[Peace] Idith Zertal event and review

[David Green]

March 27, Tuesday
Idith Zertal
Historian from the Institute for Jewish Studies at University of Basel
"The Memory of the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli Conflict"
7:30pm, Reading Room, Levis Faculty Center 
   
  In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick noted that the 
Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini (a sworn enemy of 
both Zionists and British colonialism, who had met with Eichmann and 
had great expectations of a Nazi victory), was depicted in Gutman´s 
Encyclopedia as one of the major designers and perpetrators of the 
Final Solution: his entry is twice as long as those for Goebbels and 
Goering, longer than the combined entries for Heydrich and Himmler and 
longer than the entry for Eichmann. `One might add,´ Zertal says, `that 
in the Hebrew edition of the Encyclopedia, the entry on El-Husseini is 
almost as long as that on Hitler.´

  (El-Husseini's scholarly biographers agree that while he was used as a tool of Nazi propaganda, he had no influence on the final solution - DG)
   
  Children of the State
Yitzhak Laor
London Review of Books
Vol. 28 No. 2
January 26, 2006

Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood
by Idith Zertal · Cambridge, 236 pp, £19.99

In 1950 the Israeli parliament passed the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators 
(Punishment) Law, the first constitutional expression of Israel's 
belief that it must act as the heir of the Jews murdered in Europe. 
This status won international recognition only gradually, thanks by and 
large to West Germany's decision not only to pay compensation to the 
victims of Nazism but also to pay 'reparations' to the state of Israel. 
In her excellent book, Idith Zertal reviews some of the trials of 
Jewish collaborators who had immigrated to Israel after the war and 
were indicted under this law. These survivors were victims too, but the 
law required that their victimhood be suspended. Nevertheless, they 
were all given light sentences, as if the judges themselves had some 
reservations about the law.

A far more critical case followed, however, when a man called Malkiel 
Grunewald, who had lost his entire family in Hungary during the war, 
issued a series of pamphlets accusing Israel Kastner, a spokesman for 
Israel´s Ministry of Trade and Industry, of collaboration. During the 
war, according to Grunewald, Kastner had met Eichmann, travelled all 
over Germany, and arranged transport out of Occupied Europe for more 
than a thousand privileged Hungarian Jews. Grunewald´s own family, too 
unimportant to be saved, were deported to places from which no one 
returned. Kastner had known about these places but, as part of the deal 
he had struck with the Nazis, had kept this knowledge from his fellow 
Jews. After the war he testified at Nuremberg on behalf of his SS 
contact Kurt Becher and saved him from being hanged.

Instead of indicting Kastner, if only to allow him to be found 
innocent, the attorney general chose to file a libel suit against 
Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David 
Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was 
acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, `had sold his soul to 
the devil´. In Zertal´s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion´s 
downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ordered Mossad to kidnap Eichmann 
and to bring him to Israel for what Zertal and other Israeli scholars, 
following Hannah Arendt, have called a show trial.

Holocaust memory is the safest, or at any rate the least controversial, 
Israeli collective experience, at a time when the rest of our national 
values are under threat. To be a good Israeli some forty years ago 
meant doing something for the state - `for the nation´, `for the Jewish 
people´. Now, to be a good Israeli means to see ourselves as the only 
protagonists in our story. This has been a gradual process, and its 
grotesque culmination came in the spring of 1993 when Major-General 
Ehud Barak, then IDF chief of staff, stood in uniform at Auschwitz and 
said at the climax of his speech: `Had we only arrived here 50 years 
earlier . . .´

The Holocaust is by now a central element of `Israeliness´. Zertal sees 
it not just as a `spiritual´ entity, but as a material institution as 
well. She begins with the way the Zionist elite chose to ignore its 
survivors: `martyrdom´ was reserved for the dead. Dead victims are far 
more convenient for myth-making, ceremonies and political speeches.

Zertal describes three occasions when the pre-Israel Zionist elite 
turned defeats into heroic myths. First, an incident in 1920, when 
settlers near the disputed border between the French and British 
colonial powers (the border between what is now Lebanon, Syria and 
Israel) were attacked by armed locals. This quickly became a legendary 
tale of the land of Israel being redeemed by force of arms, work and 
death. The protagonist of the story was Josef Trumpeldor, whose actual 
last words were a Russian curse, something close to `motherfucker´, but 
the version we all grew up on was: `Never mind. It´s good to die for 
our country.´ The second heroic defeat was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 
and other similar rebellions against the Nazis. The third was the 
boarding of the Exodus in 1947 by the British navy to prevent its 4500 
passengers, Jewish refugees from Europe, from landing in Palestine.

There were survivors of all these defeats, but their voices were 
silenced unless they stuck to Zionist ideology when telling their 
story. If their story wasn´t part of our story, they were forgotten. 
The victims, Zertal writes, were instrumentalised. Thus the story of 
the Warsaw uprising became part of Zionist history. Zertal quotes 
speeches and articles from the immediate aftermath in which only 
Zionism is seen as capable of explaining the courage of the people 
`over there´:

The meaning of the nationalisation of the ghetto uprisings was the 
nationalisation of the narrative of the uprisings as well as the 
expunging of its incompatible non-Zionist components. Early on, while 
the insurrection was actually taking place, it was convenient to 
believe in Palestine that it was solely borne by the young people of 
the Zionist youth movements. This glossed over and ignored the fact 
that the rebel groups encompassed the entire spectrum of Jewish 
political parties; that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was led by a group 
which did in fact include representatives of the Zionists, but also 
members of the anti-Zionist Bund as well as Communists, and that the 
Jewish Fighting Organization - Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) - 
received material and moral support from both community leaders and 
institutions of the openly non-Zionist American-Jewish Joint 
Distribution Committee (the Joint), without which it could not have 
operated.

Take Marek Edelman, an extremely eloquent and charismatic man, and a 
prominent figure first in the socialist Bund movement, then as one of 
the commanders of the Warsaw uprising, then as a doctor in postwar 
Poland, then during the Solidarity insurrection, and finally in 
post-Communist Poland. He was almost erased from the official Israeli 
story of the uprising. Why?

Edelman persistently refused to view the establishment of the State of 
Israel as the belated `meaning´ of the Holocaust . . . Consequently, 
his narrative of the uprising was silenced and his role was played 
down. His book, The Ghetto Fighting, published in Warsaw in 1945 by the 
Bund, was translated into Hebrew only 56 years later, in 2001 . . . 
Within the flourishing commemoration industry that developed in Israel 
around the rebellion and its heroes, there was no room for Edelman and 
his other story.

The past had to be carefully constructed, and the Holocaust entered 
only through the eye of the Zionist needle. If the thread was too thick 
or had too many strands it had to be altered to fit - a boy scout 
morality prevailed. In 1976, Israel Gutman, later the editor of the 
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990) and himself a survivor of the 
Warsaw uprising, wrote in Haaretz about Edelman (to whom he granted a 
very short entry in the Encyclopedia) : `Why did Marek Edelman remain in 
Poland as a doctor when almost all his Jewish political colleagues and 
people close to him personally left?´ Edelman used to come, now and 
then, to Israel, to see old friends, but no one had ever publicly asked 
him this question, though he had a very good answer: he didn´t like the 
idea of the `new nation´. In fact, Edelman was always very critical not 
only of Israelis´ attitude to the Holocaust, but also of more sensitive 
issues - such as our racist laws of citizenship. In a late interview he 
told a Polish journalist: `Israel is a chauvinist, religious state, 
where a Christian is a second-class citizen and a Muslim is 
third-class. It is a disaster, after three million were murdered in 
Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider non-Jews!´

The truth, according to Israeli ideology, is that the Nazis never 
really died: they just changed languages, ideologies, systems and 
allies. The most ridiculous claims, that Arabs are Nazis, today come 
from the right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu. But Netanyahu has 
predecessors within the Zionist establishment.

In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick noted that the 
Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini (a sworn enemy of 
both Zionists and British colonialism, who had met with Eichmann and 
had great expectations of a Nazi victory), was depicted in Gutman´s 
Encyclopedia as one of the major designers and perpetrators of the 
Final Solution: his entry is twice as long as those for Goebbels and 
Goering, longer than the combined entries for Heydrich and Himmler and 
longer than the entry for Eichmann. `One might add,´ Zertal says, `that 
in the Hebrew edition of the Encyclopedia, the entry on El-Husseini is 
almost as long as that on Hitler.´

Anyone seen as an enemy of Israel is still perceived to be carrying on 
Hitler´s work. Similar paranoid traits can be found in connection with 
the `new anti-semitism´, an ugly charge aimed at anyone who criticises 
Israel´s destruction of Palestine. The campaign (which has been quite 
successful in Germany and France) was launched after the reinvasion of 
the West Bank three years ago, after the devastation of Jenin (which 
capitulated, to the great pride of the Israeli army, on Holocaust Day 
2002). The language that pro-Israelis and representatives of Israel use 
to describe the `new anti-semitism´ stems from the logic that portrays 
Palestinians as Nazis. Zertal traces it back to Ben-Gurion´s rhetoric 
of the early 1950s.

On the night of 12-13 October 1953, an Israeli woman and two of her 
children were murdered by Palestinians who had crossed the border from 
what was then the Jordanian West Bank. The response, decided on by 
Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, was immediate. A military detachment was 
sent under the command of the young Ariel Sharon on the night of 14-15 
October. Forty-five houses in Kibbya were blown up and 60 villagers 
(most of them women and children) killed. The international outrage 
directed at the young, quite popular state was unprecedented. It was 
followed by the official lie.

On 19 October, Ben-Gurion, `the father of the nation´, gave one of his 
most famous speeches - a speech in which he not only lied, as we all 
know today, but also launched his new discourse of equivalence. First, 
he gave the numbers which proved that `we´ were the victims: `Hundreds 
of Israeli citizens, women and men, old people and infants, have been 
murdered and severely injured.´ These victims were `frontier dwellers, 
most of them Jewish refugees from Arab countries or survivors of Nazi 
concentration camps´. Then he claimed that the atrocities had been 
committed by `them´:

The Israeli government justifiably allotted them weapons and trained 
them to defend themselves. However, the armed forces from Transjordan 
did not cease their criminal attacks until the patience of some 
frontier settlements was exhausted and after the murder of a mother and 
her two children in the village of Yahud, they attacked this week the 
village of Kibbya across the border . . . The Israeli government 
strongly rejects the absurd claim that 600 soldiers of IDF took part 
[in the operation] against Kibbya. Having conducted a thorough 
investigation we certify beyond a doubt that not a single military 
unit, however small, was absent from camp on the night of the attack on 
Kibbya.

Zertal comments:

While rhetorically magnifying the crime of the Palestinian infiltrators 
by defining the objects of their crime as ultimate Jewish victims, 
survivors of Nazi concentration camps, Ben-Gurion did the almost 
inconceivable . . . by pointing to those same victims and singling them 
out as having `justifiably´ taken up arms and perpetrated the Kibbya 
massacre . . . he moved the Jewish frontier dwellers, many of them in 
fact Holocaust survivors . . . equipped them with weapons, and 
transformed them into avengers who had taken the law into their hands.

Zertal is right to describe Ben-Gurion´s use of these `frontier 
dwellers´ not only as a political lie, but as an Israeli symptom: he 
wouldn´t have done it to groups that could have protested that `we´ 
don´t do such horrendous things.

He allowed himself to do it . . . because these marginal, new 
immigrants, living on the border line of Israeliness, in every possible 
sense, had no voice, no representation and no political power, and, 
consequently, could be discounted. Just as they had been sent, without 
being consulted, to those border villages, many of them recently 
abandoned Arab villages converted to immigrant settlements to become 
the living barrier of the new state, so they could also be given an 
identity and moulded to fit propaganda need or political contingency.

In 1953, `us´ (IDF, Israelis) and `them´ (Holocaust survivors and their 
moral equals, Jewish refugees from Arab countries) were still two 
separate entities. It was only later that the difference was blurred in 
the construction of our `identity´. There is no `them´ and `us´ any 
more. We are all victims. We are all saviours. One Zionist academic 
described that process as `healing the trauma´. Whose trauma? Both the 
victims´ and the saviours´.

What should also be noted about Ben-Gurion´s speech is the way he 
represents the Holocaust survivors, who were commonly supposed to be 
more cruel, more vindictive than other Israelis, as if they came out of 
one of Leon Uris´s cheap novels. The survivors were, of course, never 
more cruel than the IDF, with its tough, `guiltless´, arrogant 
officers. The Israeli story made vengeance a mode of Jewish being - 
`because they came through Hell´.

But then came the Eichmann trial (1961), the last of many pedagogical 
projects we had to go through as children of the state. Zertal quotes 
in this context one of Ben-Gurion´s ugliest speeches, of April 1961, in 
which he responded to Ernst Simon of the Hebrew University. It was 
election time, during the Eichmann frenzy, and Simon had just proposed 
a less belligerent government without Ben-Gurion. The prime minister, 
in a public speech, replied:

Has the distinguished professor co-ordinated his call with the tyrant 
of Egypt who has just declared that Israel is an `element which must be 
eradicated´ . . . ? Would the distinguished professor dare to blame the 
six million Jews of Europe annihilated by the Nazis - claiming that the 
fault was theirs for not acquiring the love and friendship of Hitler? 
The danger of the Egyptian tyrant is like that which afflicted the 
European Jewry . . . Is he [the professor] not aware that the Mufti was 
a counsellor and a partner in the extermination schemes, and that, in 
all Arab countries, the popularity of Hitler rose during World War Two? 
Is the distinguished professor confident that, without the deterrent 
force of the Israeli army, which he sees as an `anti-security´ and 
`harmful´ factor, we would not be facing similar annihilation?

This is how the nation was transformed by its political leaders. The 
rhetoric against Palestinian nationalism never ceased to involve 
comparisons with the Nazis. On 30 August 2002, in an interview with 
Haaretz, the former Israeli chief of staff Moshe (Boogey) Yaalon made 
what he called `an unequivocal statement: Arafat will not be the 
decision-maker. He will not be.´ Asked what would happen if Arafat were 
democratically re-elected, Yaalon replied: `The alternative Palestinian 
leadership has to be elected democratically on the model of Germany 
after World War Two. Anyone who was a member of the Nazi Party was not 
allowed to be a candidate in the elections there, and anyone who is 
tainted by terrorism cannot be a candidate here.´

If what Zertal writes about the ideological role Israel has assigned to 
the Holocaust - using it to legitimise the most horrific acts - is 
true, it is also important to remember that the Holocaust, even in 
Israel, plays a very ambiguous role. One cannot understand the 
phenomenon of the refuseniks (five are currently in jail for refusing 
to serve in the army), or many other types of stubborn Israeli 
resistance to the Occupation, without understanding the dreadful fear 
that haunts so many Israelis (though too few for us to be proud about): 
the fear of becoming a victimiser. Ensuring that the Holocaust is an 
inseparable part of our life has produced a counter-warning as well: 
`Beware of the Nazis, do not become one.´

Zertal´s account contains the plot of an implied melodrama, in which 
Ben-Gurion is the villain and Hannah Arendt the heroine. Arendt´s 
excommunication, in Israel and in the USA, after her book on the 
Eichmann trial was published, is described in full. In Israel the book 
was not available, even in English, until recently. Few read it. 
Gershom Scholem wrote a fierce attack on Arendt. She wrote him a 
letter. He promised to publish his attack only with her response, but 
he didn´t keep his promise, not in Israel, in Hebrew, not even in his 
later collections of articles and letters. When Arendt´s book was 
finally published in Hebrew in 2000 the attacks on her were no less 
offensive. Her relationship with Heidegger led to accusations that she 
was a Nazi-lover.

I was 13 when Eichmann was tried. I listened to the radio every day - 
there was no TV in Israel until after the 1967 war. We lived the 
Holocaust through that trial. In a way we are its products. In that 
sense, Ben-Gurion´s decision, no matter what his motives were, no 
matter how his attitude to the Holocaust changed from contempt to 
adoption, made all Israelis to a certain extent survivors. We need to 
pinch ourselves and say: we are not the victims.


   
   

 
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