The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  This situation was among the most daring components of the post-Zionist challenge to the idea of Israel. Segev claimed, for example, that the negation of the diaspora remained the ideological cornerstone of Zionist doctrine. Negation was expressed, he writes, in the Yishuv’s ‘deep contempt, and even disgust, for Jewish life in the diaspora’ and their feeling of ‘alienation [towards] those who suffered’ in the Holocaust.32 Elsewhere in his book, Segev ventures a more conspiratorial explanation for the Yishuv’s policies. He detects a tacit alliance between the Jewish community in Palestine and the British Empire. The Zionist movement was promised a favoured status after the war if it kept quiet about rescue operations and let the Allies pursue their war efforts without interference.

  It all adds up to quite an uneasy read. The Seventh Million appeared first in Hebrew and was then made into a documentary film, screened in prime time in the happy days of post-Zionist media openness.33 It showed the more questionable side of the ‘new Jew’ born in Palestine, hero of the idea of Israel. Segev pointed out that in many ways the commemoration of the Holocaust became the new religion for the secular Jews of Palestine – or, as he put it, since religion had no importance for the identity of many secular Israelis, in its place came homage to Holocaust memory, a tribute that often transmogrified into a bizarre obsession with death.

  Segev was a post-Zionist researcher par excellence. He not only told us what he found in the archives, he also condemned the previous generation of scholars, especially historians, for ignoring these unpleasant facts because of their loyalty to the Zionist interpretation of the idea of Israel. In that interpretation, those who died in the Holocaust went ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ instead of rebelling, as did the few among them, who were immediately recognised not only as the brave ones but also as the Zionist ones, who belonged to us, even if they made the mistake of not emigrating sooner to Palestine.

  ‘The Ancestor of the Warsaw Uprising Is the State of Israel’

  Mainstream Israeli historiography, the underpinning of the political élite, characterised the revolts in the various ghettos and camps as a chapter in the long Zionist history of struggle against those who wished to destroy the Jewish people. This was one narrative. The very idea that there might be another narrative was a bold suggestion, made by post-Zionist scholars in the 1990s. To them, these uprisings had been Zionised in Israeli collective memory and mainstream academia. They saw this process of Zionisation as a typical instance of how national movements tend to define people’s past identity in accordance with the needs of the present national movement.

  In early 1942, the Nazi regime in Poland began to despatch Jews to death camps. This triggered the unusual attempt by the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants to resist by force this transfer to death. Two groups of Jews in the ghetto decided to rebel – one closer to Jewish Socialist movements, such as the anti-Zionist General Jewish Labour Bund, and one closer to the Zionist Revisionist movement. Both were aided by the Polish underground. Among the leaders of the former was Marek Edelman; born in 1919, he had joined the Bund as a youth. The actual revolt broke out in January 1943, when a second wave of transports began, and held on until the beginning of May until they succumbed to the superior military might of the Nazi forces.

  After the war, Edelman studied medicine in Poland and became a cardiologist. In 1976 he joined the famous Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa and became one of Poland’s revered intellectuals. In his writing he often addressed issues of human and civil rights around the world and often criticised Zionism and Israel for their discriminatory policies towards the Palestinians. In the late 1980s he became a member of the Polish parliament. In 1993 the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, led an Israeli delegation for the jubilee commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Polish president Lech Walesa asked Edelman to be among the chief speakers; heavy pressure from the Israeli delegation removed him from the list at the very last moment.34

  In keeping with the observation by critics of nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, that it is best to nationalise dead people since they cannot claim an identity different from the one ascribed to them, one can imagine how troublesome was Marek Edelman, this major figure in the Warsaw uprising.35 At the time he was a member of a non-Zionist organisation; after the Holocaust he remained a Polish socialist; and still he was alive and kicking. It was bad enough that Edelman did not fit the image that the official cultural producers in Israel wished the leaders of the rebellion to have; worse, he actively contested it. In 1945 he wrote a book on the uprising called The Ghetto Fights, which appeared in Hebrew only in 2001.36 He disliked the way he and his friends were portrayed visually and textually in Israeli scholarship – ‘none of them had ever looked like this … they didn’t have rifles, cartridge pouches or maps; besides, they were dark and dirty’, hardly the ideal type of handsome, Aryan-like young Jews seen in the Israeli museums of the Holocaust and in the pictures decorating official texts.37

  Edelman explained that for him the uprising was a human choice about how to die (as Primo Levi, too, claimed). But death was not a simple issue for the political élite in Israel, which is always busy shaping the collective memory of a society of immigrants, while at the same time colonising a population and an area that resisted, at times violently. The leaders felt in the past, as they do today, a need to rank death in a hierarchy – to idealise one type and condemn another. Death in rebellion against the Holocaust was commendable; death in the Holocaust without resistance was questionable. Death for the sake of the nation was to be the sublime act of humanity.38

  Edelman was ignored in official Israeli texts and representations of the Holocaust. He is known now thanks to Idith Zertal, who, in the relative openness of the public debate during the 1990s, introduced his story to the world.39 Zertal was the editor of Haaretz’s prestigious weekend supplement and edited Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly, the main publication of Tel Aviv University’s School of History; today she teaches in Switzerland. In her book The Nation and the Death (in English it was titled Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood), she discussed the Warsaw uprising. As Zertal came from the heart of the establishment, she was able to get a mainstream publishing house to publish her highly subversive book. In it, one encounters Israel as a necrophilic nation, obsessed and possessed by death, and particularly the death camps of the Holocaust – unable to comprehend the atrocity, and yet quite able to use and abuse its memory for the sake of its political aims.

  Through Zertal’s book, we become able to see how deep the institutionalisation of Holocaust memory went in the young Jewish state. She describes the construction of a selective narrative that adapted the history of the Holocaust to Israel’s strategic and ideological demands. Two themes were important in this respect. The first was planting in the public mind a clear contrast between the new ‘brave’ Jews of Israel and those who went ‘willingly’ to the slaughter in Europe’s extermination camps; the second, nationalising, or Zionising, the rebellions, particularly the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as precursors of the resurrection of the Jews as a new nation in their ‘redeemed’ homeland. To use a phrase from Benedict Anderson, who served as an inspiration for Zertal’s work: ‘The ancestor of the Warsaw uprising is the state of Israel’.40 When the two themes are taken together, it is clear that the Jews who participated in the uprising were constructed by the young Jewish state as ‘proto-Zionists’ and not, as Primo Levi and others saw them, as people who wished to choose their own kind of death in the face of massive extermination.41

  In the official version of the collective memory, the uprisings were part of the narrative of Palestine, in which, whether in the Warsaw of the Second World War or north of the Galilee in Roman times, brave Jews stood firm in the face of their enemies. ‘The flame of the rebellion has been ignited in the ghettos in the name of Eretz Israel’, declared Zalman Shazar, who later became Israel’s third president.42 According to this account, the rebels drew courage from the Jews who ha
d withstood the Arab attacks of the 1920s. This reductionist approach, explained Zertal, was not just a cynical construction of a tale; it also served a psychological yearning to comprehend the Holocaust: ‘By [the rebels’] acts, the impossible and inconceivable became both possible and conceivable’.43

  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.44 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.45 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’.46 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.47

  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’.48

  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’.49 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.50

  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.51

  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.52 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.53

  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.54 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.55

  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 Dist
ribution 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.56

  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.57