The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s (review)

Among her criticisms of the trial conducted against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt included a scathing critique of Chief Prosecutor Gideon Hausner’s insistence on asking each witness why he or she had not resisted. Arendt found the question insensitive, offensive, and immaterial to the subject at hand: the actions of the defendant. She neglected to mention that the debate in Israel over Jewish resistance during the Holocaust had begun as early as 1943, in mandatory Palestine. As Roni Stauber points out in The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s, that debate had enormous significance for the formation of Jewish national identity in Israel, and revolved around the “Jewish response”—the attitudes and actions of Jews in the Diaspora. The debate in the 1950s derived from the political positions of the principals and the political and social circumstances in Israel. Stauber makes the case that it represented and extended a controversy over the nature of the Diaspora—an issue that had been hotly argued since the nineteenth century.

Stauber’s monograph is about Israeli politics and social issues and the molding of a national identity. The author argues convincingly that attitudes toward the Jewish response reflected the political agendas of the participants in the debate. In a thoroughly detailed and dispassionate account, the author addresses the complex and volatile controversies that emerged as early as 1943, the year of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. By the 1950s, the contested issues included what form a possible memorial for the uprising should take, whether such a memorial should remain separate from a commemoration of resisters and fighters, how to perceive the victims, and what date should be designated as the official memorial day. Leftist Zionists grounded their rejection of a focus on the Jewish victims in ideological terms, praising the leaders of ghetto rebellions—who were primarily socialists. Until the passage in 1953 of the Yad Vashem Law, which provided for a memorial project and an acknowledgement of Jewish heroism, Ben-Gurion himself spoke little on the subject of Jewish victimhood. For him, it seems, the image of the Jewish victim in the Diaspora had to be supplanted by that of the youthful hero of the War of Independence, a figure linked to national heroes such as the Maccabees, Bar Kochba, and King David. Ben-Gurion considered the state of Israel itself the proper memorial (p. 52). However, Minister of Education Ben-Zion Dinur’s proposal, which acknowledged the memorial project and its recognition of Holocaust heroism (carefully defined and redefined), ultimately prevailed.

Stauber begins with the statement that “the utter passivity of the Jews of the Diaspora is a myth,” but he goes on to say that this myth is not the subject of his book; rather, he says, his focus is on the “historical image created to serve national educational goals” (p. 1). The bitter arguments revolved around how perceptions of the Holocaust would inform Israeli national consciousness. The problems of defining “heroism during the Holocaust” and distinguishing between underground resisters and the rest of the Jews “caused a furor in public discourse” (p. 29). Virtually every issue emerged as symbolic of the larger one of national identity and self-image. The need to establish a date for the annual remembrance day, for example, pitted the proponents of the traditional date—the 9^th of Av, allegedly the date of the destruction of the first and second temples—against proponents of the anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Stauber does not view this debate in terms of religious versus secular camps, but he sees it as politically determined nevertheless. Mapam, the socialist party to which Mordechai Anielewicz belonged, championed the latter date.

The final version of the Yad Vashem Law, seen as a triumph for Dinur, theoretically melded the positions of Mapam and the left-leaning workers’ party Mapai. The law appeared in two parts: one memorialized the annihilation and the other...