:
The Holocaust and
Israel's Domestic, Foreign and Security
Policy
by Shlomo Aronson
(December 2009)
Introduction
The Holocaust,
its historical interpretations, and its lessons
are interwoven into the Israeli identity
and manifested in various ways. Here we explore
the historical and contemporary impact of
the Holocaust on Israel’s society,
its politics, and the actions that it has
taken for its security.
Hitler’s
ascendance in January 1933 and his phased
totalitarian takeover, including the various
steps of his anti-Jewish policy, elicited
a number of responses, controversies and
ongoing debates among Zionists and
Jewish leaders at the time and to this day.
For the Zionists, even if not for many German
Jews, Hitler’s rise to power validated
their fear that European Jewry faced existential
threats. Their practical responses amounted
to enhanced efforts to exploit Hitler’s
forced immigration policy in its various
stages between 1933 and 1940, including the
negotiation of an agreement between the Jewish
Agency for Palestine and the German government.
In the so-called Ha’avara (Hebrew
for “transfer”) accord, concluded
shortly after Hitler’s accession, Jewish
property in Germany was converted into financial
instruments and vital commodities, which
were then transferred or shipped to Palestine
and used there by the original owners upon
arrival in the country as well as by other
recent immigrants. The Ha’avara arrangement
was vehemently rejected by Vladimir
(Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the leader
of the Zionist nationalist opposition, and
by a few radical opponents of the mainstream
Zionist leadership who favored an international
boycott on German products.
Campaigning in response
to the Nazi
regime’s initial anti-Jewish measures,
the anti-Ha’avara forces condemned
the arrangement, labeling it an act of collaboration
with the enemy. Their resistance appeared
to culminate with the assassination of Dr.
Chaim Arlosoroff, director of the Jewish
Agency Political Department and negotiator
of the Ha’avara agreement, by
radical supporters of Jabotinsky. This act
portended two political complexes ,
which were created by the Nazi challenge
.
The first concerned the
notion of “collaboration” between
the Zionist leadership
and the enemy. The leadership itself, responding
to its critics, asserted that salvaging Jewish
property from the Nazis for
use in absorbing Jewish refugees in Palestine
was morally, politically and economically
right. Such arguments and counter-arguments
would be heard until Hitler adopted
the “Final Solution” in 1941
and made it his goal to exterminate the Jews
of Europe rather than force them to emigrate.
It was then that critics
of the Jewish response began to claim that
the Zionists in Palestine and the Jewish
leadership in the free world should have
done more to rescue the Jews from Hitler’s
jaws. Although mass rescue was impossible,
this “rescue debate” began during
the Holocaust, adopted its own version of “collaborators” and
even of
“traitors” among the leaders
of the Yishuv, [1] and
was politicized further by various political
parties and groupings, culminating in sensational
libel trials and a political assassination. [2]
Strategic
and Political Lessons Learned
David
Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding
father, learned several lessons from the Holocaust.
First, Israel and Zionism, as well as the
Jews, are unique historical phenomena; Israel
could obtain some support from outside
powers thanks to the unique achievements
of the Yishuv in Palestine before and during
the Holocaust, and the quest of the survivors
to join the independent Jewish state; but
Israel should expect to remain alone
for decades to come with the exception
of Jewish solidarity, seemingly as much
as Jews were left on their own during the
Holocaust. The big difference now anchored
in the birth and development of an independent
Jewish state and its necessary tools of
fighting and surviving. Yet the use of
power had its limits, and ethical considerations
had to be taken into consideration as well,
in spite of the fact that Arabs inherited
much of the Nazi
propaganda and adopted its anti-Jewish
goals as a valid precedent to be followed
by them against the Jewish state. In practical
terms, Jews should accept the partition
of the country and avoid ruling over a
large alien population, and be very careful
in using its military in order to meet
Arab challenges, while concentrating on
its own, unprecedented growth and development.
Thus, the Holocaust made
it impossible for the Zionists to
create a Jewish majority in Palestine. The
destruction of so many potential immigrants
ensured that they would have to accept the
partition of the country to avoid ruling
over a large number of Arabs, especially
in the politically sensitive West Bank. Third,
the Arabs will never accept any Israel-initiated
war as final; they will recover and prepare
for a new round, whereas Israel cannot sustain
even one defeat for fear the consequences
would be a new Holocaust. Hence, Israel must
seek support from abroad, if possible from
the United States, France, including from
West Germany—even though the Holocaust
had occurred so recently. Israel should go
it alone, in Ben-Gurion’s thinking,
only when some acute emergency necessitates
it. Fourth, the longer-range solution to
the extreme imbalance between Arabs and Jews
in conventional terms, e.g., population,
political and strategic clout, oil, and territory,
must be unconventional deterrence—the “never
again” doctrine carried to its logical
conclusion.
In Israel’s first
two decades, Israelis repeatedly observed
that their neighbors had inherited and adopted
the Nazi attitude toward the Jews, which
had been supported during the WWII
by the Palestinian leader, Hajj
Amin al Husayni, mastermind of the Arab
rebellion of 1936–1939 and subsequently
Hitler’s intimate ally. This impression
was reinforced by Arab enmity, expressed
in anti-Semitic terms during the 1950s and
60s by President Gamal
Abd el Nasser of Egypt, Palestinian guerrilla
organizations based in Syria, and the radical
Syrian regime. Israelis felt further threatened
by Soviet military aid to Nasser’s
Egypt and acts of terror launched against
Israel from the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip
in the 1950s. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion saw
no justification in an Israel-initiated preventive
war at the time, choosing instead to focus
on absorbing huge waves of new immigrants
which trippled the Jewish population and
developing the country. Thus, Israel avoided
a simplistic equation between Nazi Germany
and Nasser’s Egypt in operative terms
even when Nasser blockaded the Suez Canal
and the Straits of Tiran, the passageway
from the Red Sea to the southern Israeli
port of Eilat. Only when France became Israel’s
unofficial ally and negotiations commenced
for the acquisition of a French-supplied
military nuclear infrastructure did Israel
feel it justified to join the French and
the British in the ostensibly abortive Suez-Sinai
Campaign of 1956. [3] However,
the impression was gained—and persists
even in the scholarly literature—that
the 1956 campaign was a classic case of a
conventional preventive war, mired among
other things in the go-it-alone, “never
again”
lessons of the Holocaust.
Politicization
of the Holocaust at Home: The Kasztner Trial
Thus, Israel under Ben-Gurion
refused to conflate lessons of the past,
mainly of the Holocaust,
with present challenges and longer-range
goals in domestic, foreign and security policy,
mainly the creation of a viable sovereign
Jewish state in a partitioned Palestine.
This view was also reflected
in the national curricula, which uncoupled
the teaching of the Holocaust from the general
teaching of history and even from Jewish
history, which itself was taught separately.
Thus, Israeli students were and still are
introduced to the Holocaust as a subject
detached from general inter-war history and
World War II itself. This practice is conducive
to the raising of questions about rescue
options, the unbelievable magnitudes of the
carnage, and the simple wish to commemorate
the dead.
Ben-Gurion’s successor, Levi
Eshkol, seemed to follow his lead after
the “Old Man” was forced to
resign both of his portfolios (premiership
and defense) in the summer of 1963. The
resignation itself, however, was precipitated
by a multilevel regime crisis both directly
and indirectly related to the Holocaust
and its interpretations in the early 1960s.
The Holocaust had been a
major source of public debate since the early
1950s, when Israel signed a reparations agreement
with West Germany. Ben-Gurion’s Government
described the pact as a token payment from
the Federal Republic of Germany to the Holocaust
survivors and their state for property loss—their
own and that of Jews who had perished in
the Holocaust. The opposition, led by Menachem
Begin, termed it a deal with the devil
and a form of ongoing collaboration with
Hitler’s heirs, echoing the Revisionist
response to the Ha’avara accord. Begin’s
followers even tried to impose their will
on the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) by
demonstrating outside its building and threatening
violence. While these tactics reminded most
Israelis of Begin’s futile—and
intrinsically unjustified—“revolt” during
the Holocaust, he and his supporters were
then attempting to benefit from another event
directly related to the reparations debate
and the aforementioned “rescue debate.”
This event was a legal fracas,
first pursued by the Attorney General in
a libel suit that he brought against Malkiel
Gruenwald, who had accused Dr. Israel Kasztner,
representative of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai
(Labor) Party in Nazi-occupied Hungary,
of having collaborated with the Gestapo during
the war. Soon enough, the defense transformed
the case into the
“Kasztner trial,” and the sole
presiding judge, dismissing the libel allegation,
proclaimed Kasztner as a man who had “sold
his soul to the [Nazi] devil.” The
details of the case go beyond the scope of
this chapter, but Gruenwald’s lawyer,
Shmuel Tamir, a politically motivated Begin
follower, managed to politicize Mapai’s
behavior during the Holocaust in Hungary
and in Palestine itself by accusing the Yishuv leadership
of having collaborated with the “Nazo–British” authorities
in Palestine in the repression of Begin’s
“revolt,” thereby squandering
a major opportunity to rescue Hungarian Jewry.
At the same time, he continued, Kasztner
became a Nazi tool, betraying to the Nazis
the only large Jewish community still surviving
in exchange for personal and partisan benefits.
This argument joined forces with a real controversy
over the behavior of Judenräte (Nazi-appointed
Jewish councils in the ghettos) during the
Holocaust. Israel at this time embraced the
legacy of the ghetto fighters as, at least,
a demonstration of Jewish courage and honor,
in spite of the sad fact that both strategies—that
of the ghetto fighters and that of the “collaborationist”Judenräte—had
proved ineffective in the face of the Germans’ power
and determination to pursue the Holocaust
no matter what.
After the war, Dr. Kasztner,
who had after all managed to save a number
of Hungarian Jews, supposedly spared Nazi
war criminals by testifying in their favor
at Nuremberg. All of this was the typical
stuff of conspiracy theory; supported by
the opposition media, it was divorced from
the reality in occupied Hungary, Nuremberg,
and British Palestine. But it worked so well
that Kasztner was murdered while waiting
for the Supreme Court to clear his name him
on appeal, as it eventually did by majority
ruling.
An additional dictum that
surfaced during this sensational trial cemented
itself into the public memory: “And
what shall I do with a million Jews”?
Thus Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident
in the Middle East, supposedly responded
to a deal that Adolf
Eichmann, the Gestapo Chief, had allegedly
offered in the wake of the German occupation
of Hungary. The “offer,” purportedly
extended to the Zionist Rescue Committee
in Budapest, concerned the exchange of the
one million Jews of Hungary for strategic
goods such as trucks and other commodities
that the Western Allies would supply for
use against the Soviets. The Yishuv leadership
allegedly failed to pursue the deal and behaved
so deceitfully as to betray Joel Brand, the
Zionist emissary whom Eichmann had sent abroad
to follow up on the deal, thus justifying
the subsequent assassination of Lord Moyne
by members of Lehi (the Jewish Freedom Fighters
militia, a breakaway Revisionist group also
known as the Sternists after their founder,
Avraham Stern). After the fact, Brand himself
blamed the Zionist leadership and the Western
Allies for the mission’s failure, thus
transforming both entities into Nazi accomplices
while offering no real evidence about Eichmann’s
intentions. Brand eventually joined the Sternists,
thus lending retroactive justification to
the assassination of Moyne.
Behind this intrigue, which
originated in a German ploy to drive a wedge
among the Allies without conceding anything
of substance on the fate of the Hungarian
Jews—most of whom who were being deported
to Auschwitz at that very time—stood
the argument that the Zionist
leadership in Palestine was guilty of “Palestinocentrism.” The
term meant the focusing of Zionist power
on the small Yishuv at all costs, including
collaboration with the “Nazo-British,”
to the neglect of rescuing Jews. Such rescue,
the argument went, could have taken place
had Begin’s and the Sternists’ “revolt” forced
the gates of Palestine open and had the mainstream
Zionists’ man in Hungary, Kasztner,
alerted the Hungarian Jews to the need to
fight or flee instead of collaborating with
Eichmann for the rescue of the few, including
his own family and various dignitaries of
his party. Truth to tell, the British did
indeed close the gates of Palestine to Jewish
refugees from Hitler's Europe in May 1939,
but when Hitler decided to murder them rather
than force them out of his domain, including
to British Palestine, Hitler closed the gates
of Europe to Jewish immigration. "Forcing
its gates open" by Begin and the Sternists
by fighting the British – whose main
concern was to fight Hitler - became pointless
and counterproductive when the mainstream
Zionists were seeking moral and political
support in the West.
At the time this huge conspiracy
tale, composed of a string of libels and
falsehoods, had not taken root among most
Israelis. It lurked in the background, however,
waiting to be preached and rediscovered again
and again. The resurrection of the “Palestinocentrism”
conspiracy was facilitated by psychosocial
circumstances related initially to German–Israeli
relations and then to the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in Israel and German (and Austrian)
relations with Egypt.
The Trial
of Adolf Eichmann and Its Critics
By the early 1960s, most
Holocaust survivors in Israel had acculturated
and integrated successfully. [4] Precisely
then, however, a belated impact of the Holocaust began
to surface among many survivors when the Chief
Executive of the “Final Solution” Adolf
Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem in
April 1961. Until then, few survivors had
been actively involved in the German reparation
controversy or in Kasztner’s trial.
They were also not involved politically in
the public debate over Ben-Gurion’s
policy of forging military relations with
West Germany and proclaiming the Bonn republic
a “different Germany.” However,
a change in public opinion took place when
it was revealed that Ben-Gurion had ordered
the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann from his
haven in Argentina. After being flown to
Israel, Eichmann
was indicted for war crimes, crimes against
humanity and crimes against the Jewish people.
He spent two years in a glass cage before
the Jerusalem District Court and then the
Supreme Court until his execution on May
31, 1962—the only person ever to be
hanged in Israel. The prosecution conceived
the proceedings in their broadest historical
terms by summoning an endless parade of survivors
to recount their experiences in mass death
and suffering, thereby allowing the repressed
experience of many other survivors to resurface.
Politically, this was not
enough to inspire a major shift among Israeli
voters to Begin’s party, despite its
pretense of being the survivors’ spokesman.
Two related phenomena, however, did play
a role here. The first was a growing sense
of doubt about whether the so-called “new
Germany” deserved Ben-Gurion’s
exoneration—i.e., that a gap had opened
between the Holocaust experience, as described
during Eichmann’s lengthy trial, and
Israel’s foreign and security praxis.
The immediate benefactors of the doubt were
the anti-German parties on the Left, who
reopened their criticism of the Judenräte
as representatives or close colleagues of
the ghetto fighters in the context of the
belated impact of the Holocaust in Israel
and Ben-Gurion’s German relations.
Further developments in this context and
in connection with Israel’s nuclear
program, discussed below, would eventually
terminate Ben-Gurion’s long rule and
have then-unforeseeable political results.
For the time being, Left and Right joined
forces in their criticism of Ben-Gurion’s
foreign and security policies, with Holocaust
allusions figuring prominently. Thus they
legitimized Begin’s party and person,
which Ben-Gurion had maneuvered into the
political wilderness as a result of Begin’s
own behavior during the Holocaust and the
German reparations debate.
The trial itself attracted
criticism from various intellectuals in Israel
and elsewhere, in a fashion that would be
repeated much later by post-Zionists and
other contemporary opponents of a Jewish
state in Israel and the Jewish world. The
best known critique of this type was delivered
by Hannah
Arendt, who, in her Eichmann in Jerusalem,
accused Ben-Gurion of having staged the trial
on behalf of militant Zionism in disregard
of the nature of the totalitarian Nazi regime
and Eichmann’s role as a mere cog in
it. An array of major Israeli intellectuals
rose up against Arendt, accusing her of sheer
ignorance of the facts, an almost inhuman
attitude toward the victims, and the spewing
of unfounded speculations. Although these
intellectuals won the day, Arendt’s
arguments have been resurrected recently
in a post-Zionist context discussed below.
An additional and less well-known
criticism deserves our attention because
it involves the resurrection of anti-Zionism
among Jews in the context of Eichmann’s
trial. A booklet by the Jewish-British publisher
Victor Gollancz, published in 1961, anticipated
a contemporary Israeli critique of the memory
of the Holocaust and its quest to abandon
this memory in favor of fighting the Zionist
idea and the occupation of Palestinian land. [5] Gollancz was one of
the few who had actively worked during World
War II not only to make the extermination
of Jews known in Britain, but also to prompt
his government to work for the rescue of
the Jews. He argued that Eichmann’s
crimes, committed within the framework of
the latitude given him, were much less serious
than those that would be committed by a pilot
who would kill many more by dropping a hydrogen
bomb simply by pushing a button as ordered.
Gollancz’s main argument against what
he called the “staging” of Eichmann’s
case was the prosecution’s use of the
survivor-witnesses. In his view, the court
had foisted on the public a protracted experience
with Evil, the negative side of humanity,
whereas it should have emphasized the Good,
the forgiveness, that the victims should
be able to demonstrate toward the perpetrators. “We
live in the realm of malevolence,” he
argued, and thus we avoid the presence of
the Good. On these grounds, Gollancz alluded
to the possibility that the victims might
imitate the evildoers and justify more evil
due to their own experience. In practical
terms, he wrote, we are preoccupied with
things that happened and cannot be reversed
instead of pledging our immediate attention
to the cruelties and mistreatment of people
occurring around us right now. In this regard,
Gollancz cited his own futile experience
in trying to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Finally, he argued, contemporary Israeli
youth should avoid the intensification of
the sense of racial solidarity and, instead,
reinforce its instinct of human solidarity
at large.
In his rejoinder, the Israeli
poet Nathan
Alterman [6] termed
Gollancz’s moralism totally detached
from the rights and the obligations of the
victims, as well as their nation, to at least
remember and mourn. Furthermore, he continued,
human history itself demands that evil be
remembered in order to learn its lessons
and avert it in the future. Again, this view
triumphed in Israel at the time. Today, however,
Gollancz’s arguments have been resurrected
in connection with criticism of the Zionist
endeavor by contemporary Israeli intellectuals
such the philosopher Adi Ofir, to whom we
shall return.
The German
Scientists
While the Israeli Right
and Left hoped to use the belated impact
of the Holocaust for political purposes,
a new Holocaust-related threat emerged: The
Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence
service, purportedly discovered that German
and Austrian technicians and scientists were
producing unconventional weapons in Egypt,
including medium-range missiles capable of
reaching Israel. The connection between this
German involvement in seemingly existential
threats to Israel and the Holocaust was made
at once. Begin accused the Bonn Government
of using Egypt to circumvent the ban on unconventional
weapons that Bonn had accepted in 1955 as
a precondition for limited rearmament within
the framework of NATO. Bonn refused to recall
the scientists, arguing that as private citizens
they had the democratic right to move and
work wherever they pleased. Ben-Gurion endorsed
this position and was immediately criticized
by Begin for the same kind of “collaboration
with the enemy” that Kasztner had supposedly
committed, this time in exchange for German
economic aid. In fact, the Bonn Government
was secretly providing Israel with vital
military assistance at this time.
Still, the left-wing parties
and even some of Ben-Gurion’s own colleagues
in Mapai
Party adopted an anti-West-German posture,
some even terming Bonn the successor of the
Third Reich. Enraged, Ben-Gurion retorted
that West Germany, with all its faults, was
a promising democracy that was recognized
as such by everyone except Moscow and its
East German vassal. In the meantime, Isser
Harel, the legendary director of the Mossad,
campaigned in the media against Bonn by invoking
Holocaust-related arguments.
By now, the Mapai rank-and-file
and most of the party’s secondary leadership
had come around to the view that Israel’s
military collaboration with Bonn was not
worth the political and psychological price
of accepting the presence of German personnel
in Egypt, given the context of the revival
of the Holocaust experience and its political
ramifications.
Although Israeli Military
Intelligence soon proved that the Egyptian
missiles had neither unconventional warheads
nor guidance systems, the damage to Ben-Gurion’s
standing was done. This outcome helped to
induce Ben-Gurion again to resign both of
his portfolios, the premiership and defense,
on June 16, 1963. Behind the scenes, the
resignation was abetted by another factor:
heavy pressure from U.S. President John F.
Kennedy to force Israel to renounce or at
least suspend its nuclear program.
The Holocaust,
Dimona and the Road to the 1967 Six Day War
From the early 1960s onward,
the Americans had been courting Ben-Gurion’s
designated successor, Levi Eshkol, hoping
to gain his agreement to stop construction
at Dimona of a nuclear facility believed
to be building bombs in exchange for secret
guarantees of Israel’s 1949 armistice
demarcation lines.[7] They
also hoped for some Egyptian concessions
on Cairo’s missile program. [8] Eshkol
made no concessions [9] At
fitst, but later in 1963, he signed Israel
to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In
early 1964, he issued an official but ambiguous
statement to the effect that Israel “[would]
not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons
to the Middle East.” In the 1965 general
election campaign, he defeated the Rafi party
of Ben-Gurion, Moshe
Dayan, and Shimon
Peres—known at the time as the
“nuclear party.” Then he “civilianized” the
Israel Atomic Energy Commission. Finally,
he cemented his new governing coalition with
the Left-nationalist Ahdut ha-‘Avoda
(Labor Unity) party, which promoted a conventional
first-strike strategic doctrine and took
a rather skeptical if not altogether negative
view of the nuclear program due to Arab “irrational
behavior” and in light of American—and,
possibly, Soviet—opposition to it. [10] Ahdut
ha-‘Avoda also considered Israel–German
relations dangerous in view of the Soviet
campaign against Bonn at the time. In domestic
political terms, they hoped to marshal the
support of Israelis who had been outraged
by Ben-Gurion’s German policy.
How did Washington view
all of this?
“Israel regards maintenance of an independent
military deterrent as vital to its survival,” the
State Department noted. [11] Neither
Eshkol nor Ben-Gurion had ever ruled out
Israel’s developing a nuclear weapon
if the Middle East situation so warranted,
and there was evidence that a French firm
was developing missiles for Israel that could
carry either a high explosive or nuclear
payload. [12] Lower-level
Israeli officials spoke frankly about Israel’s
strategy toward Egypt: (a) surface-to-surface
missiles targeting the Nile Delta and (b) the
capacity to bomb and release the waters behind
the Aswan High Dam.
Thus, Israel would avert
the possibility of a new Holocaust in two
ways. The first focused on the ability to
deal the enemy a blow too great for the enemy
to risk. The second was more subtle: Given
the official undertaking of the combined
Arab nations to destroy Israel, Israel would
respond by creating a psycho-political counter-threat
that might not only justify its unusual behavior
but also to allow the Arabs to climb down
from the perilous branch that they had ascended.
As long as they enjoyed overwhelming conventional
superiority, they could, or must, strive
for Israel’s utter destruction. A nuclear
Israel, in contrast, would have to be tolerated.
The United States hoped
to arrange a deal whereby Egypt would limit
its acquisition of offensive missiles in
exchange for Israel renouncing its nuclear
ambitions. On July 26, 1964, President
Nasser wrote to President Lyndon Johnson, “The
UAR (Egypt) will not introduce or develop
weapons of total destruction.” [13] If
the Egyptian President wanted the Americans
to stop the Israeli nuclear program, they
had to offer this assurance in the face of
Israeli accusations that the German scientists
in Egypt were developing radiation and biological
and chemical warheads for Nasser’s
missiles, an ominous combination in the eyes
of the Israeli man-in-the-street, sensitized
to Holocaust remembrance by the Eichmann
trial.
The Egyptian tactic worked.
The Egyptian missiles were useless as practical
weapons, but Nasser successfully used the
danger they posed, and the threat of attacking
Dimona to prevent Israel from getting the
bomb, to persuade the United States to pressure
Israel to give up the one weapon that was
viewed as shielding it from another Holocaust.
Continuing his efforts to prevent Jerusalem
from adopting a nuclear deterrent, President
Lyndon B. Johnson agreed for the first time
to directly supply Israel with conventional
arms. [14]
The lessons of the Holocaust,
however, remained so ingrained that Israel
was unwilling to gamble its security on the
new relationship. Indeed, Washington remained
concerned about Israel’s intentions
and managed to obtain an agreement to carry
out inspections in Dimona (although the Americans
never believed that they were shown the sensitive
parts). The Arabs, meanwhile, were concerned
that Israel was developing a capability that
would allow it to expand their territory
and at least make an ultimate Arab victory
impossible. Jerusalem, fearing that the Arabs
might preempt the unveiling of this capacity
by launching a limited strike on Dimona—possibly
legitimized by the Soviet Union and, perhaps,
even the United States—agreed to delay
the deployment of French missiles capable
of carrying nuclear warheads.
This was the background
of the events of May 1967. In that month, Nasser marched
his troops into the Sinai Peninsula and the
Gaza Strip, ordered out the UN buffer force
that prevented action against Israel on both
fronts, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli
shipping to Eilat again, and threatened to
destroy the Jewish state.
Amid these actions, other
Arab states emitted rhetoric containing threats/prophecies
of Israel’s imminent destruction. Ordinarily
one does not hear such talk in foreign relations,
however hostile, and when aimed at Israel
it inevitably evoked Holocaust metaphors.
Israel had a choice of waiting to see if
the Arabs meant what they were saying or
taking preemptive action to prevent them
from having the chance to attack. If Israel
did strike first, however, Nasser could
respond by attacking Israel’s most
vital target (Dimona), occupying Eilat, and
allowing Palestinian guerrillas to operate
from Gaza. This explains better than any
previous explanation the Eshkol cabinet’s
lengthy deliberations after the May 1967
crisis began. What the cabinet really wanted
was not to play Nasser’s game at all,
and instead to ask Washington to remove the
obviously illegal Egyptian blockade of the
Straits. Thus Israel would avoid having to
fight while placing Nasser in confrontation
with the United States. [15] But
this was exactly what the Johnson Administration
was trying to avoid, in order to maintain
its position in the Arab World, prevent a
possible confrontation with their Soviet
supporters, or at least refrain from enhancing
Soviet influence among the Arabs in spite
of Washington's commitments to keep the Straights
open.
Eshkol’s buying-time
strategy in hopes of a remedy from Washington
made him look dithering and irresolute, thereby
destroying his public standing in a mobilized
and economically idled Israel. Holocaust-related
rhetoric in Israel mounted: the world was
prepared to abandon the Jews again. The public’s
demand for action forced Eshkol to yield
the defense portfolio and establish a national
emergency coalition including Menachem
Begin as minister without portfolio and
Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense. Soon
enough, Dayan opted for an all-out preemptive
war against Egypt and, later, Dayan and Eshkol
ordered the occupation of the entire West
Bank after King
Hussein of Jordan succumbed to Nasser’s
persuasion and intervened in the Israel–Egypt
war. Israel also seized the Syrian Golan
Heights.
Dimona survived the war
unscathed. The Nixon-Kissinger Administration
subsequently gave up their predecessors’ efforts
to curb Israel’s nuclear ambitions
and agreed to look the other way so long
as Israel did not publicly acknowledge its
arsenal. This allowed Israel to keep the
bomb hidden in the basement. The bomb remained
visible enough, however, to inhibit the combined
Egyptian–Syrian offensive in 1973,
contribute its share toward the Israeli–Egyptian
peace treaty in 1979, and, possibly, check
Iran’s nuclear ambitions in the future.
The bomb was not meant to prevent limited,
conventional attacks such as the Yom
Kippur War of 1973, which was a limited
challenge as a result – among other
reasons – of Israel's nuclear option,
or terrorist attacks requiring conventional
response.
The Age
of Uncertainty and Its Remedies: Right and
Left Invoke the Holocaust
Israel’s tremendous
victory in June 1967 over Egypt, Jordan,
Syria, and an Iraqi expeditionary force was
expressed, among other things, in Holocaust
terms: this time the Jewish ghetto
had fought and won on its own against the
Soviet-backed Arabs and the neutral Americans.
Zionism and its from-destruction-to-redemption
doctrine were vindicated.
Another byproduct of the
war was the rehabilitation of Menachem Begin,
whose refusal to accept the partition of
the country in 1948 was connected to his
lessons of the Holocaust and to his party's
legacy of rebelling against the British during
the Holocaust. This syndrome viewed current
politics in Holocaust related terms, in regard
to Israeli territorial claims and eventual
concessions. Begin joined ministers from
the nationalist Left, Israel Galili and Yigal
Allon, who shared his interest in controlling
at least parts of the West Bank for ideological
and political-strategy reasons as an indispensable
security space and as a Zionist entitlement.
A Greater Israel Movement, favoring the maintenance
and settlement of an unpartitioned western
Palestine, took root among many Mapai activists
and intellectuals. Eshkol himself, at first
rather skeptical about the possibility of
retaining most of the West Bank, endorsed
his Government’s decision to unify
Jerusalem under Israeli rule, extend its
city limits, and create Jewish neighborhoods
in the formerly Jordanian-controlled sector.
Soon enough, a national-religious movement
called Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful)
actively pursued its own settlement efforts,
first near Hebron with the support of Yigal
Allon, Eshkol’s coalition ally, and
later on its own and with backing from Begin’s
secular Right. The settlement enterprise
was abetted by the Arab rejection (the “three
nos” of the 1967 Arab Summit in Khartoum)
of Eshkol’s offers to negotiate peace
in exchange for the territories Israel had
captured.
The shock-and-awe blow that
Israel sustained in October 1973 shattered
many Israelis’ self-confidence and
reinstated the sense that no measure of military
strength assured survival. This feeling of
insecurity precipitated the decline of the
Labor Party and the elevation of Menachem
Begin, with his passionate never-again rhetoric,
to power.
In the meantime, Gush
Emunim intensified the settlement of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and its
leaders ascended to leadership of the National
Religious Party, a key coalition member.
After the 1973 war, Gush Emunim perceived
itself, and was widely perceived in the
Israeli street, as the true vanguard of
pioneering Zionism and of Judaism itself
after the seeming military disaster that
the old and tired secular Labor elite had
allowed. Gush Emunim’s religious
doctrine addressed the overwhelming mystery
of the Holocaust for the Orthodox: the
question of theodicy (the righteous who
suffer). The Holocaust, various orthodox
doctrines explained, traced to the Jewish
Enlightenment and, more generally, willing
Jewish secularization in the Diaspora.
Where anti-Zionist religious thinkers viewed
the Holocaust as a Divine punishment for
this wanton abandonment of God’s
covenant, some Religious Zionists thinkers
interpreted the Holocaust and the birth
of Israel as the outcomes of a composite
divine program entailing the transformation
of the Jewish religious hubs in the European
exile into an Orthodox religious Jewish
entity in Israel, especially in the occupied
territories, ruled by halakha (rabbinical
law). By extension, Gush Emunim considered
its settlement project—focusing on
the largely Jew-free West Bank and Gaza
Strip—a part of a divine program
seemingly justified by the spiritual and
psychological decline of the secular syndrome
following the Yom Kippur War.
An especially extreme manifestation
of this thinking was propagated by Rabbi
Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense
League in North America, and his followers,
some of whom wore yellow stars with the inscription “Never
Again” as they preached the deportation
of the Arabs from Israel and the occupied
territories and the instigation of a militantly
anti-secular regime in Israel. Kahane’s
legacy persists among radical youngsters
active in the West Bank and inside Israel.
Begin’s electoral
victory in 1977 and its aftermath, a Right/religious
coalition, [16] made
settlement in the West Bank and Gaza an official
policy that the Government justified by citing
a mixture of Holocaust-related political
arguments. Mr. Begin justified his bombing
of the Osiraq nuclear reactor near Baghdad
in 1981 as the obliteration of a Holocaust-like
threat to Israel’s survival. He later
expanded this into the “Begin Doctrine,” enjoining
Israel’s enemies against launching
military nuclear projects.
The first Palestinian uprising
(Intifada),
instigated in late 1987 on Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir’s watch, set in motion
a number of Israeli responses that include
Holocaust imagery. Israeli responses to Palestinian
violence were likened to the Nazi treatment
of Jews, though they bore no resemblance.
This would become an ongoing theme of Israel’s
detractors as they have sought to isolate
and delegitimize Israel.
The Israeli effort to negotiate
peace with the Palestinians, pursued by the
Labor Party under Yitzhak
Rabin and Shimon Peres, and culminating
in the conclusion of the two “Oslo
accords,” [17] entailed
the withdrawal of Israeli forces from most
of the Gaza Strip and densely Arab-populated
areas in the West Bank, the introduction
of armed Palestinian police in the newly
created Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian
obligations to recognize Israel and desist
from terrorism against her. The ultra-nationalist
Orthodox and some Likud activists likened
the accords to the Munich deal that preceded
World War II, compared government ministers
to Judenräte who ostensibly sold out
the Jews during the Holocaust, and termed
Rabin an SS henchman by word and picture.
Rabin’s assassin drew direct inspiration
from this manner of thinking. As implementation
of the Oslo accords moved ahead, despite
the Palestinian Authority’s failure
to fulfill its commitment to prevent terrorism,
Jewish religious fanatics, and some other
extremists, depicted the withdrawal of Israeli
forces from of the West Bank and Gaza and
other concessions to the Palestinians as
acts of unacceptable betrayal—comparable
to negotiating the Ha’avara agreements
with the Nazis, Judenrat collaboration
with the Gestapo, and the pre-Israel Zionist
leadership’ s alleged collaboration
with the “Nazo-British.”
Oslo also led to the novelty
of mobilization of the Holocaust by some
on the Israeli Left. To them, Oslo signified
such a decline of Jewish nationalism that
the old Zionist ideology itself should yield
to radical change in the region. The targets
of their criticism are the Zionist ethos
and state as such, rather than the occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza. Examples of such
thinkers are Orientalists such as Ilan Pappé,
the sociologist Uri Ram of Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev, the psycholinguist Yosef Grudzinsky,
the film historian Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv
University, the journalist Tom Segev of Ha’aretz,
the poet Yitzhak Laor, the cultural historian
Idith Zertal, and the philosopher Adi Ofir
of Tel Aviv University. [18] A
common argument of these writers and academics
is that Zionism failed to meet the challenge
of the Holocaust because its “Palestinocentrism” rendered
it unable and unwilling to engage in serious
rescue efforts. Instead, the parochial, nationalistic,
narrow-minded Zionists allegedly exploited
the Holocaust and used the survivors for
their own particularistic purposes at the
expense of the real victims, the Palestinian
Arabs. For these intellectuals, no peace—even
a peace treaty as an outgrowth of the Oslo
process—is possible unless the
initial evil, the nakba (Palestinian-Arab
disaster of 1948), is cleansed, meaning the
return of the Palestinian refugees, i.e.,
those who left in 1948 and all their descendants.
This may, and should, transform Israel to
a post-colonial, non-Zionist entity of the
sort that a variety of left-wing intellectuals
has advocated at least since the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
By so behaving, many of
these academicians seem to be collaborating,
as a result of their view of the Holocaust,
with those who seek the delegitimation of
Zionism and the State of Israel. This has
brought them into an unholy alliance with
the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox and the legacy
of Sir Victor Gollancz, as in Adi Ofir’s
claim the centrality of Holocaust remembrance
in Israel is a sort of immersion in an irreversible
malevolence. Stop remembering the Holocaust,
Ofir counsels, and pursue the cause that
counts: active resistance against the occupation
of Arab lands, to begin with.
This group, sometimes termed
“post-Zionists” or “new
historians,” has influenced mainstream
Israel only by negation, helping to drive
many Israelis toward the Right and explaining
intermittent Right-wing electoral triumphs
amid skepticism about the intentions of the
center-Left forces that are elevated to power
in between.
The “Second” or “Al-Aqsa” Intifada,
launched in late 2000 with Palestinian leader Yasser
Arafat’s support in spite of his
previous signature of the Oslo Accords, and
aimed at Israel’s heartland and presence
in the West Bank, further delegitimized the
Oslo accords in many Israeli eyes. As Prime
Minister Ehud Barak (Labor) continued to
pursue negotiations amid the violence, some
cited the “Munich” precedent.
Having lost his parliamentary support, Labor
PM Ehud Barak was roundly defeated in 2001
by Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu’s
successor as leader of the Likud. Sharon’s
response to the Intifada—reoccupation
of the Oslo-evacuated Palestinian territory
in the West Bank—elicited a new interpretation
of the Holocaust: the equation of Israel
with Nazi Germany on the grounds of alleged
violations of human rights and crimes against
humanity. Behind these charges and the resulting
efforts to instigate various anti-Israel
boycotts are various NGOs, including UN-affiliated
bodies controlled by Arab and Muslim states
and Palestinian interests supported by expatriate
Israelis and radical Jews abroad.
Thus, to Israel’s
immense frustration, the Holocaust and its
lessons, which brought about the adoption
of human-rights and anti-racist norms by
the international community, are being diverted
by Palestinians and their supporters to use
against the state of the Holocaust survivors.
Palestinians’ involvement with Hitler,
their role in preventing rescue during the
Holocaust, and rampant Holocaust denial today,
are forgotten in favor of anti-Israeli arguments
disseminated by human-rights deniers (Sudan
and Libya come to mind), while human-rights
violations in various parts of Africa, Southeast
Asia, Tibet, and the Muslim world are largely
ignored.
Today: From
Munich to Gaza to Tehran
It is in this context that
Israelis judge their country’s withdrawal
from the Gaza
Strip and parts of the northern West
Bank in 2005. The Holocaust metaphors in
reference to the architects of the withdrawal
were manifested again. Despite this campaign
and the real pain of uprooting Jews from
their homes, the disengagement had the overwhelming
support of the Israeli public and was carried
out with remarkable ease. The Palestinians’ subsequent
conduct, including eight -year bombardment
of southern Israel with more than 10,000
rockets and mortar shells, backed by an anti-Semitic
drumbeat invoking Nazi allusions, provided
motivation to oppose initiatives by Sharon’s
successor, Ehud
Olmert, to carry out further withdrawals
in the West Bank on behalf of the “two-state
solution.”
The elephant in the room
today is revolutionary Iran. When Teheran
adopted a policy of Holocaust denial and
apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons, the
focus of Israeli opinion turned to a seeming
Iranian existential threat.
Are the 1940s about to recur?
In fact, there is an enormous difference
between Jews during the Holocaust and those
in Israel today. The former were utterly
helpless against Hitler’s existential
threat and the Allies’ bystander approach;
the latter have the independent ability,
due to the bomb, to obliterate Iran and any
other enemy, and the Ayatollahs know it.
Any transferring of feasible
material by Iran to terrorist organizations
would not prevent Israel from retaliating
against Iran itself. Should the Iranian bomb
prompt a nuclear race in the region, all
the Arab targets are known and marked. Yet
we may hope that proper sanctions or these
very developments may prevent Iran from adopting
an overt, offensive, strategic nuclear posture,
opening the way for the Iranian people to
reform their government in due course.
Bibliography/Sources:
[1] The organized
modern Jewish community in Palestine.
[2] See Shlomo
Aronson, Hitler, the Allies, and the
Jews (New York: Cambridge University
Press, paper edition, 2006).
[3] See Benjamin
Pinkus, From Ambivalence to Tacit Alliance,
Israel, France, and French Jewry 1947–1957 (Sede
Boqer: Ben-Gurion Research Institute, 2005,
in Hebrew).
[4] See Hanna
Yablonka, Foreign Brethren, Holocaust
Survivors in the State of Israel 1948–1952 (Jerusalem
and Beersheva: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press
and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Press, 1994, in Hebrew).
[5] See Elhanan
Yakira, Post Holocaust Post Zionism (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
[6] Nathan Alterman, Works,
Vol. III, (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1972), pp.
528–530.
[7] See Mordechai Gazit, President Kennedy’s
Policy toward the Arab States and Israel (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984). Gazit
served at the Israeli Embassy in Washington
at the time of the events and, later, was
Director General of the Prime Minister
Office under Golda Meir.
[8] This refers
to the visit by the Presidential envoy
John J. McCloy to Egypt and Israel in the
summer of 1963, aimed at concluding a package
deal linking Israel’s nuclear program
with Nasser’s missiles. See John
F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Boston, NSF
(National Security Files), Box 119.
[9] Yitzhak
Greenberg,
“Creation of the Foundation for the
R&D and Defense Production Aspects
of Policy and Budgeting,” in ‘Iyyunim
bi-tequmat Yisrael, Studies in Zionism,
the Yishuv and the State of Israel, a
Research Annual, Vol. 9 (Sede Boqer:
Ben-Gurion Research Center, 1999), pp.
167–187.
[10] See Shlomo
Aronson, Conflict and Bargaining in
the Middle East, an Israeli Perspective (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978), pp. 52–53. The analysis ad
loc of this set of circumstances remains
valid.
[11] Background
Paper on Factors Which Could Influence
National Decisions Concerning Acquisition
of Nuclear Weapons, Lyndon B. Johnson Memorial
Library, Austin, Texas, NSF, Committee
on Nuclear Proliferation, containers 1-2,
problem 2, item 1.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Archival
source: LBJ Library, NSF, UAR, Containers
159–161, Cables, Vol. 2, Item 99a.
[14] See Yitzhak
Rabin, A Service Record, Vol. I
(Tel Aviv: Ma’ariv, 1979), pp. 129–130.
Cf. Report on Ambassador Harriman’s
meeting with PM Eshkol, UPA/Library of
Congress, February 25, 1965, in which Harriman
told Eshkol that “For one thing,
the late President Kennedy had cured Khrushchev
and Company of using the threat of nuclear
war,” as the USSR had done during
the Suez crisis of 1956. Finally,
cf. report to Amembassy Cairo on the results
of the Harriman/Komer visit: “Harriman/Komer
talks have eased situation, but basic
problems remain and are still a potential
cause of war[. . .]. USG
will keep up pressure on Israel not to
go nuclear. As Nasser undoubtedly aware
fact of recent American visit to Dimona
has been revealed by US press” [Italics
added].
[15] See Arie
Baron, Moshe Dayan and the Six-Day War (Tel
Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1997, in Hebrew).
General Baron was Dayan’s aide after
the Six-Day War and had access to the IDF’s
studies on the war and its origins.
[16] Rabbi
Ovadia Yosef, the leader of subsequently
formed religious party, Shas, has repeatedly
maintained that those who perished in the
Holocaust were “sinners,”
having accumulated in their souls all transgressions
committed by Jews during their 2,000 years
of exile. Although based on a specific
way of interpreting Jewish sources, this
rather bizarre justification of the Holocaust
seems to have had little influence even
among his followers, whose exposure to
the Holocaust is less encompassing and
grave than that of European or even Iraqi
Jews.
[17] Declaration
of Principles on Interim Self-Government
Arrangements (1993) and Interim
Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip (1995).
[18] See Shlomo
Aronson,
“On ‘Post-Zionism’ and
the Anti-Semitic Tradition in the West,” in
Pinchas Ginosar and Avi Bareli (eds.), Zionism:
a Contemporary Controversy, in Iyunim
bi-tequmat Yisrael (Tel Aviv and Sede
Boqer: 1996, in Hebrew). |