Actual footage from 1950 of the humanitarian crisis and the survival of the Palestinian people in the wake of their ethnic cleansing from Palestine.
The Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in order to make room for this:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O9W3UsdRyM]
(Tarboush tip: Razan and QuiQui)
Related posts:
- This is totally unrelated to EVERYTHING…
- Saudis Have Too Much Time On Their Hands
- Hib-Hob And You Don’t Stob!
- Sy Hersh Breaks Down Lebanon Fighting
- Nakba
Hey, I know that guy.
Posted by Moses | August 28, 2007, 10:30 amHow sad. Thanks for posting this bro.
Posted by Pali-American | August 28, 2007, 7:24 amNo comment about the fact Palestinians and their Arab allies tried to ethnically cleanse the Jews, first? And failed? Seriously? Is that really how you see the history? The Jews of Israel just went on an unprovoked rampage?
Posted by programmer craig | August 28, 2007, 1:06 pmProgrammed Crackhead,
You need to cleanse your mouth from all the teabagging you partake in.
Posted by Pali-American | August 28, 2007, 1:11 pm>>ISRAEL’S CULTURE OF MARTYRDOM
By Baruch Kimmerling
Nation
January 10, 2005 Issue
‘Death and the Nation: History, Memory, Politics’
by Idith Zertal
‘In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews
and Zionists in the Aftermath of World’
by Yosef Grodzinsky; with a forward by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Nations like to imagine themselves as unique, but
one belief they have in common is that it is
noble to die in their name. Death and redemption
are the themes of almost every form of
patriotism. In the case of Israel, however, the
connection between nationalism and death is
especially visceral. For the Jewish state is a
nation that emerged from the ashes of a project
of extermination, and that sees itself as the
best defense against the renewal of violent
persecution. Zionism, the state’s ruling
ideology, is a triumphal creed shadowed by death.
The Israeli historian Idith Zertal argues that
the nexus of death and nationalism is essential
to understanding Israeli society today. In her
powerful new book, Death and the Nation (which
will be published in an English translation this
summer by Cambridge University Press under the
title Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of
Nationhood), she demonstrates how the
catastrophes of Jewish history have been
transformed into nationalist fables of heroism,
victory and redemption. In debunking the official
nationalist historiography, Zertal’s book follows
in the footsteps of works such as Nachman
Ben-Yehuda’s The Masada Myth and Yael
Zerubavel’sRecovered Roots, both of which
explored how ancient Jewish history was distorted
to serve the needs of the Zionist movement. What
sets Zertal’s book apart is her focus on death.
She believes that an obsession with death and
martyrdom has vitally shaped the way Israelis
understand themselves and their state. One of her
recurring themes is “ancient graves produce fresh
graves.”
At the center of this culture of death is the
remembrance of martyrs–Jews who, in Zionist
ideology, had to die so that the state might be
born. The central chapter in the construction of
Israeli martyrology was, of course, the
Holocaust, but it began well before, according to
Zertal, who traces it to the cult surrounding
Joseph Trumpeldor, the first hero of the Jews who
settled in Palestine.”Never mind dying,”
Trumpeldor is reported to have said shortly
before his death in 1920. “It is good to die for
our country.” Born in a small town in the
northern Caucasus, Trumpeldor was strongly
influenced in his youth by a nearby farming
commune established by followers of Leo Tolstoy,
a model that soon merged in his mind with the
Zionist ideal of settling Palestine. In 1912 he
made his way to Palestine, hoping to establish
agricultural communes. The kibbutznik, however,
ended up achieving distinction not as a farmer
but as a soldier. Drafted into the Russian army
in 1902, he lost an arm in the Russo-Japanese
War. He went on to serve as the deputy commander
of a Jewish brigade established by the British in
World War I, participating in the Gallipoli
campaign of 1915.
When he returned to Palestine four years later,
he was called by the Jewish community leadership
to northern Galilee to help organize the defense
of small frontier-zone outposts against attacks
by Arab militias allied with the newly
established, British-backed regime of Faysal in
Damascus. These outposts had been created by
Jewish settlers as a way of establishing the
northern border of Palestine, an issue of
contention between France and Britain. In 1920, a
year after his return to Palestine, Trumpeldor
was mortally wounded while defending the outposts
at Tel Hai, a commemorative “holy place.” Along
with five of his comrades, he was buried near Tel
Hai. In 1934 a memorial was erected at his
gravesite, and it soon became, for Zionist youth
movements, a place of pilgrimage nearly as
important as Masada, where, according to the
Zionist interpretation of Flavius Josephus,
Jewish rebels committed mass suicide rather than
surrender to the Romans in AD 73.
The remembrance of Trumpeldor’s death at Tel Hai,
argues Zertal, marked the beginning of a cult of
death among Israeli Jews. The “new Jewish man,”
in this ideology, was ready to make the ultimate
sacrifice, to die defending his land and people,
in stark contrast with Diaspora Jews, who would
later be depicted as weaker souls who went “like
lambs to the slaughter” in the Holocaust. The
voices arguing that it is better to live for
one’s country than to die for it were accordingly
stifled and silenced. It is deeply ironic that
the very same society now claims to be shocked by
the “martyrdom culture” in the occupied
territories.
The Tel Hai affair also established the basic
pattern of conflict management with the Arabs. As
Zertal points out, the Zionist leadership made
appeals to the defenders of Tel Hai to withdraw,
citing their poor weapons and their immense
numerical inferiority. After a heated debate,
this option was rejected by the Jewish community
leadership (with the exception of Vladimir
Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Zionist
right). In this moment, we can see the seeds of
the idea that the construction of Jewish
settlements–the creation of “facts on the
ground,” in contemporary Israeli parlance–should
be the major tool by which to establish the
geopolitical boundaries of Jewish control over
Israel-Palestine. The line that runs from Tel Hai
to “Judea and Samaria” may be twisted, but it is
more direct than some would like to imagine.
Death was an inescapable presence in the early
days of the Jewish state, which had recently
become a sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of
Holocaust survivors. Israeli leaders have often
invoked the Holocaust as the ultimate
justification for the Jewish state (and, more
cynically, for Israel’s counterinsurgency tactics
in the occupied territories). Yet as Zertal
shows, Israel’s relationship to Holocaust victims
has been highly ambivalent, and the state’s
treatment of survivors has sometimes been
strikingly manipulative.
This point is clearly illustrated by Yosef
Grodzinsky, a neurolinguist at Tel Aviv
University, in his new book, In the Shadow of the
Holocaust, a detailed and well-researched account
of the struggle between the survivors of the
Holocaust and the various Zionist agencies and
emissaries who pressured them to immigrate to
Palestine, regardless of the survivors’ own
wishes, through superior organizational skills
and connections with the US military and civilian
authorities.
The Holocaust presented a unique set of
challenges for the Zionist movement. On the one
hand, the major reservoir of Jewish candidates
for immigration to Palestine had been
annihilated. On the other hand, between 1945 and
1951 millions of displaced people and refugees,
330,000 of them Jewish Holocaust survivors, were
desperately wandering the roads of Europe in
search of a home. Many of these survivors could
potentially be directed to Palestine, especially
since the immigration gates of the United States
were all but closed. This created a unique
opportunity to bring an unprecedented number of
Jews to Palestine. At the same time, these
potential immigrants suffered from high rates of
malnutrition, physical degeneration and illness.
Most had no family and no home
to which they
could return or be repatriated. They were
completely disoriented and many were still
influenced by the Nazi worldview, which regarded
them as subhumans, as Bruno Bettelheim (himself a
camp survivor) has described. However, until the
camps for Jewish displaced persons and refugees
were fully dismantled, less than 40 percent of
the survivors came to Palestine (or Israel, after
its establishment in 1948), in spite of heavy
pressures by the Zionist agencies: a
disappointing proportion, given the movement’s
initial expectations.
David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist
movement and Israel’s first prime minister,
viewed the future Jewish homeland as the one and
only destination for the survivors, as Zertal
makes clear in an illuminating discussion of the
odyssey of the 4,500 survivors from German camps
who set sail in July 1947 as “illegal immigrants”
on a ship later named Exodus. The real story of
the ship was far less glorious than the one told
in Leon Uris’s 1958 bestseller and Otto
Preminger’s 1960 film. When the ship embarked,
the UN Special Committee on Palestine was holding
discussions and Ben-Gurion, the head of the
Jewish Agency, the primary governing body of the
state-in-formation, felt that the plight of
Jewish refugees in Europe needed to be dramatized
in order to attract more sympathy for the Jewish
struggle over Palestine. The British authorities
had refused to let the immigrants disembark in
Palestine, or even to take refuge in transitional
camps in Cyprus, forcing the boat to be
redirected back to Germany. To prevent such a
ghastly outcome, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann
persuaded the French Prime Minister, Leon Blum,
to host the refugees. Ben-Gurion rejected this
solution out of hand, and the poor survivors
remained on board for seven months.
Ben-Gurion’s insensitivity was rooted in his
“Palestine-centric” attitude, best exemplified by
his 1938 remark that “if I knew it was possible
to save all children of Germany by their transfer
to England and only half of them by transferring
them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the
latter, because we are faced not only with the
accounting of these children but also with the
historical accounting of the Jewish people.” This
was not merely a rhetorical declaration.
Grodzinsky tells us with great pain how
Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the
immigration of 1,000 orphans, who were in
physical and emotional danger as a result of the
harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany
to England, where the Jewish community had
managed to secure them permits. Another group of
roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was
barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching
France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered
them safe haven.
Ben-Gurion’s strategy in the Exodus affair paid
off. The fate of the refugee ship attracted
considerable and sympathetic attention around the
world, and served the Zionist cause well. Few
observers at the time knew that many of the
refugees from the Exodus had applied for
immigration visas to the United States, and were
hardly anxious to settle in Israel. By
dramatizing the fate of the survivors, in whom he
had little interest except as future residents of
the state he was building (Good Human Material is
the original Hebrew title of Grodzinsky’s book),
Ben-Gurion helped to make Israel the world’s
chief power broker over Jewish affairs. Under his
leadership, Israel established a claim to
represent all of world Jewry, and on this basis
successfully claimed reparations from the Federal
Republic of Germany. Indeed, as Zertal argues,
Israel acquired the right to speak not only for
living Jews but for the 6 million exterminated
Jews, to whom Ben-Gurion suggested granting
symbolic citizenship–in effect, turning them
into martyrs for the Jewish state.
Another affair described in detail by Grodzinsky
concerns the preparation and conscription of the
displaced persons in European camps for
participation in the Arab-Jewish struggle over
Palestine. From 1946, the Palestinian Jewish
underground militia organizations–mainly
Ben-Gurion’s Haganah–attempted to recruit
veteran Jewish partisans from Russia, Poland and
France for the anticipated war. Moreover, in
February 1948 the Haganah issued a call to every
fit man and woman in the European camps between
the ages of 17 and 35, seeking volunteers for the
military forces of the embryonic Jewish state in
Palestine. The Zionist movement’s assumption that
the survivors in the camps would become citizens
of Israel and fight on its behalf aroused
resentment among many of them.
At the same time, the sense of existential fear
in the Jewish community of Palestine, roughly
600,000 in number and short on weapons, was quite
real. There was a deep anxiety that the coming
intercommunal (and perhaps interstate) war could
lead to their annihilation. The sense of urgency
led a number of inhabitants of the camps in
Europe to join the Haganah, which provided a
degree of pride and some psychological
compensation for the horrors they had suffered.
In addition, it rescued them from their miserable
lives in the camps.
Yet the request for volunteers yielded only about
700 recruits. The majority of survivors were in
no mood to take up arms for the Jewish state. “We
have already smelled fire, let others smell it
now,” said one. As Grodzinsky shows, the low
number of volunteers led, from April 1948 onward,
to “compulsory conscription” in the camps in
Germany and Austria. This “compulsory
conscription” was implemented by the autonomous
camp managers through a variety of means, among
them firing employees from their jobs; evicting
tenants from their houses; denying food supplies;
arrests and beatings; and the threat of ostracism
from the community. The number of draftees rose
to 7,800, many of whom disembarked from the ships
only to be sent directly to the battlefield to
die for their new homeland.
After the war, under pressure from Holocaust
survivors, Israel’s Knesset passed the Nazis and
Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, in 1950. The
law, tailored in accordance with the Nuremberg
precedent, required a mandatory death sentence
for every person found guilty of genocide, war
crimes and crimes against humanity, without any
differentiation between the degree and scope of
their crimes. The law’s intention was mainly
symbolic since, as Zertal observes, nobody
seriously considered the possibility that Israel
would bring Nazis to trial after Nuremberg, even
if some Nazis succeeded in escaping justice. The
passage of this law, however, would have
unintended and far-reaching consequences.
Initially intended to punish Nazis and their
collaborators in Eastern and Central Europe, the
law turned sharply against certain Jews
themselves. During the 1950s dozens of Jewish men
and women were sued by Holocaust survivors who
identified them as kapos–Jewish supervisors in
death and concentration camps–or as former
members of the Judenräte, the Jewish community
councils that provided the Nazis with lists of
community members and organized the transports to
the camps. In most of these cases the sentences
were light, since the judges felt that most of
the Jewish collaborators were themselves victims
and that the 1950 act was not designed to apply
to them. Nonetheless, the boundary between
perpetrators and v
ictims began to be blurred in
disturbing ways, raising troubling questions
about the role some Jews had played in the Nazi
campaign of destruction.
In the 1954 Kastner affair, the carefully policed
boundary between victim and perpetrator all but
evaporated, upsetting the stability of Israel’s
entire political system. The controversy broke
out after a 71-year-old Hungarian Jew, Malkiel
Gruenwald, published a pamphlet in which he
accused another Hungarian Jew, 48-year-old Dr.
Rudolf Kastner, of collaborating with the Nazis
in Hungary between 1944 and 1945. Kastner had
assumed various leadership roles within the
Jewish community in Hungary and Transylvania
before and during the war, including the
chairmanship of the “rescue committee” of Jews
who escaped from countries occupied by Nazi
Germany. After arriving in Palestine in 1946, he
became a prominent member of Ben-Gurion’s ruling
Labor party (then known as Mapai) and was to be
its candidate for the Knesset in the coming
election. Kastner also occupied several
influential positions, including spokesman of the
Trade and Industry Ministry, director of
broadcasting in Hungarian and Romanian, chief
editor of Uj Kelet (a Hungarian daily) and
chairman of the Organization of Hungarian Jewry
in Israel.
According to Gruenwald, Kastner, in his capacity
as a Jewish community leader in Hungary, had
provided indispensable assistance to SS
Lieutenant Col. Adolf Eichmann in the latter’s
efforts to ship a half-million Hungarian and
Transylvanian Jews to the extermination camps. At
the time Eichmann was head of the Gestapo
department in charge of Jewish matters and
population evacuation. Eichmann had been largely
responsible for the deportation to the East of
nearly 190,000 Austrian Jews from March 1938
onward. Eichmann had also participated in the
January 1942 Wannsee conference, where the
administrative and logistic details of the “final
solution to the Jewish problem” were settled. He
was not, it must be underscored, a policy-maker
in the Third Reich, and his activities and
decisions were mostly bureaucratic. Even his
negotiations with the Jewish dignitaries and
Nazi-appointed or self-appointed Judenräte were
aimed at achieving a well-organized and well-run
transportation process to the camps. His role, on
arriving in Budapest in March 1944, was to send a
half-million Hungarian Jews to their death as
swiftly and efficiently as possible.
To accomplish this goal, Eichmann needed Jewish
collaborators like Kastner, since he was
understaffed, with an SS team of 150 men and only
a few thousand Hungarian soldiers at his
disposal. Eichmann knew that the Jews would not
go voluntarily to the so-called resettlement
areas at the behest of the Nazis or the Hungarian
authorities. The only people they would trust
were their own leaders. Here, Kastner played a
major role. He and his staff had to make sure
that the Jews were not informed of the real
destination of the trains. Misled by Kastner and
others like him, the Jews showed up dutifully at
the trains in the belief that they were merely
being resettled. Some even made efforts to get on
the earlier trains in order to have a better
choice of housing in the new settlements. In
exchange for Kastner’s help, Gruenwald alleged,
the Nazis gave the gift of life in June 1944,
organizing a special rescue train for him and
1,600 Jewish notables, including Kastner’s
relatives and friends.
Charged with slander by Israel’s attorney
general, Gruenwald hired the services of a young,
able and highly motivated lawyer, Shmuel Tamir.
Tamir had his own political agenda, as did
Gruenwald and the judge presiding over the trial,
Benjamin Halevi. All three men were veterans of
the right-wing Lehi underground during the
British colonial period and were vehement
opponents of Ben-Gurion’s government, which
Kastner represented. During the trial, one of
Israel’s most dramatic ever, Tamir succeeded in
turning the tables on his client’s accuser,
arguing that the Jewish leadership in Palestine
had sabotaged a series of attempts to rescue Jews
during the Holocaust. In his verdict, which
cleared the accused of slander, Judge Halevi
rejected most of Gruenwald’s charges against the
Jewish leadership (during Eichmann’s trail, the
judge would maintain a discreet silence about
this painful issue), but he accepted the main
one: that Kastner had collaborated with the Nazis
and “sold his soul to the devil.”
Following the Gruenwald verdict, an appeal was
submitted to the High Court of Justice, but in
March 1957 Kastner was assassinated. Three people
were arrested, accused and sentenced for the
murder, but even today the assassination is a
matter of contention. The official version is
that the assassins belonged to a tiny right-wing
underground group inspired by the fringe
right-wing zealot Israel (Sheib) Eldad. Zertal’s
account, however, is closer to the alternative
version, advanced by extremist right- and
left-wing groups, according to which Kaster was
eliminated by the state security services because
he proved too much of an embarrassment for the
government. Posthumously, the High Court cleared
Kastner of responsibility for any of the crimes
of which Gruenwald accused him, except for that
of false testimony on behalf of Nazi officer Kurt
Becher at the Nuremberg trial.
Zertal’s preference for the unofficial version of
Kastner’s assassination is not incidental. This
version reinforces the link she makes between the
Kastner trial and the extraordinary trial that
followed it, that of Adolf Eichmann, whose
capture by Israeli agents in Argentina Ben-Gurion
announced in the Knesset in May 1960. According
to Zertal, there were several motives behind
Ben-Gurion’s decision to bring Eichmann to trial
in Israel. The first and most immediate was to
correct the impression left by the
Gruenwald-Kastner trial, namely that the Jewish
leadership in Palestine failed to undertake any
serious rescue efforts on behalf of their
European brethren during the Holocaust. Second,
in spite of his initial discomfort with the
subject and his insensitivity toward survivors,
Ben-Gurion sought to turn the Holocaust into the
central pillar of Israeli identity and to use it
as the main basis upon which to legitimize the
Zionist project. Third, the Eichmann case could
be used as a tool to equate Israel’s Arab enemies
with the Nazis. Fourth, the trial helped cast
Israel as the representative and savior of world
Jewry.
The trial lasted from April to August of 1961.
Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed in
Ramleh Prison in May 1962. It was a show trial,
not because the accused was innocent–Eichmann
was responsible for staggering crimes against
humanity–but because the trial was a grand
attempt to shape Jewish and Holocaust history and
memory by a single man, Ben-Gurion, and because
it had far less to do with the task of proving
Eichmann’s guilt. (Ben-Gurion went to great
lengths to keep post-Holocaust Germany–the “New
Germany,” as he called it–and the West German
leadership out of the trial, so as not to
embarrass Israel’s new military and economic
ally, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.)
The entire narrative was set in motion from the
very first statement made by Attorney General
Gideon Hausner:
When I stand before you here, judges of Israel,
to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann,
I am
not standing alone. With me are 6 million
accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and
point an accusing finger toward him who sits in
the dock and cry: “I accuse.” For their ashes are
piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields
of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of
Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the
length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries
out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I
will be their spokesman and in their name I will
unfold this awesome indictment.
Over four months, day after day, witnesses
recounted the horrors of the death camps, the
heroism of Jewish partisans and soldiers who
fought the Nazis, especially the hopeless
uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. As Zertal
observes, the Jewish resistance was presented as
having been organized and led solely by Zionist
movements and their leaders, while the role of
the Bundists, Beitarists and Communists was
either downplayed or ignored. Marek Edelman, one
of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and
the deputy commander of the uprising under
Mordechai Anielewicz, was not even mentioned.
Edelman, who represented the Jewish Socialist
Party (Bund), opposed Anielewicz’s decision to
commit suicide (accompanied with the murder of
one’s relatives). After the war, Edelman rejected
the very idea that one could draw “lessons” from
the Holocaust, as well as the notion that Zionism
provided the “answer” to the Jewish question. He
remained in Poland and achieved fame as a leading
cardiologist and a key figure in the Solidarity
labor movement of the 1980s. In 1946 he published
one of the first accounts of the ghetto uprising,
The Ghetto Fights, in Polish, Yiddish and
English. The book was translated into Hebrew only
in 2001.
The Eichmann trial received extraordinary
attention in Israel, where much of it was
broadcast live on state radio (the country’s only
radio station at the time), which functioned, in
the words of media expert Elihu Katz, as Israel’s
“tribal campfire.” The state radio supplemented
its live broadcasts with follow-ups and daily and
weekly summaries and comments. For most of
Israel’s Jewish population, the trial provided a
rite of passage, imbuing them with the sense that
they were all, in a way, Holocaust survivors and
that another Holocaust might be imminent. Had it
not been for the Eichmann trial, Zertal suggests,
Israelis might not have seen the 1967 war as an
“existential threat” of Holocaust proportions but
as a secular war over disputed land.
The trial also attracted considerable attention
abroad. Hundreds of foreign reporters descended
on Jerusalem to cover the remarkable story.
(Adding to the drama–and raising questions about
the trial’s legality–was the fact that the
accused had been kidnapped in Argentina by the
Israeli secret service, and that the Israeli law
was invoked retroactively.) Among these reporters
the best-known was the political philosopher
Hannah Arendt, who had recently achieved fame for
her 1951 tome The Origins of Totalitarianism. A
German Jew who had studied under Heidegger (with
whom she had a brief affair), Arendt had a long,
troubled relationship with the Jewish state. In
her early 20s she was a Zionist. In the 1940s, as
she became a critic of any form of nationalism,
she drew close to the tiny Brit Shalom movement,
which espoused an Arab-Jewish binational state in
Palestine. In 1945 she published an article
titled “Zionism Reconsidered”–which forecast
most of the wrongdoings of Zionism while still
demonstrating a deep emotional and intellectual
concern for the future of Israel and its people.
Arendt arrived in Jerusalem as a reporter for The
New Yorker, but her interest in the trial went
far beyond that of a foreign correspondent. She
saw the trial as an opportunity to re-examine her
thesis about the uniqueness and modernity of the
Nazi regime and to find answers to the enigmatic
question of how it was possible to implement the
Final Solution so easily and efficiently.
Elaborating on an argument in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, she asserted that the
bureaucratization and rationalization of the
nation-state made possible a new, industrialized
kind of mass murder. Sitting at his desk in a
sterile office, organizing the logistics of
properly managing transportation and
extermination camps, Eichmann was, in her view, a
symptom of the “banality of evil” rather than a
prime mover in the Nazi machinery of organized
killing.
As the Arendt scholar Jerome Kohn has argued in
an illuminating essay, one of the major reasons
for the controversy provoked by her book Eichmann
in Jerusalem was and remains the failure of many
readers, both Jews and non-Jews, to make the
tremendous mental effort required to transcend
the fate of one’s own people and see what was
pernicious for all humanity. The notion of a
“crime against humanity” was introduced in the
Nuremberg trials of major war criminals in 1946,
but in Arendt’s opinion the crime was confused
there with “crimes against peace” and “war
crimes” and had never been properly defined nor
its perpetrators clearly recognized.
In Arendt’s view, the Nazi genocide, while
“perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people,”
was a crime that “violated the order of mankind.”
What stood out for her as a political philosopher
was less “the choice of victims” than the
extraordinary “nature of the crime.”
Unlike some Israeli-Jewish intellectuals, such as
Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, Arendt did not
object to the trial being held in Jerusalem. She
did not argue for an international court, nor did
she oppose the capital sentence. She did,
however, object to Attorney General Hausner’s
understanding of Jewish history, and of the
nature of Nazism as a form of genocidal
anti-Semitism. In his opening speech, Hausner
presented Jewish history as a narrative of
eternal victimization. Far from being an
unprecedented program of mass industrialized
killing, the Holocaust was discussed as if it
were merely an immense pogrom. The effect of
Hausner’s speech, in Arendt’s view, was to define
Zionism and Israeli nationalism as the only
guarantors of Jewish survival and continuity. She
also objected to the ideologically motivated
characterization of Eichmann as the incarnation
of the ultimate evil. Arendt in no way sought to
diminish the magnitude of Eichmann’s crimes. But
with her concept of the banality of evil, she
sought to underscore the bureaucratic machinery
in which Eichmann was a cog (however
enthusiastic), and without which he could never
have committed his crimes.
However, Arendt did not believe that the rise of
the nation-state and its bureaucratization
sufficed as an explanation of the Nazi genocide.
More controversially, she also turned to an
examination of the social structure of the Jewish
communities and the nature of their leadership
and representatives. Drawing upon Raul Hilberg’s
exhaustive research in The Destruction of the
European Jews (a book that has never been
translated into Hebrew and is not quoted in
Israel), she provided an unsparing anatomy of the
ways in which the European Jewish communities
facilitated Nazi purposes–for example, by
providing lists and addresses of their members
and their property. She also analyzed the ways in
which most of the Jewish leadership consciously
collaborated with the Nazis. Law-abiding to a
fault, the
y filled out endless forms (about their
property), policed themselves, funded the
“project of resettlement,” went to the
concentration points and entered the trains of
“resettlement,” while most of their leaders were
fully aware of the railroad destination. The Nazi
officers and clerks were surprised at how
obediently the Jews went to their death.
Thus, the Kastner case cannot be considered as an
isolated one, but should be seen as part of a
syndrome that characterized both Eastern and
Western organized Jewish communities. As Arendt
pointed out, in cities where the Jews were less
tightly organized, or where the leadership warned
the population or refused to collaborate with the
Nazis, many more Jews survived. Had the Nazis
been forced to hunt individuals or families, they
would have needed more time and manpower to
accomplish their mission. By a uniquely cruel
twist of fate, what had been for generations a
vehicle of Jewish survival became, in the hands
of their enemies, one of the major tools for
their physical annihilation. Contrary to Arendt’s
often vituperative critics, this analysis does
not reduce the perpetrators’ responsibility–if
anything, it makes the Holocaust even more
monstrous.
Eichmann in Jerusalem sparked “a civil
war…among New York intellectuals,” as Irving
Howe recalled in his memoirs. Writing in the New
York Times Book Review, the noted historian
Barbara Tuchman accused Arendt of seeking to aid
in Eichmann’s defense, despite the fact that her
book was published only after Eichmann’s
execution. According to Zertal, in the mid-1960s
alone more than a thousand articles and books
were published in response to Arendt–most of
them in the spirit of Tuchman’s attack. Arendt’s
descriptions of Eichmann’s pettiness struck many
American Jewish readers as a coded apologia for
his behavior; her discussions of trial evidence
regarding Jewish collaborators, as well as of
non-Zionist Jews and their role in the
resistance, were widely seen as attempts to blame
the Jews for the Holocaust and to undermine the
Zionist cause. A refugee from Hitler’s Germany,
Arendt found herself subjected to a vehement
campaign of vilification by the Anti-Defamation
League and other Jewish organizations, and
denounced as a self-hating Jew, an anti-Semite
and even a Nazi.
In Israel, by contrast, the language barrier
insulated most of the population from Arendt’s
heterodox ideas. Few Israelis were aware of
intellectual controversies beyond the country’s
borders, unless they passed through the filters
of the local intelligentsia. Although Eichmann in
Jerusalem was translated into Hebrew by the
Israeli thinker Boas Evron soon after its
publication, it was not published in Israel for
almost four decades, and even today none of
Arendt’s other work is available in Hebrew.
This state of affairs did not protect her from
attacks in the Hebrew press. Shortly after the
publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom
Scholem, the distinguished scholar of Jewish
mysticism, wrote an open letter in the Hebrew
daily Davar accusing Arendt of lacking ahavat
Israel–”love for the Jewish people.” In her
reply, published in Encounter, she explained that
the notion of allegiance to a group–particularly
one to which she would be bound by birth–was
highly suspicious to her, since it is rooted in
self-interest. Her love, Arendt sharply remarked,
was reserved for her friends. In her political
commitments, she professed a “love of humanity”
and not of a distinct people. Scholem and Arendt
agreed to publish their exchange, and indeed both
letters were printed in a book, but not in
Hebrew. Thus, Hebrew-speaking readers only had
the opportunity to read Scholem’s criticism of a
book that was not available to them and, unless
they read English, they had no access to the
author’s response. In Death and the Nation,
Zertal presents, for the first time in Hebrew,
considerable portions of Arendt’s letter to
Scholem.
One striking effort of the attorney generalduring
Eichmann’s trial was to equate the Arabs with the
Nazis. This was achieved by inflating the role of
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the prominent Palestinian
political and religious leader (chairman of the
Supreme Muslim Council and the mufti of
Jerusalem) in the extermination of the Jews. In
1937, a year after the outbreak of the Arab
Revolt, the British tried to arrest Husseini,
among other Arab rebels, in the hope of quelling
the uprising. Husseini escaped to Fascist Italy
and then to Germany, where he offered his
services to Hitler. There is no doubt that he saw
in Nazi Germany an important ally against Zionism
and, in at least one case, he tried to intervene
to prevent the rescue of 10,000 Jewish children
to Palestine. Husseini probably knew and approved
of the Nazi plan to annihilate the Jewish people
and hoped to receive a proper position in
“liberated Palestine.” He helped the Nazis form a
collaborationist Muslim brigade in Bosnia, and to
broadcast propaganda to the Arab world. However,
the argument that he was a chief adviser to the
Nazis on the “solution of the Jewish problem”–an
argument on prominent display at Yad Vashem,
Israel’s Holocaust Museum–is preposterous. The
Germans did not need Husseini’s advice and in
fact scorned the non-Aryan religious cleric.
Since then, however, “the mufti” has become one
of the major assets of pro-Israel propaganda. The
argument was and is as follows: The Arabs do not
accept the establishment of a Jewish state in
Palestine, therefore they are anti-Semites who
want to annihilate all the Jews and to accomplish
the Nazi program–the best example being the
mufti’s alliance with Nazi Germany. This social
construction of reality ignores not only the
complexity and the fundamentally different basis
of the Israeli-Arab conflict but also some
inconvenient historical facts. One such fact is
that while assisting the Nazis, the mufti lost
almost all his influence over the Palestinian
Arabs, which he never regained. Another is that
during the 1930s and ’40s Palestine was the only
country in the region (and perhaps in the whole
world) where no Nazi party or organization was
established. During the 1930s, some Arab, as well
as some Jewish, leaders expressed admiration for
fascist regimes, but this was before the racist
bases of these regimes became clear. It was only
much later that Arabs borrowed anti-Semitic
literature and motifs from the Europeans and used
them in their propaganda.
It’s true, of course, that the native Palestinian
Arabs, as well as the Arabs of the region, did
not like or welcome the European Jews who
colonized Palestine. They perceived the Jewish
claims of ownership over the land based on a
distant and ambiguous past and on some holy
scriptures as unjust and ridiculous. They opposed
this colonization with all the means at their
disposal, sometimes with indiscriminate violence
and terror. The confrontation between Arab and
Jew in Palestine was a conflict of mutually
exclusive interests, much like any other
ethno-national conflict. To be sure, there were
some racist undertones and expressions on both
sides. But it is dangerously misleading to regard
the Arab resistance against the Jewish presence
and the gradual conquest of the land as an
expression of historical anti-Semitism.
Ironically, the Zionist effort to “Nazify” the
Arabs–a strategy that began in the 1940s-
-ends
up diminishing the extraordinary genocidal crimes
committed by Nazi Germany.
Zertal cogently demonstrates how a social
construction of a “second coming Holocaust” was
built before and during the wars of 1948 and 1967
for the mobilization of domestic public opinion,
world Jewry and Western nations. In fact, this
campaign of fear directly contradicted the
Zionist dogma asserting that a Jewish state in
Palestine would insure Jewish security (and
normalize Jewish existence). This inherent
paradox was ironically expressed by Israeli Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol, who referred to the Jewish
state as Shimshon der Nebedicher (in Yiddish “the
Wretched Samson”), the mighty military superpower
that considers itself a victim. By invoking the
Holocaust as a catastrophe whose repetition had
to be avoided by any means (such as Abba Eban’s
famous definition of the Green Line as “Auschwitz
borders”), Israeli leaders unburdened themselves
of almost any moral restrictions, or even
obedience to internal and international laws,
whether it came to the making of nuclear weapons
(with France’s assistance and America’s tacit
acceptance), the occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza or the invasion of Lebanon. Faced with
political problems, Israel saw only existential
threats. Once the Palestinian national movement
was defined as a mortal threat to Jewish
survival, any response to it, from the demolition
of homes to the bombing of refugee camps, could
be justified as legitimate self-defense. The
worst abuses of the Holocaust in Israel, however,
have occurred in the midst of debates between
Jews, particularly the controversies around the
territories occupied in 1967. The frequency and
casualness with which Israeli Jews accuse one
another of Nazi-like or anti-Semitic behavior
today is a disturbing measure of the coarsening
of the country’s political culture.
The example of such invective best-known outside
Israel was the left-wing philosopher Yeshayahu
Leibovitz’s description of settlers as
“Judeo-Nazis.” More common and far more
dangerous, however, has been the abuse of the
Holocaust by the Israeli right wing. As Zertal
points out, almost every Israeli politician who
has tried to make peace with the Arabs has been
likened to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime
minister who tried to avoid the Second World War
by appeasing Hitler, or as a “Nazi” whose secret
desire is nothing less than the annihilation of
the Jewish people. Any “concession” to the Arabs
signals, in these terms, the destruction of
Israel, the end of Zionism and the end of the
Jewish people. Another symbol often seen at
right-wing demonstrations is the yellow Star of
David, the single most emotive symbol of Jewish
victimization. If Ariel Sharon is Israel’s prime
minister today, it is in large part because of
this right-wing campaign of vilification against
supporters of a negotiated peace with the
Palestinian people. Now, it seems, it is his turn
to be demonized as his proposed evacuation from
the Gaza Strip settlements comes to be labeled as
a process aimed at making the Land of Israel
judenrein–i.e., cleansed of Jews.
In October 1995 Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and
the late Rafael Eitan attended a rally in
Jerusalem organized by the extremist right-wing
organizations Chabadand Zu Artzenu. The assembled
mob called for the deaths of the “Oslo criminals”
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Cabinet minister
Shimon Peres, calling them the “Judenrat.” One
month later Rabin was shot dead by Yigal Amir, a
religious nationalist youth who hoped to stop the
implementation of the Oslo Accords. Rabin’s
assassination was the culmination of months of
unprecedented incitement and violent
demonstrations against the accords and the prime
minister himself, who was blamed for betraying
the idea of a Greater Israel. At right-wing
rallies protesters held up posters depicting
Rabin in an SS uniform. Opposition leaders played
a major role in these incitements by using an
unrestrained rhetoric of blood, land and treason.
“Never forget” has been the mantra of Jewish and
Israeli politics for three decades. But in Death
and the Nation, Idith Zertal argues, daringly and
I think rightly, that one can “remember too
much.” The obsessive commemoration of the
Holocaust and of Jewish victimhood has blinded
much of the Jewish community to Israel’s real
position in the world and to the humanity of the
Palestinian people. The result has been to make
ever more distant a reasonable political solution
to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is the victory
of death over life, of the past over the future.
To be sure, there are periods in the history of a
nation when ultimate sacrifices are necessary,
and a cult of death unavoidable. The question in
Israel today is whether this heroic period has
come to an end or whether the prevailing ideology
of the 1948 war will last another hundred years,
until the entire “Land of Israel” is “liberated.”
To choose the former option is to grant priority
to the lives of Israel’s citizens, Jewish and
Arab. To choose the latter is to remain a
community of victims, joined in a mythical
communion of Jewish sacrifice in an eternally
hostile gentile world. Tragically, most of the
organized American Jewish communityseems to
prefer the mythic option, a course that can only
lead to disaster.< <
this is old news to me, but I take it to heart.
http://www.whimit.com/forum_read.php?f=17&id;=24531&page;=4
{^.*}
Posted by Anonymous | August 28, 2007, 2:14 pmI like how fadi uses footage of asshole teenagers as an example of what Israel is all about. yes, this is exactly why the Palestinians were displaced (wasn’t there a war going on?). For someone who is supposedly? intelligent this is quite a misleading and idiotic post.
holla back, son.
Posted by Anonymous | August 28, 2007, 3:27 pmAnon 3:27pm. Palestinians were kicked out of their homes and land. Racist assholes like the ones featured in the second video were brought from Europe and given full rights to live on the land and be citizens of the State created, to the exclusion of the indiginous people who were kicked out and featured in the first video.
i hollered at you son, now go read.
Posted by Pali-American | August 28, 2007, 3:34 pmQ: does anyone else equate Sharon’s “coma” to something a little less picnic-convenience and a little more ‘oh, he’s gonna pay for removing those settlers’ out there; than me?
puhLeez.
{^.*}
Posted by Anonymous | August 28, 2007, 3:35 pmi think the illegal Jewish settlers displayed in the video do represent the racism of colonialism and complete disregard of the natives (such as “this is my land”) that such racism entails. I actually prefer the verbal abuse of some drunk kids as opposed to the physical manifestation of their words delivered by the colonial state of Israel to the ethnically cleansed and dispossesed Palestinians.
Posted by Fadi | August 28, 2007, 3:48 pmaight. so we are seriously even considering an account written by jews allocating themselves land from two thousand years ago? lol HuH? little known fact that the other parcel of land they were considering to make a “holy” state at the time was in south america. things that make you go.. things that make you go.. wait a second, things that make you go, WTF?
{^.*}
Posted by Anonymous | August 28, 2007, 4:25 pmWTF does “2000 years ago” have to do with the fact that Palestinians backed by Arab Armies tried to ethnically cleanse the Jews from the Israeli portion of the Israel/Palestine?Jordan partition of 1948? You guys tried to steal their land and exterminate them. And you lost. It’s not a real good idea to broadcast to the whole world that you intend to wipe a people out, try to do just that, and then NOT SUCCEED.
The stupidest part is that you are still trying. And failing. 60 years later.
Posted by Craig | August 28, 2007, 5:24 pmCraig, not even Zionist historians will claim that the Palestinians were attempting to kick all the Jews out of Palestine in the 1948 war.
Posted by Anonymous | August 28, 2007, 6:36 pmThen what would they claim?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab-Israeli_War
Do you know who this man is?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Qadir_al-Husayni
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, the Chairman of the Arab Higher Committee collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In 1940, he asked the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right, “to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy
He spent the second half of WWII in Germany making radio broadcasts exhorting Muslims to ally with the Nazis in war against their common enemies. In one of these broadcasts, he said, “Arabs, arise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, such statements by Arab leaders (along with the Mufti’s violently anti-Semitic history) led to a widespread belief that the Israelis were facing a new “warrant for genocide.”
Posted by Craig | August 29, 2007, 1:07 amCraig, that doesn’t even make any sense man. No historians would claim that the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948 was anything but a recent transplant from Europe. Of course, you have the old jewish minority that was very small that has always existed int he arab world, living more or less peacefully with the arabs under the ottoman empire (treated WAY better than the Europeans ever treated european jewery walled off in ghettos). But we all know jewish immigration to Palestine began in an obvious way in the early 1900s.
I don’t think anyone would be too surprised if local inhabitants in, say, the US would protest and take up arms if their land was basically sold from underneath them to a new minority created over a handful of decades.
When floods of Jewish immigrants (leaving various parts of Europe because Europeans at the time were pretty unwelcoming, to say the least) began turning up in Palestine and started buying up everything, they weren’t immediately viewed with deep hostility.
It was only when after it started becoming clear to the Arabs what was actually happening that local inhabitants started getting pretty defensive and hostile. After World War 2 this artifically transplanted immigrant community was put IN CHARGE of palestine – the creation of Israel – and palestinians were forced to leave -THAT’s right around when arabs began to realize that Israel was a serious threat. Rationally, it makes a lot of sense actually…not just because i’m arab, but it does: If you set up the same situation, substituting fictional names for the historical actors, then the immediate reaction is really quite predictable and (i think) justified.
This is made even worse by the fact that the ARABS didn’t kill 5million jews and lots of gypies and gay people….i’m pretty sure Europeans committed the Holocaust. Just like it was Europeans who have treated Jews like second-class citizens through most of history…which is why they were inspired to leave Europe in the first place!!
So basically, the Arabs get to pay in land and blood because Europeans in history are a bunch of imperialistic racist bastards. Not to be crude, but um – i think that’s the bottom line here.
Because no one rational person can REALLY, TRULY believe a land claim 2000years old based on some dubious religious logic is legimitate.
Posted by Anonymous | August 29, 2007, 1:26 amcome on, don’t bring in collaboration with or pleas for assistance from the Nazis as some sort of ‘proof’ of evil…you want to investigate the history of US actors at the time? a freaking LOT of businessmen and such had ties with the Nazis.
don’t feed us some crap about this justifying this being a ‘new warrent for genocide’. Just say plain and true that there was (justrifiably) some paranoia here: first having just suffered a Holocoust at the hands of Nazis and thier European colloborators, and second the paranoia that comes of knowing you’ve stole something and realizing you’ll never be secure…unless you kill or expell or crush every last palestinian to attempt to make them ‘forget’ or ‘give up’ thier claim…which has seemed to be Israeli policy since inception
Posted by Anonymous | August 29, 2007, 1:32 amcome on, don’t bring in collaboration with or pleas for assistance from the Nazis as some sort of ‘proof’ of evil…you want to investigate the history of US actors at the time?
That was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Not a “businessman”. And have any of you actually READ the history of what happened in 1947 and 1948? And please give me a break about “transplants”… what the fuck does that have to do with the fact that it was Arabs and Palestinians who intended ethnic cleansing on the Jews (and in fact, attempted it) – not vice versa?
What’s the matter? You think the real history is irrelevant, when it doesn’t match today’s propaganda?
Hypocrites.
Honestly, where do you find people (westerners) stupid enough to believe in your cause? Are there really so many ignorant and completely gullible people on this planet?
Nice comparison to Tibet, as well. I wonder how many people will buy off on that one? When did Tibet ever try to exterminate the Chinese? When did Tibetans engage in terrorism and mass murder of the innocent to promote their cause?
Posted by programmer craig | August 29, 2007, 3:26 pmProgrammed Crackhead,
The people in the first video are people who were fucking ethnically cleansed. There homes and land were taken from them. A state was created, Israel. Israel controls millions of people, but discriminates and indiscriminatley kills, abuses and steals from a sub-group of those people because they are not Jewish.
You are a teabagging zionut.
Posted by Pali-American | August 29, 2007, 3:57 pmTibet? what are you talking about. I didn’t say anything about tibet.
And I still think it a valid point that quite a few people were involved with the nazis. I don’t think there is anything particularly odd about that – I was people polite to say ‘businessmen’ – we all know the ties between business and politics in the US. Our own checkered history during the Nazi era makes it harder to throw stones at others.
I notice how you didn’t respond to anything else. Fair enough. Not much you can say when its pointed out that it was EUROPEANS who have been anti-semitic in history and them who committed the holocaust…at the very heart of this debate, i see a European problem that became an Arab problem…for which the arabs themselves are to blame, apparently.
But there’s no need for belligerance, man. Americans do read history in school, but it’s the history they write which involves omitting huge unpleaseant bits that are no longer ‘appropropriate’ to discuss. If you are trying to convince me that American is a nation of nuanced historians, who give a fuck, then that’s just silly….
Posted by Anonymous | August 29, 2007, 11:58 pmStern Gang (of which many of Israel’s Prime Ministers were trained in) had ties to the Nazis.
What the fuck does that have to do with the fact that the video one shows people being ethnically cleansed, in fact, by zionists…who then established a state on these poeple’s land, excluded them and rules over others who it refuses to grant equal rights to?
Programmed Crackhead, stick to teabagging, you’re much better at it than spewing propoganda.
Posted by Anonymous | August 30, 2007, 8:38 am“When did Tibetans engage in terrorism and mass murder of the innocent to promote their cause?”
I don’t know. But Zionists, Stern Gang, Hagana, etc. and later the IDF use terrorism, ethnic cleansing and mass murder to promote their cause, a racist oppresive state, all the time.
Next time you’re teabagging a zionut (or two) ask him about it.
Posted by Pali-American | August 30, 2007, 8:47 am