chapter five
Israeli Lessons
Yad Vashem, Israel’s commemorative and research institution for the Holocaust, or Shoah as it is known in Hebrew, is a place of paradox. A national memorial, it calls to mind the greatest of horrors; but it is a peaceful place, often sun-drenched, blending into a carefully landscaped mountaintop that seems about as far from sites of mass murder as one could imagine. Built on forty-five acres atop a ridge on the western hills of Jerusalem, more than 2,500 feet above sea level and with spectacular views of the valley below, Yad Vashem is a major cluster of buildings, the size of a small university campus, much of it built or clad in a creamy white or gold-coloured Jerusalem stone and including imposing memorials, an impressive and newly renovated museum, an art museum, synagogue, decorative garden, administrative and academic offices, and places for public gatherings of all sorts, plus quiet walkways that link one place to another. Its postal address is Har Hazikaron, the Hill of Remembrance. Some fifteen acres have been set aside for distinctive landscaping, and stones and trees commemorating those the institution designates the Righteous among the Nations – gentiles who helped protect Jews from their oppressors during the Holocaust. Its name is taken from a verse in the Book of Isaiah, “Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name [in Hebrew, yad vashem] better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off,” conveying the idea of a repository of memories of the nameless victims of the Holocaust. When Yad Vashem was established as the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in 1953 by a law of the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, the statute solemnly defined its mandate as being “to establish memorial projects at its own initiative and under its own management, to gather, study and publish testimony about the Holocaust; and to impart its lessons to the people.” Lessons, then, were there at the institution’s creation, as much a part of the institution as its Jerusalem stone.
Today, Yad Vashem is understood to be at the heart of Israel’s self-definition. As a matter of course, distinguished visitors from abroad come there soon after they arrive in the country – just as they were once taken, in the early days of the Jewish state, to visit a kibbutz or some other modern-day achievement of which the country was rightfully proud. Speeches of welcome and visitors’ reactions have hardened into a standard pattern. As the Israeli intellectual Bernard Avishai puts it, these orations “must include a syllogism in which the ‘Holocaust’ forms the first part and ‘the Jewish state’ the second.” What is being intoned, sometimes explicitly, are oft-alluded-to lessons.
Tellingly, there has never been a consensus about how these should be understood. The earliest Holocaust researchers associated with Yad Vashem were clearly divided over priorities and directions. As charted by an Israeli scholar, Boaz Cohen, some survivor-intellectuals, mainly from Poland and Lithuania, looked far afield for implications, posing big questions concerning the nature of the Jewish catastrophe for the Jewish people and the European civilization of which they had been a part. Their starting point, Cohen notes, was “the concept of the people as an organic entity with its own existence, and an emphasis on social aspects.” Those who came from the young Israeli academic world centred on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, however, drawing on German historical traditions, took a much more scholarly approach and sought to integrate the Holocaust into the great stream of Jewish history written by historians. Emphases differed. But as the debates persisted, one thing was clear: for both groups, Holocaust wounds were fresh and seeped into each interpretation.
A quest for deeper significance that mingled with the mourning process was therefore unavoidable. Moreover, it was practically impossible for these pioneers of Holocaust inquiry to separate the study of what the Jews had been through from the reality of a new and still beleaguered Jewish state fresh from its War of Independence and from the Zionist world view that was so actively shaping the national ethos. It is not by accident that Yad Vashem is adjacent to Israel’s main military cemetery. Nearby is the tomb of Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, and a memorial to Jewish civilian victims of terrorist attacks going back to 1851. To the formidable Ben-Zion Dinur, Zionist, politician, and Hebrew University historian, Israeli minister of education from 1951 to 1955 and the first chairman of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust reinforced the centrality of Israel for the Jewish people. “The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust,” declared Dinur, is that “the Diaspora is not only a disaster and a catastrophe, but also a sin and a transgression: ‘Diaspora’ and ‘destruction’ are not two separate categories; rather, ‘Diaspora’ includes ‘destruction.’” It was for Yad Vashem, its founders agreed, to conduct the research necessary to clarify these lessons and to communicate them to the wider public. This was a “sacred obligation,” as the survivor-historian Joseph Kermish put it, supremely important because scholarship would be the antidote to “emotions and prejudices” that infused the subject. The truth about the recent past would shape the future of the Jewish people. The events of the Holocaust, Kermish added, “should … serve as a silent admonition and warning that we must draw national conclusions for future generations.” Popular literature, Kermish and his colleagues felt, was simply not up to this task.
Such were the views of scholars and theorists who pondered Yad Vashem’s role in formulating the lessons of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, harder men, sometimes more practical leaders, and it must also be said those for whom issues of the Holocaust still cried out for resolution, had their own things to say. For Ben Gurion, the founding father of his country, the main challenge was putting the new state on a secure footing – a task that required attention to long-range goals and strategic alliances, a pragmatic search for allies, cooperation with the new German state in Europe, and an unwillingness to be mired in recriminations over the past, whether at home or abroad. Understandably, this suggested an avoidance of the Holocaust, a cauldron of grief, anger, and unresolved questions. But many felt otherwise. They had scores to settle – with Germany, principally; with the British, charged with closing the gates of Palestine while the Nazis rampaged in Europe and inhibiting the growth of the Jewish state; with states deemed to have collaborated in the Final Solution or to have refused calls for rescue; and also with Jews who were deemed to have escaped proper retribution for what they had done or not done during the Holocaust. In the latter view, such betrayers even included leaders of the Palestinian Jewish community during the dark years, who were charged with “Palestinocentrism,” that is, focusing exclusively on the building of the Jewish homeland rather than confronting the British more aggressively or prioritizing the rescue of Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe; or those who had allegedly collaborated with the Nazi enemy, either through participating in the Jewish Councils, or Judenräte, or the Nazi-imposed Jewish police, or as Kapos, assisting in the management of concentration or death camps; or those who negotiated with the Nazis, ostensibly to save Jews, but in reality, according to those who pursued this line, to enrich and empower themselves and to save their associates, family members, and a privileged elite.
Issues relating to the Jews’ wartime ordeal burst into postwar public attention from time to time – among the most spectacular being the bitter, protracted debates in the early 1950s over the Israeli government’s eventually successful efforts to conclude a Holocaust reparations agreement with German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Notwithstanding the difficult negotiations and the reluctance of many Israelis to accept negotiations with the Germans, Ben Gurion managed to carry the day, famously describing his policy with a biblical verse, “Let not the murderers of our people also be their inheritors.” Angry opponents, led by Menachem Begin, then leader of the right-wing Herut Party, construed the agreement as tantamount to a pardon of Germany for the murder of European Jews. Other clashes centred on accusations of alleged wartime Jewish misbehaviour, sometimes against individuals accused of having been accomplices of the Germans and committing various offences during the war. The most serious was the affair of Rudolf Kastner, in the middle of the decade, when that Hungarian Zionist leader, closely associated with the ruling Labour Party, brought a libel suit against an angry polemicist, Malkiel Grunewald, who had accused him, and by implication the Labour establishment, of having collaborated with the Nazis during the war and betraying Jewish victims. Kastner’s failure to secure the conviction of his tormenter, his subsequent assassination in 1957, and the High Court’s eventual reversal of the decision against him in the libel action were all noisy, bitter public clashes. Israel in the 1950s was a bustling, generally forward-looking place, absorbing many tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors and constructing the institutions of the fledgling state, but it was also fertile soil for bitter recrimination, the weaving of conspiracy theories about what was done and what was not done and what ought to have been done during the war, and tempestuous polemics over what the Holocaust taught, how people should think about it, and what should be done about those who had yet to be judged.
Hanna Yablonka, the Israeli historian of the Eichmann trial, notes contrasting reactions within the country in May, 1960, when Ben Gurion announced to the Knesset that Adolf Eichmann, “who was responsible, together with the Nazi leaders, for what they called ‘the final solution of the Jewish problem’ in other words – the annihilation of six million of Europe’s Jews,” had been captured and brought to Israel for trial. In the general public, there was pandemonium – and as often with great historic events, Israelis remember to this day where they were when they heard the news. “Shock, pride, satisfaction, verbal letting off of steam, anticipation, and the feeling that justice should be carried out under the law” – all these strong reactions jostled together. Among Holocaust survivors, however, numbering some half a million and constituting one-quarter of the country’s entire population, Yablonka continues, responses were more sombre, subdued, and complicated. Their satisfaction at the news, she summarizes, included “a large measure of sadness, pain, and frustration.”
The ambivalence among so many survivors was due to their often disheartening experience of their reception in Israel. For the truth was that, notwithstanding the Yishuv’s and then Israel’s eager acceptance of so many victims of the Holocaust during the postwar period and the War of Independence, survivors had not in general had an easy time in the new Jewish state. The new country found it difficult to fit them into the new national narrative. In her book on these issues, historian Idith Zertal refers to the period as one of “buried memory.” For the most part, the stories of Holocaust survivors remained discreetly out of the national limelight. As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarizes, “The Holocaust came to be seen as a Jewish defeat. Its victims were censured for having let the Nazis murder them without fighting for their lives or at least for the right to ‘die with honor.’ This attitude in time became a sort of psychological and political ghost that haunted the State of Israel – reflecting scorn and shame, hubris and dread, injustice and folly.” In the Hebrew slang of the day, Holocaust survivors were sometimes called sabonim, which some say refers to the soap that was believed (mistakenly, it turned out) to have been fabricated from Jewish corpses by the Germans, and which others say derives from a colloquial Hebrew term for weaklings – in either case, a term of cruel deprecation. In this atmosphere, Holocaust remembrance was mainly consigned to religious groups. Fanfare was avoided. The country’s attention to survivors, for the most part, went to Holocaust heroes – leaders of ghetto uprisings and partisan formations, understood as having engaged in a common struggle with those who had battled for a Jewish state in Palestine. Survivors were not part of the national pantheon.
Eichmann’s abduction in Argentina and his dispatch to Israel, his trial and eventual execution brought the country’s conception of the wartime catastrophe to an entirely different level, capturing the attention of Israelis as no other domestic public event, before or since. The impact upon the young country was profound. Certainly the Israeli leadership was conscious of the spectacle’s importance – although when the affair began few could have predicted just how profound its impact was going to be. What conclusions Israelis drew from it, however – and what lessons it promoted – were of course another matter, and historians debate these matters to this very day.
Practically minded, the Israeli prime minister riveted upon the consolidation of the thirteen-year-old Jewish state. Ben Gurion had not been among those who had dwelt upon Holocaust themes. Yehiam Weitz, one of the students of this subject, notes that the prime minister had been very little involved in the Kastner affair or other Holocaust-related issues of the 1950s. It is unclear that Ben Gurion had any idea, when Eichmann was captured, that his trial would constitute an important turning point in the national consciousness of his countrymen. Much has been written about Ben Gurion’s declared goals for the Eichmann trial and his eagerness to harness it to national objectives. Hannah Arendt embraced this view, seeing the Israeli prime minister as the moving force behind bringing Eichmann to Jerusalem and what she called “the invisible stage manager of the proceedings” against him. Arendt certainly exaggerated, and in fact the Israeli prime minister was very little preoccupied with the details of the case. But Ben Gurion did interfere in the trial. In what was a highly irregular procedure to say the least, the Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner submitted his opening speech to the prime minister beforehand. Ben Gurion demanded several changes related to the country’s relationship with West Germany, all of which were intended to distinguish between ordinary Germans and the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The Israeli prime minister wanted the word “Nazi” added to the word “Germany” to assert the distance of Nazism from the German people; he wanted Hausner to omit a claim that Nazism was inevitable in Germany; and he wanted to emphasize the role of Hitler in German criminality rather than that of ordinary citizens. All of these points were intended to facilitate Israel’s domestically controversial engagement with the new German state – even though Israel and West Germany had no diplomatic relations at this point. And so there was no little irony and no little concern with lessons. “Here was a leader dictating the historiography of his people,” Segev observes – quite remarkable for a prime minister who had so assiduously avoided Holocaust issues in the preceding period.
Ben Gurion’s central preoccupation was state building. As Israel’s veteran Zionist and most powerful political founder saw it, the purpose of the trial was to solidify Israel’s standing at home and abroad. The trial, he told the New York Times, would “make the details of his case known to the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the holocaust” (sic). These facts, which he implied constituted a “lesson” in themselves, were unashamedly nationalist and related to Israel’s future generation rather than to settling the scores with Germany or the Second World War. “It is necessary that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish people. We want them to know the most tragic facts in our history, the most tragic facts in world history. I don’t care whether they want to know them. They should be taught the lesson that Jews are not sheep to be slaughtered but a people who can hit back – as Jews did in the War of Independence.”
Ben Gurion also wanted to secure international recognition of the Jewish state and to have it accepted globally as “the heir of the murdered Six Million, the only heir,” as he wrote to Joseph Proskauer of the American Jewish Committee. Beyond this, the obligation to “remember” extended to the world at large. Pointedly, he wanted the world to be ashamed. And this had everything to do with Israel and its place in the international community.
We want to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happened to be Jews, and one million babies, because they happened to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis. We ask the nations not to forget it. We want the nations of the world to know that there was an intention to exterminate a people. That intention had its roots in anti-Semitism. They should know that anti-Semitism is dangerous, and they should be ashamed of it. I believe that through this trial all thinking people will come to realize that in our day the gas chamber and the soap factory are what anti-Semitism may lead to. And they will do what they can about it.
Linked with these basic objectives was Ben Gurion’s case for Israeli jurisdiction – something sharply questioned internationally because of Eichmann’s kidnapping by Israeli agents in Argentina and their flying him to Israel for trial. In the lead-up to the proceedings, Ben Gurion was outspoken in justifying Israel’s judicial standing. For the prime minister it was essential that the country’s own legal institutions take charge of prosecuting a crime against the murdered millions, and by implication the Jews worldwide. “The Holocaust that the Nazis brought down upon the Jewish people is … a unique and unparalleled affair, an intentional attempt to totally exterminate all the Jewish people in the world,” he said. “It is the duty of the State of Israel, the only sovereign authority of the Jews, to tell in the greatest detail all there is to know about its scope and dreadfulness, without disregarding the other crimes against humanity of the Nazi regime, not however as one of the items of these crimes, but as a unique crime that has no parallel in the history of mankind.” “In my opinion, the punishment is not important,” he told a cabinet meeting. “There is [no] punishment for the murder of 6,000,000 Jews. But what we want to do is to tell the whole story before the Jewish people, because the Jewish case has not been recounted, not even in the Nuremberg Trials.”
While preoccupied with international objectives, Ben Gurion’s strategy also had its internal Jewish political context. This involved his bitter quarrel with the president of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Goldmann, over the nature of the trial. Suave and sophisticated, Goldmann was an imposing personality who made a powerful case for Diaspora Jewish interests as a counterpoise to those of Israel and his great rival, the Israeli prime minister. Countering Ben Gurion, Goldmann spoke up very shortly after Eichmann’s capture, arguing that, while the accused should be brought before an Israeli judge, the court should be enlarged by other judges, coming from other countries whose citizens had been murdered. Ben Gurion responded furiously, condemning this proposal as an affront not only to the Jewish state but also to Jewish honour. The prime minister’s response was as blunt as his history, notes Tom Segev. In a nutshell, “the Holocaust happened because the Jews did not live in their own country.” At a heated meeting, Ben Gurion famously accused Goldmann of being “neither an Israeli nor an American, but a wandering Jew.”
Ben Gurion had little time for historical lessons. Unlike his opponents, he wasted no effort building analogies. “The world has changed since 1945,” he wrote in response to an inquiry. “The ruling forces in the world are not the same. We cannot bring back the six million, who were slaughtered and burnt in Europe, but in the Middle East, in Egypt and Syria, the Nazi disciples wish to destroy Israel – and this is the greatest danger now facing us, and we must withstand it.”
When the trial opened on the morning of April 18, 1961, the prosecution had its strategy in place: it would be the survivor-witnesses, not the lawyers, who would communicate what the Holocaust was all about. In a moving presentation of the prosecution’s case, Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner began with a lengthy address that spanned the history of the Holocaust and Eichmann’s purported role in it. Clad in a simple black robe, occasionally pointing at the accused in a protective glass booth, he addressed the court – “Judges of Israel,” he called them – in a voice that had biblical resonance.
When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: “I accuse.” For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman and in their name I will unfold the awesome indictment.
In the jurist Lawrence Douglas’s acute analysis of the prosecution’s case, this was Hausner’s way to “teach history lessons,” both to the Israelis and to the world. “Hausner treated the Nazis’ central crime as both the act of physical annihilation and the more profound attempt to erase memory itself – both of the cultural life of a people and the crimes of the final solution. The act of creating an opportunity for the public sharing of the narratives of the survivors, the proxies of the dead, was itself a way of doing justice.” In contrast to the trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg fifteen years before, the case against Eichmann did not rest upon documents, which had been the American strategy, but rather upon scores of survivors who gave detailed and sometimes anguished accounts of what they had endured.
Historians have noted that Ben Gurion’s appreciation of the impact of the trial on the Israeli public actually grew during the lengthy preparation of the trial and the proceedings themselves. Once these began, their effect on the Israeli public at large took on a momentum of its own. Close to eighty thousand Israelis attended the trial at one point or another, and some seven hundred journalists from every part of the globe covered the proceedings. Tens of thousands throughout the country heard occasional live transmission of testimony of witnesses and daily wrap-ups by leading journalists of Kol Yisrael, the national broadcaster, in the evenings, following the daily news. In buses, shops, and street corners, normal social interaction stopped whenever people heard these transmissions from the courtroom. Political strategists seem to have been caught unaware: they had no idea that the radio would move so many people so powerfully and actually had no prearranged strategy to orchestrate this. Outside Israel, the Eichmann trial was a major television event; at home, Ben Gurion had not believed in television and had even vetoed its introduction in the Jewish state. Like most others, the Israeli prime minister seems to have been surprised at the degree to which the testimony of so many survivors touched the psyche of the Israeli public, marking an important step in the country’s receptivity to a new public discourse on the Holocaust.
More than this: as Annette Wieviorka puts it, at the Eichmann trial the survivor witnesses came to centre stage for the first time. “The trial in Jerusalem was in theory the trial of a perpetrator. But Eichmann quickly disappeared. The attention of the media was no longer directed at the protagonist of the ‘final solution.’ The man in the glass booth was eclipsed by the victims.” Thanks to the survivors’ testimony, Holocaust recollections were validated nationally and attended to by a receptive public as never before. Radio seems to have played a crucial role in this process. What the survivors had to tell was disembodied, stripped down to voices, unmediated by age, broken spirits, or expressions of pain. “Taking to the airwaves meant an opportunity to speak away from the tattooed, traumatized body, clear of the label of madness and unintelligibility,” write two Israeli researchers, Amit Pinchevsky and Tamar Liebes. “By removing survivors’ voices from their bodies radio effectively redefined the conditions by which trauma could find public articulation.” The trial also gave a major boost to the writing and publishing of new memoirs – a process that continues even to our own time, when the ranks of survivors have thinned. Public discourse about the Holocaust, including films, literature, and other works of art, followed, together of course with media interest, historical research, and more popular writing on the subject.
In their judgment at the trial’s conclusion, the three-judge panel returned briefly to the issue of lessons, even as they limited their determinations to matters having strictly to do with the charges against the accused. “What is the lesson which the Jews and other nations must draw from all this, as well as every person in his relationship to others?” the judges asked. In their response, the jurists famously refused to pronounce. “The Court … cannot allow itself to be enticed into provinces which are outside its sphere,” they said. “The judicial process has ways of its own, laid down by law, and these do not change, whatever the subject of the trial may be … Accordingly, [the court’s] ability to describe general events is inevitably limited. As for questions of principle which are outside the realm of law, no one has made us judges of them, and therefore no greater weight is to be attached to our opinion on them than to that of any person devoting study and thought to these questions.” In a rare moment of temptation to define its own lessons, the court said no.
Yet as virtually no one had fully expected, the Eichmann trial promoted a sense of shared cultural trauma, something that has become a central element in the national consciousness ever since. And this, inescapably, was its Zionist message. “All of us should bear the enormity of the Holocaust and its mandatory lesson for the nation’s retention of its country,” said Hausner about the core message of the proceeding. “We must cling to this country, preserve and support every stone and rock, since it is our last refuge.” And with all of this came debate and discussion on all levels, with all kinds of themes, and among them more than a few who framed their views as the lessons of the Holocaust. “Thanks to Eichmann,” writes David Cesarani, “‘the Holocaust’ gelled and became part of the civil religion of Israelis, for good and for ill.” And the lesson-teaching did not stop there. The Israeli attorney Michal Shaked, author of a sensitive study of Justice Moshe Landau, the presiding judge of the Eichmann court, had his own lesson to teach, namely that Israel was a country where the rule of law prevailed. Shaked, drawing on Landau’s private memoirs, shows how deeply committed this jurist was to his lesson, and how successful he was in pursuing it.
In the years following the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust infused Israeli national identity, its role and intensity shifting according to the prevailing national self-image, as sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider put it. Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the Israeli Knesset and an Orthodox Jew, makes a similar case. “The Shoah is more present in our lives than God,” he writes. Grounding this astonishing statement, Burg draws upon a poll of teaching trainees in Tel Aviv, in which more than 90 per cent of respondents said that the Holocaust was “the most important experience of Jewish history.” Burg is hardly sanguine about what Israelis draw from this preoccupation. “Politicians use it as a central argument for their ethical manipulations. People on the street experience daily the return of the horrors, and newspapers are filled with an endless supply of stories, articles, references and statements that emanate from the Shoah and reflect it back into our lives.”
Burg is not the first to make this point. “From the day you were born in Israel,” observes Etgar Keret about the larger context for his countrymen, “you’ve been taught that what happened in Europe over the past few centuries was nothing but a series of persecutions and pogroms, and despite the dictates of common sense, the lessons of that education continue to fester somewhere in your gut.” The Holocaust, says Israeli historian Steven Aschheim, echoing the views of many, “has become a defining, almost obsessive fact of our consciousness.” And remarkably, far from diminishing over time, this preoccupation becomes, if anything, more intense year by year. In January 2012, Haaretz reported on a poll of Israeli Jews on their religious views. “The guiding principle” of Israeli Judaism, they found, is “to remember the Holocaust.” Ninety-eight per cent of respondents, reported a popular journalist, Merav Michaeli (the granddaughter of Rudolf Kastner), consider it either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people. Michaeli concludes: “The Holocaust is the primary way Israel defines itself. And that definition is narrow and ailing in the extreme, because the Holocaust is remembered only in a very specific way, as are its lessons. It has long been used to justify the existence and the necessity of the state, and has been mentioned in the same breath as proof that the state is under a never-ending existential threat.” At times, in moments of national peril, public anxiety prompts a quest for guidance from what are described as the lessons of the Holocaust and seeks to situate the dangers faced in that context. Sometimes, conflicting interests battle for legitimacy by asserting the applicability of Holocaust analogies – either with the persecuted, for example, or with struggles for justice in the face of local, national, or global indifference. Campaigners seeking to dramatize their grievances, for example, might appear in striped uniforms as concentration camp inmates or wear yellow stars to associate themselves with the persecuted. Thereby issues, sometimes highly contested, become even more difficult, and responding to them with equanimity, like the Holocaust itself, seemingly impossible.
The most powerful invocations of the Holocaust have involved matters of national security that engage, or are said to engage, the country’s physical existence. In June 1967, five years after the Eichmann trial, Israelis faced what seemed to many such a threat in the lead-up to the Six-Day War. Partly at issue, although in the background, was Israel’s fear of a “new Holocaust” perpetrated by a dangerously equipped, possibly even nuclear-armed Egypt. Then came immediate threats in rapid succession. In May, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser concentrated heavy armour and troops along Israel’s southern border, dismissed the UN buffer force separating his soldiers from the Israelis, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and thus to the country’s southern port of Eilat. Should Israel launch a war, Nasser warned as he assembled his allies, “it will not be a limited war. Egypt will, thanks to this war, at long last wipe Israel off the face of the earth. We have waited for this moment for eleven long years,” he said. Anxiety tightened its grip, Israeli reserves mobilized, and Holocaust-related analyses became a major way of assessing the conflict. This became known as the “waiting period.” Jordan joined Syria and Egypt as tensions rose. References to the Holocaust were constant. “During those weeks of drumbeating, the newspapers continually identified Nasser with Hitler,” writes Tom Segev. “The proposals to defuse the crisis by any means other than war were compared with the Munich agreement forced on Czechoslovakia before World War II.”
After some weeks, on June 5, 1967, Israel launched its long-awaited pre-emptive strike against the Egyptians, routing their air and ground forces, sweeping through the Sinai, and, as the Jordanians, Syrians, and an Iraqi expeditionary force entered the conflict, Israeli soldiers captured East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights as well. Thereby, Israelis found themselves in control of three times as much territory as prewar Israel, along with nearly a million inhabitants living there. Victory, notes Segev, just as with the threat of war, was associated with the Holocaust. Uri Ramon, a young Israeli officer, described his particular experience, which reflected a widespread sentiment:
Two days before the war, when we felt that we were at a decisive moment and I was in uniform, armed and grimy from a night patrol, I came to the Ghetto Fighters Museum at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. I wanted to pay my respects to the memory of the fighters, only some of whom had reached this day when the nation was rising up to defend itself. I felt clearly that our war began there, in the crematoriums, in the camps, in the ghettos, and in the forests.
In the wake of this spectacular success, it was easy to avoid critical thought about the place of the Holocaust and its lessons for Israeli society. Victory seemed to provide its own legitimation. Historians have described a brief period of introspection, during which many Israelis contemplated both their shattering insecurities associated with the Holocaust and their euphoric sense of achievement. Self-doubt did not last long, however, and the Six-Day War was followed by the War of Attrition in 1969–70, with intermittent hostilities conducted by Egypt; the murder of Israeli Olympians at Munich in 1972; and another, less successful war for the Israelis, when in 1973, on Yom Kippur, a coalition of Arab countries led by Egypt and Syria attacked territory occupied by the Jewish state. This war was almost certainly Israel’s greatest trauma since its inception. During the first days of fighting, Egyptian troops stormed across the Bar Lev Line fortifications along the Israeli side of the Suez Canal that it had captured in 1967, while in the north, Syrian soldiers swept across Israeli defences in the Golan Heights. Thousands of Israeli soldiers were killed, and its air force suffered heavy losses. The country’s leadership seemed shaken. Although the Israelis soon recovered and turned the tide of battle, their Holocaust preoccupations not surprisingly persisted, with the sense that the country was constantly under siege.
Among the most chilling and persistent reminders of the linkage of security matters with the Holocaust was a rhetorical reference to “Auschwitz borders,” a conflation of the Holocaust past with a geopolitical threat to Israel that came into life only two years after the Yom Kippur War and continues to this very day. The idea was that withdrawal from the conquered territories could precipitate nothing less than Auschwitz-scale massacres, a nightmare come to life. The story of the “Auschwitz borders” began in a speech to the United Nations by Israel’s famous diplomat Abba Eban, who addressed the General Assembly in 1975, explaining Israel’s apprehensions about returning to the status quo ante:
We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June, 1967, if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza. This is a situation that will never be repeated in history.
From Eban’s explanation of Israeli anxieties, however, there was considerable distance to travel to argue that withdrawal from the territories under any circumstances might entail a mortal danger – indeed, might precipitate genocide. However, many promoted just this vision. Over the years, Israeli settlers have marched and protested against trading land for peace accompanied by chants of “Auschwitz borders.” Recently, others have denounced American president Barack Obama, who argued for a pulling back to the 1967 armistice lines with mutual territorial swaps, as favouring “Auschwitz borders.” And in the most egregious instance that I have found, the rightist Zionist Organization of America actually declared in 2011, “We won’t return to Auschwitz!”
Following the Yom Kippur War in 1973, in which Israeli unpreparedness had exposed the country to the gravest dangers, Israelis began a national debate which author Yossi Klein Halevi has called “a decades-long internal war of atonement.” How could the Jewish state have been so overwhelmed in the earliest days of the fighting? Left and Right developed their own responses. To the former, the lesson was that political leaders had been arrogant, unresponsive to Egyptian offers, and over-reliant on force; to the latter, the problem was Israeli disunity, irresolution, and illusory hopes for peace. In this clash, reference to the Shoah came naturally to an Israeli Right that had long stigmatized the Left for its alleged relinquishing of historic claims. In 1974, supporters of a greater Israel and aggressive colonization of newly occupied territories coalesced around the religiously inspired extremist Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, drawing adherents from the Labour Left as well as the extreme Right. This movement infused its settlement activities with religious and Zionist energies, contributing to the decline of Labour and the rise of a hard-line Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud, closely associated with the rhetoric of the Holocaust. And to their right was an extremist American rabbi, Meir Kahane, whose Kach (“Thus!”) Party was if anything even more disposed than was the Likud to invoke the Holocaust as exemplifying Jewish vulnerability. It was Kahane who coined the term “Never Again,” which was taken up by Begin and his political allies. Another consequence of the debate was a growing distrust of the previously dominant Labour Party as insufficiently assertive of Israeli national priorities. In 1977, Begin’s electoral success and the advent of a coalition of the Right and the religious parties solidified settlement policies and prompted an increasing recourse to Holocaust-related justifications for aggressive responses to Palestinian terror and violence.
These inclinations accompanied the erosion of Israeli self-confidence after the Yom Kippur War. Such sentiments no doubt contributed in themselves to the intensification of Holocaust-related rhetoric in Israel. But there was also a personal element, namely the powerful impact of Menachem Begin himself. The Shoah personally and deeply marked the Likud leader, whose parents and brother were murdered during the war and who barely escaped with his own life. Quite unlike his great rival, Ben Gurion, for Begin the Holocaust was continuing reality. “Begin thought about the victims, while Ben Gurion thought about the survivors,” writes the Likud leader’s biographer, Avi Shilon. “Begin sought to restore the national honor and the memory of those who had perished, while Ben Gurion looked to the future; throughout Begin’s life the Holocaust was a present reality that served to strengthen his convictions and toughen his spirit, while Ben Gurion emphasized that after the State of Israel had gained its independence the Holocaust became a distant memory, and he wanted Jews to look at the impressive aspects of their people’s past.” Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of Haaretz at the time of writing, similarly contrasts Begin’s preoccupations with those of his Labour predecessors:
The leaders of Israel in 1973, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, did not speak about the Holocaust even during the hardest days of the war. Golda, who believed in the importance of public relations no less than Netanyahu, said at the time to foreign reporters: “Our neighbors are fighting to destroy us.” Golda said we know that surrender means death, the destruction of our sovereignty and the physical destruction of all our people. In the Knesset she said: “This is a war over our existence as a nation and a people.” But at the time she did not compare Anwar Sadat or Hafez Assad to the Nazis.
Menachem Begin was quite different. In what became his political signature, he made repeated reference to the destruction of European Jewry. From crisis to crisis, Segev observes, “the lessons of the Holocaust were to guide national policy, to serve as a political ideology and emotional alternative to Ben-Gurion’s pragmatism.” So it was not only with reference to the European countries whose complicity in the Holocaust he repeatedly referenced, but also to Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, whom he regularly associated either with a pro-Nazi past or with Nazi-like goals and aspirations. So it was when he justified the Israeli bombing of the Osirak Iraqi nuclear reactor in Baghdad in 1981, and with his open hostility on the diplomatic stage to PLO leader Yasir Arafat, and with his justification of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, his cracking down on Palestinian militants, and his ceaseless attack on the weaknesses of the Oslo Peace Accords concluded in 1993.
References to the lessons of the Holocaust continue to reverberate in Israeli society, both for critics of the Jewish state at home and for its defenders abroad. Some years ago, the Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese novelist José Saramago drew extraordinary attention to himself when, on visiting the West Bank city of Ramallah, he compared the place to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Observers were shocked when this happened, in 2002, but more than a decade later I fear that the use of such analogies by opponents of Israel has become almost commonplace, and on the internet and in electronic and print media such extravagant rhetoric is now a fairly regular occurrence. Israeli critics of occupation policies are often similarly preoccupied with the Holocaust. Haaretz periodically carries articles criticizing Israelis for ignoring Holocaust lessons in the country’s treatment of Palestinians. The Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua once told an interviewer that Israelis’ failure to appreciate the wrongs done to occupied Palestinians made it easier to understand how Germans could claim, during the Holocaust, that they did not know what was happening.
Amira Hass is a controversial, left-wing Israeli journalist who writes about the West Bank and Gaza, and for years she was the only Israeli actually living among Arabs in the occupied territories. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she has edited a concentration camp diary her mother kept about her time as an inmate of Bergen Belsen after being captured by the Germans in Yugoslavia. She told all this recently to a reporter who asked about her motivations. “I have a dread of being a bystander,” she explained. “Israeli activists opposing their country’s treatment of the Palestinians have likened checkpoints in the Occupied Territories to those at the Warsaw Ghetto bridge and other humiliating gestures of control during the course of the Holocaust.” As one critic put it of these analogies, “temptations are strong to replace historical analysis with sentiment.”
Holocaust preoccupations are common on the Israeli Right, and never more so than in perceptions of a potentially nuclear-armed Iran, whose prime minister from 2005 to 2013 was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conspicuous Holocaust denier. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been particularly prone to invoke supposed lessons of the Holocaust – or for that matter the lessons of history, speaking in Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day. “The most important lesson from the Shoah is that murderous evil must be stopped as soon as possible, before it can realize its schemes,” he said in 2010, unmistakably invoking the Holocaust while threatening a pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear targets. Recently, following a speech to AIPAC, the American pro-Israel lobby group, when Netanyahu brandished a letter of 1944 calling for the bombing of Auschwitz, an article in the Financial Times referred to “mounting criticism at home over a small but deeply significant aspect of his international campaign: his frequent references to the Holocaust.” Among Israelis who complained was Tzipi Livni, former foreign minister and then a leader of the opposition, who called upon “Netanyahu and his government to stop with the hysterical comparisons.” Netanyahu’s references to the Holocaust have extended to other threats as well. Speaking to the Knesset in January 2012 on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he said that by allowing genocide to occur in Syria the world had shown that it had not learned the lessons of the Holocaust. Some Israelis, unfortunately, had forgotten those lessons too. The “main lesson of the Holocaust when it comes to our fate,” he insisted, was “‘We can only rely on ourselves’” – a widely held belief that runs the risk, his critics feel, of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We cannot know precisely how much weight to assign to Netanyahu’s personal predilection for Holocaust rhetoric, for, after all, as we have seen, he reflects a widespread disposition on the Israeli Right to speak in this manner, especially among those, such as the prime minister himself, who see themselves as heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Zionist Revisionism and a champion of the most militant current of Jewish nationalist thought. Netanyahu’s fidelity to much of the Zionist Right’s linkage of Israel and the Holocaust, outlined in his 1993 book A Place among the Nations, is seen in his situation of the Holocaust in the context of events in the Middle East. In this account, the Arabs are seen as having lent their support to the Nazis’ campaign to murder the Jews, and they supposedly continued this objective, along with their Nazi linkages, even after the end of the war. As historian Arye Naor, formerly Begin’s cabinet secretary, puts it, “Netanyahu did not interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict in the context of the Holocaust. Rather, he interpreted the Holocaust in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” In practical terms, Naor observes, “this means that the Holocaust is not over yet.” What is important to note is that for Netanyahu, and indeed for many Israelis, there has been no basic change in the relationship between Jews and their enemies in the global community since the Second World War. “What has really changed?” Netanyahu asked recently. “The hatred of Jews changes form, but it remains – if not [based on] racial superiority, then [on] religious superiority. And the world’s apathy toward this hatred remains the same.” What has happened is that the world has become accustomed again to those declaring that they want to destroy millions of Jews. The only thing that has changed, he continued, “is our ability and determination to act to defend ourselves and prevent another Holocaust.”
In all of this there is the prime minister’s unmistakable link to his and his family’s Revisionist past. A few years ago, the American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg drew attention to this lineage on the occasion of the one hundredth birthday of Netanyahu’s father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, celebrated at the Menachem Begin Heritage Centre in Jerusalem. (Netanyahu’s father died two years later, in 2012.) At that event, the Israeli political élite, including President Shimon Peres, and especially the elder statesmen of the Revisionist movement, gathered to celebrate a living part of their political past. A veteran activist on the Zionist Right and also an academic historian, Ben-Zion Netanyahu was born in Poland, emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1920, and was for years secretary to Jabotinsky, sharing with him a faith in Zionist territorial maximalism and the most uncompromising posture towards Zionism’s Arab foes. A prominent historian who taught for many years at universities in the United States, he was deeply imprinted by the Holocaust. His huge masterwork, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, presented a revisionist thesis that the Spanish attack upon Jewish conversos in the fifteenth century sprang not from religious hostilities but rather from an essentially racist hatred of Jews, which the victims themselves failed to understand. “Netanyahu wrote in the shadow of the destruction of European Jewry in the mid-20th century, and his words and ideas reflected this proximity,” writes Benjamin Gampel, an authority on Iberian Jewry. “[Netanyahu] described the claim of the Inquisitors of rampant Judaizing among the conversos as ‘atrocity propaganda,’ their accusations of heresy as ‘big lies’ and the group’s ‘racial theories’ as the focal point for those dedicated to ‘exterminating’ the New Christians.” For Netanyahu, Jewish history was a series of repetitions, a “history of holocausts,” as he told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 1998.
Attendees watched attentively when the old man rose to speak at the Begin Centre. “His speech, unlike his son’s, was succinct, devoid of sentiment, and strikingly unambiguous,” observed Goldberg. The short speech focused on Iranian threats that “the Zionist movement will be put to an end and there will be no more Zionists in the world. One is supposed to conclude from this that the Jews of the Land of Israel will be annihilated, while the Jews of America, whose leaders refuse to pressure Iran, are being told in a hinted fashion that the annihilation of the Jews will not include them.” What is so remarkable was Netanyahu’s repetition of the master narrative of Zionist Revisionism, largely unchanged since the time of the Holocaust. Israel will triumph over her enemies, and will do so by physical and moral strength. “I watched Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] while his father spoke,” one of the attendees told Goldberg. “He was completely absorbed.” So he likely was. Ben-Zion’s rhetoric, redolent with the Jewish tragedy, and the insistence on uncompromising determination to prevail seem to have carried his audience of the Right. Many Israelis from elsewhere on the political spectrum would probably have agreed.
While interviewing Israeli war planners for his article, Goldberg noticed dozens of offices with photographs of the three Israeli air force F-15 fighters that staged a thunderous fly-past over the former death camp of Auschwitz in 2003 – a display that unmistakably linked Israeli arms to the history of the Holocaust and the close to a million Jewish victims of that camp. Yehuda Bauer, the leading Israeli historian of the subject, recently excoriated this effort to associate Jewish power with Holocaust commemoration. Auschwitz is, he reminded his readers, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. To Bauer, the sabre-rattling from on high was an unconscionably vulgar exercise of military might. “You do not brandish flags in cemeteries,” he wrote – with obvious reference to some iconic photographs from the March of the Living, “and you do not stage exhibition flights over it. Nor do you stage coordinated performances between a flyover and a ceremony on the ground. For that you have theater. In a cemetery, you tiptoe around and weep out loud or deep down inside. Whoever is religious, prays. The flight over Auschwitz was a childish action, ostentatious, utterly superfluous – one that only underscored the shallowness of those who think the memory of the Holocaust ought to be preserved by such means. For Israel’s future, this is the wrong kind of symbol.”
The Holocaust has similarly appeared in the passionate debate, in Israel today, about asylum seekers – thousands of people from African countries who have been trying, in recent years, to find refuge in the country. Opinion within the government has run strongly against these claimants. At the time of writing, the country’s Ministry of Interior has estimated that over fifty thousand have entered Israel illegally, mainly from Eritrea and Somalia, often on foot, and insisting that they are fleeing life-threatening persecution and murderous attacks at home. Exclusionists protest that a fundamental lesson of the Holocaust is that Israel must preserve its Jewish character, and that a huge influx of foreigners poses an “existential threat” to the country, particularly because of the refugees’ concentration in particular neighbourhoods in large urban areas. They insist that the asylum seekers are in fact economic refugees, gravitating to Israel as the closest developed society to which they have access. To deal with this situation, Israel began implementing a Prevention of Infiltration Law in 2012, cracking down on masses of illegal immigrants. Demonstrations followed, and opponents of the asylum seekers pushed back, sometimes with ugly accusations. As the issue has heated, refugee advocates have made the case for openness – invoking the Holocaust, at times, against their opponents, who have also done so, but with precisely the opposite objective in mind.
It seems reasonable to ask whether the constant recourse to the Holocaust facilitates constructive decisions that Israelis can live with. Many worry that preoccupations with the Shoah have crippled Israel’s capacities to respond imaginatively to questions of national identity and to seize new opportunities in a flawed global community. “We are fast approaching an intersection where we need to decide who we are and where we are going,” writes Avraham Burg. “Are we going to the past, toward which we always oriented ourselves, or will we choose the future, for the first time in generations? Will we choose a better world that is based on hope and not trauma, on trust in humanity and not suspicious isolationisms and paranoia? In this case we will have to leave our pain behind us and look forward, to find out where we can repair ourselves and perhaps even the world.”
Can recourse to Holocaust lessons be overplayed in Israeli public discourse? Shlomo Avineri, Israel’s most distinguished political scientist, suggests as much with reference to the prime minister. “We wake up every morning to some new threat he has found,” he says. “We have grown tired of it.” Criticism of Netanyahu’s use of Holocaust rhetoric during the recent Israeli election campaign agrees. In December 2014, the Israeli prime minister claimed, as one headline put it, that “hypocritical Europeans have ‘learned nothing’ from the Holocaust.” In the popular daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Shimon Shiffer irreverently termed Netanyahu’s Holocaust references his “doomsday weapon.” “If he cannot be strong against Hamas, Netanyahu can at least be strong against Europe,” wrote the diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid in Haaretz. “All that remains to inflame rightist voters’ feelings is to curse the French, the Belgians or the Irish. When those appear not to be working, he enlists the Holocaust.” At the time, Netanyahu’s personal popularity was at an all-time low. Of course, whether the majority of his countrymen agree with Avineri, Shiffer, Ravid, and others on the subject of Holocaust lessons remains unclear.
To the late Tony Judt, a stout critic of the place of the Holocaust in Israeli society, the answer was not to abandon preoccupation with the Holocaust but to accent its universal resonance.
We have attached the memory of the Holocaust so firmly to the defense of a single country – Israel – that we are in danger of provincializing its moral significance. Yes, the problem of evil in the last century, to invoke Arendt … took the form of a German attempt to exterminate Jews. But it is not just about Germans and it is not just about Jews. It is not even just about Europe, though it happened there. The problem of evil – of totalitarian evil, or genocidal evil – is a universal problem. But if it is manipulated to local advantage, what will then happen (what is, I believe, already happening) is that those who stand at some distance from the memory of the European crime – because they are not Europeans, or because they are too young to remember why it matters – will not understand how that memory relates to them and they will stop listening when we try to explain.