Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  The sense of hopelessness and fear prevalent in the Arab community in Israel, a community already traumatized by the Catastrophe of 1948, was exacerbated by the fact that it was saturated with security agents and informers reporting to the state’s internal security services. “People used to say ‘they’ knew everything about the population, even what they’d eaten for lunch,” comments Abed Satel. Abed’s uncle was politically active back in the ’60s, and was jailed for helping to start a social club for Muslims. A year later, his involvement with al-Ard (“The Land”), an all-Arab political organization, got him in trouble again.

  They took my uncle to the jail because of his involvement. He was there for four months, moved from one place to another. He was released, dropped over the border into Jordan; he made it back, but then he wasn’t allowed to leave Jaffa for four years. He had to go every day to the police station to sign in; even if he wanted to walk to his job in Bat Yam, just two kilometres from here, he needed to get a licence from the police to go. After four years he went to see a Jewish lawyer, Dr. Hayek, who checked his file with the police, and told him that the police had no reason for what they were doing. The lawyer got it dropped. (This is something we know in our society: people are judged better if they go to a Jewish rather than an Arab lawyer.) We thought then than it was over, but when he bought a house and tried to renovate it, he had trouble getting a licence to renovate — it took him seven years, and intervention from people in the municipality.

  By June 1949 more Jewish immigrants were arriving in Jaffa and, as the defeated city was slated for annexation into Tel Aviv, the barbed wire around Ajami was removed. But Palestinian Israelis in rural areas remained under military administration for eighteen years, an experience that defined what it meant to be an Arab in Israel for an entire generation.

  More and more refugees were flooding into the new country — from 1948 to 1951, Israel’s Jewish population doubled. Barely half of the new arrivals were from Europe. By 1956, some 450,000 Jews from Arab countries had arrived in Israel.

  Historically, Jews had fared significantly better in Muslim than in Christian lands. Although examples of persecution can be found in the long and diverse histories of those countries, there were lengthy periods of harmonious coexistence. But with the Balfour Declaration and the rise of Zionism in Mandate Palestine, things began to change. Events in Palestine spilled over, affecting other Jewish communities in the Middle East. Many Arabs were chafing against western colonial rule, which stifled their nationalist yearnings for self-determination. Zionism was seen as an ally of British imperialism, a threat to Palestinian Arab independence, and, indeed, to pan-Arab aspirations. Nazi anti-Judaism also left its mark. From 1938 Hitler’s Arabic radio service was broadcasting daily from Berlin, and during the 1940s there were pogroms of Jews in Axis-allied Iraq and German-occupied Libya.

  Open conflict with Israel in 1948 brought things to a head. Political repression and populist antipathy made life difficult for Arab Jews, difficult enough that entire communities emigrated to Israel. In Egypt, they were pushed out — in 1956 President Nasser expelled all Jewish citizens and confiscated their property. Local Zionists and agents arriving from Israel encouraged their fellow Jews, many of whom were very devout, to return to the Promised Land. In Iraq, their persuasions may have become violent. Bombings of Jewish businesses, cafés, and a synagogue in Baghdad, upping the ante in a climate of hostility and fear and encouraging a speedier exodus, were widely believed to be the work of Israeli operatives.§

  Jewish communities had been a part of Arab society in the Middle East for many centuries. They were Jews, yes, but they were also Moroccan, or Yemeni, or Iraqi, and their Jewishness had been shaped in that environment. It was this richness of identity that they brought as refugees to Israel.

  The influx of these Mizrahi Jews posed something of a dilemma for the Sabras. The new arrivals were welcomed as Jews, but looked down upon as Arabs. This dynamic had been there from the early days of Zionist settlement. Yemeni Jews, animated by messianic hope rather than political desire, began arriving in the 1880s, at the same time as the Zionists. By 1911, they were actively solicited for their labour. “They build new neighbourhoods and work very hard and for little pay in the farmers’ fields,” commented historian Mordechai Naor. “The Yemenites are patient workers who seldom complain about the harsh living conditions. For they believe that one would only be worthy of living in Eretz Israel if one ‘earns it through tribulation.’”[17] Their second-class status is painfully apparent: Ashkenazi settlers were to be pioneers and kibbutzniks, and Mizrahi settlers were to be the hired labour — fit, as one Yishuv newspaper put it, to “take the place of the Arabs”[18] who, for ideological reasons, the Zionists didn’t want to hire.¶ One Yemeni community that bucked the trend by establishing a farming community in the Galilee region in 1912 was eventually driven off its land by the European kibbutzniks who settled nearby a decade later.

  Now, the Mizrahis were arriving in droves. “We do not have a common language with them,” argued one member of the Knesset (MK) in 1949. “Our cultural level is not theirs. Their way of life is medieval…”[19] Joseph Weitz of the Jewish National Fund discussed the problem with a government colleague, and wrote in his diary: “he expressed anxiety about preserving our cultural standards given the massive immigration from the Orient. There are indeed grounds for anxiety, but what’s the use? Can we stop it?” Yaakov Zrubavel of the Jewish Agency agreed: “Perhaps these are not the Jews we would like to see coming here, but we can hardly tell them not to come.” The Jewish Agency was concerned that, like the Holocaust survivors, the Mizrahis represented inferior “human material.”[20]

  Much of the housing freed up by the Arab exodus had already been occupied by the new arrivals from Europe. Swamped by refugees, the government arranged for the hasty assembly of transit camps. These became home for tens of thousands of Mizrahi Jews, often for years. In these bleak tent cities there was a shortage of everything: food, fuel, schooling, work. “If there was a plane going back to Iraq that same second, I would have taken it,” an Iraqi Jewish immigrant told author Rachel Shabi. “We stayed there five years, in a tent and then a hut. Once there was two weeks of rain with no break…. We brothers each grabbed ahold of a pole so that the tent wouldn’t take off. You could see someone’s shoe, a saucepan, personal belongings passing in the water….”[21] Many Mizrahis had fled with few possessions, and prosperous, long-established families from Iraq, Egypt, or Morocco now found themselves living in poverty, with little possibility of reclaiming their former status. Things were so bad that many North African Jewish émigrés, hearing from friends and relatives already in Israel of the not-so-warm welcome awaiting them, chose to emigrate elsewhere.[22]

  This experience was not shared by the refugees still arriving from Europe, who either bypassed the transit camps altogether or were moved fairly quickly into permanent housing. While Ashkenazi immigrants tended to be settled in or near the cities along the coast, where many had relatives, Mizrahis were housed in the new “development towns,” which often grew out of the transit camps. As part of national security planning, these towns were usually located close to Israel’s troubled borders, in the northern Galilee or the Negev desert: Sderot, near Gaza, is one. Like the transit camps, these hinterland development towns, far from the established matrix of commerce, became associated with high unemployment; and, as the years passed, they tended to be linked with criminality and substance abuse. Sixty years later, these towns are some of the poorest in Israel, and their inhabitants still struggle against their legacy of ongoing social marginalization.

  Despite rejecting much of what they saw as the culture and values of European diaspora Jewry, the Ashkenazi Sabras leaned toward the West, and their attitudes were shaped by Occidental civilization’s sense of its own superiority over Oriental culture.[23] When the Mizrahis arrived in Israel, their heritage was a problem. David Ben-Gurion believed that “We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit o
f the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the [European] Diaspora.”[24] To be an Israeli, one could not be an Arab. Although few Mizrahi arrivals would have identified themselves as “Zionist,” that identity was key to being Israeli. With Israel in a state of perpetual tension with its Arab neighbours, Arab Jews were in an awkward position. “For Zionism,” writes Cultural Studies professor Ella Shohat, “this Arabness, the product of millennial cohabitation, is merely a Diasporic stain to be cleansed through assimilation. Within Zionist ideology, the very term ‘Arab Jew’ is an oxymoron…. Arab Jews were prodded to choose between anti-Zionist Arabness and a pro-Zionist Jewishness.”[25] Thus, as Shohat points out, “in a generation or two, millennia of rooted Oriental civilization, unified even in its diversity,”[26] was erased.

  Ironically, even the faith that had brought Arab Jews to Israel worked against them; for the secular Sabras, the very religiousness of the Mizrahis was a marker of their “primitive” nature. In the process of being turned into Israelis, immigrants from Yemen suffered in particular. Many young Yemeni Jews were removed from their families and taken to special camps for secular re-education, which for boys included the shaving of the side-locks their ancestors had worn for centuries. They were also pressed, sometimes forcibly, to work on the Sabbath. This regimen of indoctrination was nothing but “the cultural and religious murder of the tribes of Israel,”[27] one horrified MK told the Knesset. There were rumours of the disappearance of Yemeni babies, given for adoption to Ashkenazi families, rumours that successive government investigative commissions never managed to dispel.

  Dvora Elinor worked with the transit camp residents as a social services supervisor. Looking back on that time, she told her interviewer:

  An entire generation, about a hundred thousand people, actually we broke them, their values, their ability to make their own decisions. That is the worst damage we’ve caused by our paternalism and by this entire operation of discrimination … We felt that if we don’t give them all our values, in every aspect, they would be lost. We felt so arrogant and superior….[28]

  From the beginning, Jewish-Israeli society fractured along the fault lines of its diversity. There was a gulf between the Sabras and the newly arrived refugees from Europe, who by 1961 constituted over one-quarter of Israel’s population. They were profoundly traumatized by the atrocities they had survived, but they received little sympathy from the Sabras. “To put it bluntly, there were almost two races in this country,” remembered Sabra author Yehudit Hendel. “… And there was, we can certainly say, an inferior race. People we saw as inferior who had some kind of flaw, some kind of hunchback, and these were the people who came after the war.”[29] Perhaps, as psychiatrist Julius Zellermayer later suggested, the fight for Israel’s survival and the mindset it necessitated made it impossible for Israelis to identify with the radical vulnerability of the new immigrants.[30] As their tales of horror met with coldness, even derision, many survivors retreated into emotional isolation, ashamed at their own survival.

  Psychology professor Uri Hadar told me the story of one European refugee’s experience:

  I have a friend who was in hiding in Warsaw with a Christian family during the [Second World War]. Then her aunt came and said, “I’m your guardian, come with me.” My friend was thirteen or so, and she came to where I grew up, here in Israel. Years later, she told me that during the war, she was scared, and was in a way traumatized by it — she couldn’t go out, and the brother of the woman who hosted her went and robbed her family home, and kept appearing with things from her home — but personally, she was treated with respect and taken care of.

  Then she arrived in Israel. It was a catastrophe. She was totally ostracized and she didn’t know what was going on, nobody was interested in anything she had to say. She said really it was a much worse experience than what she lived in Warsaw during the war.[31]

  This culture of blame was exacerbated in the 1950s when the communities of survivors were riven by a series of trials prosecuting those who had collaborated with the Nazis. These cases, invariably initiated by other survivors, culminated in 1952 when Rudolf Kastner, head of the Hungarian Jewish Rescue Committee in the 1940s, was accused of having collaborated with Eichmann. Suing for libel, he effectively became the defendant at the trial, and was pronounced by the judge to have “sold his soul to the devil.” His exoneration on appeal came too late, as he was assassinated before the verdict was released. After this sordid and very public affair, survivors were stereotyped either as victims or as Nazi collaborators. Ben-Gurion described the “strange wall” dividing them from the rest of Israeli society as “a barrier of blood and silence and agony and loneliness.”[32]

  By the late 1950s, the barriers between Sabras and Holocaust survivors and between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews continued to divide Israeli society. Riots broke out in 1959 in the Haifa district of Wadi Salib as impoverished Moroccan Jews asserted their discontent more forcefully, and the unrest quickly spread to other cities. After a couple of months the protests were quelled, but simmering tensions remained.

  Israel was only just over a decade old. Over half of its citizens had arrived after the 1948 War and had not participated in the shared suffering of those difficult months. There was as yet no common identity powerful enough to transcend their multiple ethnicities and diverse experiences. Then, on May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann was abducted by Mossad agents on a quiet residential street in Buenos Aires.

  Eichmann was at the top of any Nazi-hunter’s most-wanted list. As a lieutenant-colonel in the Gestapo, it had been his specific task to organize and administer the Final Solution. More than any other Nazi except Hitler, he could thus be seen as personally responsible for the murder of some six million Jews. His captors drugged him, bundled him on to an El Al jet, and brought him to Jerusalem.

  The case against Eichmann was prepared and prosecuted by the newly appointed attorney general, Gideon Hausner. He faced an enormous task. Eichmann’s conviction was not in doubt; the evidence against him (thanks in part to the transcripts from Nuremburg) was overwhelming. But Hausner, and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who had appointed him, had a larger vision. They wanted to use this unprecedented politico-legal opportunity to articulate a creation myth for Israel — a foundation story to unite a divided country.

  “This is a generation with no grandfathers and grandmothers,” Hausner later wrote. “It does not understand what happened, because it has not gone into the facts. The gap between the generations has turned into a chasm, creating repugnance for the nation’s past. ‘How did they allow themselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter?’ is the common question…. We need a massive living re-creation of this national and human disaster.”[33]

  Reading through the Nuremburg transcripts, Hausner realized that the documentary presentation of testimony would not give him what he needed. “Everything went smoothly and efficiently there,” he wrote, “but that is also one of the reasons the trials did not shock the heart.”[34] Having interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors, he and his team carefully selected 121 witnesses: people from different walks of life, different geographical regions; camp inmates, ghetto dwellers, resistance fighters. Their oral testimony, woven together, would present the nation, and the world, with the fullest possible portrait of the destruction of European Jewry.

  Hausner also had an explicitly partisan purpose. With Ben-Gurion, he believed that the Holocaust was the cumulative episode in thousands of years of Jewish persecution, and that the ferocity demonstrated in this twentieth-century pogrom proved once and for all what Zionists had always known: that Jews could only be safe in their own, Jewish, state. But this position was constantly challenged by the existence, and self-understanding, of thriving diasporic communities, in the United States in particular. The trial was thus an unrivalled opportunity not only to frame the Holocaust as the definitive justification for the Zionist state, but also to present the State of Isra
el, sole prosecutor of crimes against Jews, as the authoritative voice of Jewry.

  Eichmann’s trial opened in April 1961. With no courtroom large enough for the anticipated public and press, the trial was held in a newly built theatre in Jerusalem, and was simultaneously broadcast on closed-circuit TV into a nearby auditorium. It was a traumatic and ultimately cathartic experience both for those giving testimony and for those who witnessed it. For several prosecution witnesses, the effort to give voice to their experience took a severe physical toll. Rivka Yoselewska suffered a heart attack on the morning she was scheduled to give testimony. Israeli writer Yehiel Dinur, refusing the logic of the questions gently pressed on him by the court, spoke of the other camp inmates he saw crowding about him and passed out on the stand. He was hospitalized for several weeks. Overall, the testimony, Hausner later wrote, was “so overwhelming, so shocking” that it left the prosecution team “paralyzed, benumbed.”[35] It was not uncommon for audience members to faint.

  Within his overarching vision of the Holocaust as national catalyst, Hausner grasped that the Holocaust was a devastating event in the lives of each individual survivor. “In encouraging them to unlock what had been sealed within their memories and to relate their personal stories, he redeemed them and an entire generation of survivors: Thus the trial served as a sort of national group therapy,”[36] notes historian Tom Segev. It was particularly significant that this took place in a court of law. Telling their story within that state-sanctioned framework of judgment and punishment legitimized and gave meaning to their suffering. It also affirmed to the traumatized survivors that the event was over, could be spoken of as in the past.