The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (review)

152 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No.1 Massad, arc allowed to be named in the press, arc interesting. But a definitive scholarly history of IDF Military Intelligence still remains to be written. One may, however, doubt that this will be in the ncar future. Over 50 years later records of World War II intelligence activities remain largely inaccessible. Gunther E. Rothenberg Department of History Purdue University The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, by Tom Segev, translated by Bairn Watzman. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. 593 pp. $27.50. The Seventh Million deals with a subject in which many readers, even scholars, may have predisposed ideas that arc contrary to the many elements in this important work. In the aftermath of the creation ofIsracl and the Jewish return to history, the argument is often made that if Israel had existed, six million Jews would not have perished in Europe during the Holocaust. Segev, an Israeli journalist, deals with the realistic complexity of this problem and the limits that were imposed on theyisbuv during the 1930s, not only by British Mandatory policy in Palestine but also through the almost Darwinian views of Zionist leaders in their desire to create a Jewish State. Throughout the Holocaust, the Palestinian establishment was ineffective in rescue. Segev is brutally frank with this certainty, quoting an interview with Ben Gurion, who noted, "yes, they knew ... but what could they have done?" After Statehood, the Holocaust became a taboo subject that was associated with what Segev describes "as a kind of voyeurism-it was a forbidden secret, as discomfiting and tantalizing as death and sex." Segev's work is well documented on all issues. Although the Holocaust was a hidden question for many Israelis in the 1950s, it was altered to become a justification for a good part of Israeli domestic and foreign policy thereafter, ultimately becoming part of a "bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch." The story is sometimes not so pleasant, as the ideological purity that many would like in Zionist history gives way to less than pure thinking and policies. Zionist leaders, beginning with Arthur Ruppin, dealt "with the devil" from the outset with the "transfer" agreement of 1933, and both the Zionist establishment and Revisionists had links with Berlin. Zionist leaders, including Ben Gurion, were fearful Book Reviews 153 of large contingents of illegal immigrants and those not adequately prepared in advance for the hard life in Palestine. This philosophy was clung to well beyond the end of the war. Most significant was the cultural and economic base of the German Jewish "yekkes," who did not fit the mold of the Zionist pioneers and were more like most Soviet Jews of the 1980s and 1990s-involuntary Zionists: immigrants, yes; aliyah, no. The rivalries between the yisbuv and newcomers were perhaps more fierce than between any of the culturally diverse Jewish communities that would immigrate to Israel in the post1950 era. Once World War II and the extermination ofJews started in earnest, the Zionist establishment was able to do little. Segev does not suggest a new argument, as it was asserted strongly in the past by Hannah Arendt. However, Segev's unique contribution is his focus on everything being covered in the Palestinian newspapers in a similar vein as in the American press-not a page one issue. Hommel's Afrika Corps posed such a threat to the yishuv that doomsday scenarios were rehearsed in Palestine, including refuge in caves and possibly mass suicide. We now know, of course, that nothing worked: neither illegal immigration on ships, nor paratroopers like Hannah Senesh, nor elaborate plans to swap trucks for Jews. In the aftermath of the war, Segev lifts the curtain on the individual Jewish plans for revenge against the Germans, which included mass murder by poisoning water supplies, assassination of SS members and camp guards, or killing German prisoners of war. Abba Kovner, hero of the Vilna Ghetto, was the author of one of those bizarre plans. This information is especially interesting because it provides a factual basis for understanding how revenge was indeed a "thought" in the aftermath of genocide, and that Jews indeed did more than pray, as...