The Idea of Israel (25 page)

When, a bit later, the anti-Jewish nature of the Nazis’ policies was revealed, the Zionists’ agenda turned to the promotion of an agreement that would enable the immigration of German Jews exclusively to Palestine. In late 1936, a joint delegation of the Jewish Agency and the German immigrant association in Palestine approached the German consul general in Jerusalem with a proposal that Germany send a representative to the Palestine Royal Commission, the famous Peel Commission, and support the Zionist stance (the plan was rejected).
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Zimmermann probably went further on the issue than many other scholars would have. Without hesitation, he identified the common goal shared by the Zionist movement and Nazism: the exodus of European Jews from the Continent. Of course, when it came to light that the Nazi plan called for the extermination of the Jews, the joint vision evaporated and the Zionist–Nazi collaboration ended. When the Palestinian scholar Joseph Massad recently implied such an interdependence on Al Jazeera’s website, the network briefly bowed to pressure and removed the article, but then republished it.
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The most elaborate research into the attitudes towards and contacts with the Nazis was carried out by the Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev, whose area of expertise was German history, specifically Nazi history. Segev’s doctoral dissertation dealt with the commanders of the extermination camps, and his other work focused on the Mandatory period and early statehood. In his research on Holocaust memory, he showed that the contact continued well into 1937; not only did he describe the contact but, like Zimmerman, condemned it. Segev exposed meetings between the Hagana, the main Jewish military group, and senior Nazi personalities, the most important being Adolf Eichmann. Most of the meetings involved the heads of the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD (the security service of the SS), in the winter of 1937.
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According to the later claims of Zionist organisations, the Hagana wanted to direct the exiting German Jews to Palestine, not to anywhere else. The German foreign ministry did not encourage these meetings, however, as it did not see the formation of a Zionist state to be in the German interest; the Hagana emissary countered by asserting that a Jewish majority in Palestine would in fact serve Germany’s purposes, because it would rid the country of its Jews and would serve as an anti-British base. Segev is unsure about this emissary’s degree of authority, but as Zimmerman has shown, the line he took was not contrary to the one taken by the Zionist leadership.
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It is obvious that once the true nature of Nazism and its extermination policies was recognised, this attitude changed and contact ceased (until an attempt was made to save the Jews of Hungary in 1944 by offering the German army money for ammunition). But
then a different issue emerged: How much was the Zionist leadership willing to invest in the rescue operations once it came to recognise the fate of the Jews in Europe?

On that question, Segev proved to be Zionist policy’s severest critic. In his book
The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust
, he describes a Zionist leadership interested only in saving Jews who were willing to emigrate to Palestine or who were physically and mentally capable of contributing to the success of the community. Segev begins this thesis in the pre-war years, when saving the Jews of Europe was important to the Zionist leadership only in so far as it contributed to the building of a Jewish state. ‘If I knew’, said David Ben-Gurion,

that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.
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The practical manifestation of this attitude, Segev found, was that rescue operations not connected directly with the Jewish community in Palestine were not undertaken. He describes in his book a community that went about its mundane affairs while its leaders revealed themselves to be people of limited imagination whose rarefied self-image as national leaders stymied their willingness to engage in the duplicity and stratagems necessary for underground activity. Not wishing to invest heavily in rescue operations was not only a matter of prioritisation; it was also a condemnation of those Jews who were unwise enough to ignore Zionist warnings. Or, to put it differently, the priorities regarding the allocation of monetary and human resources for salvage operations reflected a more deeply embedded stance. This dismissive attitude towards the diaspora Jews, even at their hour of need, was part of a wider distaste for the diaspora itself.

This situation was among the most daring components of the post-Zionist challenge to the idea of Israel. Segev claimed, for example, that the negation of the diaspora remained the ideological cornerstone of Zionist doctrine. Negation was expressed, he writes, in the
Yishuv
’s ‘deep contempt, and even disgust, for Jewish life in the diaspora’ and their feeling of ‘alienation [towards] those who suffered’ in the Holocaust.
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Elsewhere in his book, Segev ventures a more conspiratorial explanation for the
Yishuv
’s policies. He detects a tacit alliance between the Jewish community in Palestine and the British Empire. The Zionist movement was promised a favoured status after the war if it kept quiet about rescue operations and let the Allies pursue their war efforts without interference.

It all adds up to quite an uneasy read.
The Seventh Million
appeared first in Hebrew and was then made into a documentary film, screened in prime time in the happy days of post-Zionist media openness.
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It showed the more questionable side of the ‘new Jew’ born in Palestine, hero of the idea of Israel. Segev pointed out that in many ways the commemoration of the Holocaust became the new religion for the secular Jews of Palestine – or, as he put it, since religion had no importance for the identity of many secular Israelis, in its place came homage to Holocaust memory, a tribute that often transmogrified into a bizarre obsession with death.

Segev was a post-Zionist researcher par excellence. He not only told us what he found in the archives, he also condemned the previous generation of scholars, especially historians, for ignoring these unpleasant facts because of their loyalty to the Zionist interpretation of the idea of Israel. In that interpretation, those who died in the Holocaust went ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ instead of rebelling, as did the few among them, who were immediately recognised not only as the brave ones but also as the Zionist ones, who belonged to us, even if they made the mistake of not emigrating sooner to Palestine.

‘The Ancestor of the Warsaw Uprising Is the State of Israel’

Mainstream Israeli historiography, the underpinning of the political élite, characterised the revolts in the various ghettos and camps as a chapter in the long Zionist history of struggle against those who wished to destroy the Jewish people. This was one narrative. The very idea that there might be another narrative was a bold suggestion,
made by post-Zionist scholars in the 1990s. To them, these uprisings had been Zionised in Israeli collective memory and mainstream academia. They saw this process of Zionisation as a typical instance of how national movements tend to define people’s past identity in accordance with the needs of the present national movement.

In early 1942, the Nazi regime in Poland began to despatch Jews to death camps. This triggered the unusual attempt by the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants to resist by force this transfer to death. Two groups of Jews in the ghetto decided to rebel – one closer to Jewish Socialist movements, such as the anti-Zionist General Jewish Labour Bund, and one closer to the Zionist Revisionist movement. Both were aided by the Polish underground. Among the leaders of the former was Marek Edelman; born in 1919, he had joined the Bund as a youth. The actual revolt broke out in January 1943, when a second wave of transports began, and held on until the beginning of May until they succumbed to the superior military might of the Nazi forces.

After the war, Edelman studied medicine in Poland and became a cardiologist. In 1976 he joined the famous Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa and became one of Poland’s revered intellectuals. In his writing he often addressed issues of human and civil rights around the world and often criticised Zionism and Israel for their discriminatory policies towards the Palestinians. In the late 1980s he became a member of the Polish parliament. In 1993 the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, led an Israeli delegation for the jubilee commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Polish president Lech Walesa asked Edelman to be among the chief speakers; heavy pressure from the Israeli delegation removed him from the list at the very last moment.
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In keeping with the observation by critics of nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, that it is best to nationalise dead people since they cannot claim an identity different from the one ascribed to them, one can imagine how troublesome was Marek Edelman, this major figure in the Warsaw uprising.
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At the time he was a member of a non-Zionist organisation; after the Holocaust he remained a Polish socialist; and still he was alive and kicking. It
was bad enough that Edelman did not fit the image that the official cultural producers in Israel wished the leaders of the rebellion to have; worse, he actively contested it. In 1945 he wrote a book on the uprising called
The Ghetto Fights
, which appeared in Hebrew only in 2001.
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He disliked the way he and his friends were portrayed visually and textually in Israeli scholarship – ‘none of them had ever looked like this … they didn’t have rifles, cartridge pouches or maps; besides, they were dark and dirty’, hardly the ideal type of handsome, Aryan-like young Jews seen in the Israeli museums of the Holocaust and in the pictures decorating official texts.
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Edelman explained that for him the uprising was a human choice about how to die (as Primo Levi, too, claimed). But death was not a simple issue for the political élite in Israel, which is always busy shaping the collective memory of a society of immigrants, while at the same time colonising a population and an area that resisted, at times violently. The leaders felt in the past, as they do today, a need to rank death in a hierarchy – to idealise one type and condemn another. Death in rebellion against the Holocaust was commendable; death in the Holocaust without resistance was questionable. Death for the sake of the nation was to be the sublime act of humanity.
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Edelman was ignored in official Israeli texts and representations of the Holocaust. He is known now thanks to Idith Zertal, who, in the relative openness of the public debate during the 1990s, introduced his story to the world.
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Zertal was the editor of
Haaretz
’s prestigious weekend supplement and edited
Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly
, the main publication of Tel Aviv University’s School of History; today she teaches in Switzerland. In her book
The Nation and the Death
(in English it was titled
Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood
), she discussed the Warsaw uprising. As Zertal came from the heart of the establishment, she was able to get a mainstream publishing house to publish her highly subversive book. In it, one encounters Israel as a necrophilic nation, obsessed and possessed by death, and particularly the death camps of the Holocaust – unable to comprehend the atrocity, and yet quite able to use and abuse its memory for the sake of its political aims.

Through Zertal’s book, we become able to see how deep the
institutionalisation of Holocaust memory went in the young Jewish state. She describes the construction of a selective narrative that adapted the history of the Holocaust to Israel’s strategic and ideological demands. Two themes were important in this respect. The first was planting in the public mind a clear contrast between the new ‘brave’ Jews of Israel and those who went ‘willingly’ to the slaughter in Europe’s extermination camps; the second, nationalising, or Zionising, the rebellions, particularly the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as precursors of the resurrection of the Jews as a new nation in their ‘redeemed’ homeland. To use a phrase from Benedict Anderson, who served as an inspiration for Zertal’s work: ‘The ancestor of the Warsaw uprising is the state of Israel’.
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When the two themes are taken together, it is clear that the Jews who participated in the uprising were constructed by the young Jewish state as ‘proto-Zionists’ and not, as Primo Levi and others saw them, as people who wished to choose their own kind of death in the face of massive extermination.
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In the official version of the collective memory, the uprisings were part of the narrative of Palestine, in which, whether in the Warsaw of the Second World War or north of the Galilee in Roman times, brave Jews stood firm in the face of their enemies. ‘The flame of the rebellion has been ignited in the ghettos in the name of Eretz Israel’, declared Zalman Shazar, who later became Israel’s third president.
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According to this account, the rebels drew courage from the Jews who had withstood the Arab attacks of the 1920s. This reductionist approach, explained Zertal, was not just a cynical construction of a tale; it also served a psychological yearning to comprehend the Holocaust: ‘By [the rebels’] acts, the impossible and inconceivable became both possible and conceivable’.
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