The Idea of Israel (24 page)

Shahak was also the first to bring up the enthusiasm felt by certain leading Zionists for the Nazis in the early 1930s, an enthusiasm which, he acknowledged, ceased in the late 1930s. About one of the most revered liberal Zionist philosophers, Martin Buber, he wrote: ‘Buber glorified a movement holding and actually teaching doctrines about non-Jews not unlike the Nazi doctrines about Jews’. And, he wrote, Joachim Prinz, later a leading figure in the post-war American Zionist establishment,

congratulated Hitler on his triumph over the common enemy – the forces of liberalism. Dr Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book,
Wir Juden
(We, Jews), to celebrate Hitler’s so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism.
⁵

Obviously Shahak did not mince his words. He characterised an attempt by religious Jews during the Litani Operation in 1978 (in which Israel occupied southern Lebanon as retaliation for a PLO attack on a bus on the outskirts of Tel Aviv) as an effort ‘to induce military doctors and nurses to withhold medical help from wounded “Gentiles” ’, calling this ‘Nazi-like advice’.
⁶
He referred to the Jewish settlers in a similar vein. Following the 1980 assassination attempts by Jewish terrorists in which Mayor Bassam Shak’a of Nablus lost both his legs and Mayor Karim Khalaf of Ramallah lost a foot, Shahak reported to his readers: ‘A group of Jewish Nazis gathered in the campus of Tel Aviv University, roasted a few cats and offered their meat to passers-by as shish-kebab from the legs of the Arab mayors’.
⁷

Boaz Evron echoed similar concerns in his 1980 article ‘The Holocaust – A Danger to the Nation’.
⁸
He questioned the uniqueness of the Jewish experience within the overall Nazi programme, saying that the extermination of the gypsies ‘disproves the false assumption that the Nazi extermination policy was exclusively directed against the Jews’.
⁹
He further argued that Holocaust memorialisation in Israel was responsible for creating a ‘paranoid reaction’ among Israelis and even a ‘moral blindness’, which posed a real ‘danger to the nation’ and could lead to an occurrence of ‘racist Nazi attitudes’ within Israel itself.
¹⁰

Eight years later Yehuda Elkana, who, like Shahak, was a young child in Nazi Europe, repeated these very ideas in an article in
Haaretz
.
¹¹
Elkana was ten when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and fourteen when he arrived in Israel in 1948. He became an international star in the philosophy of science – receiving his PhD from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, teaching at Harvard for a while, having a long and distinguished career at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and finally becoming the president and rector of the Central European University in Budapest.

In 1988 Elkana witnessed with growing unease two simultaneous displays of Israeli power and force. One was the brutality of the Israelis during the early months of the First Intifada; the second was the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem. Demjanjuk was allegedly a notorious guard, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, in the Treblinka extermination
camp. He was sentenced to death in 1988, after having been extradited from the United States, but was exonerated in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court on grounds of lack of decisive evidence for his true identity.

On 2 March 1988, Elkana published an article in
Haaretz
titled ‘The Need to Forget’. Israeli society, he recommended, should ease its excessive and obsessive preoccupation with the Holocaust. He argued that Israeli Jews suffered from a surplus of memory and would do well to unburden themselves of the symbols, ceremonies, and purported lessons of their traumatic past. While it may be ‘important for the world at large to remember’, wrote Elkana, ‘[f]or our part, we must learn to
forget
!’ He warned that there was no greater danger to the future of Israel than to be preoccupied from morning to night, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust, and he exhorted his country’s leaders to uproot the rule of historical remembrance from their lives.
¹²

Elkana saw the trial of Demjanjuk as an example of excessive preoccupation with the Holocaust, but he also connected this obsession with the supposedly ‘anomalous’ behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians in the First Intifada. Searching for ways to understand this behaviour, he attributed the soldiers’ actions to the negative effects that the manipulation of Holocaust memory had on the younger generation, contending that it perverted their moral judgement and values.

In his view, Israelis harboured an exaggerated sense of themselves as victims, and this self-image, itself the result of wrong lessons learned from the Holocaust, prevented them from seeing the Palestinians in a more realistic light and impeded a reasonable political solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict. Elkana worried that a Holocaust-induced image of the Jews as eternal victims might encourage Israelis to justify the crudest behaviour toward the Palestinians. Drawing parallels between the excesses committed by soldiers in the territories and what took place in Germany, Elkana voiced his concern that Israeli Jews could end up mimicking the behaviour of the worst of their enemies and thereby grant Hitler a ‘tragic and paradoxical victory’.
¹³
Amos Elon, the famous Israeli journalist and essayist, agreed with
Elkana and in response to the latter’s article wrote ‘a little forgetfulness might finally be in order’.
¹⁴

These early public ponderings about the manipulation, overusage and potential harm of Holocaust memory set the stage for the more scholarly post-Zionist academic challenges of the 1990s. The academics’ readiness to go that far was also influenced by a surprisingly rich literature from the American Jewish community. Conscientious Jews in the United States – such as Peter Novick, Lenni Brenner and Norman Finkelstein – had begun to rebuke their own community’s manipulation of Holocaust memory in the service of Israel.
¹⁵
It is through the work of these scholars that one can appreciate the crucial role played by the Zionist representation of Holocaust memory in marketing the idea of Israel in the United States. Novick summarised his criticism by claiming that American Jewry turned ‘inward and rightward’ in recent decades, mostly because of the ‘centring of the Holocaust in the minds of American Jews’.
¹⁶
He also drew more general conclusions from what he termed ‘Holocaust consciousness’, which encouraged Jewish self-aggrandisement and prevented other victimised peoples from receiving a proper share of public attention and sympathy.

The most vociferous American critic, however, has been Norman Finkelstein. Born in 1953 in New York to parents who were Holocaust survivors, he chose an academic career as a political scientist very early on, and his postgraduate studies took him to Paris and then to Princeton University, where he completed his doctorate. He has taught at several American universities, encountering real hardship in gaining tenure because of his forthright criticism on Israel, which he has voiced in numerous articles and several books. Most of his work has focused on Zionism and Palestine.

In 2000 he published
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
. The book sought to indict ‘the Holocaust’ as an ideological representation of history that was fraudulently devised and marketed to the American public in order to revive a faltering Jewish identity and to ‘justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies’. Finkelstein decries the fact that Israel, ‘one of the world’s most formidable military powers,
with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a “victim” state’ and looks for ways of garnering ‘immunity to criticism’. The industry is not only about images; it is in fact more about money. People who have made money out of the misery of the Holocaust: are ‘a repellent gang of well-heeled hoodlums and hucksters’ seeking enormous legal damages and financial settlements from Germany and Switzerland – money which then goes to the lawyers and institutional actors involved in procuring it, rather than to the actual Holocaust survivors.
¹⁷

Very much as in the case of the sensitive issue of 1948, scholars demanded more than just strong conviction and could only be satisfied when presented with hardcore evidence that shook their confidence in the hegemonic narrative. Nor did the archives and the newspapers of the past disappoint on that score either. Reappraisal of declassified documents exposed several issues, of which three were especially important: the Zionist leadership’s past stance towards fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust; the attitude towards the survivors of the catastrophe who arrived as immigrants to Palestine during and after the catastrophe; and the nature and significance of the uprisings in the ghettos.

‘What Italy Can Achieve, So Can Yehuda!’

The first topic the new scholars dared to tackle in the new and relatively open atmosphere were the sympathies shown in the early 1930s towards fascism and Nazism by some participants in the Zionist movement. Even when leaders of the movement were unenthusiastic about the ideologies themselves, the very fact that Italy and Germany were Britain’s enemies, as many Zionist activists saw it, was enough to allow for contact with both powers during the years leading up to the Second World War. In addition, before they became aware that the Nazis planned to exterminate the Jews, pragmatic Zionist leaders wanted to exploit the Nazi wish to expel them, because these leaders saw expulsion as benefiting the Jewish community in Palestine.
¹⁸

The picture that emerged when all three themes were fused into one challenging new narrative was, to say the least, embarrassing. Leading intellectuals of the Jewish community, such as Itamar Ben-Avi (the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, reviver of the Hebrew language) and Aba Ahimeir, sang the praises of fascism loud and clear. Ben-Avi even suggested that the Italian Fascist model was suitable for the
Yishuv
, the Jewish community in Palestine. As he wrote, ‘what Italy can achieve, so can Judah!’
¹⁹

In 1928, Aba Ahimeir, who became a leading member of the far-right wing of the Revisionist movement, wrote a regular column in the Hebrew daily
Doar Hayom
, edited by Ben-Avi. The title of the column was
‘Mipinkaso shel Fashistan’
(From a Fascist’s Notebook). In 1931 he played a central role in the founding of Brit Habiryonim (Union of Thugs), an underground group modelled on European fascist groups and devoted to opposing British policy in Palestine. At the trial of members of this organisation who were accused of disrupting a left-wing event at the Hebrew University in early 1932, their lawyer declared, ‘Yes, we Revisionists have a great admiration for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany … And if he had given up his anti-Semitism we would go with him.’
²⁰

In the summer of 1932, Ben-Avi commented in the pages of
Doar Hayom
that one should accept the inevitability of Hitler’s rise to power. What he meant was spelled out in another newspaper,
Hazit Ha’am
, edited by Aba Ahimeir and Yehoshua Heschel Yevin, which declared that unlike the socialists and democrats who were convinced that Hitler’s movement was an empty shell, ‘we believe that there is both a shell and a kernel. The anti-Semitic shell is to be discarded, but not the anti-Marxist kernel’.
²¹

The mainstream leadership did not exhibit such sympathy, but refused to adopt an aggressive stance against the Nazi regime. The archives revealed a Zionist leadership so focused on the project in Palestine that the boycott declared by Jews around the world against the Nazis in the 1930s seemed to these Zionists the wrong policy. At the time, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, said: ‘Zionism bears the obligations of a state; it therefore cannot initiate an irresponsible battle against Hitler as
long as he remains a head of state’. The ‘irresponsible battle’ was the boycott.
²²

In order to convince his listeners, Ben-Gurion further pointed out that other countries hostile to Germany, even the Soviet Union, had not severed their ties with the Third Reich. Instead of joining in with the other Jewish communities in a worldwide boycott of German goods, the Zionist leadership adopted a different stance – the only Jewish community to do so. It struck an agreement with the Gestapo that in return for the Zionist movement agreement not to support such a boycott, the Jews of Germany would be allowed to liquidate their holdings and possessions and bring them along when they moved to Palestine.
²³

The contacts with the Nazis were less an issue of sympathy and more a matter of practicality, and yet exposing these contacts required a self-assertive, confident academic. Moshe Zimmermann was such a person.
²⁴
He was a well-known expert on German history at the Hebrew University and was used to public notoriety and abuse. He attracted the nation’s attention with a very blunt condemnation of the settlers and their youth movement.
²⁵
So perhaps it is not surprising that he was willing to excavate this uncomfortable topic. Greatly assisted by the US historian Lenni Brenner, Zimmermann discovered that Zionist contact with the Nazis had begun in earnest in 1933. The main supporter in Germany of this contact was the German journalist Leopold von Mildenstein, who was close to the Zionist ideologue and leader Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew. Early on, Zionist leaders offered an alliance with Germany, since, at the time, they saw Germany primarily as Britain’s enemy.
²⁶