Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective Memory

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Abbreviations ASCD Archives of the Soldiers’ Commemoration Division CZA Central Zionist Archives GBA Giv’at Brenner Archives HA Haganah Archives IBA Israel Broadcasting Authority IDF Israel Defense Fund ISA Israel State Archives ISLD Inter-Service Liaison Department IZL Irgun (Irgun Zeva’i Leumi) JNF Jewish National Fund KMA Hakibbutz Hameuhad Archives LHI Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel) OSS Office of Strategic Services SIS Secret Intelligence Service SOE Special Operations Executive 219 Notes Preface 1. In AD 73 a group of Jewish fighters, zealots, and their families who found refuge on the hilltop fortress of Masada, in the Judean desert, chose collective suicide rather than to be captured by Roman forces. The idea of choosing death over slavery became a leitmotif in the Labor Zionist view of what was considered honorable behavior in ancient Jewish history. See Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Shimon Bar Kokhba was the leader of a Jewish revolt against the Romans that began in AD 132 and ended three years later. Initially having succeeded in liberating parts of Judea from the Roman garrisons, the rebels established Bar Kokhba as Nasi (president) of Judea. Within three years, however, the Romans mobilized additional troops and suppressed the Jewish revolt. In Zionist memory the Bar Kokhba revolt symbolizes the final expression of Jewish national patriotism and the struggle for freedom during antiquity. Tel Hai was one of four Jewish settlements on the northern frontier of the Upper Galilee in Palestine. As a result of prolonged negotiations between the British and the French over their respective spheres of influence in the Middle East, the political fate of that region became unclear following World War I. When control over the area passed from the British to the French in late 1919, the Zionist pioneers who had settled there were cut off from the rest of the Yishuv, which was under the British Mandate. In March 1920 a large group of armed Arabs assembled near Tel Hai. Due to a lack of communication between them and the settlers, shooting broke out and five of the settlers died in the battle. The group’s commander, Joseph Trumpeldor , was critically wounded and died several hours later. Before dying it is reported that when asked how he was feeling, he answered, “Never mind; it is worth dying for our country”—a phrase that made its way into the Zionist lexicon as an expression of patriotism and bravery. 2. See the studies by historians Yehuda Bauer, Tuvia Friling, and Yoav Gelber, listed in the bibliography. 3. Rudolf (Israel) Kasztner was a Hungarian Jewish leader who agreed to provide the Nazis with trucks in return for the lives of Jews. Because he was a civil servant, in the early 1950s the state attorney general filed a suit on his behalf against Malkiel Gruenwald, a journalist who accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis. 4. In 1954 an airplane crashed into a crowd during a memorial ceremony for the parachutists at Kibbutz Ma’agan, killing four of the former parachutists and over a dozen other participants. See chapter 4 in this book, 126 –35. 5. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (New York: Chelsea House, 1983). 220 Notes to pages xi–xiv 6. My thanks to Dr. Tali Tadmor-Shimoni and Prof. Eli Tzur for assisting me in developing this typology. 7. Eric Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. 8. Yechiam Weitz, “Yishuv, Diaspora, Holocaust: Myth and Reality,” YIVO Annual 23 (1995): 365 –90. 9. Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist in Emile Durkheim’s circle, dealt extensively with the nature of individual memory and the potential (and danger) inherent in its inclusion in the dynamic of collective memory. His monumental book The Social Frameworks of Memory was published in 1925. Following his death in the Buchenwald camp, another collection appeared comprising portions of his articles that had not been published before his death. (See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter [New York: Harper & Row, 1980].) Halbwachs’s remarks on the relationship between collective and individual memory appear in “Historical Memory and Collective Memory,” an article published in his posthumous book. 10. Among those who expanded on Halbwachs’s remarks were Pierre Nora (“Between History and...