The Idea of Israel (26 page)

Zertal relied heavily on Hannah Arendt’s work. In the wake of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961–62, Arendt challenged Israel’s crude distortions of the Holocaust.
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She was even more fiercely rebuked than Edelman and to a degree demonised. Arendt not only philosophised about the historical narrative but, far more important, contemplated the moral implications of nationalism, Judaism, and evil. She offered an alternative humanist and universalist view of the Holocaust and contemporary Judaism.

In the 1990s, the educator Yair Auron went as far as to propose a radical change in the way the Holocaust was taught in Israel, suggesting that it be taught as part of the history of modern genocide.
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He was supported at the time by a University of Haifa philosopher of education, Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, who in the 1990s was a strong voice in favour of a universalist approach. Gur-Ze’ev decried what he called ‘the Israeli educational industry’s desire to dominate the memory of the Holocaust’ and to exclude any universalisation of the event. The Shoah, he wrote, ‘became the Totem of Zionism’.
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The educational system in Israel acts as a conservative, non-reflective, manipulative tool and labels as taboo any other approach to the event and its implications.

After the Second Intifada, Gur-Ze’ev would come to regret his own post-Zionism and embrace afresh the old Zionist narrative and interpretation of the Holocaust. The philosopher Adi Ofir, editor of
Theory and Criticism
, on the other hand, remained steadfast in his criticism. Already in 1986, he depicted the Israeli preoccupation with the Holocaust as religious practice. He claimed that anyone who would dare ‘to offer a different representation’ or ‘even claim he or she knows what really happened there’ would be branded as a heathen and traitor.
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The Embarrassing Jews: Demonisation of Holocaust Survivors

Part of this more humanist and universalist approach to the history of the Holocaust was de-Zionising the revolts and also providing space for the different narratives of those who had survived the camps and the atrocities. This new angle also enabled a revisiting of the way the survivors themselves were treated once they reached Palestine and, later, Israel.

Until the 1990s, Holocaust studies in Israel was a widespread discipline; almost every university and college had a special department or centre devoted to extensive research on it. Their brand of inquiry, however, was quite limited and focused mainly on the Nazis themselves and the uprisings against them. The vast majority of scholars
seemed to ignore Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s famous comment when he was asked by the film-maker Eyal Sivan, in the documentary
Yizkor: Slaves of Memory
, about Holocaust memorialisation in Israel (more on this film in
Chapter 9
): ‘Why should the Holocaust interest us? We are the victims. It is the Germans who should be concerned with what they have done’.
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In the 1990s post-Zionist scholarship, in the course of extending the scope of research, juxtaposed for the first time the Jewish state and its political élite with individuals who survived the inferno and chose to become citizens of Israel (or were forced to do so). These survivors did not fit the image of the Sabra – the new Jew – a disparity reflected in the documentary films of the 1940s and 1950s. This pattern was discovered by Nurith Gertz, a literary scholar at the Open University who contributed significantly to post-Zionist work on cinema. She showed that the survivors appeared in those films as obstinate, strange Jews who were unwilling to integrate into their new society. She called this representation the silencing of memory, as the films gave no room for either the personal or collective narrative of these survivors. Their narrative, wrote Gertz, was ‘stifled by the collective narrative of Holocaust and heroism’.
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Their memories, she continued,

erupt in the present and disrupt the Zionist narrative that leads from the obliteration of the Diaspora past to the formation of the Israeli present and future. This is the narrative of people who remained foreign and ‘other’ in Israeli society, who did not exchange their identities as Zionism expected of them. The films attempt to integrate these people into the Israeli collective.
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And nothing could mitigate this negative image. As Tom Segev noted, even the fact that a third of the soldiers who fought in Israel’s war of independence were survivors of Hitler, or that some of them had indeed rebelled, was of no help to them. The young State of Israel was still, in Segev’s words, ‘embarrassed by the Holocaust’. The Jewish state was founded on the concept of the ‘new’ Jew: tough, proudly speaking Hebrew, working the land, self-reliant. The Holocaust
victims, it was said, had gone like sheep to the slaughter. They were the ‘old’ Jews: Yiddish-speaking exiles, urban and mercantile.
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The State of Israel, so it seems, coped much better with dead Holocaust Jews than with Holocaust survivors. As a Ben-Gurion University historian, Hanna Yablonka, put it, in general the Zionist sense was that those who survived were guilty by the sheer fact that they were alive, and thus represented a past that the Israelis wished to forget.
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Idith Zertal, too, in her earlier book
From Catastrophe to Power: The Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel
, focused on the lofty and dismissive attitude of the Sabras towards the survivors and their plight, and she noted that this attitude left deep scars in the souls of those who survived the Holocaust and reached Palestine.
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But the survivors were not simply despised; when necessary they were recruited, quite often against their will, to the Zionist cause in Palestine. It began on their day of liberation from the death chambers in Europe. This much we now know because of the work of Yosef Grodzinsky, a neurolinguist from Tel Aviv University. His father was a survivor and a member of the Bund, an organisation that even after the Holocaust continued to maintain that there was an international socialist alternative to Zionism.
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This personal history motivated Grodzinksy to step out of his field of inquiry and take the unusual step of writing a historical study of how people like his father were treated by the Zionist movement after the Holocaust, when, having survived the war, they were put in ‘displaced persons’ (DP) camps all over Germany.

The DP camps played an important part in the Zionist diplomatic battle over the fate of post-Mandatory Palestine. In those days, the Palestinian counter-argument against the idea of the Jewish state was based on the idea that, among other things, the Arabs in Palestine, constituting an absolute two-thirds majority, had the democratic right to determine what kind of state they wanted at the end of the Mandate. Zionist propaganda worked hard to associate, initially only in vague terms, the Jews all over the world and the fate of the Jewish community in Palestine. In this way, the demographic balance on the ground became immaterial – it had to include all Jews, wherever they were, and therefore the Jews were a potential majority in Palestine.

But this approach was deemed too academic, for instance by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry charged in 1946 with proposing a solution to the conflict in Palestine. It was clear that a more concrete association had to be established between the fate of the European Jews and those in Palestine. To prove that point, the people in the DP camps would have to wish, en masse, to emigrate to Palestine. One member of the Anglo-American Committee, Richard Crossman, was unimpressed by the general argument at the time he was appointed, but changed his mind once he visited the camps and was told that most of the people there wanted to come to Palestine. If he had actually consulted the American and British commanders of those camps, they would have told him that the vast majority in fact wanted to emigrate to Britain or the United States.
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Grodzinsky found out why the Anglo-American Committee and its successor, the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), heard only one voice in the camps. In his book
Good Human Material
, he describes a reign of Zionist terror against anyone else trying to help the DPs emigrate to places other than Palestine (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, for instance, was very active in trying to help Jews go to the United States). In the camps were recruitment offices for the Hagana where the DPs were sworn in as soldiers; for such soldiers to change their mind was tantamount to desertion. Grodzinsky described other unsavoury means for Zionising survivors who were fit for military action and for barring other organisations from establishing a presence in the camps.
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Moreover, the Zionist leadership continued to utilise the survivors after they left the camps and were on their way to Palestine. This has become evident in post-Zionist scholarship through a reappraisal of the case of the SS
Exodus
, or
Exodus 1947
, the ship that sailed from Europe with more than four thousand Holocaust survivors on board and was refused entry to Palestine by the Mandatory government, its passengers ultimately forced to return to Germany.

On 11 July 1947, SS
Exodus
left France in the middle of the night with its cargo of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe’s DP camps. None of them had a certificate to enter Mandatory Palestine. The British Royal Navy trailed the ship and finally intercepted it.
This was the intended outcome of the incident, as the Jewish Agency wanted to attract world opinion to the blockade Britain had imposed on large immigrant ships attempting to reach Palestine. A mainstream Israeli historian, Aviva Halamish, showed that the refugees were told to prepare for the interception and were instructed how to resist the British forces when they boarded the ship.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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