Israel struggling with the Shoah

“” We cut ourselves from our inner memory, of our most intimate memories This reflection by the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld inspires the subject of the latest book by Georges Bensoussan, specialist in Zionism. Auschwitz in inheritancehis previous work published in 1983, analyzed the memory regime in European countries. This time focusing his investigation into Israel, the historian attacks one of the best -shared myths at the start of XXI^e Century: the State of Israel was born out of the bad conscience of Western powers and compensation given to the Jews for the misfortunes suffered. By showing how, on the contrary, the Shoah and the story that prolonged it took the Zionist project, Bensoussan back to back, on the one hand, the defenders of the Palestinian cause which, like the historian Edward Said, make Palestinians the ultimate victims of the Shoah and the Israelis a new incarnation of the Nazi persecutors and the other, historians “ post-Zionists “, Which, like Idith Zertal, denounce the manipulations of Zionist leaders playing the inheritance of persecution to legitimize the Wars of Israel.

Last avatar of this conspiracy theory, the thesis according to which the State of Israel is the consequence of the extermination of Jews in Europe is, according to Bensoussan, of pure and simple negationism. This version of the facts indeed ignores the many – and very tangible – manifestations of the presence of Jews in Palestine prior to 1945. We must therefore start by recalling the existence around the 1920s of a strong community of 84,000 souls (to reach 484,000 in 1942), the rebirth of Hebrew under the leadership of Ben Yehouda, the presence of universities, a press, unions and even an army, which, in short, constitutes the evidence of the existence of a state, even before the official recognition of it. To silence these facts not only considers the historical truth to consciously disguise, but even more so that they are refrained from understanding Israeli reality and the place occupied today in the Holocaust in the history of Israel.

Because the memory of the Holocaust has not integrated smoothly or pain in the construction of Israeli identity. She went so far as to violently question the foundations of the Zionist project itself. This movement has proven to be all the more painful since Zionism maintains a relationship both privileged and paradoxical with the history of the Jewish people. Running the people of Israel on the land of their ancestors, it is in the biblical story that the latter anchors its legitimacy. But, in his desire to break with the discourse of the diaspora, he also seeks to detach from it, presenting himself as a new birth. It is this contradiction that came to exacerbate the difficulty in absorbing the memory of the Shoah.

The war has imposed itself on Israeli leaders as a political test first, then moral. To understand it, it is necessary to consider no longer Zionism in its dimension of intellectual project, but in the materiality of its political reality. Political Zionism of the beginnings, that of Yishouv, by seeking to impose the existence of a Jewish State in Palestine, relied on a political discourse at the antipodes of that, emancipator, of the Jews of Europe. It was both a question of proving that it was necessary for the Jews to constitute a State, but also, against the anti -Semites, that as much as the right they had its strength and the capacity. However, by being incapable of saving the Jews of Europe from extermination, the Zionists brought a blow to the new image which they had strived to forge and seemed to return to the old prejudices. Many were then those who considered better to ignore the facts rather than admitting their helplessness. From whom the Jews of Yishouv, in collective mourning from December 1942 to January 1943, they really felt orphaned ? Of their tortured brothers or their own dreams ? The idea that the future state would constitute a refuge for all the Jews of the earth vanished in smoke in the camps.

It was not until the early 1980s, the moment of unlocking memory, for historians to ask the question and opened the debate on the attitude of former Zionist leaders. Have they been, as has often been said, for example, of Ben-Gurion, insensitive to the fate of the Jews in Europe because their unique goal was the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine ? Or did they play this indifference to hide their helplessness, as the Israeli historian Touva Friling thinks on the contrary ? The controversy is far from closed as evidenced, for example, the success in 1998 of the seventh million, the work of Tom Ségev, journalist in Haaretz.

Massada against Auschwitz

As in Western countries, the years following war were in Israel years of occultation. However, in a country where, in the 1950s, just over 40 % of the population consisted of camp survivors, denial could not take place in the same way. Bensoussan describes the way in which the underground work of memory will gradually erode the forms of an apparently victorious political project on the military field, before tackling the very face of society. The shadows that populate the country, the remarks held secret “ children out of children »As evidenced by the latest novel by Amir Gutfreund, Indispensable people never diehave never ceased to be part of the reality of the country. Simply, the Israeli nation has, for a time, tried to identify with the political voluntarism of its leaders for both vital and ideological reasons imposed on it by its adversaries. To the survivors we therefore opposed the character of the Sabra, a young pioneer born on the land of Israel and tearing cultures into the desert. To the Jewish victim – the question of the responsibility of the Jews of Europe returned in a laminating way in the mouth of the Hausner prosecutor throughout the Eichmann trial -, the victorious soldier was substituted and it was not until the 1990s to see the disappear of the prayer of Yizkhor, recited in memory of the dead, the expression “ like a herd at the slaughterhouse ». “” They did not speak our language, the language of survivors. We had another language, a language that we had acquired during the war ». The words of Itzhak Zuckerman, survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and mounted in Israel after the war, are among the most evocative of the discomfort created in the population by the denial of memory that Zionist leaders have sought a time to impose.

But there are cases where political voluntarism is not enough. Israel must have gradually assumed the six million exterminated Jews on the international scene. Dead because they were Jews, they naturally entered the composition of the Jewish people who founded the very existence of the State. It was in their name that the State of Israel asked after the war from Germany. It was on their behalf that the Eichmann trial took place from April 1961.

Consequently, Israeli society then found itself in the grip with an inextricable work of mourning which brings to its climax the ambiguous relationship that Judaism has had for centuries with history. There is the Kastner-Grünwald trial of 1954-1955, during which a Hungarian Jew emigrated to Israel, the D^R Kastner, is accused of having collaborated with the Nazis to save his family ; He is sentenced before being laundered on appeal-he will mean in the meantime shot at the foot of his building. There is also the Eichmann trial which, by placing the witnesses at the heart of the accusation, returns their faces to the voices that whispered in the background of Israeli society. The six -day war, making plausible, in Israel and in the world, the hypothesis of a destruction of the State of Israel, then that of Kippur, resurface the ghosts that were tried in vain to bury. The Shoah is therefore omnipresent in Israeli society carried by the questions of children of the second generation who struggle to put a name on what they do not manage to ignore. Many writers and filmmakers have testified to this feeling of schizophrenia specific to Israeli society and which historian Maurice Kriegel often defined.

Israel and Holocaust now have a linked destiny. What will happen to this memory ? Time has not passed enough for a demand for competing memory to be heard. Everything suggests that it would lead the Israelis to reconnect with Judaism whose history and culture refer to an identity which is partly foreign to them, that of the Jews who continued to live on European soil. If this was the case, it would mean a deep transformation of Israeli culture. Is the company ready ? We bet that historians will still question the specifics of a society for a long time which, any more than the state from which it comes, will never resemble any other.