Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials

Chapter Four: Israeli Judicial Proceedings and Changing Remembrances of the Holocaust

4 Israeli Judicial Proceedings and Changing Remembrances of the Holocaust A A A A A remarkable monster of a Kastner returns to Budapest. . . . His silence in Kluj was a death sentence for twenty thousand, minus three hundred. —Ben Hecht, Perfidy In this chapter, I study the circulation of Holocaust remembrances in Israeli judicial proceedings. By reviewing some of the rhetorical dimensions of the Kastner, Eichmann, and Demjanjuk cases, I hope to provide a rhetorical analysis that explicates some of the legal complications that attend the politics of nationalistic remembering and forgetting. As I noted in chapter 1, many observers are convinced that governmental authorities have to be active agents in the preservation of genocidal memories, and they are bothered when certain vectors of memory tell tales that exclude their versions of the truth. As Shoshana Felman observed in The Juridical Unconscious, prior “to the Eichmann trial, what we call the Holocaust did not exist as a collective story. It did not exist as a semantically authoritative story.”1 I would slightly modify this analysis and argue that perhaps it did exist as a possible dissident tale within some American and Israeli communities , and the Eichmann trial helped turn this same constellation of arguments into a more didactic tale. 77 Perhaps this condensation of arguments into a more didactic story is because there are many different types of vectors, and it takes time for accretive texts to become a part of what scholars now call collective memories or didactic histories. For Rousso, the diverse types of nationalistic memories were circulated in the vectors that were configured in official, organizational , cultural, and scholarly artifacts.2 As I argue below, in the case of Israeli Holocaust histories and memories, the Eichmann case provided a type of judicial theater that resonated in polyvalent ways. Critics might complain that this was just another show trial,3 but supporters liked to think that this trial was helpful: it filled in some of the gaps that existed in the historical “record”; it provided a safe forum where victims were allowed to tell their traumatizing tales; and it showed how nation-states could hold their own legitimate war crimes trials. In many ways, the Eichmann trial, like the Nuremberg proceedings, has its own judicial legacy. George Will, for example, viewed it as precedent for an Iraqi trial of Saddam Hussein, reminding us that over time “there was no nonsense about Eichmann being tried by ‘the international community’ for crimes against ‘humanity.’”4 Daphne Eviatar, after reviewing the work of Lawrence Douglas and Mark Osiel, noted how this trial provided key touchstones for those legal theorists who were defending war crimes show trials.5 In theory, effective war crimes trials can be “carefully orchestrated” so that they can “teach history to a world audience.”6 However, there are those of us who share the views of Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Emily Haslam, who argued in the spring of 2004 that the “privileging of law” should not “suppress or unnecessarily delay the development of other nonlegal narratives.”7 In the case of Israeli legal rhetorics, many of the discursive origins of the vectors that make their appearance in many post–World War II judicial narratives can be traced back to the mid–1930s, when tens of thousands of Jews fled Nazi Germany. Because of these challenges, “Jewish legal immigration reached unprecedented numbers after the Nazis came to power: 30,000 in 1934, 42,000 in 1935, 62,000 in 1936. . . . The Jewish population in Palestine doubled to about 470,000.”8 For many members of the Mapai Party, or labor party, the beginning of the “annihilation” could be traced back to prewar activities. Even though the Nazi plans for the systematic annihilation of Jews did not begin before 1941, the Mapai speakers were “looking for the appropriate words to describe the mass arrests, sporadic killings, humiliations, and abuse that culminated in the events of the Kristallnacht.”9 Long before the formal 78 Chapter Four construction of the state of Israel in the late 1940s, organizations had gathered information about wartime atrocities.10 Moreover, members of the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Palestine in the prestate 1940s— worried about Rommel’s troops in North Africa,11 and they constantly demanded that the Allied powers support the creation of Jewish battalions. Tales of patriotic paratroopers landing behind enemy lines were popular storylines, and these communal...