Holocaust fears, real and manipulated, have shaped Israel

Rivka Waxmann was one of the first Israelis. She was born in Poland and survived the Holocaust, and she went to Israel in 1948. On one of her first days there, she went shopping on Herzl Street in Haifa. She noticed a young man walking toward the ticket window of a movie theater. She froze on the spot and cried out, “Haim?!” The young man turned around, and for the next few seconds they stared at each other in disbelief. She was his mother. They last saw each other eight years earlier, when he was 14. Until that day in Haifa, she believed that her son had perished in the Holocaust, and he had believed he would never see his mother again. 

Such dramatic encounters were quite frequent in those days. Hundreds of thousands of people were torn from their loved ones during the Nazi occupation of Europe and never knew what had become of them in the ghettos, the deportations, the death camps and the forests. In Israel they found one another, purely by chance or thanks to a heartrending daily radio program called “Who Identifies? Who Knows?” Among the voices of my childhood, I can still hear those names of people who were looking for lost relatives. All were recent immigrants on the threshold of a new life.

I may remember that particular radio program so vividly because when I grew up in the 1950s, the Holocaust was almost a complete taboo. Parents would not talk about it with their children; children would not dare to ask. The great silence that engulfed the Holocaust in those days was mainly the result of guilt and shame. Many survivors felt guilty for having stayed alive; many Israelis were ashamed that they were not able to rescue Jews from the Nazis. The moral, psychological and often political issues involved in life after the Holocaust were so tormenting, it was felt best not to mention them at all.

At the beginning of the 1960s the Holocaust started to become what it is today, a major element of the Israeli identity. This gradual process began in the wake of the trial of former SS officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The great silence was broken; collective therapy began. 

The Eichmann trial created a firm, almost sacred Holocaust doctrine, which put great emphasis on the historical uniqueness of the destruction of the Jews. Any deviation from this notion was considered in dangerous proximity to Holocaust denial. To some extent, it still is. The uniqueness of the Holocaust was to add force, to dramatize the separate identity of the Jews as a nation, in accordance with the Zionist ideology. Consequently, many Israelis regard their country as the historical and the moral answer to the Holocaust. There was little place in that epic narrative of redemption, obviously, to acknowledge that Israel’s creation involved the traumatic displacement of another people. Still, today most Israelis probably have a better understanding of the Palestinian tragedy than most Palestinians have of the Holocaust.

Some Israeli scholars today view the Holocaust in a long chain of crimes against humanity committed by European powers, including colonial genocide and anti-Semitic massacres.

Over the years, the Holocaust has assumed constant presence in Israel’s public discourse, generating much moral and political soul searching. Only about 200,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive in Israel, but there is no day without some reference to the Holocaust in the Israeli media. Constant arguments about the proper Holocaust lessons often lead to debates about who we are and what it is we want to be. Mandatory Holocaust studies have repeatedly been extended in high schools and elementary education. Recently a Holocaust program for toddlers was introduced in kindergartens. 

Most of the 20,000 Israeli high school students who travel each year to Auschwitz are expected to recharge their patriotic batteries there. At the entrance to the gas chambers, they repeatedly hoist the Israeli national flag and sing the national anthem. The main lesson they bring home is “never again”: Israel still faces destruction, the students are told, and it must stand fast against its enemies. 

Not surprisingly for a deeply divided society like Israel, some schools see the Auschwitz trip as an opportunity for students to recharge their humanistic batteries as well. These students are taken to a monument in memory of the Roma people, or Gypsies, persecuted by the Nazis; they hear about the Nazi euthanasia program and become familiar with the persecution of gays and Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are encouraged to protect democracy and human rights and to fight racism.

A 1957 court decision obliges Israeli soldiers to disobey manifestly illegal orders, including in combat situations. Soldiers are expected to be decent enough to recognize the black flag of illegality waving over such orders — obviously not an easy task for an 18-year-old. This, for me, may be the most significant lesson Israel has learned from the Holocaust; there are others that we still have to learn.

Understanding Israel is no easy task, and one of the greatest difficulties is to distinguish between genuine Holocaust sentiments and manipulated Holocaust arguments. In the late 1950s, genuine Holocaust fears led to the development of Israel’s nuclear project. And genuine Holocaust fears led in 1967 to the Six Day War. By contrast, then–Prime Minister Menachem Begin presented Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon as a campaign against the Nazis, comparing Yasser Arafat to Hitler. In Israel, almost every Arab head of state since 1948 has been compared to Hitler; Iran’s leaders still are. Tehran’s atomic aspirations evoke genuine Holocaust fears in many Israelis today, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is manipulating these fears as part of his current election campaign. 

The Holocaust is all too often used cynically to support ideological and political arguments in Israel. But Israelis’ genuine Holocaust fears are also too often ignored, even denied, particularly by Palestinians and their supporters. That tendency may be understandable, given Israel’s oppressive policies in the Palestinian territories, but one cannot understand Israel without acknowledging its genuine Holocaust fears. And unless one understands an enemy, one cannot make peace.