Realpolitik and the Burden of the Past: Israeli Diplomacy and the 'Other Germany'

Introduction

Political scientists C.S. Liebman and E. Don-Yehiya, in their pioneering studies on the role of Holocaust memory in Israel's formative years, asserted that the memory of the Holocaust was not a major component of Statism, the ideology of Ben-Gurion and the Mapai governments that enshrined the state and state-building as of prime importance. Hence the Holocaust found little place in the myths and the ceremonies of Israel in the 1950s. ¹ Maoz Azaryahu, researcher of Israeli culture, in State Cults, also emphasized the marginality of the official commemoration of the Holocaust as opposed to the centrality of the Day of Independence and the creation of what historian George L. Mosse called the "cult of fallen soldiers." ²

Although the idea of the marginality of Holocaust commemoration in the state's cult in the 1950s appears in various sources, ³ the attitude toward the Holocaust held by Ben-Gurion and the leadership of Mapai was not unequivocal. On the one hand, the government, from the beginning of statehood, recognized their historical and moral connection with the memory of the Jewish communities that had been annihilated and with the millions murdered in the wake of the Final Solution. Ben-Gurion held that the very existence of the State of Israel embodied the memory of those wiped out in the Holocaust. "The entire State of Israel," he wrote, "is the single fitting monument to those destroyed by the savage Nazi beast." ⁴ The establishment of the state after the Holocaust was regarded in Israel as the epitome of the renaissance of the Jewish people, encapsulated in the phrase "from destruction to rebirth," ⁵ a view which explains the vigorous opposition to the establishment of Holocaust memorial centers in the Diaspora that would parallel Yad Vashem. The centrality of the moral obligation of Israel to the commemoration of the Holocaust was emphasized in the Knesset debate of 1953, prior to the vote on the Yad Vashem law, as well as in the intention to give Israeli citizenship to Jews murdered in the Holocaust. ⁶

The fundamental distinction between 'here' and 'there' (the State and the Galut) made by Ben-Gurion and the Israeli establishment was of considerable influence on Holocaust commemoration during Israel's formative years. This distinction stressed the contrast between the independence of the Jews in the State of Israel, who possessed their own military and political institutions and were engaged in nation building, and the powerlessness and helplessness of Diaspora Jewry. Israel's Declaration of Independence and the speeches of Israel's leader ⁷ repeatedly referred to the tragic lesson of the Holocaust as substantiating the Zionist position, that the Jewish people must have their own country, while the Holocaust itself, the destruction of the Jewish communities, the daily struggle for survival as well as the ghetto uprisings, were not reflected in the structure of symbols and national myths in the Israel of the 1950s. Statism emphasized the desire for normalization. It implied that images connected with state building were to be highlighted, in contrast to the destruction, total defeat and death associated with the Holocaust. ⁸

The aim of this article is to show how this equivocal attitude toward the memory of the Holocaust was reflected in the foreign policy of Israel, particularly in her relations with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). We will analyze the conflict between the desire for normalization, the striving to cultivate foreign relations on the basis of common interests and present needs of Israel, and the burden of the past, the traumatic collective memory of the Holocaust and its influence on the policy makers and the delegates of the state. This conflict between Realpolitik and the power of memory will be related to different, even contradictory, perceptions of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) held by Israel's leaders, notably Ben-Gurion, and prominent government officials and representatives. The discussion...