The Jerusalem seminar on Nazism was a graduate seminar, and I had a full house of exceptionally motivated and bright students. I felt close to them, as I felt close to the country I had returned to. It was the enthusiasm of new beginnings. I have to admit that although I remember some splendid graduate seminars in Geneva, Tel Aviv, and UCLA, this Jerusalem première remains somehow engraved in my mind. Apart from four or five of the students, I’ve since forgotten the names of the participants, but I can still recall their faces, their attentiveness, and their eagerness to learn, and this shortly after most of them had returned from the nerve-racking waiting period in their units and then from the war.
Raul Hilberg came to Israel sometime at the end of 1967 or in early 1968 and was shunned by Yad Vashem (he was not allowed access to its archives, if my memory is correct). As I previously mentioned, in The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg accused the Jewish Councils (the Jewish leadership in each community under German occupation) of becoming instruments of the Germans in the process of persecution leading to extermination; he also attributed to Jews in general atavistic attitudes that facilitated their own annihilation. Later, Hilberg nuanced his judgment but never retracted his overall assertions. For Yad Vashem of the 1960s, this was too much and Hilberg was excommunicated, but only for a while.
One scholar was excommunicated forever: Hannah Arendt. Widely known and respected from the early fifties onward for her very original though utterly idiosyncratic book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt, who covered the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker, adopted Hilberg’s criticism of the Jewish Councils (she simply “adopted” Hilberg’s material, as she was totally ignorant of the history of the relations of Jewish communal leadership with local or national authorities, according to the Columbia Jewish historian Yosef Haim Yerushalmi). But in her sensational Eichmann in Jerusalem, she managed to add a high dose of sarcasm about Jewish leadership to Hilberg’s theses — for example, calling the elderly leader of German Jewry, Rabbi Leo Baeck, “the Jewish Führer” — thereby deeply hurting many Israelis and Jews far and wide, particularly her former German-Jewish friends in Jerusalem. Scholem wrote to her that she lacked any “love for the Jewish people.” She never set foot in Israel again.
In those days, Yad Vashem considered itself as the depository of some sort of “orthodoxy” regarding the Shoah; that orthodoxy found its quintessential expression in the law establishing Yad Vashem as the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority and in the designation of the yearly memorial day for the victims of the Shoah, Yom Hazikaron Lashoah Velagevurah (Remembrance Day for Catastrophe and Heroism). Israel in those times could not accept the catastrophe without giving an equal place in its national memory to heroism, which, historically, was of course a mythical construct. Although the designations remained the same, Israeli consciousness evolved from the Eichmann trial on and so did Yad Vashem’s horizons, albeit more slowly.
I invited Hilberg to my seminar and although I do not remember the issues we discussed with him, it would be a fair guess to suggest that his criticism of the councils and his assessment of collective Jewish attitudes were among our main topics. The historian of “German ideology,” George L. Mosse, was another guest, and I am almost sure that I also asked him to present his own iconoclastic views: the impact of German völkisch (nationalist, racist) ideology, in its early twentieth-century guise, on some important trends within Zionism. In any case, I wanted to keep the seminar open to controversy. It also led to a baffling experience.
I wanted the students to see Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, public screenings of which were not permitted in Israel. It wasn’t easy tracking down a copy, but finally I received three separate nonsubtitled reels from the Kibbutz of Ghetto Fighters. The only appropriate hall for the screening was one of the largest halls in the university, and, as I had put a notice in our building, the news spread and on the day and hour of the presentation some four hundred students sat waiting.
The film arrived after a great delay and could not be viewed before the screening. As the right sequence of the reels was not indicated, we set them haphazardly. The first reel had “lost” the entire beginning of the film and opened with the end of “day one” of the Nuremberg rally of 1934: Hitler leaving the immense field as schoolchildren holding flowers in their hands shout “Heil!” Throughout, noise and laughter did not cease and most of the audience must have wondered about the whole idea of showing throngs of excited Nazi children.
The second reel started with the assembly of high party officials inside a covered hall, cheering the leaders who, one after another, proclaim the achievements of their twenty months in power: a series of short speeches in expectation of the address by the Führer. Then Hitler speaks, in a low voice at first, moving to a crescendo of incantations, exhortations, promises, and threats (the rally took place a few weeks after the murder of the brownshirts, the SA leadership). Although almost nobody in the audience understood German, silence fell and lasted for the duration of Hitler’s speech and the setting of the third reel.
The last sequence opened with the central ceremony of the rally, during which Hitler addresses the tens of thousands of men of his massed battalions and the half million or so of faithful followers present in the stands. The speech leads to the “blood flag” ritual. Hitler walks slowly past the flag bearers of the battalions, touches their flags with the “blood flag” of the “martyrs” killed during the failed Nazi putsch of 1923, each time staring straight at the flag bearer, that is, into the camera, while one hears the muted sounds of the hallowed military song “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden” and of the party hymn, the “Horst Wessel Lied.” There, the reel abruptly stopped. It took a while for the audience to get up and start moving out, exchanging a few words in low voices. They were, it seems, troubled and pensive.
The strange impact of Riefenstahl’s film on a few hundred Israeli students led to intensive discussions in our seminar, and I remember adding Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd to the readings, as well as some excerpts on propaganda from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It also convinced me of the significance of an initiative I was considering for some time: a study of Nazi anti-Semitism from the angle of collective psychology, as a kind of collective psychosis. Obviously, I was influenced by psychoanalysis, by my treatment and by my readings. It resulted first in L’Antisémitisme Nazi, published by Seuil in 1971, then, a few years later, in History and Psychoanalysis: An Essay on the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (1975). The two studies led me on a road I should not have taken; they were simplistic.
Why did I get sidetracked for a while? The amount of psychoanalytic literature I had read during my therapy gave me — or so I thought — enough wherewithal to turn in that direction; the conviction that behind anti-Semitic ideology an obsession, a cluster of delusional beliefs lurked which seemed to justify the attempt. My major mistake, as that of much psychohistory, resided in the simplistic move of psychoanalytic concepts from the individual field to the collective one. Moreover, after a while I recognized that the spreading of an obsession to a sizable population depended on a vast array of social factors that, in turn, molded the psychic structure of the obsession as such. Thus, whatever insights psychohistory could offer, they had to be part of a complex sociological analysis to avoid any reductionist kind of interpretation. I had learned my lesson.
In any case, as we were leaving Israel, in the early summer of 1968, I had a more immediate project.
4
At the end of the semester, the dean of social sciences, the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, asked me to return after the coming year in Geneva and tacitly offered (before the regular nomination procedure) a full professorship in history and international relations, if I agreed to reestablish and chair the Department of International Relations that had been closed several years beforehand. Half of my appointment would be in international relations, the second half in history. It was understood that I could keep my position at the Geneva
institute and teach there from April to July every year (the second semester there, equivalent to only a quarter in Jerusalem). Whether this arrangement was temporary or permanent was not spelled out; thus, it could be interpreted in both ways. I accepted, and Freymond, to whom I communicated the proposal, also accepted.
A few weeks after our departure, I started writing a book-length essay, Réflexions sur l’avenir d’Israel (Reflections on the future of Israel), while Hagith and I spent a month at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio on Lake Como, in northern Italy.
In 1968, an American couple, the Marshalls, was in charge of the villa. Mr. Marshall, a genial personality, had written apparently well-known cookbooks, while Mrs. Marshall was a “connoisseur” of Italian paintings and something of a snob.
Our small group included the American poet Louise Glück; Stanley Hoffman, a professor of international relations at Harvard, and his wife Inge; the playwright Arthur Kopit and his wife; and a historian of religion from Notre Dame University whose name escapes me. On the first Sunday, Mrs. Marshall explained in great detail how to get to mass in Bellagio, though in vain, as we were all Jews (the historian of religion was a converted Jew, but I doubt that he went to mass). In August, shortly before the end of our stay, we anxiously followed the news of the Soviet invasion of Prague.
For the first time since 1969, the year of its publication, I have now read again Réflexions sur l’avenir d’Israel; I must have continued to write it through the end of 1968, as I refer to events of that autumn. I remained essentially an advocate of the official Israeli position. Yet I had doubts about the open-ended prolongation of a full-scale occupation, not that I thought of the Palestinians’ rights to their own state, but because of the dangerous impact the domination of a vast and potentially hostile population would have upon Israeli society. Thus, I suggested the establishment of an “autonomous Palestinian entity” (in those very words) in which all internal matters would be in the hands of the Palestinians while Israel would keep military control until peace with the Arab world was achieved. As for Jerusalem, I suggested keeping the unified city as the capital of Israel, while the small area of the holy places could be internationalized or, alternatively, while the Muslim holy places could be put under Jordanian authority and considered as a foreign enclave.
Did I believe that these measures were steps on the way to general peace? Explicitly not, even in the long run: thus, the “autonomy” and the exterritorial status of the Muslim holy places were, in my view, the best possible arrangement within an indefinite waiting period, with the probability of further wars. All of this was neither very audacious nor very original, even at the time (it was in fact close to Dayan’s position). As for my pseudo-moral concerns, they were identical (in my book) to those of a group of soldiers, mostly kibbutz members, brought together by the left-wing intellectual Avraham Schapira, with the assistance of the writer Amos Oz, for a series of conversations on the war and its aftermath; they were published under the Hebrew title Siah Lohamim (Fighters’ Conversations, which in its English version became The Seventh Day). I quoted it at length in Réflexions.
I didn’t keep the letters I received about Réflexions, except for one; it inaugurated my friendly relations with Claude Lanzmann, at the time (and to this day) editor in chief of Les Temps Modernes, the periodical founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. “Dear Sir,” Claude wrote in February 1969, “Your book isn’t amusing at all. But it is truthful [il est vrai] and I wish to express my full agreement. Rarely did I so fully agree with anybody on the issue of Israel.” According to Claude, Simone de Beauvoir also read the book and was very impressed by my analysis. They wished the three of us could have lunch together on the occasion of one of my trips to Paris. I didn’t follow up as far as the lunch was concerned and never met Simone de Beauvoir (nor do I remember meeting Sartre, except maybe briefly in 1973), but my relations with Claude hold to this day, although I didn’t see him for some years. I shall come back to him.
A conversation I had upon our return to Geneva with Yakov Herzog, Eshkol’s closest adviser, who was attending some meeting in Switzerland, reinforced my pessimism about peace prospects. Herzog got in touch with me to discuss what I had written about his father, the chief rabbi of Palestine, in my book on the pope, and his (failed) attempts to meet with Pius XII and plead with him for the handing over to Jewish institutions of hidden Jewish children who had been converted to Catholicism. Herzog, his father’s secretary at the time, added some details that have since slipped my mind. But I did not forget the part of the conversation that dealt with peace negotiations between Israel and the Arab states.
According to Herzog, there could eventually be peace with each of the Arab countries if Israel declared its readiness to give back all the territories conquered during the war (this had briefly been Israel’s position regarding Egypt and Syria — not Jordan — immediately after the end of the fighting, before the government decided on “defensible borders”). But then, Herzog added, the fate of Jerusalem would be brought up and everything would fall apart.
Herzog was almost right: a change of relations with some Arab countries demanded another war and the giving up of territory occupied during the Six-Day War, while an arrangement with the Palestinians and acceptance of their demand to turn East Jerusalem into the capital of their state remains hanging in midair.
5
On our return to Europe, in the fall of 1968, I realized how much a part of public opinion, mainly on the left, was becoming hostile to Israel. The Vietnam War, increasingly loathsome to many, fed a preexisting, anti-imperialist stance, particularly in the academic world. Israel as such and, since 1967, the Israeli occupation of densely populated Arab territories, became prime examples of Western domination: anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism turned into one and the same ideology. In France, for example, Maxime Rodinson’s Israel, fait colonial? (Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?) was widely read. Rodinson, a well-known anthropologist, was Jewish, as were many leaders of the Western anti-Zionist campaign.
At Lycée Henri IV, in 1947–48, one of my closest friends, one year ahead of me, had been an Egyptian Communist, Samir Amin. He helped me to leave the lycée without drawing attention, on the day I had to reach the Gare de Lyon (the Communists, following the Soviet Union, were in favor of the UN partition plan and the creation of a Jewish state). I hadn’t seen Samir since then but knew that he had become a well-known Marxist theoretician of the anti-imperialist struggle.
Sometime at the end of 1968 or in early 1969, the Geneva institute students’ association invited Amin for a lecture. I was in the audience, delighted to see my old friend. When the time for questions arrived, I raised my hand and was called on by my name. “Dear Samir, I am so delighted to see you here,” I began, then asked my question. “Sir,” he answered, without the slightest sign of recognition. Obviously he had recognized me, but wouldn’t it be shameful on his part to admit that he knew a stooge of imperialism, or even worse, let it be known that we had been friends? Samir was tremendously applauded at the end of his thoroughly political presentation, and he continued to ignore me. We didn’t exchange a further word. At the institute, a friend of several years, an Egyptian law professor, stopped speaking to me.
In moving between Jerusalem and Geneva, I missed the excitement of the student movement. Some demonstrations took place at the University of Geneva, but were modest in scope. After all, this was Switzerland. At the time, I did not perceive the importance of the cultural changes that the events generated in Western society in general, nor did I realize the importance of the changes that would follow in the academic world. What I perceived, though, was the provocative and extremist aspect of some of the demonstrations (the bullying of teachers and so on); the little I knew of it didn’t attract me.
Mainly, I soon became disappointed by the dogmatism of the extreme left, by what I considered their total misunderstanding of Nazism and fascism, tags they applied so easily to the existing
democratic systems, either out of ignorance or in bad faith; by their naive infatuation with Mao or Che Guevara; and by their rabid hatred of Israel, which at times sounded like anti-Semitism. As for the outbursts of wanton violence that sporadically shook Germany and Italy then and in later years, they appeared abhorrent to me. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was right in calling leftist extremism “Linksfaschismus” (left fascism). Much later, I encountered remnants of these ideological zealots who mostly called themselves Trotskyites, but were nothing less than purebred Stalinists.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hubris
In the early fall of 1969, I was back in Jerusalem. During the year just spent in Geneva, I had attended to my courses, given some talks about the newly published Réflexions, and continued planning the reopening of the Department of International Relations that I was expected to chair upon my return to the Hebrew University.
Easier planned than done. I could rely on assistance from four old-timers of the defunct former department: two professors of international law and two in the history of international relations. There was no new faculty, there were no assistants, there was nothing. When enrollment opened, eight hundred students, mainly undergraduates at that stage, descended on the new department. It was a true deluge, as befitted the land of the Bible, but the tiny and fragile ark rose and fell dangerously on the stormy waters, under the “guidance” of a rather inexperienced captain. We survived. Temporary adjunct faculty was appointed within weeks: some stayed, others had to go. It didn’t win me many friends. Yet, within approximately two years, the department was running according to the usual routine of academic life.
When Memory Comes Page 12
