Victims and Victors: Holocaust and Military Commemoration in Israel Collective Memory

"Holocaust and Heroism," the formula of Holocaust commemoration in Israel, recognizes the ghetto fighters, links the memory of the annihilation to the creation of the state, and gives meaning to the deaths of the 6 million Jews. Yet, those who fell in battle were viewed as the central pillar of Israel's national revival. Since the 1970s, the status of the military victims has declined and their memory no longer serves as a tool of social solidarity. On the contrary, it has become a source of confrontation with the government. At the same time, the image of ghetto fighters and partisans has been diminished as the primary representation of Holocaust commemoration. In its place, the memory of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust have emerged as a more appropriate representation. The reasons for the changes are inherent in the democratization of Israeli society and in its becoming a pluralist, capitalist, and even postindustrial society. I seek to examine this change by examining the transformation in the Holocaust and military monuments throughout Israel.

On Zionist Memory and Commemoration

Zionism viewed the Land of Israel as more than a "homeland"; i.e., a geographic space serving as a habitat for the socio-cultural creation that endows each individual with collective identity and provides historic validity and moral meaning to life. Zionism as a civil religion revived the connection between Dam-Adam-Adama [Heb.: blood-man-land], as a means for shaping a "new man" or "new Jew" free from the shame of the contamination of the Diaspora. ¹ One traditional explanation claimed: "The difference [from the Diaspora Jew] is not only ideological, but psychological, biological, almost physiological." ² Therefore, the "new Jew" who struggled for the existence of the national home was elevated after his death to the status of a martyr—a hero who died "in sanctification of the place" (where "place," or makom in Hebrew, refers not only to a terrestrial location, but to the Divine Itself).

The acknowledged "hero" is identified with the values of the collective by having chosen to adhere to such values and defend them, even at the cost of his own life. Death testifies to the absolute commitment of the "sacrifice" for the homeland and its collective values, because the fallen have "given us our independence; and with their deaths have given us life." ³ The symbolic importance of the "hero"/"victim" is in the deed rather than in empty rhetoric. Herzl opened his classic novel, Altneuland, with a call to action: "If you will it, it is no dream." Since Israel's founding, the continuing struggle with the Arabs has intensified the need for transmitting messages of encouragement and consolation to a public concerned with bloodshed. Monuments for the fallen in battle "convey the heroic actions of the fallen and make them a symbol and an example to the coming generations," ⁴ thereby bestowing meaning to the deaths of thousands of young people.

Commemoration, the recording of the sacred history of the society, bestows significance on events, raising them to the level of symbols with power beyond their immediate historical connection. ⁵ They serve as a paradigm for understanding the historical development of the group experience. Essentially, on the national level, commemoration leads the society to self-awareness by emphasizing the boundaries of relationship, identity, and commitment to the collective memory. However, in contemporary Western society, Israel included, there is growing cultural difficulty in using the past for creating collective identity, preserving it, and conveying it as a "collective memory." The uniqueness of cultural changes in the last third of the twentieth century, according to various scholars and thinkers, justifies a new way of contemplating the reality defined as post-modern. ⁶ Their claim, in the context of this milieu, is that, not only is the "truth" relative, but that culture is also relative, with no clear symbolic order of myths, ideas, and hierarchy. For that reason, there is...