Israel and the Holocaust Trauma

Author(s): Robert S. Wistrich

Source: Jewish History, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall, 1997), pp. 13-20
Published by: Springer
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 Jewish History ? Volume 11, No. 2 * 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
of "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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 14 Robert S. Wistrich

secular, Zionist or non-Zionist. To quote Jean Amery, the Holocause epitomized

that "solidarity in the face of threat" which has become a defining 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?8 What will be the
psychological effects on a new generation of Diaspora Jews who no longer know
at first 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 having 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

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 Israel and the Holocaust Trauma 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 not 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 danger 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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 16 Robert S. Wistrich

sense of national emergency and to mobilize Jewish organizations and their

supporters.
Opinion polls in recent years reveal an interesting finding 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 Yom Kippur) and American anti-Semitism third (just ahead of
God!) as a symbol of Jewish identity.15 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
from 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 and 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.n 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 die 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 final consequence of life in the Galut. The lesson appeared to

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 Israel and the Holocaust Trauma 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" ofthat 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 of Yom 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 itself - 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 ana 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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 18 Robert S. Wistrich

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 from 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

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 Israel and the Holocaust Trauma 19

through the distorting lens of Nazi mass murder, even if it may temporarily serve
Israeli interests to do so. Some Israelis also need to reconsider their 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.25 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. Conor Cruise O'Brian, The Siege (New York, 1986), 317.
2. Rochelle G. Saidel, "The Role of the Holocaust in the Political Culture of Israel," in
Remembering for the Future: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World
(Oxford, 198), Theme II, 1379-92.
3. Charles S. Lieb man and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel (University of California
Press, 1983), 142.

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 20 Robert S. Wistr?ch_

4. Saidel, 1385, quoting the Israeli author Boaz Evron's critique of the central i ty of the Holocaust
in contemporary Israeli culture.
5. David Shipler, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (New York, 1986), 346-7.
6. Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its
Realitites (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), 58.
7. Ibid.
8. Ismar Schorsch, uThe Holocaust and Jewish Survival," Midstream 27/1 (January 1981):
38-42.
9. Michael Berenbaum, After Tragedy and Triumph; Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and
the American Jewish Experienc (Cambridge 1990), 8-13, 36-40.
10. Yehuda Bauer, "Whose Holocaust?" Midstream 26/9 (November 1980): 42.
11. Geoffrey Hartmann (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, Ind.,
1986).
12. David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York, 1984).
13. Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness (Toronto, 1979).
14. 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.
15. Steven M. Cohen, "Jewish Continuity over Judaic 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.
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.
17. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago asnd London, 1990), 207-27.
18. Robert S. Wistrich, Between Redemption and Perdition: Antisemitism and Modern Jewish
Identity (London, 1990), 195-205.
19. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1992), (Hebrew),
368fT.
20. Dan Diner, "Israel and the Trauma of the Mass Extermination," Telos 57 (Autumn 1983):
41-52.
21. Robert Wistrich, Antisemitim: The Longest Hatred (London, 1991), 249-50.
22. Snippier, Arab and Jew, 339-44.
23. Charles Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American
Experiences (New Haven and London, 1990), 32-3.
24. Aharon Appelfeld, quoted in Jerusalem Post Magazine, 27 November, 1987.
25. Segev, The Seventh Million.
26. Moshe Zimmermann, "Israels 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.
27. See Robert S. Wistrich and David Ohana (eds.), The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory
and Trauma (London, 1995).

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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