A Belated Inclusion: Jewish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and Their Place in the Israeli National Narrative

This article analyzes the changing attitudes of the Israeli authorities towards the Jewish veterans of the International Brigades, most of them Communists. Following a brief overview of Jewish participation in general and Jewish Palestinian participation in particular in the Spanish Civil War, we focus our attention first on the initial reactions to the returning volunteers and then on two major events in the process of memory appropriation and gradual inclusion of these fighters in the Israeli national narrative: the 1972 Tel-Aviv conference of Jewish fighters in Spain, sponsored by the Histadrut, and the 1986 speech by Israeli president Chaim Herzog on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Once the fighters' documents were deposited in the archives of the Israel military in the 1990s, the process was complete. Now they could be portrayed as Jewish heroes, national patriots fighting to protect their people and their homeland, Israel.