Jewish History 9 Volume 11, No. 2 9 Fall 1997
Israel and the Holocaust Trauma Robert S. Wistrich
The Holocaust has in recent years come to assume a major role in the political culture both of Israel and of Diaspora Jewry. In the case of Israel, the proximity of the country's foundation to the massacre of Europe's Jews makes this centrality scarcely surprising. 1 To begin with, there were many survivors and their relatives in Israel's population whose presence made the initial efforts to repress the memory of the Holocaust unlikely to succeed. Moreover, continuing Arab hostility and Israel's sense of isolation in the last twenty years reinforced what would in the best of circumstances have remained a massive trauma. 2 The linkage is omnipresent and has grown ever more pervasive since 1967, strengthening the emotional bonds between Israel and the Diaspora and reinforcing the Jewish feeling of being a unique people among the nations. 3 The institutionalization of the Holocaust in Israel and its status as a kind of civil religion are not however without problems. It stands in opposition to classical Zionism which aimed at normalizing the status of the Jews, not at the concept o f " a people that dwells alone. ''4 Political Zionism sought to positively transform Gentile attitudes to Jews, not to dwell on the eternal antagonism between Jews and Gentiles; it aimed at economic and political independence, not at playing on the guilt of the nations as a justification for favorable treatment or for demanding immunity from criticism. The Holocaust contributed to this distortion of Zionism because of the ways in which it has been instrumentalized and politicized on all sides. Israel has used it frequently as a propaganda weapon against the Arabs and as a reproach against its critics. Arabs have manipulated it as a tool against the Jewish State, as have anti-Zionist Jews seeking to deligitimate Israel's moral and historical foundations. 5 To understand this deformation one must consider why the Holocaust emerged in the first place as a central reference point for contemporary Jewish identity. One reason is that its memorialization has served to unite Jews pursuing very different ideological agendas, whether they are of the Right or Left, religious or
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secular, Zionist or non-Zionist. To quote Jean Amery, the Holocause epitomized that "solidarity in the face of threat" which has become a def'ming characteristic of post-Holocaust Jewishness. 6 Amery summed up the indissoluble link between the Holocaust and Jewish identity, as follows: "On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number: it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet it provides more thorough information. It is also more binding that the basic formulas of Jewish existence.''7 For many Israelis the conclusions drawn from the Holocaust seem to be those of straightforward survivalism. Only a strong State of Israel can ensure that the horror of the Nazi massacre will not recur. This is a view probably shared by many European and American Jews as well, though it does not necessarily lead them to draw Zionist conclusions for themselves. But what are the implications for Diaspora Jewry of having created a "civic religion" out of the Holocaust? Can this provide a healthy basis for secular or religious Jewish self-identification? Will a millennium of Jewish culture in Europe find itself boiled down to the final monstrous denouement in the crematoria of Auschwitz?s What will be the psychological effects on a new generation of Diaspora Jews who no longer know at fin'st hand the creativity of that vanished world of European Jewry before the Holocaust? And what of the millions of non-Jews, brought up on a cheapened culture, who may come to see Diaspora Jews purely as a victim-people, with no real history before the catastrophe? How many Gentiles will ever grasp the deeper significance of Jews continuing to live Jewish lives, of their haying created a Jewish State and having had the courage to reaffirm the continuity of their history after the Holocaust? Diaspora Jewish responses to the Holocaust to some degree inevitably reflect the priorities and culture of the society in which they are framed. Each nation memorializes its past in ways which reflect its own national myths, ideals and contemporary political purposes. Hence the National Holocaust Memorial in the United States can scarcely be as Judeocentric as its equivalent in Israel. 9 The more that it needs to involve the larger Gentile society the more it must strive for a universal and "de-judaized" message. 10 At its best such universalism may succeed in combining genuine pluralism and a sensitivity to the murder of millions of non-Jews during the Second World War with emphasis on the uniquely systematic attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. This approach emphasizes universal values like democracy, pluralism, individual freedom and general opposition to racism. In terms of non-Jewish America (and also of Europe) the magic words are above all tolerance and freedom from prejudice. These are admirable ideals in themselves but decidedly banal as lessons to be drawn from a cataclysmic event like the Holocaust. This kind of liberal perspective, which doubtlessly appeals to American national optimism, suggests a basic incapacity and reluctance to deal with the phenomenon of radical evil. Perhaps it helps to explain the kind of trivialization of the Holocaust perpetrated a decade ago by President Reagan in Bitburg. 11
Israel and the HolocaustTrauma 15 Western Jews are led ineluctably down the road of universalizing or "nativizing" the Holocaust by demonstrating that it belongs to all of humanity. Hence they naturally focus on interpretations that emphasize its universal meaning. They are understandably concerned that the Holocaust may have the effect of isolating Jews from other groups in Western society, particularly if(as is often the case) its singularity and uniqueness are stressed. This can lead to antagonism from other victimized groups like African-Americans, who often resent the special attention given to the Holocaust as being an obstacle to their own suffering being fully acknowledged by white American society. Thus, rather than being an inspiration for cooperation between historically oppressed groups, the Holocaust can sadly enough become a source of divisiveness in America as in Europe or in the Middle East. But what of its practical impact on Western Jews? It has demonstrably not led to a mass exodus from America or Western Europe to Israel or even to a slowing down of intermarriage and assimialation. It has not even changed the basic conviction of most American Jews that the United States is home and not just another Galut (Exile). Many American Jews know perfectly well that the United States in the 1930s and 40s was a land of draconian immigration restructions for their co-religionists; that the United States and Britain, which did so much to defeat Hitler and to liberate the concentrations camps, failed to bomb Auschwitz and virtually abandoned the Jews to their fate in Europe. 12 They are of course grateful to America for defeating Hitler but they have not forgotten the quotas and the closed gates. In that sense the Holocaust has helped to politicize Diaspora Jews (especially in America) who are far more willing than fifty years ago to confront their governments in order to advance Jewish causes and concerns. Their responsiveness to the dangers facing Israel or Jews in the USSR, Ethiopia, Syria, etc. has been amply demonstrated on many occasions. This militancy with which Jewish rights and interests are pursued may be related to a sense of guilt about what was n o t done during the Holocaust and the determination that this will never recur. It is reinforced each time that Israel appears to be in danger and instinctively leads to a rapid closing of ranks. But solidarity with Jews suffering distress and adversity is not in itself a new lesson, specific to the Holocaust trauma. What is novel is the consensus since 1945 concerning the intolerability of Jewish powerlessness as manifested in the Second World War. The intensive Jewish lobbying and pressure exercised on behalf of Israel and Soviet Jewry, especially in the United States, are a direct consequence of"the Jewish emergence from powerlessness.''13 The dangel: is that such positive Jewish activity may backfire when it is overly instrumentalized and degraded to a tool for everyday fundraising or routine propaganda purposes. The temptation is great because nothing else works so well as fear to galvanize a
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sense of national emergency and to mobilize Jewish organizations and their supporters. Opinion polls in recent years reveal an interesting fmding with regard to American Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism which may help to explain why this dubious method is so widely used. American Jews consistently believe that anti-Semitism is a serious problem in the United States - far more than the empirical evidence might incline one to think. 14 Significantly, according to Steven M. Cohen, American Jews rank the Holocaust first (ahead of Rosh Hashanah and Yore Kippur) and American anti-Semitism third (just ahead of God!) as a symbol of Jewish identity) 5 Even Orthodoxy, which in pre-1945 America held assimilation and reform to be more pernicious than anti-Semitism, has similarly shifted its emphasis. 16 The Jewish memory of the Holocaust in Israel, no less than in the Diaspora, has become a central point of identity - though Israel (Palestine) was never occupied by the Nazis and direct experience of the massacres was confined to the survivors fi'om Europe who reached its shores. In the Israeli case the change in consciousness has, if anything, been more striking than among Diaspora Jewry, negating many classic Zionist assumptions. The founding fathers of Zionism and the leaders of the Yishuv long argued that the Jews in Europe were a debilitated people, leading a marginal, deracinated existence. 17 Continually dependent on the goodwill and the rules of others, divorced from the land a0d primary processes of production, lacking adequate means for self-defence, Jews in the Galut were doomed in the long run. Anti-Semitism was perceived as an outgrowth of this anomalous condition of exile and of the undesirable traits of passivity which had developed as a consequence. True, among some of the East European Zionists like Pinsker, Lilienblum and Sokolow, Judeophobia was seen as something endemic to the Gentiles, as sin'at olam le 'am olam. 18 But none of the Zionist leaders, even in their worse premonitions and nightmares, could imagine anything as total or cataclysmic in its destructiveness as the Nazi Holocaust. The horrors far surpassed the direst prognoses of Herzl, Nordau, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion or Jabotinsky. Before 1939 some Zionist leaders could still argue that the rise of Nazism was vindicating and strengthening the Zionist movement against its Jewish rivals in the Exile, while building up the Yishuv. This was hardly the case after 1945. The Holocaust was in fact an awesome blow for Zionism. It destroyed at a stroke the most important single reservoir of future immigration - the great nucleus of East European Jewry with its cohesive sense of Jewish peoplehood, its cultural creativity and background of Zionist hachshara. The Zionist solution came too late for the millions of Jews in Eastern Europe, who in 1939 still constituted one half of world Jewry as a whole. The prevailing ideology of the new Jewish State continued at first to view the Holocaust as the lrmal consequence of life in the Galut. The lesson appeared to
Israel and the HolocaustTrauma 17 be simple. Without a land, an independent State and an army - without strength, toughness and total self-reliance - there could be no Jewish survival. The "new Jews" of that generation had no patience with the survivors. Indeed many of the refugees were made to feel ashamed that they had even survived. Only after the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s had brought a change in attitudes to those who had gone through the hell of the death camps did the stigma of having gone like "sheep to the slaughter" begin to fade. In the Israeli commemoration of the 1948 war as in the linking ofYom Hashoah (Holocaust Day) with the Warsaw ghetto uprising, there is however an awareness that the fight for Israeli independence began in the ghettos, the camps and in the forests where Jewish partisans had fought the Nazis. It is difficult to say exactly when this feeling became generalized. But there were young Israelis in the Six Day War who referred to the six million ghosts who fought with them and regarded the eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not be killed!" as a powerful legacy of the Holocaust. 19 The 1967 war sharply highlighted some of the more painful aspects in the Israeli consciousness of the Holocuast. The period of waiting in May-June 1967 with the threats of extermination coming from Arab capitals ominously recalled traumas that had barely healed in the intervening quarter of a century. Though Israeli Jews were well-trained and highly motivated to defend their existence, the possibility of being wiped out had materialized once more in their minds, the great fear and the "miraculous" redemption produced a much more complex situation after the war which we can only touch on briefly. The paradox of Israel being both a nation of victorious conquerors and heirs of a people who had barely survived a holocaust is unparalleled in any other country, and undoubtedly a source of powerful identity conflicts for many Israelis. The reality of domination over Palestinians since 1967 coupled with the sense of being surrounded by implacable Arab enemies - difficult enough to cope with in i t s e l f - has been greatly complicated by these legacies from the past. 20 The linking of the Holocaust with the Middle East conflict contains a number of distinct but interrelated features. On the Israeli side there have undoubtedly been elements of political instrumentalization. These have ranged from references to the 1967 borders as the "Auschwitz lines" to the call to hunt down the PLO leader in his Beirut bunker, during the Lebanon war of 1982. Menahem Begin liked to compare the Palestinian National Covenant with Mein Kampf and Yasser Arafat with Hitler. On the other side, a massive PLO, Arab, Soviet and left-wing propaganda campaign in the West denounced the State of Israel as a new edition of the Third Reich, Zionism as a form of fascism or neo-Nazism and claimed that Israel was carrying out a "genocidal" policy against the Palestinians.21 The Palestinians themselves attacked Israelis for ignoring the real factors in the Palestine conflict, for projecting "Holocaustal" intentions on to the Arabs and using the subject as a way to divert attention from their own repressive policies.
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The Holocaust, so their more sophisticated spokesmen claim (and in this view they are echoed by some dovish Israelis) has even become an apologia for anti-Arab racism. 22 Demagogues like the late Meir Kahane and the phenomenon of Kahanism, which inter alia drew on the Holocaust to justify expelling Arabs from Israel, gave some plausibility to this contention in the 1980s. Arab and Western (including Jewish) critics of Israel also pointed to the instrumentalizing of anti-Semitism by some Israeli politicians as a way of claiming immunity from any outside criticism of government policy, thereby encouraging isolationism and paranoia. There is, however a simple point here, often overlooked in the polemical contentions of Israel's adversaries and critics. As Henry Kissinger once put it, even paranoics sometimes have real enemies, and the siege of Israel has not been a figment of the imagination. Moreover, Israel's sense of insecurity is reinforced by the continuity of persecution in its history, from the Egyptian slavery, through the "mythical" enmity of Amalek and Haman to Roman times, from the Crusades through the Reformation to the Chemelnicki massacres followed by the Russian/Ukranian pogroms of 1881, 1903, 1905 and 1918-20, 23 climaxing in the Nazi Holocaust itself. These episodes of persecution have certainly strengthened Jewish national consciousness and their memory is inextricably linked to the existence of the Jews as a people. It is therefore tempting to see Jewish history in Aharon Appelfeld's words as "a series of holocausts with only some improvements in technique. ''24 Such a view can become dangerous if one starts to believe that Esau hates Jacob as some kind of metahistorical law, dictated fi'om above. On this assumption all Gentiles are assumed to be either covert or overt anti-Semites seeking Jewish annihilation. Hence only Israeli and Jewish power ulitmately matter. This simplistic picture can seem plausible because it is not purely mythical but also contains some recognizable elements of truth. Anti-Semitism has been a fairly constant reality accompanying Jewish existence during the past 2,500 years. It has also been a major source of Jewish solidarity and identity, as well as being one of the most important driving forces of Zionism. Its annihilating power during the Holocaust made it probable that it would eventually become a central axis of Israeli consciousness, especially against the background of Arab hostility to the existence of a Jewish State in the Middle East. On the other hand, exaggerated emphasis on persecution can lead to a regressive form of isolationism and negative thinking. It should not be turned into an absolute value, however important it remains as a source of Israeli and/or Jewish identity. Both in Israel and in the Diaspora as a whole, Jews should be cautious about efforts to remove the Holocaust from temporality, thereby treating it as a metaphysical or ahistorical phenomenon. One must avoid viewing the often intractable problems of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Middle East terrorism
Israel and the HolocaustTrauma 19 through the distorting lens o f Nazi mass murder, even if it may temporarily serve Israeli interests to do so. Some Israelis also need to reconsider theh" attitude to the Gentile world as a whole. The Holocaust admittedly poses an immense question-mark concerning the degree to which there is a bond between Israel and the non-Jewish world or the extent to which Jews as a whole can ever trust Gentiles again. But these relations cannot be solely determined by the catastrophic paradigm of the Holocaust though Jews can never excise it from their awareness, and it would be inhuman to expect this. The Gulf War of 1991, with its accompanying feeling of momentary Israeli powerlessness, the wearing of gas-masks and the comparisons between Hitler and Saddam Hussein, revived many painful memories of the Second World War. So, too, in a different way, did the wave of racist and neo-Nazi violence in a newly united Germany, during the following two years. But these external stimuli have reinforced the centralitiy of the Holocaust in Israeli consciousness, primarily because they corresponded to the deep-seated needs already manifest in Israeli society.2s Ever since 1967 - and even more since the 1973 Yom Kippur War - the Holocaust had come to replace the founding myths of the Jewish State as a major source of its raison d'etre. Instead of the worn-out ideals of a model socialist society, a pioneering utopia or a full ingathering of the exiles, the notion of Israel as the guardian and heir of the Holocaust memory has steadily gained ground as a new unifying myth, alongside religion and nationalism. Paradoxically, as the distance from the traumatic event itself has increased, so too have the trends towards mythologizing it - whether from a secular or a religious standpoint. 26 It was greatly strengthened by the long years of Likud rule and it is doubtful if successive change of government will make any difference to the underlying tendency to reify the Holocaust and transform it into a fundamental pillar of Israeli identity.27 The crucial question remains whether this centrality will ultimately strengthen or undermine the Jewish foundations of Israel (and of the Diaspora) while permitting a degree of universalistic openness towards the non-Jewish world, more compatible with the hope of a peaceful Middle East.
NOTES 1. ConorCruise O'Brian, The Siege (NewYork, 1986),317. 2. RochelleG. Saidel, "The Rote of the Holocaust in the Political Culture of Israel," in Remembering for the Future: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World
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(Oxford, 198), ThemeII, 1379-92. CharlesS. Liebmanand EliezerDon-Yehiya,Civil Religion in Israel (Universityof California Press, 1983), 142.
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4.
Saidel, 1385, quoting the Israeli author Boaz Evron's critique of the centrality of the Holocaust in contemporary Israeli culture. David Shipler, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (New York, 1986), 346-7. Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realitites (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), 58. Ibid. Ismar Schorseh, "The Holocaust and Jewish Survival," Midstream 27/1 (January 1981): 38-42. Michael Berenbaum, After Tragedy and Triumph; Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Jewish Experienc (Cambridge 1990), 8-13, 36-40. Yehuda Bauer, "Whose Holocaust?" Midstream 26/9 (November 1980): 42. Geoffrey Hartmann (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, Ind., 1986). David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York, 1984). Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness (Toronto, 1979). See Gary A. Tobin, Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism (New York, 1988). Also Tom W. Smith, What Do Americans Think about Jews? (American Jewish Committee, New York, 1991), series of working papers on contemporary anti-Semitism based on empirical social research. Steven M. Cohen, "Jewish Continuity over Judaie Content: The Commitment of the Moderately Affiliated American Jew," paper delivered at the Hebrew University Conference on Changes in Jewish Thought and Society, Jerusalem, 17 June 1992: 15-16. See Samuel C. Heilman and Menahem Friedman, "Religious Fundmentalism and Religious Jews: The Case of the Haredim," in Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago, 1992), 197ff. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago asnd London, 1990), 207-27. Robert S. Wistrich, Between Redemption and Perdition: Antisemitism and Modern Jewish ldentity (London, 1990), 195-205. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1992), (Hebrew), 368ff. Dan Diner, "Israel and the Trauma of the Mass Extermination," Telos 57 (Autumn 1983): 41-52. Robert Wistrich, Antisemitim: The Longest Hatred (London, 1991), 249-50. Shippler, Arab and Jew, 339-44. Charles Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences (New Haven and London, 1990), 32-3. Aharon Appelfeld, quoted in Jerusalem Post Magazine, 27 November, 1987. Segev, The Seventh Million. Moshe Zimmermann, "lsraels Umgang mit dem Holocaust," in Rolf Steininger (ed.), Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust, Europe-USA-Israel (Vienna, 1994), 387-406. Zimmermann himself is guilty of another kind of "mythologizing" in his groundless comparison in the summer of 1995 of the children of Hebron's Jewish settlers with the Hitler youth. See Robert S. Wistrich and David Ohana (eds.), The Shaping oflsraeli Identity: Myth, Memory and Trauma (London, 1995).
5. 6. 7. 8. 9. I0. 11. 12. 13. 14.
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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
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The H e b r e w University o f Jerusalem
