorism, and War ThemeTracker
Revenge, Terrorism, and War Quotes in Dawn
I did not know the man. To my eyes he had no face; he did not even exist, for I knew nothing about him. I did not know whether he scratched his nose when he ate, whether he talked or kept quiet when he was making love, whether he gloried in his hate, whether he betrayed his wife or his God or his own future. All I knew was that he was an Englishman and my enemy. The two terms were synonymous.
The situation was grave. The Zionist leaders recommended prudence; they got in touch with the Old Man and begged him, for the sake of the nation, not to go too far: there was talk of vengeance, of a pogrom, and this meant that innocent men and women would have to pay.
The Old Man answered: If David ben Moshe is hanged, John Dawson must die. If the Movement were to give in the English would score a triumph. They would take it for a sign of weakness and impotence on our part, as if we were saying to them: Go ahead and hang all the young Jews who are holding out against you. No, the Movement cannot give in. Violence is the only language the English can understand.
In the late 1940s, following the horrors of the Holocaust, the Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine is filled with conflict. Though Zionists agree on the importance of creating an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine, they disagree on methods for establishing that homeland. In Dawn, the “Old Man”—the anonymous leader of the radical “Movement”—resorts to terrorist tactics like reprisals. This means that if the British execute a Jewish fighter, then the Movement will respond by executing a British soldier in turn. From the Movement’s perspective, the Jewish people have submitted to violence at others’ hands for far too long; if there is any hope for establishing an independent nation, then they must now treat others as they have been treated throughout history. Though other Zionists argue that such actions will invite indiscriminate violence, the Old Man maintains that anything less will keep the Jewish people in the same persecuted position they’ve occupied for centuries. Elisha soon finds himself in the middle of this tension as the Old Man calls upon him to carry out the execution.
"You want my future?" I asked. "What will you do with it?"
He smiled again, but in a cold, distant manner as one who possesses a power over men. "I'll make it into an outcry," he said, and there was a strange light in his dark eyes. "An outcry first of despair and then of hope. And finally a shout of triumph."
Gad's stories were utterly fascinating. I saw in him a prince of Jewish history, a legendary messenger sent by fate to awaken my imagination, to tell the people whose past was now their religion: Come, come; the future is waiting for you with open arms. From now on you will no longer be humiliated, persecuted, or even pitied. You will not be strangers encamped in an age and a place that are not yours. Come, brothers, come!
We don't like to be bearers of death; heretofore we've chosen to be victims rather than executioners. The commandment Thou shalt not kill was given from the summit of one of the mountains here in Palestine, and we were the only ones to obey it. But that's all over; we must be like everybody else. Murder will be not our profession but our duty. In the days and weeks and months to come you will have only one purpose: to kill those who have made us killers. We shall kill in order that once more we may be men[.]
I remembered how the grizzled master had explained the sixth commandment to me. Why has a man no right to commit murder? Because in so doing he takes upon himself the function of God. And this must not be done too easily. Well, I said to myself, if in order to change the course of our history we have to become God, we shall become Him. How easy that is we shall see. No, it was not easy.
When Elisha trains to become a terrorist, he doesn’t just discover new ideas about what it means to live in Zion (the Holy Land). He also discovers new interpretations of the religious teachings on which he was raised. Here he explains how his childhood mentor, a rabbi known as the grizzled master, taught him to understand the sixth of the Ten Commandments, the one which prohibits killing. The grizzled master explains that life and death are in God’s hands, so killing someone means wrongly playing the role of God. As Elisha becomes indoctrinated into the Movement’s ideas, however, he looks at the sixth commandment in a new way—accepting that in order to secure a peaceful future, the Jewish people have a responsibility to “become God,” even if that includes killing. If they don’t do this, he reasons, they will continue to be at the mercy of history and may eventually cease to exist as a people. Dawn as a whole is the story of Elisha learning just how difficult it is to live out such an idea.
"But it's all quite simple," he exclaimed. "We are here to be present at the execution. We want to see you carry it out. We want to see you turn into a murderer. That's natural enough, isn't it?" […]
I was beginning to understand. An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.
"We say that ours is a holy war," she went on, "that we're struggling against something and for something, against the English and for an independent Palestine. That's what we say. But these are words; as such they serve only to give meaning to our actions. And our actions, seen in their true and primitive light, have the odor and color of blood.”
Though female characters play a relatively small role in the novel, their role is important in that these characters—especially Catherine and, here, Ilana—help Elisha talk through his struggles more than any male characters do. Often, these women raise and grapple with ethical questions more directly than the story’s central characters do. Perhaps because she isn’t directly involved in terrorist operations (she’s the voice of their radio broadcast), Ilana serves as an honest, approachable confidant for Elisha as he faces the reality of the execution he must carry out within hours.
Ilana acknowledges that the Movement has a specific aim which they believe to be “holy”—the establishment of a free Jewish nation. Ilana doesn’t speak for or against this idea directly. However, she draws a distinction between the actions that the Movement fighters carry out and the words with which they interpret those actions. She openly acknowledges what Elisha has been thinking—that, when the Movement’s actions are separated from their justifications, their violent, murderous nature becomes clear. Ilana’s articulation of the ethical dilemma stays with Elisha. Later, when Elisha faces John Dawson, he tells Dawson that he’s trying to hate him in order to give meaning to the act of shooting him.
There are not a thousand ways of being a killer; either a man is one or he isn't. He can't say I'll kill only ten or only twenty-six men; I'll kill for only five minutes or a single day. He who has killed one man alone is a killer for life. He may choose another occupation, hide himself under another identity but the executioner or at least the executioner's mask will be always with him. There lies the problem: in the influence of the backdrop of the play upon the actor. War had made me an executioner, and an executioner I would remain even after the backdrop had changed, when I was acting in another play upon a different stage.
John Dawson shook his head and said in an infinitely sad voice: "You hate me, don't you?"
[…]
I certainly wanted to hate him. That was partly why I had come to engage him in conversation before I killed him. It was absurd reasoning on my part, but the fact is that while we were talking I hoped to find in him, or in myself, something that would give rise to hate. A man hates his enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: This fellow, my enemy, has made me capable of hate. I hate him not because he's my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate.
Armies and governments the world over have a definite technique for provoking hate. By speeches and films and other kinds of propaganda they create an image of the enemy in which he is the incarnation of evil, the symbol of suffering, the fountainhead of the cruelty and injustice of all times.
[…] All enemies are equal, I said. Each one is responsible for the crimes committed by the others. They have different faces, but they all have the same hands, the hands that cut my friends' tongues and fingers. As I went down the stairs I was sure that I would meet the man who had condemned David ben Moshe to death, the man who had killed my parents, the man who had come between me and the man I had wanted to become, and who was now ready to kill the man in me. I felt quite certain that I would hate him.
Without hate, everything that my comrades and I were doing would be done in vain. Without hate we could not hope to obtain victory. Why do I try to hate you, John Dawson? Because my people have never known how to hate. Their tragedy, throughout the centuries, has stemmed from their inability to hate those who have humiliated and from time to time exterminated them. Now our only chance lies in hating you, in learning the necessity and the art of hate. Otherwise, John Dawson, our future will only be an extension of the past, and the Messiah will wait indefinitely for his deliverance.
The night lifted, leaving behind it a grayish light the color of stagnant water. Soon there was only a tattered fragment of darkness, hanging in midair, the other side of the window. Fear caught my throat. The tattered fragment of darkness had a face. Looking at it, I understood the reason for my fear. The face was my own.
