Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  On January 7, 1952, hundreds of demonstrators, many wearing a yellow Star of David, converged on the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. They carried sticks and hurled stones at the police who tried to stop them. People were set upon. Shop windows were smashed. A car was set alight.

  Inside the building, Israel’s legislators were debating the question of reparations from Germany for the Holocaust. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, ever the pragmatist, had been negotiating with Konrad Adenauer’s West German government. Many of his fellow citizens were appalled; it was a profoundly controversial issue. But the Israeli economy was in crisis, swamped by the new arrivals from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. An austerity program was in place. Reparations payments would help build the new country.*

  Member of the Knesset (MK) Menachem Begin, of the Herut party, headed the opposition to the plan. Like many other MKs, Begin himself had experienced the destruction of the Shoah first-hand: both his parents had been murdered, and he had spent two years in a prison camp. After making it to Mandate Palestine, he had led the rightist Etzel militia in its terror attacks against British and Arab targets. During the debate Begin left the Knesset building to address a large rally nearby, assuring the assembled crowd that this abomination would never happen. “Go, make a stand, surround the Knesset,” he exhorted them, and, when he headed back to the legislature, many followed him.

  Scuffles broke out. The police lobbed tear gas canisters into the crowd. “Gas against Jews!” cried another Herut MK, as the gas wafted into the Knesset. A window smashed as the demonstrators began hurling stones. Amid the sound of breaking glass, the wail of police sirens, and the angry yelling from outside, Ben-Gurion called in the army to block the protesters’ way into the building.

  When things calmed down, it was dark. Three hundred and forty people had been wounded, including a hundred and forty police officers, and four hundred people arrested.

  Begin then addressed the Knesset:

  Nations worthy of the name have gone to the barricades for lesser matters. On this matter, we, the last generation of slaves and the first of the redeemed; we, who saw our fathers dragged to the gas chambers; we, who heard the clatter of the death trains … shall we fear risking our lives to prevent negotiations with our parents’ murderers?

  … I know that you will drag me to the concentration camps. Today you arrested hundreds. Tomorrow you may arrest thousands.… If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no “reparations” from Germany.

  May God help us all to prevent this Holocaust of our people, in the name of our future, in the name of our honour.[1]

  Begin lost his battle. The Knesset voted in favour of reparations, and there was no mass protest. In political terms, his hyper-dramatic performance, aimed to engineer a showdown with his archrival Ben-Gurion,† had ended in “tragic and ludicrous”[2] failure, as the prime minister noted with satisfaction. But its significance runs much deeper. This was a specific engagement with the Holocaust as political tool, and a struggle for ownership of its legacy.‡

  That day’s events demonstrate the moral imperative of Holocaust memory, a symbolic force so powerful that it threatened to destabilize Israel’s fledgling democratic process. They also illustrate the ease with which the evil of the Holocaust could be used to frame a political perception of the Other.

  Reparations were obviously a deeply sensitive issue for Israeli Jews, but they were not “the Holocaust.” Begin’s rhetoric threw the cloak of Nazi evil over his political rivals. Less than seven years after the death camps were liberated, by invoking the memory of the Holocaust in a Jewish parliament he claimed its moral authority to sanctify his political position.

  Even in the Knesset that day, Begin was not alone in raising the spectre of the Holocaust — Labour MK Meir Argov condemned the attack on the legislature by comparing it to the burning of the Reichstag.§

  Six decades later, the use of the Shoah as moral bludgeon remains part of Israel’s political culture.

  To be traumatized means to live in the fear that the traumatic event will be repeated. This is why Holocaust language touches such a deep chord in Israel, and why it is such a powerful weapon in any politician’s arsenal. Fear of the past’s repeating itself shapes how the events of the present are experienced, and how we respond to them. There may well be genuine threats in the moment but, encumbered by the burden of the traumatic past, we are not free to deal with them on their own terms. If we perceive ourselves as constantly at risk of annihilation, it is all too easy to demonize those seen as threatening our position.

  The Holocaust is repeatedly invoked by parties across the political spectrum, but particularly by those, like Menachem Begin, on the right. A small but striking example: Jewish settlers in Gaza wore yellow star patches in 2004 to protest their impending evacuation; Nadia Matar, of the pro-settler organisation Women in Green, equated the disengagement administration with the Judenrat.[3] Both Begin and Ariel Sharon compared Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Hitler — as prime minister, Begin repeatedly used the analogy in support of Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 1982.[4]

  In the ongoing conflation of past and present enemies, Palestinians are press-ganged into the role of the all-powerful and genocidal Nazis. During the public debate around Begin’s exploitation of the Holocaust during the 1982 Lebanon war, the editor of Israel’s most popular daily, Yediot Aharonot, wrote, “Arafat, were he stronger, would do to us things that Hitler never even dreamed of.… He will cut off our children’s heads with a cry and in broad daylight and will rape our women before tearing them to pieces and will throw us down from the rooftops and will skin us as do hungry leopards in the jungle…. Hitler is a pussycat compared to what Arafat will bring upon us.”[5] ,¶

  Such language freezes the possibility of genuine debate. “What suffers, of course, when everything is reduced to the Holocaust or analogous to the Holocaust, is the ability to think through the issues that confront the Jewish people,” says Jewish liberation theologian Marc H. Ellis. He quotes Jewish essayist Philip Lopate: “The Hitler/Holocaust analogy deadens all intelligent discourse by intruding a stridently shrill note that forces the mind to withdraw.… The image of the Holocaust is too overbearing, too hot to tolerate distinctions. In its life as a rhetorical figure, the Holocaust is a bully.”[6]

  Yet it’s a complicated dynamic. I discussed it with Jewish-Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, whose work has probed the subject in detail. “The fear is there,” Tom told me over tea in his central Jerusalem apartment.[7] “Some of it is manipulated, some is genuine. For example, when Begin told Reagan [in 1982], ‘I am going to capture Adolf Hitler in his bunker,’ and he was referring to Arafat, that’s manipulation. When, prior to the Six-Day War in 1967, massive areas were sanctified for graveyards, that’s genuine. It was secret, we only found out later.”

  The Holocaust is something of a civil religion within Israel, continually referenced in the media and in cultural and political discourse. “It has become a major element of Israeli identity,” Tom says. “Eight out of ten high-school kids say they are Holocaust survivors. ‘Why, what makes you think you are a Holocaust survivor? Your parents are not even from Europe, you are the grandson of somebody who came from Morocco’ — ‘Yes, I am a Holocaust survivor.’” Tom believes that the Holocaust acts as a way for secular Jewish Israelis to connect with their Jewish heritage. The Nazi attempt to destroy the Jewish people is now a defining element of their self-understanding.

  The Eichmann Trial released the Holocaust into Israeli collective memory, universalizing it in the experience of Jewish Israelis: just as the 1948 War had been fought in the shadow of the Holocaust, so the war of June 1967 was fought in the shadow of the Eichmann Trial.

  Those weeks were a time of deep anxiety. Arab radio stations were broadcasting speeches calling for the destruction of Israel. “This will be total war,” stated Egyptian president Gamal Nasser on May 26. “Our basic aim will be to destroy Israel.”[8] One
Israeli soldier remembered afterwards: “People believed we would be exterminated if we lost the war. We got this idea — or inherited it — from the concentration camps. It’s a concrete idea for anyone who has grown up in Israel, even if he personally didn’t experience Hitler’s persecution. Genocide — it’s a real possibility.”[9] As Tom Segev noted, parks, empty lots, and baseball courts in Tel Aviv were quietly sanctified as cemeteries for the anticipated dead: tens of thousands of them.[10] Filmmaker Ilan Ziv, who was seventeen at the time, recalls his English teacher telling the class on June 5 that war had begun. He had tears in his eyes. Everyone went home, thinking they were going to die.[11]

  Israel’s top generals didn’t share this perspective. “The only crisis was psychological,”[12] Cabinet Minister Yigal Allon remembered later. Yet, although confident in their military superiority, they kept it from the Israeli populace. Panicked citizens began demanding that charismatic, hawkish General Moshe Dayan, hero of the 1956 Suez campaign, be given the defence portfolio currently held by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Four days after Dayan took over, Israeli pilots destroyed Nasser’s fighter planes on the airfields of Egypt.

  Israel’s pre-emptive strike against its increasingly bellicose neighbours ended in a sweeping victory: Arab armies were repulsed and decimated, and the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the West Bank were occupied by Israeli forces. Even more crucially, perhaps, the entire city of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall (which had been in the Jordan-occupied part of the city since 1948) was now in Jewish territory. Israelis had another chance to exorcise the millennia-old perception of the passive, victimized Jew. For the first time in modern history Jews had won an unambiguous, crushing victory against their enemies, based on the military power of a Jewish sovereign state.

  But that existential anxiety continues. “The fear of Iran is becoming now like the fear of Nasser,” Tom Segev told me. While Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s poison cocktail of Holocaust denial, talk of destroying Israel, and pursuit of a nuclear capability means that Israel must be vigilant — as Tom puts it, “I’m not in a position not to believe him” — every detail of Ahmadinejad’s posturing dominates the Israeli media.

  Israeli national identity oscillates between the twin poles of the Holocaust and the Six-Day War, victim and vanquisher — the latter is the antidote to the former. Permanently vulnerable, Israel must respond to any attack with massive force. For a nation with genocide as a central political referent, security is paramount, and it trumps all other considerations. “Never again!” puts Israel’s militaristic policy choices into a place beyond debate.

  In 1980, the Knesset legislated the Holocaust into the school curriculum, where it comprises 20 percent of the history syllabus. Since glasnost opened Poland to outside visitors, high-school students are taken there on a secular pilgrimage to learn the heritage of the Holocaust. They spend a day in Warsaw, discovering Jewish culture in Poland before the Shoah, and then go on to Auschwitz and other death camps. Often a Holocaust survivor will travel with the students and their teachers. The trips are optional, but most students choose to go; the considerable expense is offset by subsidies.

  Left-leaning Israelis are often unhappy with the nature of these trips. Norma Musih is one of them. “There’s a hegemonic story of the Holocaust,” she told me as we sat in her living room in Tel Aviv, her little daughter Amilia’s colourful building blocks scattered around us.[13] “It tells the story of how we were weak when we were not in Israel before the Holocaust. We had no army, we were not organized. That’s why the Holocaust could take place, and that’s why we need a strong army. You can see this very well in the last year of high school. Students travel to Poland, to the concentration camps, and when they finish high school they go into the army. Part of that last year of school is preparation for the army in some ways. We are a very militaristic society; the army and civil society are very connected.”**

  Norma recalled what she had learned in high school. “We learned about the Holocaust, learned about the war of ’48 and we learned that the Arabs were going to attack us from other countries, and we had to take care of ourselves.” Her friend Shlomit Dank, who was playing with Amilia while we talked, joined in the conversation. “Because we were persecuted, we needed a state. They tell you nothing about the [Arab] houses, the people who were living in the houses.”

  Shlomit, a speech pathologist in her mid-thirties, went on her second high-school tour to Poland a few years ago, as assistant to the group leader. Revisiting Auschwitz as an adult gave her a more critical perspective on the trip. It was an intense and difficult experience for the young people, to walk through the camp where a million Jews had been murdered. But the event was framed for them through a particular political lens, and the heightened emotions left little space for other perspectives. “I think I was the only one who left the trip feeling something about humanity, not feeling like I hated Poland, I hated Germany, and that we needed a stronger army,” Shlomit said. “We were debriefing at the end of my trip, everyone saying how they felt, and I felt like I couldn’t say anything. One of the security guards said, ‘The most important thing to take from this is that we need a strong army.’ And I’m thinking, no, no.”

  “That was one of the security guards at the camp?” I asked, unsure why a security guard would be present.

  “No, every trip has two or more security guards.”

  “It makes you feel that you live in tension, even now — we are in Europe, we need security guards,” added Norma.

  “Students go to the camps with Israeli flags,” Norma told me. “It’s amazing to see this… people who were killed in the Holocaust were not Israelis, they were Jews. And many Jews were not Zionist. Communists, religious — a lot of people were killed there. What Israel is doing is co-opting the Jews that were killed and turning them into Israelis.”††

  Norma and her husband both had grandparents who were killed in the Shoah. Hers were religious Jews, his were Communist — neither supported the founding of a Jewish state. “When I went, I felt strange taking the flag with me. I lived on a kibbutz, and it’s more of a democratic culture there, so I convinced my class not to take flags. But when we got to Treblinka, the teacher opened her bag and took out lots of small flags.” We all laughed. “I was so angry at her!”

  The intensity of Israel’s engagement with the Shoah is illuminated by Tom Segev, who writes:

  Israel differs from other countries in its need to justify — to the rest of the world, and to itself — its very right to exist. Most countries need no such ideological justifications. But Israel does — because most of its Arab neighbors have not recognized it and because most of the Jews of the world prefer to live in other countries. So long as these factors remain true, Zionism will be on the defensive. As a justification for the State of Israel, the Holocaust is comparable only to the divine promise contained in the Bible: It seems to be definitive proof of the Zionist argument that Jews can live in security and with full equal rights only in their own country‡‡ and that they therefore must have an autonomous and sovereign state, strong enough to defend its existence. Yet, from war to war, it has become clear that there are many places in the world where Jews are safer than in Israel.[14]

  If security is all-important for the Jewish state, then so too are demographics. Israel is both ethnically defined and democratic, but these two identities are in constant tension. In a democracy, all citizens have equal rights; but should the population balance between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis tilt, Israel may no longer be Jewish.§§

  When Jewish Israelis deem their Jewishness to be of prime importance, Palestinian Israelis are seen as a demographic threat, their very existence positioning them as a security issue.

  For Palestinians too, Holocaust memory is profoundly political. Azmi Bishara, one of the few Palestinian Israelis who has sat as a member of the Knesset, wrote:

  The connection of the Arabs to the history of the Holocaust is indirect. The scene of
the disaster was Europe, and the perpetrators of the extermination acts were European, but the Palestinians paid the reparations first and foremost in the Middle East. This is probably the reason that the discussion of the Holocaust in the Arab context always [r]evolves around its political implications, and circumvents the event itself. The basic Arab anti-Zionist stance determined their attitude toward the Holocaust, as towards anti-Semitism in general. This stance is not the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but its outcome. Anti-Jewish texts were engaged in the justification of the Holocaust and with its denial as a Zionist hoax — a rhetoric which, among other things, was an attempt to deal with the Zionist instrumentalisation of the Holocaust.[15]

  As we’ve seen, Holocaust denial amongst Palestinians is widespread. Even Mahmoud Abbas, now President of the Palestinian National Authority, is not exempt. In his 1982 doctoral thesis, later turned into a book, Abbas stated that “[t]he Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them and to expand the mass extermination.”[16] He decided that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was “less than a million.”

  Bishara’s suggestion that Palestinian Holocaust denial is reactive seems to be borne out in the Palestinian Israeli community, where it appears to ebb and flow according to how integrated that group feels within the national collective. The Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel for 2008 reported that “The proportion of Arabs not believing that ‘there was Shoah [sic] in which millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis’ increased from 28.0% in 2006 to 40.5% in 2008.” The author, Sammy Smooha, commented: “In Arab eyes disbelief in the very happening of the Shoah is not hate of Jews (embedded in the denial of the Shoah in the West) but rather a form of protest. Arabs not believing in the event of Shoah intend to express strong objection to the portrayal of the Jews as the ultimate victim and to the underrating of the Palestinians as a victim. They deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state that the Shoah gives legitimacy to.”[17] Again we see the mechanisms of trauma at work. The collective understanding of a historical event is mutable, shaped by reaction to a present threat of exclusion. There is a lashing-out in fear, and the past suffering of the Other is denied.