Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Hausner’s efforts to place the testimonies within a wider narrative of meaning caused dissonance in the courtroom, as the judges attempted to conduct a criminal trial — the State of Israel versus Adolf Eichmann — and the attorney general endeavoured to conduct, or orchestrate, something of much greater resonance. In practice, this meant that they were constantly struggling to rein Hausner in, as the following excerpt from the transcript illustrates:

  [Presiding Judge:] Mr. Hausner, … in many parts of this evidence we have strayed far from the subject of this trial. There is no possibility at all of interrupting evidence such as this, while it is being rendered, out of respect for the witness and out of respect for the matter he is relating. It is your task … to eliminate everything that is not relevant to the trial, so as not to place the Court once again — and this is not the first time — in such a situation.[37] ,**

  Again and again, Hausner pressed beyond the bounds of evidentiary procedure. Interrupting witness Moshe Beisky’s shocking description of camp brutality, the attorney general abruptly asked, “[You are saying that] fifteen thousand people stood there, facing a few dozen or even hundreds of [Nazi] police. Why didn’t you lash out? Why didn’t you rebel?” This interjection had nothing to do with Eichmann or his culpability, and clearly distressed Beisky, whose testimony became unfocused and confused. He sat down. Finally, expressing his own inability to articulate or indeed to find meaning in what he had lived through, Beisky replied, “the conditions at that time were indescribable,”[38] and continued to recount the details of his experience. This interaction reached to the heart of the divide between Sabra and survivor — this was the unanswered question beneath the incomprehension and the contempt. Forcing his witness to meet it head on, Hausner made that unspoken question present, giving his greater audience a chance to understand as they witnessed the drama of Beisky’s answer.††

  Clearly, a criminal trial was an inadequate way to deal with the death of six million people. But with its huge mandate, its political vision, and its myriad unlocked testimonial voices, the Eichmann trial moved beyond a legal forum into what Susan Sontag described as “theater in its profoundest sense … attempting to make comprehensible the incomprehensible”;[39] building, like tragic drama, to catharsis.

  Israel was transfixed by the trial. Over the four months of the proceedings, a staggering 83,500 people attended court, and tens of thousands more the closed-circuit screening. Newspaper coverage was intense. But most Israelis experienced the trial, and through it the Holocaust, by radio. The words of the survivors, so long suppressed, were now transmitted across the nation. Court coverage was broadcast on buses; it poured out of apartment windows; on the street, people walked along holding transistor radios to their ears. Civil servants were reprimanded for listening during office hours. While Haaretz was well aware of the propagandistic nature of the trial (running the pre-trial headline “The Eichmann Circus”) its final assessment reflected both the prosecution’s Zionist subtext and the overwhelming national sentiment: “It is not only justice bestowed upon one man but justice for the history of an entire people.”[40]

  “The Holocaust has happened now,” wrote Haim Gouri, covering the trial for Ma’ariv newspaper. The discernable hint of distaste in his earlier daily reports had gradually given way to a deeper understanding: “None of us will leave here as he was before…. We must ask the forgiveness of the multitudes whom we have judged in our hearts, we who were outside that circle.… We began to understand, not from the abstraction that it ‘was hard to resist,’ but from the detailed stories that, at the end of the day, left us, too, close to the state of utter paralysis in which the victims had found themselves the whole time.”[41] His conversion of heart is a testament to the power of the prosecution’s testimonial drama.

  In December 1961, the judges gave their verdict: Eichmann was found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was executed six months later, and his ashes scattered outside Israel’s territorial waters. As Ben-Gurion and Hausner had hoped, Israeli society was forever changed by his trial. The Sabras could finally grasp what their fellow-citizens had lived through in Nazi-occupied Europe: as historian Hanna Yablonka has written, “information was turned into knowledge.”[42] Holocaust survivors, once shunned, were now embraced as fully Israeli, and their recent nightmarish experience as diaspora Jews was understood as part of Israel’s national identity.

  For many Holocaust survivors, the trial represented a personal as well as a national healing. Dr Shlomo Kilcher, head of Tel Hashomer Hospital’s psychiatric department, believed that “the Eichmann trial, with all its testimonies of atrocities, contributed to the complete mental recovery of the concentration camp survivors…. when the memories surfaced in the wake of the trial, they re-emerged in the consciousness of these Jews, and resulted in a release from the torment.”[43] Many went to add their stories to the archives at Yad Vashem, the recently established Holocaust Museum, and many applied to the German government’s reparations program,‡‡ a development that psychiatrist Julius Zellermayer attributed to increased self-esteem.[44]

  The Holocaust thus became a unifying national story, weaving the disparate threads of Israeli Jewry into a common whole. Mizrahis too were ushered, somewhat awkwardly, into the new master-narrative. The wider lessons of the Holocaust encompassed all Jewry. “They lived in Asia or Africa and they had no idea what was being done by Hitler, so we [had] to explain the thing to them from square one,”[45] commented Ben-Gurion. As did the time they spent on army duty, the story of the Holocaust socialized them into a Zionist Israeli identity. A Mizrahi reporter told a colleague that, after the trial, he felt “more Jewish.”[46] Another Mizrahi thanked Hausner “for reawaking [in me] the latent sense of Israel’s unity, when I read about the suffering of our brothers in Europe.”[47]

  But the healing catharsis provoked by the trial came at a cost. Fixing the Holocaust as a founding myth of the state established Israel’s sense of itself as a perpetual victim facing a permanently hostile world. From that fearful place, the grim lessons of the past could too easily be projected eternally into the future.[48] ,§§

  And, as we’ve seen, with such fear comes the need for control: of one’s territory and of one’s fate. As Israelis, Jews could take steps to secure both. Speaking of the dispossessed Arab refugees, former Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan stated forcefully, “what is becoming clear at the Eichmann trial is the active passivity of the world in the face of the murder of the six million. There can be no doubt that only this country and only this people can protect the Jews against a second Holocaust. And hence every inch of Israeli soil is intended only for Jews.”[49]

  In the prosecution’s scripting of the Holocaust, Israel and the Jews were one and the same, and the Arab enemies of the Jewish state were thus implicitly tainted with Nazism.[50] This was a subtext of the trial from its inception. Mossad boss Isser Harel encouraged the initial rumours that Eichmann had been found in Kuwait. Avraham Zellinger, head of the police unit investigating Eichmann, wrote that Hauser had instructed him, at Foreign Minister Golda Meir’s request, “that it would be desirable from a political point of view, to include the Nazis’ connections with the Arab states as part of the indictment.”[51]

  Of particular interest during the trial was the role played by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, during the Holocaust. Al-Husseini, head of the Palestinian political elite, escaped Mandate Palestine in 1937 during the suppression of the Arab Revolt. He was on friendly terms with the Nazi regime, with whom he shared two common enemies — the Jews and the British — and he eventually settled in Berlin. The Mufti met with Hitler, made anti-Jewish propaganda broadcasts on the Nazis’ Arab Radio station, and drummed up Muslim recruits for Hitler’s army. He also lobbied against the transfer of Jewish children out of Axis nations, for fear they would immigrate to Palestine.[52] Odious and well-documented as the Mufti’s anti-Semitism was, his connection with Eichmann was tenuous, and he was not involved in the planning a
nd implementation of the Final Solution. Nonetheless, his name was raised by Hausner again and again, and his culpability was magnified in the popular press.¶¶

  There was no more than an uneasy truce between Israel and its neighbouring Arab states. The tribulations Jews had recently suffered in Arab lands had already been condemned by Ben-Gurion’s government within a rhetorical framework of neo-Nazi anti-Semitism.[53] Now Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs in particular, could be seen as tainted by the Mufti’s Nazi sympathies. The Zionist construction of what it meant to be Israeli gave Mizrahi Jews little choice but to deny their Arab heritage.

  As our Time reporter commented at the beginning of this chapter, “fear of the Arabs” acted as a cohesive force in Israel’s highly pluralistic society. Israeli Jews originated from every country in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, as well as elsewhere across the globe. Many Jews, especially those from Europe, were secular: racial understandings of national identity, and the persecutions that trailed in their wake, meant that Jewishness was an ethnic marker as much as a common faith. Jews came to Israel because it was a Jewish state, but a shared religious heritage was not the same as a shared religion. What Israeli Jews did share, however, and what the Eichmann Trial served to sharpen, was a common memory of persecution; an ongoing fear that their mortal enemies would once again try to destroy them; and a certainty that their state must do all in its power to ensure their future security.

  But, of course, this Zionist-forged Israeli identity left some Israelis outside. While the Eichmann trial brought down Ben-Gurion’s “barrier of blood and silence,” it helped shore up the nation’s understanding of itself as a Jewish state. The Holocaust was cemented in place as part of the history of Israel, and this national story united Israeli Jews by strengthening their shared sense of historical persecution. Mizrahi Jews were pulled into the fold at the cost of their Arab identity. Politically and geographically isolated, Palestinian Israelis were excluded altogether.

  * * *

  * While there was an unusual level of gender egalitarianism in the Yishuv, Sabra culture was masculine in character: women participated in what men shaped and led. Certainly, the classic Sabra would be male.

  † Interesting comparisons may be made here with how native Americans were seen in U.S. settler culture. “Since Puritan times, the Indian had been associated with precisely those traits of character that now composed the virtues of the frontier hero…” writes Richard Slotkin in Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) at page 418. “With the gradual vanishing of the Indian populations east of the Appalachians, it became possible to romanticize the Indian as the noble savage…. This romantic tendency did not in any substantive way alter the policy of the nation towards actual Indians….”

  ‡ “It is the natural right of the Jewish people, like any other people, to control their own destiny in their sovereign state.

  Accordingly, we … do hereby proclaim the establishment of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel — the State of Israel.”

  § The five bombs that exploded in Baghdad in the early 1950s killed three people and injured some thirty more: two Iraqi Jews and an Israeli were tried, convicted, and punished. Sources differ as to the veracity of the charge, although belief in it is pervasive amongst Iraqi Jews. Israel has openly acknowledged involvement with a botched covert bombing campaign in Egypt in 1954, but has not done so for the bombings in Baghdad.

  ¶ This trend continued even in the many kibbutzes established after the 1948 War.

  ** Hannah Arendt, reporting for the New Yorker, was highly critical of the trial, and of Hausner in particular. Her commentary later became the hugely influential Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Having chosen to leave Germany for the United States rather than for Israel, Arendt implicitly stood for a vision of Jewish life in which the diaspora was a vibrant and flourishing option for post-Holocaust Jews. Hausner’s monolithic and collectivized vision, co-opting history into the teleological endpoint of the Zionist State of Israel, was anathema to her. In particular, she challenged his view of the Holocaust as being essentially located within the history of the Jewish people, seeing it rather as one manifestation of the universal dangers of the totalitarian state.

  †† Hausner asked this question of a number of witnesses.

  ‡‡ The reparations payments from Germany eased the financial straits of the survivors and helped establish them in Israel, simultaneously widening the economic gap between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis.

  §§ Six years after the trial, Israelis faced the Six Day War newly saturated with Holocaust memory, and a level of existential anxiety not present during the 1948 War when the objective threat of annihilation had been greater. These dynamics will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

  ¶¶ This trend continues. According to historian Peter Novick, Yad Vashem’s prestigious Encyclopedia of the Holocaust gives more space to the Mufti than to Eichmann. See The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 158.

  Chapter Four

  Reshaping the Landscape

  Along the side of the path through the eucalyptus trees lie rusted army vehicles. Just beyond them is a cemetery, or what remains of it. The graves are now little more than rubble, a jumble of stones on the hillside. This, in former days, was al-Kabri, a thriving Galilean village of some six thousand people. In March 1948, a convoy of seven armoured trucks headed out through Arab territory to assist the settlers of the recently established Kibbutz Yechiam. The convoy was ambushed here, on the edge of the village, and forty-seven young Jewish fighters were killed. All were aged between sixteen and twenty-two.

  By May, the tide of the war was turning. Haganah forces were clearing out Arab villages across the Galilee. As they approached al-Kabri, the destruction of the Yechiam convoy was fresh in their minds. Their orders were specific: “attack with the aim of conquest, the killing of adult males, [and] the destruction and torching of the villages of Kabri, Umm al Faraj and al Nahar.”[1] Dov Yirmiya, who took part in the operation, reported that:

  Kabri was conquered without a fight. Almost all inhabitants fled. One of the soldiers, Yehuda Reshef, who was together with his brother among the few escapees from the Yehi’am convoy, got hold of a few youngsters who did not escape, probably seven, ordered them to fill up some ditches dug as an obstacle and then lined them up and fired at them with a machine gun. A few died but some of the wounded succeeded to escape.[2]

  The surviving villagers fled and their homes were destroyed. The orange grove close to the cemetery is gone as well, replaced by the eucalyptus trees. A large house nearby was completely leveled; no trace of it remains.

  The convoy’s heroic struggle to help the besieged settlers is commemorated on the site of the former village by a sign, erected by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). “In the footsteps of Yechiam Convoy,” it says, in yellow lettering on painted wood. This is now a recreation area, with picnic tables and tarmac paths winding through the eucalyptus trees. The hollow shells of the armoured trucks are repainted regularly, a rusty red-brown. As I’m looking at the sign, a busload of visitors arrives on a day-trip; a woman comes up and asks me where the toilets are.

  The landscape of al-Kabri has been completely transformed to tell a story of its past, and to tell that story as if it were the only one to tell. This process is an inherent part of a nation’s self-construction. The physical landscape, although it seems to be natural, neutral, and permanent, is not. Its soil, trees, and stones are malleable, open to playing a role in the re-creation of a collective memory.

  “Within nation states, history and heritage tell powerful stories, often ones that stress stability, roots, boundaries and belonging,”[3] writes anthropologist Barbara Bender. “The landscape is never inert, people engage with it, rework it, appropriate and contest it. It is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether as an ind
ividual, group, or nation-state. Operating therefore at the juncture of history and politics, social relations and cultural perceptions, landscape has to be … ‘a concept of high tension.’”[4] For Bender, from whose perspective political territory becomes anthropological landscape, “Landscapes contain the traces of past activities, and people select the stories they tell, the memories and histories they evoke, the interpretive narratives that they weave, to further their activities in the present-future…. We need to be alert to whose stories are being told, and to be aware that they naturalize particular sorts of social relations.”[5]

  When these social relations reflect the dynamics of a radical imbalance of power, the landscape becomes charged with that high tension referred to by Bender. For another anthropologist, David Wesley, who pushes this concept further, “geographic elements … are a part and parcel of the disposition of forces” in the creation of a “landscape of power.”[6]

  At al-Kabri, the ruined cemetery and the carefully preserved armoured trucks, which are always rusted but never rust away, bear mute witness to the political dynamics that shaped the country after the war. They form part of a tableau created by those who can memorialize a lost convoy and expunge a lost village because they won the war and the land became solely their possession.

  The erasure of Palestinian-Arab collective memory, and indeed the memory of Palestinian Arab presence, was translated in physical terms onto the landscape. Arab villages were literally demolished, stone removed from stone, leaving little trace of human habitation. Some 418 villages were depopulated in or shortly after the war. Over two-thirds of these were reduced to rubble, few with any standing walls.[7] This destruction did not simply occur during the expulsions, or as a result of the conflict; it was also the result of policy decisions made after 1948.