In August 2005, the Israeli government evicted from
the Gaza Strip eight thousand settlers who had occupied the region since 1967. In
a desperate attempt to thwart the government’s action, the settlers’ crusade
adopted insignias meant to link the evacuation with the Holocaust: sewing
yellow stars of David onto their clothing while tattooing numbers onto their
arms. During the actual removal, many of the settlers, crying and shouting on
their way to the luxury buses that whisked them off to Israel, re-enacted
scenes they had seen in Holocaust films or museums. They cursed soldiers and
police as Nazis, and likened senior army officers to Hitler.
This was a supremely ugly manipulation of the memory of
the Holocaust, witnessed in a state that had perfected such manipulation as a
diplomatic tool in its struggle against the Palestinians. But even when the
manipulation has been excessive or indeed pathetic, Israeli academics have
nonetheless been very careful about criticising such occurrences.
The protection of the Holocaust memory in Israel from
any critique is consensual and widespread. For that very reason, recording
those who in the 1990s did dare to ask some pertinent questions about it within
academia must be an important part of this book. Their effort was as unique as
those who challenged the 1948 foundational mythology, and so perhaps it is not
surprising that, in both cases, the persons most associated with the academic
research on the topic later retracted, becoming neo-Zionist defenders of Zionism
as well as the chief critics of their former colleagues. These persons are
Benny Morris, in the case of 1948, and Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, in the case of Holocaust
memory.
As is often true, there were in fact earlier
attempts, most of them not by scholars, to understand the impact and
significance of Holocaust memory in the constructing and marketing of the idea
of Israel. The search of truth was driven by moral and ethical concerns, and
paved the way for the initiation of scholarly inquiry when a more amiable atmosphere
developed in Israeli academia in the 1990s. A more open approach to Holocaust
memory in Israel showed the connection between the state’s narration of the
Holocaust – its causes and impact – and its justification of harsh policies
towards the Palestinians. This connection became a major theme in the
post-Zionist critique of Holocaust memorialisation in Israel.
One of the first persons to voice a genuine concern
about the way Holocaust memory was brought to bear in Israel was none other
than Nahum Goldmann, founder and president of the World Jewish Congress through
the late 1970s. Despite his senior position, he condemned as sacrilegious the
way Israel manipulated Holocaust memory in order to justify its oppression of
the Palestinians. (1) Many years later, in our own century, Avraham Burg, a
speaker of the Knesset and subsequently chair of the Jewish Agency, would voice
similar concerns. He summarised his thoughts on this issue in a book whose
title says it all, The Holocaust Is Over:
We Must Rise From Its Ashes, in which he states: ‘In fact, the only hope we
have to make peace with the Arabs is if we free ourselves of our Shoah
mentality, and stop acting like a small Eastern European shtetl’. (2)
The strongest voice came from Holocaust survivors.
The first was Israel Shahak, in whose writing one can often encounter the
phrase ‘the falsification of the Holocaust’:
I disagree ... that the Israeli education system has
managed to instill a ‘Holocaust awareness’ in its pupils. It is not an
awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the Holocaust or even a
falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that ‘a half-truth’ is worse than
a lie) which has been instilled here. (3)
In another passage, Shahak refers to the fear felt in
Israel about explaining how crucial Jewish collaborators were in helping the
Nazis carry out their extermination of the Jews, and he justifies the killing
of these collaborators by the Resistance at the time, just as he indicates an
understanding of why the Palestinians killed collaborators during the First
Intifada:
If we knew a little of the
truth about the Holocaust, we would at least understand (with or without
agreeing) why the Palestinians are now eliminating their collaborators. That is
the only means they have if they wish to continue to struggle against our
limb-breaking regime [referring here to Yitzhak Rabin’s famous call, during the
First Intifada, for the Israeli soldiers to break the limbs of the
Palestinians]. (4)
Shahak was also the first to bring up the enthusiasm
felt by certain leading Zionists for the Nazis in the early 1930s, an
enthusiasm which, he acknowledged, ceased in the late 1930s. About one of the most revered liberal Zionist philosophers,
Martin Buber, he wrote: ‘Buber glorified a movement holding and actually
teaching doctrines about non-Jews not unlike the Nazi doctrines about Jews’.
And, he wrote, Joachim Prinz, later a leading figure in the post-war American
Zionist establishment,
congratulated Hitler on his
triumph over the common enemy – the forces of liberalism. Dr Joachim Prinz, a
Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be
vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World
Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in
1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We,
Jews), to celebrate Hitler’s so-called German Revolution and the defeat of
liberalism. (5)
Obviously Shahak did not mince his words. He
characterised an attempt by religious Jews during the Litani Operation in 1978
(in which Israel occupied southern Lebanon as retaliation for a PLO attack on a
bus on the outskirts of Tel Aviv) as an effort ‘to induce military doctors and
nurses to withhold medical help from wounded “Gentiles”’, calling this
‘Nazi-like advice’. (6) He referred to the Jewish
settlers in a similar vein. Following the 1980 assassination attempts by Jewish
terrorists in which Mayor Bassam Shak’a of Nablus lost both his legs and Mayor
Karim Khalaf of Ramallah lost a foot, Shahak reported to his readers: ‘A group
of Jewish Nazis gathered in the campus of Tel Aviv University, roasted a few
cats and offered their meat to passers-by as shish-kebab from the legs of the
Arab mayors’. (7)
Boaz Evron echoed similar concerns in his 1980
article ‘The Holocaust – A Danger to the Nation’. (8) He questioned the
uniqueness of the Jewish experience within the overall Nazi programme, saying
that the extermination of the gypsies ‘disproves the false assumption that the
Nazi extermination policy was exclusively directed against the Jews.’ (9) He
further argued that Holocaust memorialisation in Israel was responsible for
creating a ‘paranoid reaction’ among Israelis and even a ‘moral blindness’,
which posed a real ‘danger to the nation’ and could lead to an occurrence of
‘racist Nazi attitudes’ within Israel itself. (10)
Eight years later Yehuda Elkana, who, like Shahak,
was a young child in Nazi Europe, repeated these very ideas in an article in Ha’aretz. (11) Elkana was ten when he
was imprisoned in Auschwitz and fourteen when he arrived in Israel in 1948. He
became an international star in the philosophy of science – receiving his PhD
from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, teaching at Harvard for a while,
having a long and distinguished career at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and
finally becoming the president and rector of the Central European University in
Budapest.
In 1988 Elkana witnessed with growing unease two
simultaneous displays of Israeli power and force. One was the brutality of the
Israelis during the early months of the First Intifada; the second was the
trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem. Demjanjuk was allegedly a notorious
guard, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, in the Treblinka extermination camp. He was
sentenced to death in 1988, after having been extradited from the United
States, but was exonerated in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court on grounds of
lack of decisive evidence for his true identity.
[page157]
On 2 March 1988, Elkana published an article in Ha’aretz titled ‘The Need to Forget’.
Israeli society, he recommended, should ease its excessive and obsessive
preoccupation with the Holocaust. He argued that Israeli Jews suffered from a
surplus of memory and would do well to unburden themselves of the symbols,
ceremonies, and purported lessons of their traumatic past. While it may be
‘important for the world at large to remember’, wrote Elkana, ‘[f]or our part,
we must learn to forget!’ He warned
that there was no great danger to the future of Israel than to be preoccupied
from morning to night, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust,
and he exhorted his country’s leaders to uproot the rule of historical
remembrance from their lives. (12)
Elkana saw the trial of Demjanjuk as an example of
excessive pre-occupation with the Holocaust, but he also connected this
obsession with the supposedly ‘anomalous’ behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards
Palestinians in the First Intifada. Searching for ways to understand this
behaviour, he attributed the soldiers’ actions to the negative effects that the
manipulation of Holocaust memory had on the younger generation, contending that
it perverted their moral judgement and values.
In his view, Israelis harboured an exaggerated sense
of themselves as victims, and this self-image, itself the result of wrong
lessons learned from the Holocaust, prevented them from seeing the Palestinians
in a more realistic light and impeded a reasonable political solution to the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Elkana worried that a Holocaust-induced image of the
Jews as eternal victims might encourage Israelis to justify the crudest
behaviour toward the Palestinians. Drawing parallels between the excesses
committed by soldiers in the territories and what took in Germany, Elkana
voiced his concern that Israeli Jews could end up mimicking the behaviour of
the worst of their enemies and thereby grant Hitler a ‘tragic and paradoxical
victory’. (13) Amos Elon, the famous Israeli journalist and essayist, agreed
with Elkana and in response to the latter’s article wrote ‘a little forgetfulness
might finally be in order.’ (14)
These early public ponderings about the manipulation,
overusage and potential harm of Holocaust memory set the stage for the more
scholarly post-Zionist academic challenges of the 1990s. The academics’
readiness to go that far was also influenced by a surprisingly rich literature
from the American Jewish community. Conscientious Jews in the United States –
such as Peter Novick, Lenni Brenner and Norman Finkelstein – had begun to
rebuke their own community’s manipulation of Holocaust memory in the service of
Israel. (15) It is through the work of these scholars that one can appreciate
the crucial role played by the Zionist representation of Holocaust memory in
marketing the idea of Israel in the United States. Novick summarised his
criticism by claiming that American Jewry turned ‘inward and rightward’ in
recent decades, mostly because of the ‘centring of the Holocaust in the minds
of American Jews’. (16) He also drew more general conclusions from what he
termed ‘Holocaust consciousness’, which encouraged Jewish self-aggrandisement
and prevented other victimised people from receiving a proper share of public
attention and sympathy.
The most vociferous American critic, however, has
been Norman Finkelstein. Born in 1953 in New York to parents who were Holocaust
survivors, he chose an academic career as a political scientist very early on,
and his postgraduate studies took him to Paris and then to Princeton
University, where he completed his doctorate. He has taught at several American
universities, encountering real hardship in gaining tenure because of his
forthright criticism of Israel, which he has voiced in numerous articles and
several books. Most of his work has focused on Zionism and Palestine.
In 2000 he published The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish
Suffering. The book sought to indict ‘the Holocaust’ as an ideological
representation of history that was fraudulently devised and marketed to the
American public in order to revive a faltering Jewish identity and to ‘justify
criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies’.
Finkelstein decries the fact that Israel, ‘one of the world’s most formidable
military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a
“victim” state’ and looks for ways of garnering ‘immunity to criticism’. The
industry is not only about images; it is in fact more about money. People who
have made money out of the misery of the Holocaust: are ‘a repellent gang of
well-heeled hoodlums and hucksters’ seeking enormous legal damages and
financial settlements from Germany and Switzerland – money which then goes to
the lawyers and institutional actors involved in procuring it, rather than to
the actual Holocaust survivors. (17)
Very much as in the case of the sensitive issue of
1948, scholars demanded more than just strong conviction and could only be
satisfied when presented with hardcore evidence that shook their confidence in
the hegemonic narrative. Nor did the archives and the newspapers of the past
disappoint on that score either. Reappraisal of declassified documents exposed
several issues, of which three were especially important: the Zionist
leadership’s past stance towards fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust; the
attitude towards the survivors of the catastrophe who arrived as immigrants to
Palestine during and after the catastrophe; and the nature and significance of
the uprisings in the ghettos.
‘What Italy Can Achieve,
So Can Yehuda!’
The first topic the new scholars dared to tackle in
the new and relatively open atmosphere were the sympathies shown in the early
1930s towards fascism and Nazism by some participants in the Zionist movement.
Even when leaders of the movement were unenthusiastic about the ideologies
themselves, the very fact that Italy and Germany were Britain’s enemies, as
many Zionist activists saw it, was enough to allow for contact with both powers
during the years leading up to the Second World War. In addition, before they
became aware that the Nazis planned to exterminate the Jews, pragmatic Zionist
leaders wanted to exploit the Nazi wish to expel them, because the leaders saw
expulsion as benefitting the Jewish community in Palestine. (18)
The picture that emerged when all three themes were
fused into one challenging new narrative was, to say the least, embarrassing.
Leading intellectuals of the Jewish community, such as Itamar Ben-Avi (the son
of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, reviver of the Hebrew language) and Aba Ahimeir, sang
the praises of fascism loud and clear. Ben-Avi even suggested that the Italian
Fascist model was suitable for the Yishuv,
the Jewish community in Palestine. As he wrote, ‘what Italy can achieve, so can
Judah!’ (19)
In 1928, Aba Ahimeir, who became a leading member of
the far-right wing of the Revisionist movement, wrote a regular column in the
Hebrew daily Doar Hayom, edited by
Ben-Avi. The title of the column was ‘Mipinkaso
shel Fashistan’ (From a Fascist’s Notebook). In 1931 he played a central
role in the founding of Brit Habiryonim (Union of Thugs), an underground group
modelled on European fascist groups and devoted to opposing British policy in
Palestine. At the trial of members of this organisation who were accused of
disrupting a left-wing event at the Hebrew University in early 1932, their
lawyer declared, ‘Yes, we Revisionists have a great admiration for Hitler.
Hitler has saved Germany ... And if he had given up his anti-Semitism we would
go with him.’ (20)
In the summer of 1932, Ben-Avi commented in the pages
of Doar Hayom that one should accept
the inevitability of Hitler’s rise to power. What he meant was spelled out in
another newspaper, Hazit Ha’am,
edited by Aba Ahimeir and Yehoshua Heschel Yevin, which declared that unlike
the socialists and democrats who were convinced that Hitler’s movement was an
empty shell, ‘we believe that there is both a shell and a kernel. The
anti-Semitic shell is to be discarded, but not the anti-Marxist kernel’. (21)
The mainstream leadership did not exhibit such
sympathy, but refused to adopt an aggressive stance against the Nazi regime.
The archives revealed a Zionist leadership so focused on the project in
Palestine that the boycott declared by Jews around the world against the Nazis
in the 1930s seemed to these Zionists the wrong policy. At the time, the leader
of the Jewish community in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion; ‘Zionism bears the
obligations of a state; it therefore cannot initiate an irresponsible battle
against Hitler as long as he remains a head of state’. The ‘irresponsible
battle’ was the boycott. (22)
In order to convince his listeners, Ben-Gurion
further pointed out that other countries hostile to Germany, even the Soviet
Union, had not severed their ties with the Third Reich. Instead of joining in
with the other Jewish communities in a worldwide boycott of German goods, the
Zionist leadership adopted a different stance – the only Jewish community to do
so. It struck an agreement with the Gestapo that in return for the Zionist
movement agreement not to support such a boycott, the Jews of Germany would be
allowed to liquidate their holdings and possessions and bring them along when
they moved to Palestine. (23)
The contacts with the Nazis were less an issue of
sympathy and more a matter of practicality, and yet exposing these contacts
required a self-assertive, confident academic. Moshe Zimmermann was such a
person. (24) He was a well-known expert on German history at the Hebrew
University and was used to public notoriety and abuse. He attracted the
nation’s attention with a very blunt condemnation of the settlers and their
youth movement. (25) So perhaps it is not surprising that he was willing to
excavate this uncomfortable topic. Greatly assisted by the US historian Lenni
Brenner, Zimmermann discovered that Zionist contact with the Nazis had begun in
earnest in 1933. The main supporter in Germany of this contact was the German
journalist Leopold von Mildenstein, who was close to the Zionist ideologue and
leader Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew. Early on, Zionist leaders offered an
alliance with Germany, since, at the time, they saw Germany primarily as
Britain’s enemy. (26)
When, a bit later, the anti-Jewish nature of the
Nazis’ policies was revealed, the Zionists’ agenda turned to the promotion of
an agreement that would enable the immigration of German Jews exclusively to
Palestine. In late 1936, a joint delegation of the Jewish Agency and the German
immigrant association in Palestine approached the German consul general in
Jerusalem with a proposal that Germany send a representative to the Palestine
Royal Commission, the famous Peel Commission, and support the Zionist stance
(the plan was rejected). (27)
Zimmermann probably went further on the issue than
many other scholars would have. Without hesitation, he identified the common
goal shared by the Zionist movement and Nazism: the exodus of European Jews
from the Continent. Of course, when it came to light that the Nazi plan called
for the extermination of the Jews, the joint vision evaporated and the
Zionist-Nazi collaboration ended. When the Palestinian scholar Joseph Massad
recently implied such an interdependence on Al Jazeera’s website, the network
briefly bowed to pressure and removed the article, but then republished it.
(28)
The most elaborate research into the attitudes
towards and contacts with the Nazis was carried out by the Israeli journalist
and historian Tom Segev, whose area of expertise was German history,
specifically Nazi history. Segev’s doctoral dissertation dealt with the
commanders of the extermination camps, and his other work focused on the
Mandatory period and early statehood. In his research on Holocaust memory, he
showed that the contact continued well into 1937; not only did he describe the
contact but, like Zimmerman, condemned it. Segev exposed meetings between the
Hagana, the main Jewish military group, and senior Nazi personalities, the most
important being Adolf Eichmann. Most of the meetings involved the heads of the
Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (the security or service of the SS), in the winter of
1937. (29) According to the later claims of Zionist organisations, the Hagana
wanted to direct the exiting German Jews to Palestine, not to anywhere else.
The German foreign ministry did not encourage these meetings, however, as it
did not see the formation of a Zionist state to be in the German interest; the
Hagana emissary countered by asserting that a Jewish majority in Palestine
would in fact serve Germany’s purposes, because it would rid the country of its
Jews and would serve as an anti-British base. Segev is unsure about this
emissary’s degree of authority, but as Zimmerman has shown, the line he took
was not contrary to the one taken by the Zionist leadership. (30)
It is obvious that once the true nature of Nazism and
its extermination policies was recognised, this attitude changed and contact
ceased (until an attempt was made to save the Jews of Hungary in 1944 by
offering the German army money for ammunition). But then a different issue
emerged: How much was the Zionist leadership willing to invest in the rescue
operations once it came to recognise the fate of the Jews in Europe?
On that question, Segev proved to be Zionist policy’s
severest critic. In his book, The Seventh
Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, he describes a Zionist leadership
interested only in saving Jews who were willing to emigrate to Palestine or who
were physically and mentally capable of contributing to the success of the
community. Segev begins this thesis in the pre-war years, when saving the Jews
of Europe was important to the Zionist leadership only in so far as it
contributed to the building of a Jewish state. ‘If I knew,’ said David
Ben-Gurion,
that it was possible to save all the children in
Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting
them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not only the
reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.
(31)
The practical manifestation of this attitude, Segev
found, was that rescue operations not connected directly with the Jewish
community in Palestine were not undertaken. He describes in his book a
community that went about its mundane affairs while its leaders revealed
themselves to the people of limited imagination whose rarefied self-image as
national leaders stymied their willingness to engage in the duplicity and
strategems necessary for underground activity. Not wishing to invest heavily in
rescue operations was not only a matter of prioritisation; it was also a
condemnation of those Jews who were unwise enough to ignore Zionist warnings.
Or, to put it differently, the priorities regarding the allocation of monetary
and human resources for salvage operations reflected a more deeply embedded
stance. This dismissive attitude towards the diaspora Jews, even at their hour
of need, was part of a wider distaste for the diaspora itself.
This situation was among the most daring components
of the post-Zionist challenge to the idea of Israel. Segev claimed, for
example, that the negation of the diaspora remained the ideological cornerstone
of Zionist doctrine. Negation was expressed, he writes, in the Yishuv’s ‘deep contempt, and even
disgust, for Jewish life in the diaspora’ and their feeling of ‘alienation
[towards] those who suffered’ in the Holocaust. (32) Elsewhere in his book,
Segev ventures a more conspiratorial explanation for the Yishuv’s policies. He detects a tacit alliance between the Jewish
community in Palestine and the British Empire. The Zionist movement was
promised a favoured status after the war if it kept quiet about rescue
operations and let the Allies pursue their war efforts without interference.
It all adds up to quite an uneasy read. The Seventh Million appeared first in
Hebrew and was then made into a documentary film, screened in prime time in the
happy days of post-Zionist media openness. (33) It showed the more questionable
side of the ‘new Jew’ born in Palestine, hero of the idea of Israel. Segev
pointed out that in many ways the commemoration of the Holocaust became the new
religion for the secular Jews of Palestine – or, as he puts it, since religion
had no importance for the identity of many secular Israelis, in its place came
homage to Holocaust memory, a tribute that often transmogrified into a bizarre obsession with
death.
Segev was a post-Zionist researcher par excellence.
He not only told us what he found in the archives, he also condemned the
previous generation of scholars, especially historians, for ignoring these
unpleasant facts because of their loyalty to the Zionist interpretation of the
idea of Israel. In that interpretation, those who died in the Holocaust went
‘like sheep to the slaughter’ instead of rebelling, as did the few among them,
who were immediately recognised not only as the brave ones but also as the
Zionist ones, who belonged to us, even if they made the mistake of not
emigrating sooner to Palestine.
‘The Ancestor of the
Warsaw Uprising Is the State of Israel’
Mainstream Israeli historiography, the underpinning
of the political élite, characterised the revolts in the various ghettos and
camps as a chapter in the long Zionist history of struggle against those who
wished to destroy the Jewish people. This was one narrative. The very idea that
there might be another narrative was a bold suggestion, made by post-Zionist
scholars in the 1990s. To them, these uprisings had been Zionised in Israeli
collective memory and mainstream academia. They saw this process of Zionisation
as a typical instance of how national movements tend to define people’s past
identity in accordance with the needs of the present national movement.
In early 1942, the Nazi regime in Poland began to
despatch Jews to death camps. This triggered the unusual attempt by the Warsaw
Ghetto’s inhabitants to resist by force this transfer to death. Two groups of
Jews in the ghetto decided to rebel – one closer to Jewish Socialist movements,
such as the anti-Zionist General Jewish Labour Bund, and one closer to the
Zionist Revisionist movement. Both were aided by the Polish underground. Among
the leaders of the former was Marek Edelman; born in 1919, he had joined the
Bund as a youth. the actual revolt broke out in January 1943, when a second
wave of transports began, and held on until the beginning of May until they
succumbed to the superior military might of the Nazi forces.
After the war, Edelman studied medicine in Poland and
became a cardiologist. In 1976 he joined the famous Solidarity movement led by
Lech Walesa and became one of Poland’s revered intellectuals. In his writing he
often addressed issues of human and civil rights around the world and often
criticised Zionism and Israel for their discriminatory policies towards the
Palestinians. In the late 1980s he became a member of the Polish parliament. In
1993 the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, led an Israeli delegation for
the jubilee commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Polish president Lech
Walesa asked Edelman to be among the chief speakers; heavy pressure from the
Israeli delegation removed him from the list at the very last moment. (34)
In keeping with the observation by critics of
nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, that it is best to
nationalise dead people since they cannot claim an identity different from the
one ascribed to them, one can imagine how troublesome was Marek Edelman, the
major figure in the Warsaw uprising. (35) At the time he was a member of a
non-Zionist organisation; after the Holocaust he remained a Polish socialist;
and still he was alive and kicking. It was bad enough for Edelman did not fit
the image that the official cultural producers in Israel wished the leaders of
the rebellion to have; worse, he actively contested it. In 1945 he wrote a book
on the uprising called The Ghetto
Fighters, which appeared in Hebrew only in 2001. (36) He disliked the way
he and his friends were portrayed visually and textually in Israeli scholarship
– ‘none of them had ever looked like this ... they didn’t have rifles,
cartridge pouches or maps; besides, they were dark and dirty’, hardly the ideal
type of handsome, Aryan-like young Jews seen in the Israeli museums of the
Holocaust and in the pictures decorating official texts. (37)
Edelman explained that for him the uprising was a
human choice about how to die (as Primo Levi, too, claimed). But death was not a simple issue for the political élite in
Israel, which is always busy shaping the collective memory of a society of
immigrants, while at the same time colonising a population and an area that
resisted, at to rank death in a hierarchy – to idealise one type and condemn
another. Death in rebellion against the Holocaust was commendable; death in
the Holocaust without resistance was questionable. Death for the sake of the
nation was to be the sublime act of humanity. (38)
Edelman was ignored in official Israeli texts and
representations of the Holocaust. He is known now thanks to Idith Zertal, who,
in the relative openness of the public debate during the 1990s, introduced his
story to the world. (39) Zertal was the editor of Ha’aretz’s prestigious weekend supplement and edited Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly, the main
publication of Tel Aviv University’s School of History; today she teaches in
Switzerland. In her book The Nation and
the Death (in English it was titled Israel’s
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood), she discussed the Warsaw
uprising. As Zertal came from the heart of the establishment, she was able to
get a mainstream publishing house to publish her highly subversive book. In it,
one encounters Israel as a necrophilic nation, obsessed and possessed by death,
and particularly the death camps of the Holocaust – unable to comprehend the
atrocity, and yet quite able to use and abuse its memory for the sake of its
political aims.
Through Zertal’s book, we become able to see how deep
the institutionalisation of Holocaust memory went in the young Jewish state.
She describes the construction of a selective narrative that adapted the
history of the Holocaust to Israel’s strategic and ideological demands. Two
themes were important in this respect. The first was planting in the public mind
a clear contrast between the new ‘brave’ Jews of Israel and those who went
‘willingly’ to the slaughter in Europe’s extermination camps; the second, nationalising, or Zionising, the rebellions,
particularly the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as precursors of the resurrection of
the Jews as a new nation in their ‘redeemed’ homeland. To use a phrase
from Benedict Anderson, who served as an inspiration for Zertal’s work; ‘The
ancestor of the Warsaw uprising is the state of Israel’. (40) When the two
themes are taken together, it is clear that the Jews who participated in the
uprising were constructed by the young Jewish state as ‘proto-Zionists’ and
not, as Primo Levi and others saw them, as people who wished to choose their
own kind of death in the face of massive extermination. (41)
In the official version of the collective memory, the
uprisings were part of the narrative of Palestine, in which, whether in the
Warsaw of the Second World War or north of the Galilee in Roman times, brave
Jews stood firm in the face of their enemies. ‘The flame of the rebellion has
been ignited in the ghettos in the name of Eretz Israel’, declared Zalman
Shazar, who later became Israel’s third president. (42) According to this
account, the rebel drew courage from the Jews who had withstood the Arab
attacks of the 1920s. This reductionist approach, explained Zertal, was not
just a cynical construction of a tale; it also served a psychological yearning
to comprehend the Holocaust: ‘By [the rebels’] acts, the impossible and
inconceivable became both possible and conceivable’. (43)
Zertal relied heavily on Hannah Arendt’s work. In the
wake of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961-62, Arendt challenged
Israel’s crude distortions of the Holocaust. (44) She was even more fiercely
rebuked than Edelman and to a degree demonised. Arendt not only philosophised
about the historical narrative but, far more important, contemplated the moral
implications of nationalism, Judaism, and evil. She offered an alternative
humanist and universalist view of the Holocaust and contemporary Judaism.
In the 1990s, the educator
Yair Auron went as far as to propose a radical change in the way that Holocaust
was taught in Israel, suggesting that it be taught as part of the history of
modern genocide. [A sign of crazy State? Or is it not that unusual?] (45)
He was supported at the time by a University of Haifa philosopher of education,
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, who in the 1990s was a strong voice in favour of a universalist
approach. Gur-Ze’ev decried what he called ‘the Israeli educational industry’s
desire to dominate the memory of the Holocaust’ and to exclude any
universalisation of the event. The Shoah, he wrote, ‘became the Totem of
Zionism’. (46) The educational system in Israel acts as a conservative,
non-reflective, manipulative tool and labels as taboo any other approach to the
event and its implications.
After the Second Intifada, Gur-Ze’ev would come to
regret his own post-Zionism and embrace afresh the old Zionist narrative and
interpretation of the Holocaust. The philosopher Adi Ofir, editor of Theory and Criticism, on the other hand,
remained steadfast in his criticism. Already in 1986, he depicted the Israeli
preoccupation with the Holocaust as religious practice. He claimed that anyone
who would dare ‘to offer a different representation’ or ‘even claim he or she
knows what really happened there’ would be branded as a heathen and traitor.
(47)
The Embarrassing Jews:
Demonisation of Holocaust Survivors
Part of this more humanist and universalist approach
to the history of the Holocaust was de-Zionising the revolts and also providing
space for the different narratives of those who had survived the camps and the
atrocities. This new angle also enabled a revisiting of the way the survivors
themselves were treated once they reached Palestine and, later, Israel.
Until the 1990s, Holocaust studies in Israel was a
widespread discipline; almost every university and college had a special
department or centre devoted to extensive research on it. Their brand of
inquiry, however, was quite limited and focused mainly on the Nazis themselves
and the uprisings against them. The vast majority of scholars seemed to ignore
Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s famous comment when he was asked by the film-maker Eyal
Sivan, in the documentary Yizkor: Slaves of Memory,
about Holocaust memorialisation in Israel (more on this film in Chapter 9):
‘Why should the Holocaust interests us? We are the victims. It is the Germans
who should be concerned with what they have done’. (48)
In the 1990s post-Zionist scholarship, in the course
of extending the scope of research, juxtaposed for the first time the Jewish
state and its political élite with individuals who survived the inferno and
chose to become citizens of Israel (or were forced to do so). These survivors
did not fit the image of the Sabra – the new Jew – a disparity reflected in the
documentary films of the 1940s and 1950s. This pattern was discovered by Nurith
Gertz, a literary scholar at the Open University who contributed significantly
to post-Zionist work on cinema. She showed that the survivors appeared in those
films as obstinate, strange Jews who were unwilling to integrate into their new
society. She called this representation the silencing of the memory, as the
films gave no room for either the personal or collective narrative of these
survivors. Their narrative, wrote Gertz, was ‘stifled by the collective
narrative of Holocaust and heroism’. (49) Their memories, she continued,
erupt in the present and disrupt the Zionist
narrative that leads from the obliteration of the Diaspora past to the
formation of the Israeli present and future. This is the narrative of people
who remained foreign and ‘other’ in Israeli society, who did not exchange their
identities as Zionism expected of them. The films attempt to integrate these
people into the Israeli collective. (50)
And nothing could mitigate this negative image. As
Tom Segev noted, even the fact that a third of the soldiers who fought in
Israel’s war of independence were survivors of Hitler, or that some of them had
indeed rebelled, was of no help to them. The young State of Israel was still,
in Segev’s words, ‘embarrassed by the Holocaust’. The Jewish state was founded
on the concept of the ‘new’ Jew: tough, proudly speaking Hebrew, working the
land, self-reliant. The Holocaust victims, it was said, had gone like sheep to
the slaughter. They were the ‘old’ Jews: Yiddish-speaking exiles, urban and
mercantile. (51)
The State of Israel, so it seems, coped much better
with dead Holocaust Jews than with Holocaust survivors. As a Ben-Gurion
University historian, Hanna Yablonka, put it, in general the Zionist sense was
that those who survived were guilty by the sheer fact that they were alive, and
thus represented a past that the Israelis wished to forget. (52) Idith Zertal,
too, in her earlier book From Catastrophe
to Power: The Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, focused on
the lofty and dismissive attitude of the Sabras towards the survivors and their
plight, and she noted that this attitude left deep scars in the souls of those
who survived the Holocaust and reached Palestine. (53)
But the survivors were not simply despised; when
necessary they were recruited, quite often against their will, to the Zionist
cause in Palestine. It began on their day of liberation from the death chambers
in Europe. This much we now know because of the work of Yosef Grodzinsky, a
neurolinguist from Tel Aviv University. His father was a survivor and a member
of the Bund, an organisation that even after the Holocaust continued to
maintain that there was an international socialist alternative to Zionism. (54)
This personal history motivated Grodzinsky to step out of his field of inquiry
and take the unusual step of writing a historical study of how people like his
father were treated by the Zionist movement after the Holocaust, when, having
survived the war, they were put in ‘displaced persons’ (DP) camps all over
Germany.
The DP camps played an important part in the Zionist
diplomatic battle over the fate of post-Mandatory Palestine. In those days, the
Palestinians counter-argument against the idea of the Jewish state was based on
the idea that, among other things, the Arabs in Palestine, constituting an
absolute two-thirds majority, had the democratic right to determine what kind
of state they wanted at the end of the Mandate. Zionist propaganda worked hard
to associate, initially only in vague terms, the Jews all over the world and
the fate of the Jewish community in Palestine. In this way, the demographic
balance on the ground became immaterial – it had to include all Jews, wherever
they were, and therefore the Jews were a potential majority in Palestine.
But this approach was deemed too academic, for
instance by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry charged in 1946 with
proposing a solution to the conflict in Palestine. It was clear that a more
concrete association had to be established between the fate of the European
Jews and those in Palestine. To prove that point, the people in the DP camps
would have to wish, en masse, to emigrate to Palestine. One member of the
Anglo-American Committee, Richard Crossman, was unimpressed by the general
argument at the time he was appointed, but changed his mind once he visited the
camps and was told that most of the people there wanted to come to Palestine. If
he had actually consulted the American and British commanders of those camps,
they would have told him that the vast majority in fact wanted to emigrate to
Britain or the United States. (55)
Grodzinsky found out why the Anglo-American Committee
and its successor, the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), heard only
one voice in the camps. In his book Good
Human Material, he describes a reign of Zionist terror against anyone else
trying to help the DPs emigrate to places other than Palestine (the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, for instance, was very active in trying to
help Jews go to the United States). In the camps were recruitment offices for
the Hagana where the DPs were sworn in as soldiers; for such soldiers to change
their mind was tantamount to desertion. Grodzinsky described other unsavoury
means for Zionising survivors who were fit for military action and for barring
other organisations from establishing a presence in the camps. (56)
Moreover, the Zionist leadership continued to utilise
the survivors after they left the camps and were on their way to Palestine.
This has become evident in post-Zionist scholarship through a reappraisal of
the case of the SS Exodus, or Exodus 1947, the ship that sailed from
Europe with more than four thousand Holocaust survivors on board and was
refused entry to Palestine by the Mandatory government, its passengers
ultimately forced to return to Germany.
On 11 July 1947, SS Exodus left France in the middle of the night with its cargo of
Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe’s DP camps. None of them had a
certificate to enter Mandatory Palestine. The British Royal Navy trailed the
ship and finally intercepted it. This was the intended outcome of the incident,
as the Jewish Agency wanted to attract world opinion to the blockade Britain
had imposed on large immigrant ships attempting to reach Palestine. A
mainstream Israeli historian, Aviva Halamish, showed that the refugees were
told to prepare for the interception and were instructed how to resist the
British forces when they boarded the ship. (57)
The passengers were returned via three smaller ships
to France, where they refused to disembark. The British government decided not
to attempt forced disembarkation and made the ships sail to the place from
which most of the DP had departed: Germany. Returning Holocaust survivors to
Germany in 1947 was a shocking move, and the Jewish Agency made all the PR
capital it could out of it.
The incident became part of
what Novick, and later Finkelstein, called the Holocaust industry in the United
States. A well-known American writer, Leon Uris, wrote a novel on it that was
published in 1958. Uris was a freelance war correspondent for several American
newspapers in the 1956 Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt. He was, as would
be said today, embedded with the Israeli forces, and it was during those years
that he used the Exodus affair as a
basis for a tale that faithfully reflected the Zionist narrative. The book’s
protagonist, Ari Ben Cannan, is a fearless kibbutznik who commands the Exodus 1947. Other characters, by their
very life story, represent chapters from the Zionist narrative. Ari Ben Canaan
came vividly to life when Paul Newman played the part in Otto Preminger’s
adaptation of the novel into a Hollywood film in 1960. (58) For the mainstream,
this was the modern story of Masada; indeed, it was the redemption of Masada.
It was such a powerful narration that as a heroic tale, through Leon Uris’s
book and the subsequent film, it became one of the main media sources through
which American public opinion was galvanised in favour of the Zionist story.
The post-Zionist reading of this event was
diametrically opposed to the way it was narrated by mainstream historiography.
In the alternative narrative that emerged in the 1990s, Exodus is a tale of cynicism and manipulation. In it, the
immigrants appear as pawns in the struggle for the international recognition of
a future Jewish state. The wretched survivors demanded, or so the world was
told, to be allowed to settle in Palestine; if refused, they would end up being
sent back to the displaced-person camps in Germany. This message was directed
specifically at the UN Special Commission on Palestine, which in mid-1947
visited Palestine in an effort to find a solution after Britain’s declaration
several weeks earlier that it intended to end its Mandate over the torn
country. But Britain still held responsibility for law and order and was
adamant about preventing massive Jewish immigration or, alternatively, Arab
military intervention before the last British soldier left the land. (59)
The Exodus
affair was meant to prove to UNSCOP that only the Judaisation of Palestine was
the correct solution for these and all the other Jews who had survived the
horrors of the Holocaust. If they would not come to Palestine, they would have
to be sent to the killing fields of Germany. The gambit proved partly
successful: this ship was not allowed to disembark in Palestine and was indeed
sent back. But public opinion, and especially the UN committee, now clearly
associated the fate of the Jews in Europe with the future of the Zionist
project in Palestine. Consequently (and also because of the overall strategic
decision by the United States and the Soviet Union to support the Zionist
project), the UN decided in favour of the Jewish community and recommended the
creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Once that was achieved, however,
hardly anyone in the Zionist leadership took any more interest in the fate of
the Exodus refugees, who were shipped
back to Germany to face horrible conditions.
Even after the post-Zionist critics had salvaged the
survivors’ point of view, few survivors actually challenged the tale told by
the state about them and their fate. Their silence did not arise from fear; it
was a much deeper response to the horrors they had witnessed, as has already
been articulated by Arendt, Levi, and many others. Arendt highlighted silence
as a defence mechanism against an inconceivable horror that overpowered
‘reality and [broke] down all strands we know’. (60) Levi pointed to the link
between survival and achieving a relatively privileged position in the death
camps. This uncomfortable conclusion meant, in Levi’s words, that ‘we, the
survivors, are not the true witnesses’ to the Holocaust. (61)
But beyond their traumatic experiences, possibly
beyond the reach of any description or analysis, the survivors who managed to
make it to Israel could not obstruct, but rather had to collaborate with, the
construction and manipulation of official memory. Ex post facto, they came
Zionists during the Holocaust, whether they wanted to be or not, and those of
the survivors who had not played an actual role in the resistance became
second-rate Zionists. Worse, unless they belonged to the leadership of the
communities (the Judenräte) which
were incorporated into Israel’s ruling élite, the survivors were at risk of
being judged for their activities in the camps. Some were brought to trial for
being ex-capos (which is perhaps understandable) or for collaborating under
coercion (in order to survive) in any of the hideous ways made available to
inmates by the Nazis.
This insane persecution of survivors was the result
of the wish to bring the Holocaust itself to trial – with very limited success.
Only in 1960 did the Israelis succeed in capturing an arch-Nazi, Adolf
Eichmann, and in staging a show trial the following year, which was more of a
didactic move than a search for justice. But most of the architects of the
Holocaust were dead, gone, or tried at Nuremberg, and in the absence of other
arch-Nazis, alleged collaborators were targeted.
Such was the case of Elsa Trank, a Jewish survivor
who for a while was a forced supervisor of a block in Auschwitz and, as such,
did indeed contribute to the misery of her fellow prisoners. She was appointed
by the Nazis to keep order in one of the camp’s shacks. Trank was identified in
Israel by a survivor and brought to trial on the charge of beating her fellow
prisoners. In court, it was established that she hit them with their hands, not
with any weapon; she was found guilty. (62)
The Zionisation of the struggle omitted, or deleted,
the daily heroic struggles of those who ‘just’ survived. The main stage for
conveying this message was the Eichmann trial. The impact of this trial on the
institutionalisation of Holocaust memory, when viewed from the post-Zionist
perspective, added an angle of which Hannah Arendt was unaware, and which
emerges forcefully in the work of Idith Zertal. She connects the trial to the
impact of the manipulation and instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory on
attitudes towards, and perceptions of, the Palestinians within Israeli Jewish
society. The most important theme in this connection is the Nazification of the
Palestinian struggle. Hence, they too became victims of this manipulation.
The Nazification of the
Palestinians
Zertal exposed how the case against the Palestinians
evolved out of the story of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the exiled leader of the
Palestinians who foolishly flirted with Hitler and Mussolini in hopes of forming
an alliance against Britain and its pro-Zionist policies. Palestinians,
however, were not the only target of this case-building, which was orchestrated
and directed by the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, during the
Eichmann trial and coincided with crucial elections for his party. Also under
fire was Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. Already in 1956, Ben-Gurion had
equated Nasser with Hitler: ‘The danger of the Egyptian tyrant is like that
which afflicted the European Jews’, he said in the Knesset to help prepare the
ground for an aggressive war against Egypt. (63)
Nasser was similarly vilified before the June 1967
War. Israeli propaganda repeatedly likened him to Hitler and raised the threat
of a second Holocaust. But the focus on Nazification shifted shortly afterwards
to the Palestinians in general and the PLO in particular. The most notorious
incident in this respect occurred during the First Lebanon War in 1982, when
Israeli troops occupied Beirut, laying siege to Yasser Arafat’s bunker. Beirut
became Berlin in the last days of Nazism, Arafat was Hitler awaiting his fate
in the bunker, and the PLO charter became Mein
Kempf. It was the Israeli prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, who
continually used these references. On the day the invasion of Lebanon began,
Begin declared, ‘The alternative to fighting is Treblinka, and we have decided there
will be no more Treblinka’. (64) Even some Zionists at the time found that too
much: the novelist Amos Oz wrote of Begin, ‘Again and again ... you reveal to
the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every
day anew in the guise of terrorists’. (65)
Another of the many illuminating examples of
Nazification was provided by Peter Novick, which is that the al-Husayni entry
in the Israeli-American Encyclopaedia of
the Holocaust is longer than that of any other person apart from Hitler!
Apparently Himmler and Goering paled in comparison to the crucial role played
in the destruction of the European Jews by a pathetic Palestinian leader whose
sin was to serve as a wartime broadcaster to the Arab world from Berlin. (66)
A less obvious objective was to manipulate Holocaust
memory in such a way as to help the political and military élites in Israel to
move public opinion behind them when they needed support for taking a crucial
decision during the struggle against the Arab world or fending off a real or
imagined threat. From vindication of the brutal killing of Palestinians in 1948
and subsequently, in the war against Palestinian infiltrations, through the
instigation of public panic on the eve of the 1967 war, to the justification of
intransigent official positions on peace following the war, to the present
oppressive policies against the Palestinians in the occupied territories –
Holocaust memory has been a supremely useful and accessible means of silencing
criticism and pushing a policy of belligerence.
And so we now arrive back in 2005, where we began
this chapter. How easy, how familiar it was for the fanatical settler movement
in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 to exploit Holocaust memory in
order to justify its expansionist, theocratic, and racist version of Zionism,
which eventually turned against the state itself.
Maintaining a Nation in Trauma
Compelling a nation to be constantly at arms was not
just a matter of Nazifying the enemy – there was a need for continual angst,
which could easily be conjured via Holocaust memory. Even this kind of
manipulation became a subject for post-Zionist academic research. Notable among
those who did such research was the philosopher Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, who asserted
that a universalist commemoration of the Holocaust would liberate society from
such manipulation. (67)
Even more important in this respect, however, was the
work of Moshe Zukerman, a Tel Aviv University sociologist who showed how the
powers that be seek to re-traumatise the newly formed Jewish society and keep
alive its constant angst about a second Holocaust. Zukerman introduces as a
prime example the Israeli government’s attitude during the Persian Gulf War of
1991. His book Holocaust in the Sealed
Room describes in minute detail how Israeli society was unnecessarily
exposed to a trauma that was meant to bring them back to the Holocaust and
learn the lesson that only the Jewish state could save them from a similar
fate. (68)
The sealed room, Haheder
Hatum in Hebrew, refers to the safest room in the house, in which, during
that 1991 war, you sought refuge from a possible chemical and biological
attack. Once the siren was sounded, you ran to the room, put a gas mask on your
face, and sealed the room. For many, like my later mother, the combination of
gas, siren and a sealed room, was an enactment of the extermination chambers of
the Holocaust; reinforced by depictions of the man who might launch such
attacks, Saddam Hussein, as a new Hitler. In fact, Saddam’s army launched
primitive missiles that could kill you only if they hit you directly in the
head, and the only Israeli casualty of the war was an old Jew who panicked
because he got entangled in his gas mask.
One important segment of Israeli Jewish society was
not easily manipulated this way was the Jews from Arab and Muslim countries.
When post-Zionist Mizrachi Jews engaged with the subject of the manipulation of
Holocaust memory, they discovered that all the Arab Jews were victims of this
official and collective manipulation. As a result, certain leading activists
decided in the 1990s to commemorate the Holocaust in a new way, different from
that favoured by the state.
Two of these activists, Shlomo Svirsky and Sami
Shalom Chetrit, founded an academic high school that was meant to salvage the
culture and value system of Jews in Arab countries while enabling its graduates
to become fully matriculated. That school was named Kedma (Towards the East, in
biblical Hebrew). There on Yom Hashoah, the official day of Holocaust
remembrance in Israel, students commemorate not only the Holocaust but also
other genocides that have taken place in the world, thus giving a more
universal meaning to the event. In the official ceremony at the Yad Vashem
museum, dignitaries light six candles, one for every million Jewish victims of
the Holocaust – a ceremony repeated in every Israeli school. At Kedma, a
seventh candle is lit for the Armenian genocide that took place during and
immediately after the First World War. The additional candle also represents
other persecuted minorities, such as Native Americans and African Americans.
(69)
Identification with other minorities, and in
particular African Americans and Native Americans, is one of the main features
of the post-Zionist scholarship that has focused on Mizrachi Jews, or as they
prefer to call themselves, the Arab Jews. The next chapter tells their story.
1.
Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians,
Cambridge: MA: South End Press, 1999, p. 99.
2.
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 252.
3.
Israel Shahak, letter to the editor, Kol Ha’ir (19 May 1989).
4.
Ibid.
5.
Shahak, Jewish
History, p. 71.
6.
Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinzky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, London:
Pluto, 2004, p. 105 and in Jewish History,
p. x.
7.
Shahak, Jewish
History, p. 135, n. 25.
8.
He repeated these ideas in English in Boaz
Evron, ‘The Holocaust: Learning the Wrong Lessons’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 10: 3, (1981), pp. 16-26. The
original quote is from Boaz Evron, ‘The Holocaust – A Danger to the People’, Iton 77, 21, (May/June 1980) (Hebrew).
9.
Ibid.
10.
Ibid.
11.
Yehuda Elkana, ‘In Favour of Amnesia’, Ha’aretz (2 March 1988).
12.
Ibid.
13.
Ibid.
14.
Reproduced in English in Amos Elon, ‘The
Politics of Memory’, New York Review of
Books, (7 October 1993).
15.
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston: Mariner Books, 1999; Norman
Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, London: Verso, 2003;
and Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of
Dictators, Westport: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1983.
16.
Novick, The
Holocaust in American Life, p. 10.
17.
Finkelstein, The
Holocaust Industry, p. 47.
18.
Tom Segev, The
Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York: Picador, 2000,
appeared first in Hebrew and was the only direct reference in Hebrew to these
connections. An even more explicit condemnation can be found in Moshe
Zimmermann, ‘The Zionist Dilemma’, Ha’aretz,
(28 October 2004).
19.
Ahimeir’s references are quoted in Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, p. 125;
Ben-Avi’s appeared in sequence in Doar
Ha-Yom, August and November 1932.
20.
See Segev, The
Seventh Million, p. 33.
21.
Ibid.
22.
Hava Eshkoli-Wagman, ‘Yishuz Zionism: Its
Attitude to Nazism and the Third Reich Reconsidered’, Modern Judaism, 19: 1, (February 1999), pp. 25-6.
23.
Ibid.
24.
He published his books in Germany and then they
were translated into Hebrew. The most recent in which these views are
articulated clearly is German Against
Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938-1945, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2013 (Hebrew).
25.
One local newspaper, yerusahlaim (part of Yeidoh
Ahronoth) claimed Zimmermann compared the settler youth to the Hitler-Jugend
movement (22 September 1995). Zimmermann sued the paper for misrepresentation,
but lost the case on 3 February 2005.
26.
Brenner, Zionism
in the Age of Dictators.
27.
Ibid., p. 93.
28.
Joseph Massad, ‘The Last of Semites’, Al Jazeera English, (21 May 2013).
29.
Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, p. 93 and Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 31.
30.
Ibid.
31.
David Ben-Gurion’s Speech, Labour Party
Archives, Beit Berl, Mapai Secretariat (7 December 1938).
32.
Segev, The
Seventh Million, p. 83.
33.
The
Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, directed by Benny Brunner,
1995.
34.
Mark Edelman, Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto,
London: Ocean, 2004; Idith Zertal, Israel’s
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
35.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso,
1983; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The
Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Canto Books, 1983.
36.
Edelman, Resisting
the Holocaust.
37.
Quoted in Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 35.
38.
Ibid., pp. 54-6.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Anderson, Imagined
Communities, p. 57.
41.
Primo Levi, The
Drowned and the Saved, New York: Abacus, 1988, pp. 78-85.
42.
Quoted in Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 27.
43.
Ibid., p. 28.
44.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York:
Viking, 1968.
45.
See Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide,
New York: Transactions Publishers, 2001.
46.
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, ‘The Morality of
Acknowledging/Not-acknowledging the Other’s Holocaust/Genocide’, Journal of Moral Education, 27:2 (1998),
p. 161.
47.
Adi Ofir, ‘On “Hidush Ha-Shem”: The Holocaust as
an Anti-Theological Tract’, Politika,
8, (1986), pp. 4-5 (Hebrew). Hilul Ha-Shem means sacrilegious. Ha-Shem is one of God’s names, and Hidush means Renewal.
48.
See Eyal Sivan, Yizkor.
49.
Nurith Gertz, ‘The Early
Israeli Cinema as Silencer of Memory’, Shofar:
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 24:1 (Fall 2005)
50.
Ibid.
51.
This is the excellent summary of Milton Viorst,
‘After the Fact: A Review of The Seventh
Million’, Journal of Palestine
Studies, 24:2 (Winter 1995), p. 94; see also Segev, The Seventh Million, pp. 123-40.
52.
Hannah Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust
Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials’, Israel Studies, 8:3, (Fall 2003).
53.
Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: The Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of
Israel, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.
54.
Yosef Grodzinsky, Good Human Material: Jews Against Zionists,
1945-1951, Tel Aviv: Ma’ariv, 1998 (Hebrew).
55.
See the episode described in Pappe, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,
1947-1951, p. 31.
56.
Grodzinsky, Good
Human Material.
57.
Aviva Halamish, The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine,
Albany, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998.
58.
M.M. Silver, Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the
Americanisation of Israel’s Founding Story, Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press, 2010.
59.
See Pappe, The
Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951, pp. 24-5.
60.
Arendt, Eichmann
in Jerusalem, p. 229.
61.
Quoted and discussed in Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi, Miami, FL:
University of South California Press, 1995, p. 122.
62.
See Yablonka, ‘The Development of a Holocaust
Consciousness in Israel’ and Zertal, Israel’s
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, pp. 69-71.
63.
Ibid., pp. 196-8.
64.
Quoted in an interview he gave to Yeidoth Ahronoth on 18 June 1982.
65.
Amos Oz, ‘Hitler is Already Dead, My Prime
Minister’, Yeidoth Ahronoth, (21 June
1982).
66.
Novick, The
Holocaust in American Life, p. 158.
67.
Gur-Ze’ev, ‘The Morality of
Acknowledging/Not-acknowledging the Other’s Holocaust/Genocide’.
68.
Moshe Zuckermann, Shoah in the Sealed Room: The ‘Holocaust’ in
the Israeli Press During the Gulf War, Tel Aviv: self-publication 1993
(Hebrew).
69.
Also this year this alternative ceremony took
place in the school.
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