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The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences

Editor’s Note: This Article is Followed by Four Comments and a Response by Ian Lustick

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Abstract

The collective memory of the Holocaust among Israeli Jews has featured competition among four related but distinct constructions: Zionist Proof-text; Wasting Asset; Object Lesson for safeguarding human rights; and Template for Jewish life. This paper will analyze this competition and the implications of the apparent victory of the Template. While there is a sequence to the changing prominence of these different versions of the Holocaust, each version has enjoyed periods of relative success since World War II. In recent decades, however, the Holocaust as a Template for Jewish Life has emerged as ascendant. Throughout, competition among the four constructions was driven by parochial and temporary political interests and by the unintended consequences of dissatisfactions associated with any one of them. My analysis will trace this competition and those consequences, using them to explain the extreme and highly particular features of current Israeli Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of the hegemonic status of this version of the Holocaust for appreciating Israel’s contemporary political predicament.

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Notes

  1. This is a summary statement of the argument of the larger book project of which this article is a part. For discussion of the implications of the template for Jewish life Holocaust construction for Israeli foreign policy, see Lustick in Brenner and Nadell (forthcoming).

  2. My choice of these four is a function of sheer empirics and a judgment about parsimony. They do not form a logically closed set of possibilities. One or more of these four could be divided into subtypes by researchers who believe they could thereby gain better analytic leverage over patterns of continuity and change in Israeli political culture.

  3. For an example of the enthusiasm with which this book was greeted when it was published, see Robert Alter’s characterization of the volume as “uniquely valuable…for its searching portrait of the classical Zionist character and the temper of Israel today…” (Alter 1971).

  4. On both the private inclinations of survivors and social pressure in these early years to remain silent, see Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008) 33; Novick, op. cit, 68–83; and Yechiel Klar, Noa Schori-Eyal, and Yonat Klar, “The ‘Never Again’ State of Israel: The emergence of the Holocaust as a core feature of Israeli identity and its four incongruent voices,” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 69, No. 1, 2013, 126.

  5. On the prominence of this trope and metaphor, see, for example, Gutman (1988a, b) and Friedlander (1990, p. 6). The origins of the metaphor have been traced to arguments in favor of resistance to the Nazis made by ghetto fighters during World War II, who called upon the masses of Jews to refuse to go passively to their deaths, “like sheep to the slaughter” (Patt 2015).

  6. Although much different in substance, this is the same strategy used by some redemptionist-oriented rabbis and other Jewish fundamentalists, supporters of massive Jewish settlement of the West Bank, who have interpreted the Holocaust as “hevlaiha Moshiach” (“birth-pangs of the Messiah”) (Kasher 1968, 32; Fisch 1978, 85).

  7. Yechiam Weitz, “Even Ben-Gurion exploited the Holocaust when it suited him,” Haaretz, October 31, 2013, http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.555402. On idiosyncratic elements in Ben-Gurion’s approach to the Holocaust, see Stauber (2007, 50–56). Shabtai Teveth’s apologetic treatment of this topic in his book Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust effectively contradicts many of the characterizations the same author made in his earlier monumental biography (Teveth 1987).

  8. Ben-Gurion’s most notorious comment in this regard was made to the Mapai Central Committee in December of 1938. “Were I to know that the rescue of all German Jewish children could be achieved by their transfer to England and only half their number by transfer to Palestine, I would opt for the latter, because our concern is not only the personal interest of these children, but the historic interest of the Jewish people” (Teveth 1987, 855–856).

  9. Nazi extermination squads.

  10. For a sensitive discussion of terminology used to refer to what we now standardly refer to as the “Holocaust,” see Achcar (2010, 13–16).

  11. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million (New York: Hill and Wangl 993, l80), and Tom Segev, “The Makings of History,” Haaretz, April 1, 2010.

  12. For an interpretation that emphasizes Dinur’s effect on Ben-Gurion with respect to Holocaust construction and commemoration, see Stauber (2007, 48–51).

  13. “Mamlachtiut” literally means “rulership.” As a principle advanced by Ben-Gurion, its meaning is closest to “statism” or “etatisme,” with an emphasis on the sovereignty of central institutions of political power operating above partisanship and on behalf of the entire people.

  14. For details on the evolution of the idea that became Yad Vashem, and the struggle with uncertainty as to whether Jews who did not physically resist the Nazis could be considered “heroes,” see Stauber (2007, 19–29).

  15. For revealing treatments of Yad Vashem’s early years and its efforts to cope with strong and conflicting perspectives on the role of “heroism” in memorializing Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and the Jewish response to the Holocaust, see Stauber (2007, especially chapters 7–10).

  16. This relatively nuanced use of the Holocaust as a proof-text was more prominent among intellectual and political elites, who faced a public in the early 1950s that was much more likely to disdain the masses of Jewish victims for having gone to their deaths “like lambs to the slaughter,” than to appreciate the virtual absence of alternatives and the complexities of what could, in retrospect, be seen as simply heroic postures of armed resistance. This early and simplistic approach of the Yishuv to the experience of Jewish victims helps to explain the passage of the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, along with the visceral disgust with which many Israelis reacted to what they imagined as the craven behavior of Holocaust victims. The law allowed survivors to identify and denounce other survivors for their behavior during the war. For a discussion of the bizarre, heart-rending accusations and trials of Israelis, including former “kapos” denounced as collaborators, see Segev, The Seventh Million (1993, 258–262); and Zerrtal (2005, 60–69). For an extensive discussion of the different perspectives on “heroism” prominent in Israel in the 1950s, see Stauber (2007).

  17. At the beginning of the speech, Dinur asserted that the actual number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was 6.5 million. Ben-Zion Dinur, DivreiHaKnesset, May 12, 1953, 1310.

  18. The idea of correcting damage done to Israeli Jews’ lack of empathy or identification with diaspora Jews appeared in 1955 as an explicit tenet of the governing coalition’s “Basic Principles.” In 1959, the Ministry of Education published a booklet entitled Deepening Jewish Consciousness in Public Schools: Instructions and Curriculum (Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1959). For details, see Resnik (2003, 305–307).

  19. Concerning the severity of Israel’s economic crisis in the early 1950s as an impetus for negotiations with Germany, see Feldman (1984, 67–70).

  20. Jewish extremists tried to kill Adenauer in Paris in the fall of 1951 by sending him a package bomb, but the bomb killed a policeman instead.

  21. For more on Ben-Gurion’s approach to the temporarily available opportunity to exploit both German isolation and gentile guilt, see Auerbach (1991, 278).

  22. Divrei HaKnesset, January 7, 1952, vol. 10 (1951–1952) 897 (cited and translated by Stauber 2007, 48).

  23. Sharett used this formula earlier (see Sharett 2007, 108).

  24. The government appealed the verdict. In January 1958 the Israel Supreme Court reversed the decision. But it was too late for Kastner himself. In March 1957, he was assassinated by members of a far-right ultranationalist group.

  25. For an excellent analysis along these lines that also surveys work on Ben-Gurion and the Eichmann trial, see Weitz (2008).

  26. Weitz, “The founding father and the war criminal’s trial,” op. cit., 229–233. At Ben-Gurion’s insistence, Hausner took extraordinary precautions to prevent the name of Hans Globke being mentioned more than incidentally in the course of the trial. Globke, a high-ranking Nazi during the Third Reich, continued to serve as a close adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Ben-Gurion’s chief interlocutor in the budding Israeli–Germany relationship. For a detailed analysis of the relationship with Germany and Ben-Gurion’s decisions with regard to Eichmann, see Roni Stauber, “The impact of the Eichmann trial on relations between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany,” in The Eichmann Trial, D. Lzar and R. Wittmann, eds. (forthcoming).

  27. The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust, “The trial of Adolf Eichmann,” Part 2, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-006-007-008-02.html.

  28. As Hannah Arendt points out, the prosecution repeatedly asked testifying survivors why they did not resist, thereby revealing the depth and nagging power of the Zionist proof-text’s emphasis on distinguishing sheep-like victims from heroic resistors (Arendt 1963, 230; see also Yablonka 2008, 575).

  29. The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust, “The trial of Adolf Eichmann,” Part 3, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-006-007-008-03.html.

  30. The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust, “The trial of Adolf Eichmann,” Part 1, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-006-007-008-01.html.

  31. For a discussion of this episode, see Gur-Ze’ev (2000, 379–380).

  32. This requirement, included formally in the doctrine of the Israel Defense Forces, has been invoked repeatedly by Israeli soldiers and military officers as they refused to serve or to carry out orders against Palestinians or in Lebanon.

  33. For variants of this characterization used in Zionist contexts, see Fisch (1982, 85), Kasher (1968, 32) and Aviner (1982, 16–17).

  34. For a more detailed consideration of the debate over the relative decisiveness of these events in the transformation of Israeli collective memory concerning the Holocaust, see Shapira (1998).

  35. For a general assessment of the conclusions of many analysts regarding the Eichmann trial as a psychological turning point for the Israeli Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust, see l Klar, Schori-Eyal, and Klar (2013, 132). For the unexpected and unintended emotional impact of Ben-Gurion’s decision to apprehend and try Eichmann, see Don-Yehiya (1993, 145, 149).

  36. In 1957 the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold wanted to station UN troops on both the Israeli and Egyptian sides of the border. This would have given the UN the right to keep its peacekeepers in place even if Egypt ordered them out. Since Ben-Gurion rejected the proposal the UN had no choice but to leave the Sinai when Nasser demanded it.

  37. For an eloquent expression of how the aftermath of the 1973 war shocked Jews into experiencing a second Holocaust as a present and threatening reality, see Elie Wiesel, “Ominous Signs and Unspeakable Thoughts,” New York Times (December 28, 1974).

  38. For an analysis of the development of Holocaust consciousness among Mizrahim that describes the third generation as having had “the Shoah burnt in their souls,” see Yablonka (2009, 94).

  39. Author notes, Safed, Israel, September 29, 1969 {comment: not sure how to enter this as a source or a citation}. See also Nurith Geertz (1981, 106–114). Begin certainly did not originate the idea of equating Arabs with Nazis. For Ben-Gurion’s repeated use of this trope, including descriptions of Nasser as a new Hitler, see Zerrtal (2005, p. 97) and Weitz (2013).

  40. For a detailed discussion of Begin’s references to the Holocaust in connection with nearly every security challenge faced by Israel, see Naor (2003, 136–141).

  41. This critique reflects an attitude reflected by the increasingly common use of the term “Jewish Woodstock” to refer to student trips to Auschwitz, and of the phrase “Shoah business”— a reference used during an interview even by a senior official at a leading Israeli Holocaust museum to refer to his work and that of his colleagues (see also Finkelstein 2000). For a bitingly sarcastic version of this point of view targeted mainly at the exploitation of the Holocaust by Jews in the United States, see Reich (2008). For an endorsement of the target of this sarcasm—the efforts to manage the Holocaust “brand” by applying professional managerial and advertising techniques, see Heruti-Sover (2014).

  42. The word “masa” in traditional Zionist parlance is a strenuous journey or voyage, a kind of political and spiritual pilgrimage. It is characteristically used to describe the lives of Israel’s heroic pioneers, who had faced tremendous emotional and physical obstacles after leaving Europe to start new lives and build a new state in the Land of Israel. The journeys to the death camps are designed to recreate, for young Israelis, that same sense of danger, suffering, survival, and transcendent purpose, of having completed their own “masa.” Carefully traumatized by the guides, and segregated from positive contacts of any kind with Europeans while on the trip, the students experience an emotional breakdown, only to emerge from what they experience as an antisemitism-saturated diaspora as “witnesses” responsible for carrying on their mission as Jews to deliver the message of the Holocaust and to protect Israel and its inhabitants from contemporary threats of annihilation. For a detailed account of these trips and their psychological effects on participants, see Jackie Feldman’s brilliant ethnography. A trained anthropologist, Feldman worked for the Ministry of Education as a guide on the death camp voyages.

  43. Finding in a study published in 2012 by Asher Arian (Klar et al. 2013, 125). For the complete study, see Arian and Keissar-Sugarman (2009).

  44. Israel Air Force Ceremony—F-15 Jets over Auschwitz , uploaded to YouTube April 20, 2009.

  45. See also Magid (2015).

  46. In an interview with one Holocaust educator employed by Yad Vashem, this decision was described as designed to prevent the unprofessional presentation of Holocaust material by teachers who lacked the necessary guidance to do so effectively.

  47. For Israeli critiques of Holocaust memorialization as having counterproductive and trivializing effects on Israel, Jewish life, and the honor due to Holocaust victims, see Segev (1993), Zerrtal (2005), Burg (2007), Feldman (2008) and Zuckerman (1993).

  48. Sandy Rashty, “Israelis’ tough stance at Auschwitz,” the Jewish Chronicle OnLine, January 30, 2014, http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/115241/israelis%E2%80%99-tough-stance-auschwitz.

  49. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the acclaimed Israeli film by Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008). The film is a mostly animated treatment of the experiences and traumas of Israeli soldiers during the 1982 Lebanon War and their indirect complicity in the massacre of Palestinians by the Phalange militias under the leadership of Israel’s ally Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel. “Valtzeem Bashir,” as the title reads in Hebrew, conjures directly the idea of “doing something German” with Bashir Gemayel. Indeed, the entire film, from the ravenous dogs in the first scene to the emaciated naked bodies of Israeli soldiers rising from the sea and the trucks filled with dead Palestinians, is constructed on the knowledge that Israeli viewers will automatically make the connections, linking Israelis to Germans, that cannot be made explicitly.

  50. In the summer of 2016, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman compared the work of Israel’s most famous Palestinian poet, Marwan Darwish, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Lieberman subsequently compared President Obama’s deal with Iran with Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement. He later retracted the comparison, but not without additional commentary that established the same point less graphically (Glanz 2016; Goldberg 2016). Regarding the systematic conflation of Arabs/Palestinians and Nazis in Israeli popular culture and in the collective imagination, see Burg, Victory over Hitler (2007, 129–131), Feldman (2008, 3) and Morris (1999, 514–515). For explicit treatment of the call to apply the traditional biblical injunction to “wipe out the memory of Amalek” not only to the Nazis, but also to Arabs, see Gur-Zev (2000, 374–376).

  51. For the view that the hegemonic status of the centrality of the Holocaust in Jewish life is threatened, and that it needs to be defended, see Rosenfeld (2011).

  52. For a critical analysis of Yablonka’s position in opposition to the Holocaust playing the kind of constitutive role I have described under the “template for Jewish life” construction, see Sagi (2010).

  53. For an important effort to advance this construction by treating the Holocaust and the Nakba within the same conceptual, moral, and emotional space, see Bashir and Goldberg (2015).

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Ian S. Lustick

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Lustick, I.S. The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences. Cont Jewry 37, 125–170 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-017-9208-7

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