by Ilan Pappe
The passengers were returned via three smaller ships to France, where they refused to disembark. The British government decided not to attempt forced disembarkation and made the ships sail to the place from which most of the DP had departed: Germany. Returning Holocaust survivors to Germany in 1947 was a shocking move, and the Jewish Agency made all the PR capital it could out of it.
The incident became part of what Novick, and later Finkelstein, called the Holocaust industry in the United States. A well-known American writer, Leon Uris, wrote a novel on it that was published in 1958. Uris was a freelance war correspondent for several American newspapers in the 1956 Israeli–British–French attack on Egypt. He was, as would be said today, embedded with the Israeli forces, and it was during those years that he used the Exodus affair as a basis for a tale that faithfully reflected the Zionist narrative. The book’s protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan, is a fearless kibbutznik who commands the Exodus 1947. Other characters, by their very life story, represent chapters from the Zionist narrative. Ari Ben Canaan came vividly to life when Paul Newman played the part in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the novel into a Hollywood film in 1960.58 For the mainstream, this was the modern story of Masada; indeed, it was the redemption of Masada. It was such a powerful narration that as a heroic tale, through Leon Uris’s book and the subsequent film, it became one of the main media sources through which American public opinion was galvanised in favour of the Zionist story.
The post-Zionist reading of this event was diametrically opposed to the way it was narrated by mainstream historiography. In the alternative narrative that emerged in the 1990s, Exodus is a tale of cynicism and manipulation. In it, the immigrants appear as pawns in the struggle for the international recognition of a future Jewish state. The wretched survivors demanded, or so the world was told, to be allowed to settle in Palestine; if refused, they would end up being sent back to the displaced-person camps in Germany. This message was directed specifically at the UN Special Commission on Palestine, which in mid-1947 visited Palestine in an effort to find a solution after Britain’s declaration several weeks earlier that it intended to end its Mandate over the torn country. But Britain still held responsibility for law and order and was adamant about preventing massive Jewish immigration or, alternatively, Arab military intervention before the last British soldier left the land.59
The Exodus affair was meant to prove to UNSCOP that only the Judaisation of Palestine was the correct solution for these and all the other Jews who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust. If they would not come to Palestine, they would have to be sent to the killing fields of Germany. The gambit proved partly successful: the ship was not allowed to disembark in Palestine and was indeed sent back. But public opinion, and especially the UN committee, now clearly associated the fate of the Jews in Europe with the future of the Zionist project in Palestine. Consequently (and also because of the overall strategic decision by the United States and the Soviet Union to support the Zionist project), the UN decided in favour of the Jewish community and recommended the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Once that was achieved, however, hardly anyone in the Zionist leadership took any more interest in the fate of the Exodus refugees, who were shipped back to Germany to face horrible conditions.
Even after the post-Zionist critics had salvaged the survivors’ point of view, few survivors actively challenged the tale told by the state about them and their fate. Their silence did not arise from fear; it was a much deeper response to the horrors they had witnessed, as has already been articulated by Arendt, Levi, and many others. Arendt highlighted silence as a defence mechanism against an inconceivable horror that overpowered ‘reality and [broke] down all strands we know’.60 Levi pointed to the link between survival and achieving a relatively privileged position in the death camps. This uncomfortable conclusion meant, in Levi’s words, that ‘we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses’ to the Holocaust.61
But beyond their traumatic experiences, possibly beyond the reach of any description or analysis, the survivors who managed to make it to Israel could not obstruct, but rather had to collaborate with, the construction and manipulation of official memory. Ex post facto, they became Zionists during the Holocaust, whether they wanted to be or not, and those of the survivors who had not played an actual role in the resistance became second-rate Zionists. Worse, unless they belonged to the leadership of the communities (the Judenräte) which were incorporated into Israel’s ruling élite, the survivors were at risk of being judged for their activities in the camps. Some were brought to trial for being ex-capos (which is perhaps understandable) or for collaborating under coercion (in order to survive) in any of the hideous ways made available to inmates by the Nazis.
This insane persecution of survivors was the result of the wish to bring the Holocaust itself to trial – with very limited success. Only in 1960 did the Israelis succeed in capturing an arch-Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, and in staging a show trial the following year, which was more of a didactic move than a search for justice. But most of the architects of the Holocaust were dead, gone, or tried at Nuremberg, and in the absence of other arch-Nazis, alleged collaborators were targeted.
Such was the case of Elsa Trank, a Jewish survivor who for a while was a forced supervisor of a block in Auschwitz and, as such, did indeed contribute to the misery of her fellow prisoners. She was appointed by the Nazis to keep order in one of the camp’s shacks. Trank was identified in Israel by a survivor and brought to trial on the charge of beating her fellow prisoners. In court, it was established that she hit them with her hands, not with any weapon; she was found guilty.62
The Zionisation of the struggle omitted, or deleted, the daily heroic struggles of those who ‘just’ survived. The main stage for conveying this message was the Eichmann trial. The impact of this trial on the institutionalisation of Holocaust memory, when viewed from the post-Zionist perspective, added an angle of which Hannah Arendt was unaware, and which emerges forcefully in the work of Idith Zertal. She connects the trial to the impact of the manipulation and instrumentalisation of Holocaust memory on attitudes towards, and perceptions of, the Palestinians within Israeli Jewish society. The most important theme in this connection is the Nazification of the Palestinian struggle. Hence, they too became victims of this manipulation.
The Nazification of the Palestinians
Zertal exposed how the case against the Palestinians evolved out of the story of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the exiled leader of the Palestinians who foolishly flirted with Hitler and Mussolini in hopes of forming an alliance against Britain and its pro-Zionist policies. Palestinians, however, were not the only target of this case-building, which was orchestrated and directed by the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, during the Eichmann trial and coincided with crucial elections for his party. Also under fire was Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. Already in 1956, Ben-Gurion had equated Nasser with Hitler: ‘The danger of the Egyptian tyrant is like that which afflicted the European Jews’, he said in the Knesset to help prepare the ground for an aggressive war against Egypt.63
Nasser was similarly vilified before the June 1967 war. Israeli propaganda repeatedly likened him to Hitler and raised the threat of a second Holocaust. But the focus on Nazification shifted shortly afterwards to the Palestinians in general and the PLO in particular. The most notorious incident in this respect occurred during the First Lebanon War in 1982, when Israeli troops occupied Beirut, laying siege to Yasser Arafat’s bunker. Beirut became Berlin in the last days of Nazism, Arafat was Hitler awaiting his fate in the bunker, and the PLO charter became Mein Kampf. It was the Israeli prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, who continually used these references. On the day the invasion of Lebanon began, Begin declared, ‘The alternative to fighting is Treblinka, and we have decided there will be no more Treblinkas’.64 Even some Zionists at the time found that too much: the novelist Amos Oz wrote of Begin, ‘Again and again … you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler
in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists’.65
Another of the many illuminating examples of Nazification was provided by Peter Novick, which is that the al-Husayni entry in the Israeli–American Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust is longer than that of any other person apart from Hitler! Apparently Himmler and Goering paled in comparison to the crucial role played in the destruction of the European Jews by a pathetic Palestinian leader whose sin was to serve as a wartime broadcaster to the Arab world from Berlin.66
A less obvious objective was to manipulate Holocaust memory in such a way as to help the political and military élites in Israel to move public opinion behind them when they needed support for taking a crucial decision during the struggle against the Arab world or fending off a real or imagined threat. From vindication of the brutal killing of Palestinians in 1948 and subsequently, in the war against Palestinian infiltrations, through the instigation of public panic on the eve of the 1967 war, to the justification of intransigent official positions on peace following the war, to the present oppressive policies against the Palestinians in the occupied territories – Holocaust memory has been a supremely useful and accessible means of silencing criticism and pushing a policy of belligerence.
And so we now arrive back in 2005, where we began this chapter. How easy, how familiar it was for the fanatical settler movement in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 to exploit Holocaust memory in order to justify its expansionist, theocratic, and racist version of Zionism, which eventually turned against the state itself.
Maintaining a Nation in Trauma
Compelling a nation to be constantly at arms was not just a matter of Nazifying the enemy – there was a need for continual angst, which could easily be conjured via Holocaust memory. Even this kind of manipulation became a subject for post-Zionist academic research. Notable among those who did such research was the philosopher Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, who asserted that a universalist commemoration of the Holocaust would liberate society from such manipulation.67
Even more important in this respect, however, was the work of Moshe Zukerman, a Tel Aviv University sociologist who showed how the powers that be seek to re-traumatize the newly formed Jewish society and keep alive its constant angst about a second Holocaust. Zukerman introduces as a prime example the Israeli government’s attitude during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. His book Holocaust in the Sealed Room describes in minute detail how Israeli society was unnecessarily exposed to a trauma that was meant to bring them back to the Holocaust and learn the lesson that only the Jewish state could save them from a similar fate.68
The sealed room, Haheder Hatum in Hebrew, refers to the safest room in the house, in which, during that 1991 war, you sought refuge from a possible chemical or biological attack. Once the siren was sounded, you ran to the room, put a gas mask on your face, and sealed the room. For many, like my late mother, the combination of gas, siren and a sealed room, was an enactment of the extermination chambers of the Holocaust; reinforced by depictions of the man who might launch such attacks, Saddam Hussein, as a new Hitler. In fact, Saddam’s army launched primitive missiles that could kill you only if they hit you directly in the head, and the only Israeli casualty of the war was an old Jew who panicked because he got entangled in his gas mask.
One important segment of Israeli Jewish society was not easily manipulated this way was the Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. When post-Zionist Mizrachi Jews engaged with the subject of the manipulation of Holocaust memory, they discovered that all the Arab Jews were victims of this official and collective manipulation. As a result, certain leading activists decided in the 1990s to commemorate the Holocaust in a new way, different from that favoured by the state.
Two of these activists, Shlomo Svirsky and Sami Shalom Chetrit, founded an academic high school that was meant to salvage the culture and value system of Jews in Arab countries while enabling its graduates to become fully matriculated. That school was named Kedma (Towards the East, in biblical Hebrew). There on Yom Hashoah, the official day of Holocaust remembrance in Israel, students commemorate not only the Holocaust but also other genocides that have taken place in the world, thus giving a more universal meaning to the event. In the official ceremony at the Yad Vashem museum, dignitaries light six candles, one for every million Jewish victims of the Holocaust – a ceremony repeated in every Israeli school. At Kedma, a seventh candle is lit for the Armenian genocide that took place during and immediately after the First World War. The additional candle also represents other persecuted minorities, such as Native Americans and African Americans.69
Identification with other minorities, and in particular African Americans and Native Americans, is one of the main features of the post-Zionist scholarship that has focused on Mizrachi Jews, or as they prefer to call themselves, the Arab Jews. The next chapter tells their story.
EIGHT
The Idea of Israel and the Arab Jews
In January 1952, two agents operating clandestinely for the Zionist movement were hanged in Baghdad. They were accused of planting bombs against Jewish targets in the Iraqi capital so as to prompt the local Jews to feel unsafe in their homeland and then emigrate to Israel. Acts like these rattled a veteran community that was probably the oldest in Iraq, an organic part of the society and its history. The successful Zionist actions were not the only reason for the exodus of Iraqi Jews. The nationalist government, headed at the time by Nuri al-Said, wrongly suspected that the vast majority of Iraq’s Jews had become Zionist and hostile to the state. Al-Said also coveted their assets and belongings, and thus ordered them to leave.
In the days following the executions, the Israeli government orchestrated mass protests and ceremonies of mourning and commemoration all over the country; however, they had to work hard to persuade the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Jews who already resided in Israel to partake in these events. Most of them had arrived only a few months earlier from a country where they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years and where they would probably have stayed had not the State of Israel come into being. Declassified documentation, released in the late 1980s, revealed that an astonished Israeli political élite learned that quite a few of these immigrants, who were crammed into refugee camps upon arrival, reacted by exclaiming, ‘This is God’s revenge on the [Zionist] movement that got us where we are [namely, in the hated camps]’.1
The Tel Aviv University sociologist Yehouda Shenhav who found this document and similar evidence in the Israeli archives became one of the first scholars to expand the work of the ‘new historians’ beyond the trials and tribulations of the native Palestinians. Shenhav, like the new historians, found that with a certain frame of mind a visit to the local archives can end in a direct challenge to the state’s foundational mythologies and truisms. The particular chapter he challenged was depicted in the official state historiography as a prime example for the humanity and validity of Zionism: Operation Ezra and Nehemya. This was allegedly an operation to save the Iraqi Jewish community by ‘repatriating’ them to the lost homeland. Ezra and Nehemya were biblical prophets who instigated the return of the exiled Hebrew tribes from Babylon in the sixth century BCE and were said to be the builders of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.2
In the Zionist narrative, the repatriation of the Iraqi Jews occupied the same heroic pedestal as the attempt to save the Jews of Europe from the horrors of the Holocaust. But Shenhav and other post-Zionist scholars doubted whether it was indeed a salvage operation, because they found little evidence for an Iraqi Jewish desire to come to Palestine. It is true that in one particular nasty incident during the Second World War – the Farhoud, in April 1941 – Jews were attacked and killed after a long history of peace and excellent relations with the other Iraqi communities. This exceptional eruption unsettled the community and caused some members of its élite to emigrate, mainly to the United Kingdom. But this did not produce either massive panic or a wish to leave; the Jews of Iraq by and large shared in the excitement of witnessing an
d participating in Iraq’s struggle for independence, which was a quiet affair compared with many other anti-colonial wars and campaigns.
For Shenhav, Operation Ezra and Nehemya was not a rescue mission. In his eyes, it was a manipulative move by the Israeli government intended to counter mounting international pressure to allow the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees. What the Israeli government had in mind was to convince the international community that a kind of population transfer had occurred in the Middle East and that it was better for everyone: the Palestinians left for the Arab countries and the Jews of Iraq returned ‘home’. Later this official argument was used in a more negative way, with the late 1940s and early 1950s depicted as an extension of the post–Second World War period of mass transfer, displacement, and the reshaping of borders. The international community has never accepted either depiction. Annually, the United Nations reaffirms its commitment, dating back to December 1948, to facilitate the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees. This reaffirmation, however, is not supported by the United States and its allies and therefore has not amounted to much – so far.3
The new documents Shenhav unearthed also showed that the government was fighting hard against a tendency of many Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Europe and the United States instead of Israel. He had the impression that the official narrative on why and how the largest Arab Jewish community had arrived in Israel distorted the truth, and this impression was reinforced by a series of interviews he conducted with immigrants from that period. As he explained in 1999,
The motive for conducting this research is the wide gap between the official version, the one taught in schools, and the life stories of the immigrants from Iraq with whom I have talked. Many among them refute the official version and talked about the brutality and the coercion of the Zionist agents, in their efforts to recruit these Iraqi Jews for the national [Zionist] struggle … [T]heir life stories are the alternative to the Zionist narrative; an alternative that was repressed. My commitment to this silenced position of a large community among the Iraqi immigrants informs my attempt to expose new evidence in this historiography.4