[Peace-discuss] Israel and the holocaust

[David Green]

An important article that shows that the limits of
allowable debate on the near left are slightly
shifting.

Israel's Culture of Martyrdom
by BARUCH KIMMERLING

Death and the Nation: History, Memory, Politics
by Idith Zertal


In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between
Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World
by Yosef Grodzinsky; with a forward by Rabbi Michael
Lerner


[from the January 10, 2005 issue]

Nations like to imagine themselves as unique, but one
belief they have in common is that it is noble to die
in their name. Death and redemption are the themes of
almost every form of patriotism. In the case of
Israel, however, the connection between nationalism
and death is especially visceral. For the Jewish state
is a nation that emerged from the ashes of a project
of extermination, and that sees itself as the best
defense against the renewal of violent persecution.
Zionism, the state's ruling ideology, is a triumphal
creed shadowed by death. 

The Israeli historian Idith Zertal argues that the
nexus of death and nationalism is essential to
understanding Israeli society today. In her powerful
new book, Death and the Nation (which will be
published in an English translation this summer by
Cambridge University Press under the title Israel's
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood), she
demonstrates how the catastrophes of Jewish history
have been transformed into nationalist fables of
heroism, victory and redemption. In debunking the
official nationalist historiography, Zertal's book
follows in the footsteps of works such as Nachman
Ben-Yehuda's The Masada Myth and Yael
Zerubavel'sRecovered Roots, both of which explored how
ancient Jewish history was distorted to serve the
needs of the Zionist movement. What sets Zertal's book
apart is her focus on death. She believes that an
obsession with death and martyrdom has vitally shaped
the way Israelis understand themselves and their
state. One of her recurring themes is "ancient graves
produce fresh graves." 

At the center of this culture of death is the
remembrance of martyrs--Jews who, in Zionist ideology,
had to die so that the state might be born. The
central chapter in the construction of Israeli
martyrology was, of course, the Holocaust, but it
began well before, according to Zertal, who traces it
to the cult surrounding Joseph Trumpeldor, the first
hero of the Jews who settled in Palestine."Never mind
dying," Trumpeldor is reported to have said shortly
before his death in 1920. "It is good to die for our
country." Born in a small town in the northern
Caucasus, Trumpeldor was strongly influenced in his
youth by a nearby farming commune established by
followers of Leo Tolstoy, a model that soon merged in
his mind with the Zionist ideal of settling Palestine.
In 1912 he made his way to Palestine, hoping to
establish agricultural communes. The kibbutznik,
however, ended up achieving distinction not as a
farmer but as a soldier. Drafted into the Russian army
in 1902, he lost an arm in the Russo-Japanese War. He
went on to serve as the deputy commander of a Jewish
brigade established by the British in World War I,
participating in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. 

When he returned to Palestine four years later, he was
called by the Jewish community leadership to northern
Galilee to help organize the defense of small
frontier-zone outposts against attacks by Arab
militias allied with the newly established,
British-backed regime of Faysal in Damascus. These
outposts had been created by Jewish settlers as a way
of establishing the northern border of Palestine, an
issue of contention between France and Britain. In
1920, a year after his return to Palestine, Trumpeldor
was mortally wounded while defending the outposts at
Tel Hai, a commemorative "holy place." Along with five
of his comrades, he was buried near Tel Hai. In 1934 a
memorial was erected at his gravesite, and it soon
became, for Zionist youth movements, a place of
pilgrimage nearly as important as Masada, where,
according to the Zionist interpretation of Flavius
Josephus, Jewish rebels committed mass suicide rather
than surrender to the Romans in AD 73. 

The remembrance of Trumpeldor's death at Tel Hai,
argues Zertal, marked the beginning of a cult of death
among Israeli Jews. The "new Jewish man," in this
ideology, was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, to
die defending his land and people, in stark contrast
with Diaspora Jews, who would later be depicted as
weaker souls who went "like lambs to the slaughter" in
the Holocaust. The voices arguing that it is better to
live for one's country than to die for it were
accordingly stifled and silenced. It is deeply ironic
that the very same society now claims to be shocked by
the "martyrdom culture" in the occupied territories. 

The Tel Hai affair also established the basic pattern
of conflict management with the Arabs. As Zertal
points out, the Zionist leadership made appeals to the
defenders of Tel Hai to withdraw, citing their poor
weapons and their immense numerical inferiority. After
a heated debate, this option was rejected by the
Jewish community leadership (with the exception of
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founding father of the
Zionist right). In this moment, we can see the seeds
of the idea that the construction of Jewish
settlements--the creation of "facts on the ground," in
contemporary Israeli parlance--should be the major
tool by which to establish the geopolitical boundaries
of Jewish control over Israel-Palestine. The line that
runs from Tel Hai to "Judea and Samaria" may be
twisted, but it is more direct than some would like to
imagine. 

Death was an inescapable presence in the early days of
the Jewish state, which had recently become a
sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust
survivors. Israeli leaders have often invoked the
Holocaust as the ultimate justification for the Jewish
state (and, more cynically, for Israel's
counterinsurgency tactics in the occupied
territories). Yet as Zertal shows, Israel's
relationship to Holocaust victims has been highly
ambivalent, and the state's treatment of survivors has
sometimes been strikingly manipulative. 

This point is clearly illustrated by Yosef Grodzinsky,
a neurolinguist at Tel Aviv University, in his new
book, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, a detailed and
well-researched account of the struggle between the
survivors of the Holocaust and the various Zionist
agencies and emissaries who pressured them to
immigrate to Palestine, regardless of the survivors'
own wishes, through superior organizational skills and
connections with the US military and civilian
authorities. 

The Holocaust presented a unique set of challenges for
the Zionist movement. On the one hand, the major
reservoir of Jewish candidates for immigration to
Palestine had been annihilated. On the other hand,
between 1945 and 1951 millions of displaced people and
refugees, 330,000 of them Jewish Holocaust survivors,
were desperately wandering the roads of Europe in
search of a home. Many of these survivors could
potentially be directed to Palestine, especially since
the immigration gates of the United States were all
but closed. This created a unique opportunity to bring
an unprecedented number of Jews to Palestine. At the
same time, these potential immigrants suffered from
high rates of malnutrition, physical degeneration and
illness. Most had no family and no home to which they
could return or be repatriated. They were completely
disoriented and many were still influenced by the Nazi
worldview, which regarded them as subhumans, as Bruno
Bettelheim (himself a camp survivor) has described.
However, until the camps for Jewish displaced persons
and refugees were fully dismantled, less than 40
percent of the survivors came to Palestine (or Israel,
after its establishment in 1948), in spite of heavy
pressures by the Zionist agencies: a disappointing
proportion, given the movement's initial expectations.


David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist movement
and Israel's first prime minister, viewed the future
Jewish homeland as the one and only destination for
the survivors, as Zertal makes clear in an
illuminating discussion of the odyssey of the 4,500
survivors from German camps who set sail in July 1947
as "illegal immigrants" on a ship later named Exodus.
The real story of the ship was far less glorious than
the one told in Leon Uris's 1958 bestseller and Otto
Preminger's 1960 film. When the ship embarked, the UN
Special Committee on Palestine was holding discussions
and Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, the
primary governing body of the state-in-formation, felt
that the plight of Jewish refugees in Europe needed to
be dramatized in order to attract more sympathy for
the Jewish struggle over Palestine. The British
authorities had refused to let the immigrants
disembark in Palestine, or even to take refuge in
transitional camps in Cyprus, forcing the boat to be
redirected back to Germany. To prevent such a ghastly
outcome, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann persuaded the
French Prime Minister, Leon Blum, to host the
refugees. Ben-Gurion rejected this solution out of
hand, and the poor survivors remained on board for
seven months. 

Ben-Gurion's insensitivity was rooted in his
"Palestine-centric" attitude, best exemplified by his
1938 remark that "if I knew it was possible to save
all children of Germany by their transfer to England
and only half of them by transferring them to the Land
of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are
faced not only with the accounting of these children
but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish
people." This was not merely a rhetorical declaration.
Grodzinsky tells us with great pain how Ben-Gurion and
other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000
orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as
a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps
in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had
managed to secure them permits. Another group of
roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred,
after Zionist intervention, from reaching France,
whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe
haven. 

Ben-Gurion's strategy in the Exodus affair paid off.
The fate of the refugee ship attracted considerable
and sympathetic attention around the world, and served
the Zionist cause well. Few observers at the time knew
that many of the refugees from the Exodus had applied
for immigration visas to the United States, and were
hardly anxious to settle in Israel. By dramatizing the
fate of the survivors, in whom he had little interest
except as future residents of the state he was
building (Good Human Material is the original Hebrew
title of Grodzinsky's book), Ben-Gurion helped to make
Israel the world's chief power broker over Jewish
affairs. Under his leadership, Israel established a
claim to represent all of world Jewry, and on this
basis successfully claimed reparations from the
Federal Republic of Germany. Indeed, as Zertal argues,
Israel acquired the right to speak not only for living
Jews but for the 6 million exterminated Jews, to whom
Ben-Gurion suggested granting symbolic citizenship--in
effect, turning them into martyrs for the Jewish
state. 

Another affair described in detail by Grodzinsky
concerns the preparation and conscription of the
displaced persons in European camps for participation
in the Arab-Jewish struggle over Palestine. From 1946,
the Palestinian Jewish underground militia
organizations--mainly Ben-Gurion's Haganah--attempted
to recruit veteran Jewish partisans from Russia,
Poland and France for the anticipated war. Moreover,
in February 1948 the Haganah issued a call to every
fit man and woman in the European camps between the
ages of 17 and 35, seeking volunteers for the military
forces of the embryonic Jewish state in Palestine. The
Zionist movement's assumption that the survivors in
the camps would become citizens of Israel and fight on
its behalf aroused resentment among many of them. 

At the same time, the sense of existential fear in the
Jewish community of Palestine, roughly 600,000 in
number and short on weapons, was quite real. There was
a deep anxiety that the coming intercommunal (and
perhaps interstate) war could lead to their
annihilation. The sense of urgency led a number of
inhabitants of the camps in Europe to join the
Haganah, which provided a degree of pride and some
psychological compensation for the horrors they had
suffered. In addition, it rescued them from their
miserable lives in the camps. 

Yet the request for volunteers yielded only about 700
recruits. The majority of survivors were in no mood to
take up arms for the Jewish state. "We have already
smelled fire, let others smell it now," said one. As
Grodzinsky shows, the low number of volunteers led,
from April 1948 onward, to "compulsory conscription"
in the camps in Germany and Austria. This "compulsory
conscription" was implemented by the autonomous camp
managers through a variety of means, among them firing
employees from their jobs; evicting tenants from their
houses; denying food supplies; arrests and beatings;
and the threat of ostracism from the community. The
number of draftees rose to 7,800, many of whom
disembarked from the ships only to be sent directly to
the battlefield to die for their new homeland. 

After the war, under pressure from Holocaust
survivors, Israel's Knesset passed the Nazis and Nazi
Collaborators (Punishment) Law, in 1950. The law,
tailored in accordance with the Nuremberg precedent,
required a mandatory death sentence for every person
found guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes
against humanity, without any differentiation between
the degree and scope of their crimes. The law's
intention was mainly symbolic since, as Zertal
observes, nobody seriously considered the possibility
that Israel would bring Nazis to trial after
Nuremberg, even if some Nazis succeeded in escaping
justice. The passage of this law, however, would have
unintended and far-reaching consequences. 

Initially intended to punish Nazis and their
collaborators in Eastern and Central Europe, the law
turned sharply against certain Jews themselves. During
the 1950s dozens of Jewish men and women were sued by
Holocaust survivors who identified them as
kapos--Jewish supervisors in death and concentration
camps--or as former members of the Judenräte, the
Jewish community councils that provided the Nazis with
lists of community members and organized the
transports to the camps. In most of these cases the
sentences were light, since the judges felt that most
of the Jewish collaborators were themselves victims
and that the 1950 act was not designed to apply to
them. Nonetheless, the boundary between perpetrators
and victims began to be blurred in disturbing ways,
raising troubling questions about the role some Jews
had played in the Nazi campaign of destruction. 

In the 1954 Kastner affair, the carefully policed
boundary between victim and perpetrator all but
evaporated, upsetting the stability of Israel's entire
political system. The controversy broke out after a
71-year-old Hungarian Jew, Malkiel Gruenwald,
published a pamphlet in which he accused another
Hungarian Jew, 48-year-old Dr. Rudolf Kastner, of
collaborating with the Nazis in Hungary between 1944
and 1945. Kastner had assumed various leadership roles
within the Jewish community in Hungary and
Transylvania before and during the war, including the
chairmanship of the "rescue committee" of Jews who
escaped from countries occupied by Nazi Germany. After
arriving in Palestine in 1946, he became a prominent
member of Ben-Gurion's ruling Labor party (then known
as Mapai) and was to be its candidate for the Knesset
in the coming election. Kastner also occupied several
influential positions, including spokesman of the
Trade and Industry Ministry, director of broadcasting
in Hungarian and Romanian, chief editor of Uj Kelet (a
Hungarian daily) and chairman of the Organization of
Hungarian Jewry in Israel. 

According to Gruenwald, Kastner, in his capacity as a
Jewish community leader in Hungary, had provided
indispensable assistance to SS Lieutenant Col. Adolf
Eichmann in the latter's efforts to ship a
half-million Hungarian and Transylvanian Jews to the
extermination camps. At the time Eichmann was head of
the Gestapo department in charge of Jewish matters and
population evacuation. Eichmann had been largely
responsible for the deportation to the East of nearly
190,000 Austrian Jews from March 1938 onward. Eichmann
had also participated in the January 1942 Wannsee
conference, where the administrative and logistic
details of the "final solution to the Jewish problem"
were settled. He was not, it must be underscored, a
policy-maker in the Third Reich, and his activities
and decisions were mostly bureaucratic. Even his
negotiations with the Jewish dignitaries and
Nazi-appointed or self-appointed Judenräte were aimed
at achieving a well-organized and well-run
transportation process to the camps. His role, on
arriving in Budapest in March 1944, was to send a
half-million Hungarian Jews to their death as swiftly
and efficiently as possible. 

To accomplish this goal, Eichmann needed Jewish
collaborators like Kastner, since he was understaffed,
with an SS team of 150 men and only a few thousand
Hungarian soldiers at his disposal. Eichmann knew that
the Jews would not go voluntarily to the so-called
resettlement areas at the behest of the Nazis or the
Hungarian authorities. The only people they would
trust were their own leaders. Here, Kastner played a
major role. He and his staff had to make sure that the
Jews were not informed of the real destination of the
trains. Misled by Kastner and others like him, the
Jews showed up dutifully at the trains in the belief
that they were merely being resettled. Some even made
efforts to get on the earlier trains in order to have
a better choice of housing in the new settlements. In
exchange for Kastner's help, Gruenwald alleged, the
Nazis gave the gift of life in June 1944, organizing a
special rescue train for him and 1,600 Jewish
notables, including Kastner's relatives and friends. 

Charged with slander by Israel's attorney general,
Gruenwald hired the services of a young, able and
highly motivated lawyer, Shmuel Tamir. Tamir had his
own political agenda, as did Gruenwald and the judge
presiding over the trial, Benjamin Halevi. All three
men were veterans of the right-wing Lehi underground
during the British colonial period and were vehement
opponents of Ben-Gurion's government, which Kastner
represented. During the trial, one of Israel's most
dramatic ever, Tamir succeeded in turning the tables
on his client's accuser, arguing that the Jewish
leadership in Palestine had sabotaged a series of
attempts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. In his
verdict, which cleared the accused of slander, Judge
Halevi rejected most of Gruenwald's charges against
the Jewish leadership (during Eichmann's trail, the
judge would maintain a discreet silence about this
painful issue), but he accepted the main one: that
Kastner had collaborated with the Nazis and "sold his
soul to the devil." 

Following the Gruenwald verdict, an appeal was
submitted to the High Court of Justice, but in March
1957 Kastner was assassinated. Three people were
arrested, accused and sentenced for the murder, but
even today the assassination is a matter of
contention. The official version is that the assassins
belonged to a tiny right-wing underground group
inspired by the fringe right-wing zealot Israel
(Sheib) Eldad. Zertal's account, however, is closer to
the alternative version, advanced by extremist right-
and left-wing groups, according to which Kaster was
eliminated by the state security services because he
proved too much of an embarrassment for the
government. Posthumously, the High Court cleared
Kastner of responsibility for any of the crimes of
which Gruenwald accused him, except for that of false
testimony on behalf of Nazi officer Kurt Becher at the
Nuremberg trial. 

Zertal's preference for the unofficial version of
Kastner's assassination is not incidental. This
version reinforces the link she makes between the
Kastner trial and the extraordinary trial that
followed it, that of Adolf Eichmann, whose capture by
Israeli agents in Argentina Ben-Gurion announced in
the Knesset in May 1960. According to Zertal, there
were several motives behind Ben-Gurion's decision to
bring Eichmann to trial in Israel. The first and most
immediate was to correct the impression left by the
Gruenwald-Kastner trial, namely that the Jewish
leadership in Palestine failed to undertake any
serious rescue efforts on behalf of their European
brethren during the Holocaust. Second, in spite of his
initial discomfort with the subject and his
insensitivity toward survivors, Ben-Gurion sought to
turn the Holocaust into the central pillar of Israeli
identity and to use it as the main basis upon which to
legitimize the Zionist project. Third, the Eichmann
case could be used as a tool to equate Israel's Arab
enemies with the Nazis. Fourth, the trial helped cast
Israel as the representative and savior of world
Jewry. 

The trial lasted from April to August of 1961.
Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed in Ramleh
Prison in May 1962. It was a show trial, not because
the accused was innocent--Eichmann was responsible for
staggering crimes against humanity--but because the
trial was a grand attempt to shape Jewish and
Holocaust history and memory by a single man,
Ben-Gurion, and because it had far less to do with the
task of proving Eichmann's guilt. (Ben-Gurion went to
great lengths to keep post-Holocaust Germany--the "New
Germany," as he called it--and the West German
leadership out of the trial, so as not to embarrass
Israel's new military and economic ally, West German
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.) The entire narrative was
set in motion from the very first statement made by
Attorney General Gideon Hausner: 


When I stand before you here, judges of Israel, to
lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not
standing alone. With me are 6 million accusers. But
they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing
finger toward 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 this awesome indictment. 

Over four months, day after day, witnesses recounted
the horrors of the death camps, the heroism of Jewish
partisans and soldiers who fought the Nazis,
especially the hopeless uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.
As Zertal observes, the Jewish resistance was
presented as having been organized and led solely by
Zionist movements and their leaders, while the role of
the Bundists, Beitarists and Communists was either
downplayed or ignored. Marek Edelman, one of the
heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the deputy
commander of the uprising under Mordechai Anielewicz,
was not even mentioned. Edelman, who represented the
Jewish Socialist Party (Bund), opposed Anielewicz's
decision to commit suicide (accompanied with the
murder of one's relatives). After the war, Edelman
rejected the very idea that one could draw "lessons"
from the Holocaust, as well as the notion that Zionism
provided the "answer" to the Jewish question. He
remained in Poland and achieved fame as a leading
cardiologist and a key figure in the Solidarity labor
movement of the 1980s. In 1946 he published one of the
first accounts of the ghetto uprising, The Ghetto
Fights, in Polish, Yiddish and English. The book was
translated into Hebrew only in 2001. 

The Eichmann trial received extraordinary attention in
Israel, where much of it was broadcast live on state
radio (the country's only radio station at the time),
which functioned, in the words of media expert Elihu
Katz, as Israel's "tribal campfire." The state radio
supplemented its live broadcasts with follow-ups and
daily and weekly summaries and comments. For most of
Israel's Jewish population, the trial provided a rite
of passage, imbuing them with the sense that they were
all, in a way, Holocaust survivors and that another
Holocaust might be imminent. Had it not been for the
Eichmann trial, Zertal suggests, Israelis might not
have seen the 1967 war as an "existential threat" of
Holocaust proportions but as a secular war over
disputed land. 

The trial also attracted considerable attention
abroad. Hundreds of foreign reporters descended on
Jerusalem to cover the remarkable story. (Adding to
the drama--and raising questions about the trial's
legality--was the fact that the accused had been
kidnapped in Argentina by the Israeli secret service,
and that the Israeli law was invoked retroactively.)
Among these reporters the best-known was the political
philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had recently achieved
fame for her 1951 tome The Origins of Totalitarianism.
A German Jew who had studied under Heidegger (with
whom she had a brief affair), Arendt had a long,
troubled relationship with the Jewish state. In her
early 20s she was a Zionist. In the 1940s, as she
became a critic of any form of nationalism, she drew
close to the tiny Brit Shalom movement, which espoused
an Arab-Jewish binational state in Palestine. In 1945
she published an article titled "Zionism
Reconsidered"--which forecast most of the wrongdoings
of Zionism while still demonstrating a deep emotional
and intellectual concern for the future of Israel and
its people. 

Arendt arrived in Jerusalem as a reporter for The New
Yorker, but her interest in the trial went far beyond
that of a foreign correspondent. She saw the trial as
an opportunity to re-examine her thesis about the
uniqueness and modernity of the Nazi regime and to
find answers to the enigmatic question of how it was
possible to implement the Final Solution so easily and
efficiently. Elaborating on an argument in The Origins
of Totalitarianism, she asserted that the
bureaucratization and rationalization of the
nation-state made possible a new, industrialized kind
of mass murder. Sitting at his desk in a sterile
office, organizing the logistics of properly managing
transportation and extermination camps, Eichmann was,
in her view, a symptom of the "banality of evil"
rather than a prime mover in the Nazi machinery of
organized killing. 

As the Arendt scholar Jerome Kohn has argued in an
illuminating essay, one of the major reasons for the
controversy provoked by her book Eichmann in Jerusalem



was and remains the failure of many readers, both Jews
and non-Jews, to make the tremendous mental effort
required to transcend the fate of one's own people and
see what was pernicious for all humanity. The notion
of a "crime against humanity" was introduced in the
Nuremberg trials of major war criminals in 1946, but
in Arendt's opinion the crime was confused there with
"crimes against peace" and "war crimes" and had never
been properly defined nor its perpetrators clearly
recognized. 

In Arendt's view, the Nazi genocide, while
"perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people," was
a crime that "violated the order of mankind." What
stood out for her as a political philosopher was less
"the choice of victims" than the extraordinary "nature
of the crime." 

Unlike some Israeli-Jewish intellectuals, such as
Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, Arendt did not object
to the trial being held in Jerusalem. She did not
argue for an international court, nor did she oppose
the capital sentence. She did, however, object to
Attorney General Hausner's understanding of Jewish
history, and of the nature of Nazism as a form of
genocidal anti-Semitism. In his opening speech,
Hausner presented Jewish history as a narrative of
eternal victimization. Far from being an unprecedented
program of mass industrialized killing, the Holocaust
was discussed as if it were merely an immense pogrom.
The effect of Hausner's speech, in Arendt's view, was
to define Zionism and Israeli nationalism as the only
guarantors of Jewish survival and continuity. She also
objected to the ideologically motivated
characterization of Eichmann as the incarnation of the
ultimate evil. Arendt in no way sought to diminish the
magnitude of Eichmann's crimes. But with her concept
of the banality of evil, she sought to underscore the
bureaucratic machinery in which Eichmann was a cog
(however enthusiastic), and without which he could
never have committed his crimes. 

However, Arendt did not believe that the rise of the
nation-state and its bureaucratization sufficed as an
explanation of the Nazi genocide. More
controversially, she also turned to an examination of
the social structure of the Jewish communities and the
nature of their leadership and representatives.
Drawing upon Raul Hilberg's exhaustive research in The
Destruction of the European Jews (a book that has
never been translated into Hebrew and is not quoted in
Israel), she provided an unsparing anatomy of the ways
in which the European Jewish communities facilitated
Nazi purposes--for example, by providing lists and
addresses of their members and their property. She
also analyzed the ways in which most of the Jewish
leadership consciously collaborated with the Nazis.
Law-abiding to a fault, they filled out endless forms
(about their property), policed themselves, funded the
"project of resettlement," went to the concentration
points and entered the trains of "resettlement," while
most of their leaders were fully aware of the railroad
destination. The Nazi officers and clerks were
surprised at how obediently the Jews went to their
death. 

Thus, the Kastner case cannot be considered as an
isolated one, but should be seen as part of a syndrome
that characterized both Eastern and Western organized
Jewish communities. As Arendt pointed out, in cities
where the Jews were less tightly organized, or where
the leadership warned the population or refused to
collaborate with the Nazis, many more Jews survived.
Had the Nazis been forced to hunt individuals or
families, they would have needed more time and
manpower to accomplish their mission. By a uniquely
cruel twist of fate, what had been for generations a
vehicle of Jewish survival became, in the hands of
their enemies, one of the major tools for their
physical annihilation. Contrary to Arendt's often
vituperative critics, this analysis does not reduce
the perpetrators' responsibility--if anything, it
makes the Holocaust even more monstrous. 

Eichmann in Jerusalem sparked "a civil war...among New
York intellectuals," as Irving Howe recalled in his
memoirs. Writing in the New York Times Book Review,
the noted historian Barbara Tuchman accused Arendt of
seeking to aid in Eichmann's defense, despite the fact
that her book was published only after Eichmann's
execution. According to Zertal, in the mid-1960s alone
more than a thousand articles and books were published
in response to Arendt--most of them in the spirit of
Tuchman's attack. Arendt's descriptions of Eichmann's
pettiness struck many American Jewish readers as a
coded apologia for his behavior; her discussions of
trial evidence regarding Jewish collaborators, as well
as of non-Zionist Jews and their role in the
resistance, were widely seen as attempts to blame the
Jews for the Holocaust and to undermine the Zionist
cause. A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Arendt found
herself subjected to a vehement campaign of
vilification by the Anti-Defamation League and other
Jewish organizations, and denounced as a self-hating
Jew, an anti-Semite and even a Nazi. 

In Israel, by contrast, the language barrier insulated
most of the population from Arendt's heterodox ideas.
Few Israelis were aware of intellectual controversies
beyond the country's borders, unless they passed
through the filters of the local intelligentsia.
Although Eichmann in Jerusalem was translated into
Hebrew by the Israeli thinker Boas Evron soon after
its publication, it was not published in Israel for
almost four decades, and even today none of Arendt's
other work is available in Hebrew. 

This state of affairs did not protect her from attacks
in the Hebrew press. Shortly after the publication of
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem, the
distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism, wrote an
open letter in the Hebrew daily Davar accusing Arendt
of lacking ahavat Israel--"love for the Jewish
people." In her reply, published in Encounter, she
explained that the notion of allegiance to a
group--particularly one to which she would be bound by
birth--was highly suspicious to her, since it is
rooted in self-interest. Her love, Arendt sharply
remarked, was reserved for her friends. In her
political commitments, she professed a "love of
humanity" and not of a distinct people. Scholem and
Arendt agreed to publish their exchange, and indeed
both letters were printed in a book, but not in
Hebrew. Thus, Hebrew-speaking readers only had the
opportunity to read Scholem's criticism of a book that
was not available to them and, unless they read
English, they had no access to the author's response.
In Death and the Nation, Zertal presents, for the
first time in Hebrew, considerable portions of
Arendt's letter to Scholem. 

One striking effort of the attorney generalduring
Eichmann's trial was to equate the Arabs with the
Nazis. This was achieved by inflating the role of Haj
Amin al-Husseini, the prominent Palestinian political
and religious leader (chairman of the Supreme Muslim
Council and the mufti of Jerusalem) in the
extermination of the Jews. In 1937, a year after the
outbreak of the Arab Revolt, the British tried to
arrest Husseini, among other Arab rebels, in the hope
of quelling the uprising. Husseini escaped to Fascist
Italy and then to Germany, where he offered his
services to Hitler. There is no doubt that he saw in
Nazi Germany an important ally against Zionism and, in
at least one case, he tried to intervene to prevent
the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children to Palestine.
Husseini probably knew and approved of the Nazi plan
to annihilate the Jewish people and hoped to receive a
proper position in "liberated Palestine." He helped
the Nazis form a collaborationist Muslim brigade in
Bosnia, and to broadcast propaganda to the Arab world.
However, the argument that he was a chief adviser to
the Nazis on the "solution of the Jewish problem"--an
argument on prominent display at Yad Vashem, Israel's
Holocaust Museum--is preposterous. The Germans did not
need Husseini's advice and in fact scorned the
non-Aryan religious cleric. 

Since then, however, "the mufti" has become one of the
major assets of pro-Israel propaganda. The argument
was and is as follows: The Arabs do not accept the
establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine,
therefore they are anti-Semites who want to annihilate
all the Jews and to accomplish the Nazi program--the
best example being the mufti's alliance with Nazi
Germany. This social construction of reality ignores
not only the complexity and the fundamentally
different basis of the Israeli-Arab conflict but also
some inconvenient historical facts. One such fact is
that while assisting the Nazis, the mufti lost almost
all his influence over the Palestinian Arabs, which he
never regained. Another is that during the 1930s and
'40s Palestine was the only country in the region (and
perhaps in the whole world) where no Nazi party or
organization was established. During the 1930s, some
Arab, as well as some Jewish, leaders expressed
admiration for fascist regimes, but this was before
the racist bases of these regimes became clear. It was
only much later that Arabs borrowed anti-Semitic
literature and motifs from the Europeans and used them
in their propaganda. 

It's true, of course, that the native Palestinian
Arabs, as well as the Arabs of the region, did not
like or welcome the European Jews who colonized
Palestine. They perceived the Jewish claims of
ownership over the land based on a distant and
ambiguous past and on some holy scriptures as unjust
and ridiculous. They opposed this colonization with
all the means at their disposal, sometimes with
indiscriminate violence and terror. The confrontation
between Arab and Jew in Palestine was a conflict of
mutually exclusive interests, much like any other
ethno-national conflict. To be sure, there were some
racist undertones and expressions on both sides. But
it is dangerously misleading to regard the Arab
resistance against the Jewish presence and the gradual
conquest of the land as an expression of historical
anti-Semitism. Ironically, the Zionist effort to
"Nazify" the Arabs--a strategy that began in the
1940s--ends up diminishing the extraordinary genocidal
crimes committed by Nazi Germany. 

Zertal cogently demonstrates how a social construction
of a "second coming Holocaust" was built before and
during the wars of 1948 and 1967 for the mobilization
of domestic public opinion, world Jewry and Western
nations. In fact, this campaign of fear directly
contradicted the Zionist dogma asserting that a Jewish
state in Palestine would insure Jewish security (and
normalize Jewish existence). This inherent paradox was
ironically expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Levi
Eshkol, who referred to the Jewish state as Shimshon
der Nebedicher (in Yiddish "the Wretched Samson"), the
mighty military superpower that considers itself a
victim. By invoking the Holocaust as a catastrophe
whose repetition had to be avoided by any means (such
as Abba Eban's famous definition of the Green Line as
"Auschwitz borders"), Israeli leaders unburdened
themselves of almost any moral restrictions, or even
obedience to internal and international laws, whether
it came to the making of nuclear weapons (with
France's assistance and America's tacit acceptance),
the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza or the
invasion of Lebanon. Faced with political problems,
Israel saw only existential threats. Once the
Palestinian national movement was defined as a mortal
threat to Jewish survival, any response to it, from
the demolition of homes to the bombing of refugee
camps, could be justified as legitimate self-defense. 

The worst abuses of the Holocaust in Israel, however,
have occurred in the midst of debates between Jews,
particularly the controversies around the territories
occupied in 1967. The frequency and casualness with
which Israeli Jews accuse one another of Nazi-like or
anti-Semitic behavior today is a disturbing measure of
the coarsening of the country's political culture. 

The example of such invective best-known outside
Israel was the left-wing philosopher Yeshayahu
Leibovitz's description of settlers as "Judeo-Nazis."
More common and far more dangerous, however, has been
the abuse of the Holocaust by the Israeli right wing.
As Zertal points out, almost every Israeli politician
who has tried to make peace with the Arabs has been
likened to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime
minister who tried to avoid the Second World War by
appeasing Hitler, or as a "Nazi" whose secret desire
is nothing less than the annihilation of the Jewish
people. Any "concession" to the Arabs signals, in
these terms, the destruction of Israel, the end of
Zionism and the end of the Jewish people. Another
symbol often seen at right-wing demonstrations is the
yellow Star of David, the single most emotive symbol
of Jewish victimization. If Ariel Sharon is Israel's
prime minister today, it is in large part because of
this right-wing campaign of vilification against
supporters of a negotiated peace with the Palestinian
people. Now, it seems, it is his turn to be demonized
as his proposed evacuation from the Gaza Strip
settlements comes to be labeled as a process aimed at
making the Land of Israel judenrein--i.e., cleansed of
Jews. 

In October 1995 Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and the
late Rafael Eitan attended a rally in Jerusalem
organized by the extremist right-wing organizations
Chabadand Zu Artzenu. The assembled mob called for the
deaths of the "Oslo criminals" Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin and Cabinet minister Shimon Peres, calling them
the "Judenrat." One month later Rabin was shot dead by
Yigal Amir, a religious nationalist youth who hoped to
stop the implementation of the Oslo Accords. Rabin's
assassination was the culmination of months of
unprecedented incitement and violent demonstrations
against the accords and the prime minister himself,
who was blamed for betraying the idea of a Greater
Israel. At right-wing rallies protesters held up
posters depicting Rabin in an SS uniform. Opposition
leaders played a major role in these incitements by
using an unrestrained rhetoric of blood, land and
treason. 

"Never forget" has been the mantra of Jewish and
Israeli politics for three decades. But in Death and
the Nation, Idith Zertal argues, daringly and I think
rightly, that one can "remember too much." The
obsessive commemoration of the Holocaust and of Jewish
victimhood has blinded much of the Jewish community to
Israel's real position in the world and to the
humanity of the Palestinian people. The result has
been to make ever more distant a reasonable political
solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is the
victory of death over life, of the past over the
future. To be sure, there are periods in the history
of a nation when ultimate sacrifices are necessary,
and a cult of death unavoidable. The question in
Israel today is whether this heroic period has come to
an end or whether the prevailing ideology of the 1948
war will last another hundred years, until the entire
"Land of Israel" is "liberated." To choose the former
option is to grant priority to the lives of Israel's
citizens, Jewish and Arab. To choose the latter is to
remain a community of victims, joined in a mythical
communion of Jewish sacrifice in an eternally hostile
gentile world. Tragically, most of the organized
American Jewish communityseems to prefer the mythic
option, a course that can only lead to disaster.