Segev, Tom, The seventh million: the Israelis and the Holocaust
New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, Auszüge aus S. 11 und 513-17

After the war, a great silence surrounded the destruction of the Jews. Then came moral and political conflicts, including the painful debate over relations with Germany, which slowly brought the Israelis to recognize the deeper meaning of the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann served as therapy for the nation, starting a process of identification with the tragedy of the victims and survivors, a process that continues to this day.

The most fateful decisions in Israeli history, other than the founding of the state itself—the mass immigration of the 1950S, the Six-Day War, and Israel's nuclear project—were all conceived in the shadow of the Holocaust. Over the years, there were those who distorted the heritage of the Holocaust, making it a bizarre cult of memory, death, and kitsch. Others too have used it, toyed with it, traded on it, popularized it, and politicized it. As the Holocaust recedes in time—and into the realm of history—its lessons have moved to the center of a fierce struggle over the politics, ideology, and morals of the present.

The Seventh Million concerns the ways in which the bitter events of the past continue to shape the life of a nation. Just as the Holocaust imposed a posthumous collective identity on its six million victims, so too it formed the collective identity of this new country—not just for the survivors who came after the war but for all Israelis, then and now. This is why I have called them the seventh million. [...]

Israelis are obsessed with history. They are the offspring of a nation, a religion, and a culture that has dismissed the present and left the future in the hands of faith and fate. The past thus becomes an object of worship. Since the beginning of the 1980s, they have been worshiping moreshet hashoah—a somewhat peculiar term, meaning "the heritage of the Holocaust." [...] The contempt that many members of the yishuv felt toward the Diaspora did not disappear during the Holocaust. Rather, it deepened. And after the war the yishuv's condescending attitude to the survivors, a posture born of regret and shame, gave rise to the great silence that surrounded the Holocaust through the 1950s. These were the years when Israelis refused to speak or even think about the Holocaust, almost to the point of denial. Over the last decades, in contrast, the Holocaust has increasingly become a major factor in shaping Israeli identity and a constant and intense preoccupation. Viewed dispassionately, though, the recent eagerness to embrace the past is often no less problematic and charged with contradiction than the earlier tendency to deny it.

There are a number of explanations, both political and cultural, for the current intensity of involvement with the Holocaust. Israel differs from other countries in its need to justify—to the rest of the world, and to itself—its very right to exist. Most countries need no such ideological justifications. But Israel does—because most of its Arab neighbors have not recognized it and because most of the Jews of the world prefer to live in other countries. So long as these factors remain true, Zionism will be on the defensive. As a justification for the State of Israel, the Holocaust is comparable only to the divine promise contained in the Bible: It seems to be definitive proof of the Zionist argument that Jews can live in security and with full equal rights only in their own country and that they therefore must have an autonomous and sovereign state, strong enough to defend its existence. Yet, from war to war, it has become clear that there are many places in the world where Jews are safer than in Israel. Moreover, the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust was an obvious defeat for the Zionist movement: The Zionists were unable to convince the majority of the world's Jews to come to Palestine before the war, while that was still an option. And though the yishuv leaders certainly could have displayed greater compassion for and identification with the Jews of Europe, they could not have done more to save them; the yishuv was helpless when faced with the Nazi extermination program.

In order to resolve these contradictions, the State of Israel put forth the thesis that, had it existed during the Holocaust, it could have prevented the slaughter of European Jewry. "We, the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces, have come to this place fifty years later, perhaps fifty years too late," said Chief of Staff Ehud Barak during a visit to Auschwitz. And Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said, "The State of Israel's highest obligation is to stand ready to defend the Jewish people anywhere in the world where evil has come upon them." The first spontaneous reaction in Israel to the rescue of several thousand Ethiopian Jews in 1991 was: Had we only had a country during the Second World War, we could have saved European Jewry as well. This is, of course, an ideological, not a historical, statement; it illustrates the great diffficulty of separating rhetoric from reality.

But if the Holocaust could be used politically as a justification for statehood, it could also be used culturally to substitute for certain aspects of the Zionist program. The yishuv leadership desired to build a new nation, detached from the oppressive two-thousand-year history of Jewish existence in the Exile. The "new man" that Zionism wished to create would be the opposite of the persecuted and submissive "old Jew" who had earned his living through various kinds of commerce. The new Zionist society would represent creative, socialist, secular progress, imbue its children with sovereign pride and with the ability to defend themselves and their honor. But this Zionist ideal, too, was complicated by reality: the "new man" lacked a dimension of depth; he had no past, no link with Jewish history, and no connection to the experience of most Israelis.

Israel's founders revived the use of the Hebrew language in its biblical Sephardic pronunciation, but that fulfilled only part of their dream. Most of the immigrants—those who survived the Holocaust as well as those who arrived from the Islamic world—did not come to Israel because they wished to escape the Exile; they came because there was no other country that would take them. They were refugees, not Zionist idealists. Many of them, therefore, exhibited little enthusiasm for trading their existing culture and identities as Jews for the hypothetical identity of the "new man." It soon became clear that two thousand years of history could not be obliterated.

On the contrary. As the years went by, the similarity between life in the sovereign Israeli state and the traditional life of Jewish communities around the world increased. The country was isolated, set apart from its surroundings. Its religion, culture, values, and mentality were different. It lived in insecurity. Time and again, Israelis were forced to recognize that, for its very existence, Israel is largely dependent on outside assistance, including the support of wealthy and influential Jews abroad. Israeli legislation increasingly draws on traditional Jewish law. Like members of Jewish communities elsewhere, members of the Jewish community of Israel have a dual identity. They are both Israeli and Jewish. They represent no "new man."

All this explains why so many Israelis held fast to their Jewish roots—why, indeed, they have sought them anew. There were those who found their way into non-Zionist ultraorthodox circles. There were those whose particular integration of religion and Zionism inspired them to settle the territories occupied in the Six-Day War. There were those who left the country, choosing, for the most part, to join the world's largest Jewish community—in America. Many Israelis reverted to using the original Jewish names that they had Hebraicized upon moving to Israel. These moves, however, were radical, demanding, and difficult. Emotional and historical awareness of the Holocaust provides a much easier way back into the mainstream of Jewish history, without necessarily imposing any real personal moral obligation.

The "heritage of the Holocaust" is thus largely a way for secular Israelis to express their connection to Jewish heritage. And its importance in daily life has increased year by year as Israel has become more "Jewish'' and less "Israeli." Beginning in the 1980s, not a day has gone by without the Holocaust being mentioned in some context or other in one of the daily newspapers; it is a central subject of literature and poetry, of theater, cinema, and television. From time to time, new institutes for the study of the Holocaust spring up, devoted to a variety of subjects, including the real and imagined distress of the children of Holocaust survivors. In the 1950s and 1960s, Masada, the symbol of Hebrew rebellion and pride, was the object of pilgrimage for Israeli youngsters; soldiers scaled its sharp cliffs to swear fealty to the army and to receive their first rifles. Now many receive their weapons at the Western Wall in Jerusalem; tens of thousands of Israeli high-school students have already made the pilgrimage to the death-camp sites in Poland, and more are doing so each year. Nine out of ten of these young people have said on their return that the Jewish experience they underwent strengthened their Israeli identity. All research has shown that the consciousness of the Holocaust is increasing accordingly. A 1992 study of Israeli identity among teacher’s college students found that close to 80 percent of those asked identified with the statement, "We are all Holocaust survivors." Oded Peled, an Israeli-born poet (no relation to the general), wrote: "Mother, I am with you in Bergen-Belsen . . . I am there with you always—after all, it is you and I, Mother: you and I and the terrible snow that will remain with us always. " [...]

As the consciousness of the Holocaust increased and became, along with religion and Zionist ideology, a crucial source from which Israelis draw the elements of their identity, it played an ever more pivotal role in the ongoing debate over what fundamental values ought to guide Israel' society. It is in the framework of this debate that some have suggested that Israelis would do best to forget the Holocaust entirely, because they were not learning the proper lessons from it. Indeed, the "heritage of the Holocaust," as it is taught in schools and fostered in national memorial ceremonies, often encourages insular chauvinism and a sense that the Nazi extermination of the Jews justifies any act that seems to contribute to Israel's security, including the oppression of the population in the territories occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War. The assumption is that the Holocaust requires the existence of a strong Israel and that the failure of the world to save the Jewish people during the Second World War disqualifies it from reminding Israel of moral imperatives, including respect for human rights. The sense that the Holocaust was inevitable, in accordance with Zionist ideology, and the identification with the Jew as a victim are liable to lead Israelis to conclude that their existence depends solely on military power, and so to limit their willingness to take the risks involved in a compromise peace settlement. Paradoxically, the fatalistic lessons of this Holocaust heritage sabotage the realization of the Zionist dream—the Zionists, after all, dreamed that the Jewish people would become a nation like all other nations, a country like all other countries.

Yet it does not follow from the risks inherent in Israeli memorial culture that Israelis would do best to forget the Holocaust. Indeed, they cannot and should not forget it. They need, rather, to draw different conclusions. The Holocaust summons all to preserve democracy, to fight racism, and to defend human rights. It gives added force to the Israeli law that requires every soldier to refuse to obey a manifestly illegal order. Instilling the humanist lessons of the Holocaust will be diffficult as long as the country is fighting to defend itself and justify its very existence; but it is essential. This is the task of the seventh million.