The Eichmann Trial (6 page)

As the debate about the capture and proposed trial of Eichmann intensified, much of the attention was focused, not surprisingly, on the man who made the decision—without consulting anyone else—that Eichmann should be pursued, captured, brought to Israel, and tried. The common “wisdom” is that Ben-Gurion orchestrated the capture and trial as a means of educating Israeli youth about the Holocaust. As with so many wisdoms, this is not supported by the facts. Hanna Yablonka, who has studied Israeli’s reaction to the capture and the trial, has shown that he did not adopt education as a goal until well after Eichmann had been captured and was in Israel’s hands. When he met with the editors of
Maariv
shortly after the capture, one asked if there had been any “outstanding events this year.” Ben-Gurion replied, “I know of no outstanding events.” When a journalist present mentioned Eichmann, Ben-Gurion insisted twice that the Eichmann matter was important only from a “journalistic standpoint.” However, over the course of the year, his attitude would change. A year later, when the trial was under way, in his Independence Day address, he posited that the trial and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls were the major events of the year, and that they both affirmed the historical legitimacy and necessity for a Jewish state. He had shifted his view in response to the importance the Israeli public accorded the capture and trial.
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Ben-Gurion’s sense of the importance of the trial evolved, but his hostility toward those who criticized Israel’s action was intense from the outset. The more outspoken the critics, the more Ben-Gurion bristled. In a lengthy interview, he told the
New York Times
that since the victims had been singled out
because
they were Jews the
Jewish
state was the proper entity to render justice. Had French citizens been killed because they were French, no one would question France’s right to act. Ben-Gurion also contended that a trial would demonstrate that no longer could Jews be attacked with impunity. Now there was a Jewish state which would come to their aid. In the space of a few paragraphs, he twice described Jews who questioned Israel’s right to try Eichmann as having an “inferiority complex.” Ben-Gurion also believed that the trial would convey a contemporary political message. He considered those Arabs who threatened to destroy Israel and drive its inhabitants into the sea to be the Nazis’ heirs. The Holocaust demonstrated, Ben-Gurion insisted, that such rhetoric could not be dismissed as hyperbole.
The New York Times
received an avalanche of letters about the interview. They ranged from describing Israel as a “vicious monster of a nation” to arguing that, since only Israel had cared whether he was captured, it was disingenuous for critics now to complain that he should be tried elsewhere.
Time
magazine described Ben-Gurion’s contention that Israel was “the only sovereign authority in Jewry” that could apprehend any criminal who committed offenses against the Jews as “inverse racism.”
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By the 1960s, the number of Jews and Jewish organizations in the Diaspora who thought that the existence of a Jewish state would compromise their own status as citizens of the countries in which they lived had diminished markedly. In the intervening years since the creation of the state, they had grasped that the existence of Israel did not threaten their political status. Nonetheless, some Diaspora Jews were still sensitive to any Israeli actions that might suggest to non-Jews that Israel was acting or speaking on behalf of Jews who were not its citizens. Eichmann’s capture and, even more so, Ben-Gurion’s comments to
The New York Times
left them uneasy. Not surprisingly, some of the most vituperative criticism came from Jews who had found a comfortable home in the highest reaches of the non-Jewish world. Harvard professor Oscar Handlin was an expert on immigration who had written a book on Jews in America—a topic not generally addressed by Harvard faculty in the 1950s. In a speech at Harvard and in subsequent articles, he lashed out at Israel’s actions, denigrating the forthcoming trial as an “act of revenge in satisfaction of the private offense.” Ignoring the fact that Eichmann had escaped from a POW camp, entered Argentina under an alias, and lived clandestinely in the country, he accused Israel of violating Eichmann’s “right of refuge” with its “underhand[ed] kidnapping.” For over a century, Handlin contended, Western liberal societies had opposed pogroms and attacks on Jews because they believed Jews shared with them “a common stake in human decency.” This principle, which animated Jewish life in the West, was threatened by the kidnapping. There were certainly legal problems associated with Israel’s kidnapping, but Handlin’s juxtaposition of Eichmann’s “right of refuge” with Israel’s “underhand[ed]” actions and description of the Holocaust as a “private offense” are astonishing. More stupefying, however, is that, but fifteen years after millions of Jews had been murdered when most Western nations had barred them entry, he waxed rhapsodic about the West’s conviction that it shared with Jews a “common stake in human decency.” Handlin seemed oblivious that during the war, as Saul Friedländer has observed, “not one social group, not one religious community, no scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews.” Predictably, Rabbi Elmer Berger, the leader of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, described the trial as a “Zionist declaration of war” against American Jews’ claim to equal citizenship. Psychologist and anti-Zionist Erich Fromm, writing in the anti-Zionist
Jewish Newsletter
, seemed to have lost any sense of perspective when he claimed that Israel’s action was an “act of lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves … have been guilty.”
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These anti-Zionist reactions were predictable. The reactions by some Zionists were less so. Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, suggested that an Israeli chief judge preside but that foreign jurists serve on the tribunal. Ben-Gurion considered Goldmann’s critique a public slap at Israel’s sovereignty and its judges’ impartiality. Leveling the criticism the prime minister so often used when Jews questioned Israel’s actions, he accused Goldmann of having “an inferiority complex.” One must place this particular spat within its context. These men, both with oversized egos, had long sparred with each other. Ben-Gurion considered Goldmann a hypocrite for leading a Zionist organization but not settling in Israel. Goldmann resented Ben-Gurion’s attempt as prime minister of Israel to speak for all the Jewish people.

Even more troublesome for Ben-Gurion was the response of certain American Jews. He knew he could depend on American Zionists to support any decision he made. The group he had to woo was the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Ben-Gurion believed the AJC, with its wealthy, establishment members, was best positioned to influence American foreign policy. Though not a Zionist organization, it considered Israel a Jewish cultural, historical, and spiritual entity. It had become a proponent of a Jewish state during World War II, when it saw Jews abandoned to their fate. Nonetheless the AJC remained wary about any action on Israel’s part that might raise doubts about Jews’ loyalty to America. In 1948, when AJC leaders saw a proposed draft of the Israeli declaration of independence, they urged that references to “the Jewish State” be replaced by “the State of Israel.” (They were not replaced.) In 1950, AJC president Jacob Blaustein, in an effort to assuage growing tensions between AJC leaders and the new state, flew to Israel to meet Ben-Gurion. In an exchange of letters, they agreed that “the people of Israel have no desire and no intention to interfere in any way in the internal affairs of Jewish communities abroad,” and that the Israeli government would not in any way “undermine the sense of security and stability of American Jewry.” Despite this agreement, differences continued to percolate. They had surfaced a few months before Eichmann’s capture, during a rash of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe and the Americas. Israel’s Foreign Ministry sent notes to its counterparts, including the United States State Department, describing itself as “sensitive and alert to anything that affects our brethren.” The AJC condemned this as interference in American Jews’ domestic matters. They pointedly informed Israel that they felt entirely capable of handling this issue without its intervention. But this was not the only development that troubled AJC leaders. In March 1960, General Moshe Dayan had stated in a speech in Canada that Israel represented the rights of “all Jews.” A few weeks thereafter, Golda Meir told a delegation of the Anglo-Jewish Association that Israel would “continue to speak for Jewry.”
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Now, with Ben-Gurion justifying Israel’s right to try Eichmann because it was the
Jewish
state, the question “Who speaks for the Jewish people?” assumed newfound relevance. With a trial in the offing, this debate might well be played out on an international stage, something Diaspora Jewish leaders feared greatly. Joseph Proskauer, a former AJC president, sent Ben-Gurion a private letter articulating these concerns. He urged Ben-Gurion to turn Eichmann over to Germany or an international tribunal. Ben-Gurion responded by drawing a direct line between the Holocaust and the State of Israel. Acknowledging that while Israel could not speak in the name of all Jews, he argued that it must speak for the victims of the Holocaust because they believed “with every fiber of their being that they belonged to a Jewish people.” In truth, many of the victims believed no such thing. For Ben-Gurion, however, this was utterly immaterial. To buttress his argument, Proskauer had sent Ben-Gurion
The Washington Post
editorial that attacked Israel’s claim that it could “act in the name of some imaginary Jewish ethnic identity.” Ben-Gurion knew that the paper’s former owner, Eugene Meyer, had been an ardent anti-Zionist. His daughter, Katharine, was unaware that her father was Jewish until her classmates at Vassar asked her about having “Jewish blood.” Who, Ben-Gurion wondered, gave the
Post
the authority to determine whether there was a Jewish ethnic identity?
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As part of their continuing effort to stop Israel from holding the trial, AJC leaders met with Golda Meir to inform her that they had “arrived at a consensus” that the trial should not be in Israel. Though they did not doubt that Eichmann would get a fair trial, they feared that an Israeli trial would obscure the fact that Nazism was the enemy of mankind, and that Eichmann had committed “unspeakable crimes against humanity, not only against Jews.” This objection was sure to win no sympathy from Ben-Gurion, Meir, or other Israeli leaders. Meir dismissed their objections by recalling the world’s indifference to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and its lack of interest in finding the criminals afterward. Still hoping to effect a change in Israel’s plans, the AJC convened a group of prominent judges and lawyers. They suggested that Israel conduct the investigation and then hand Eichmann and any evidence it had gathered to an international tribunal. Israel summarily rejected this idea.
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As the complaints mounted, Ben-Gurion’s patience—never his strong suit—grew short, as was evidenced in an interview he gave to E. A. Bayne of the American Universities Field Staff. Bayne suggested that it might be best if Eichmann was not tried in Israel. Ben-Gurion exploded: “You think that we should not try Eichmann? You are a Jew? An American Jew?” When Bayne indicated he was not, Ben-Gurion continued: “I thought only an American Jew would question our right to try Eichmann.…”
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A few months later, AJC leaders, aware that they had lost the battle over the trial’s venue, tried to get Israeli officials at least to reformulate their statements about the Final Solution. They traveled to Jerusalem, where they told government leaders that Israel’s public comments about the trial should stress that not only Jews but also Germans had suffered severely because of Eichmann and the Nazis’ actions. The AJC leaders also suggested that Israel cast its comments about the Holocaust in universal terms. The Americans explained that when synagogues were bombed they spoke to the press in “broader terms” and referred to them as “houses of worship” in order to overcome non-Jews’ indifference. Israel should do the same and stop “harping constantly on the identity of the deceased Jews.”
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One can imagine Ben-Gurion’s reaction. These Jews trumpeted their complete acceptance into American society, but when their synagogues were bombed precisely
because
they were Jewish institutions, they fell back on the generic “houses of worship” and avoided identifying the victims as Jews. In fact, one need not imagine Ben-Gurion’s reaction. He expressed it quite explicitly at the meeting of the World Zionist Congress. Ben-Gurion, still bristling at the American Jewish leaders’ suggestions that he downplay
Jewish
suffering during the Final Solution, declared that the “Judaism of Jews of the United States is losing all meaning and only a blind man can fail to see the day of its extinction.” Jews living outside of Israel faced “the kiss of death and the slow … decline into the abyss of assimilation.” All Jews, he announced, belonged in Israel. As a result of his comments, the already shaky relations between Israel and American non-Zionists almost imploded. The AJC immediately charged him with violating the Blaustein understanding. Eventually, in an attempt to keep relations from completely disintegrating, Blaustein met with Ben-Gurion and convinced him to offer “strong official reaffirmation” of their agreement that Israel did not see itself as speaking for or acting on behalf of all Jews.
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