From Beirut to Jerusalem by Friedman Thomas L

Author:Friedman, Thomas L. [Friedman, Thomas L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics, War, Travel
ISBN: 9780374706999
Goodreads: 10968904
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1989-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

If Israel wasn’t founded on the basis of such a fatalistic outlook, then how did it take over?

The motto of Theodor Herzl, the Austrian journalist considered to be the founding father of Zionism, embodied the spirit of choice and initiative he hoped to instill in the Jewish people. “If you will it,” said Herzl, “then it is no dream.”

The first Jewish kibbutz collective farm built by the Zionist pioneers in 1909, Degania, was a monument to that motto. In the early years of the state of Israel it was common for native-born Israelis to feel contempt for the Jews who died in the Holocaust, and even for some of those who survived, because they were viewed as sheep who simply went off to slaughter, while the Zionists were men of bold initiative, who went out and fought the British and the Arabs and built a Jewish state.

Ruth Firer, a researcher at the Hebrew University School of Education and a specialist in the teaching of the Holocaust in Israeli high schools, recalled the spirit of those early days. Firer was born in Siberia, where her Polish parents were exiled by the Russians during World War II. Thanks to this exile, her immediate family survived the Holocaust, but all her parents’ relatives were wiped out. In 1949, her father brought the family to Israel.

“When I was a student here in the 1950s, the Holocaust was a family secret—a shame,” Firer explained one afternoon over coffee in her Jerusalem apartment. “In those days, we barely learned about the Holocaust in school. The feeling, the whole atmosphere, was that the future must triumph over the past. All of us, parents and kids, tried to cover up what had happened. When we taught the Holocaust then, we taught the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto—that was it.”

Unfortunately, a succession of traumatic events conspired to reawaken in every Israeli’s soul the spirit of the Holocaust and everything it represented in Jewish history. In the process, Israel’s motto changed from Herzl’s “If you will it, then it is no dream” to “Kacha, Ma Laasot?”—which means “That is how things are, what can we do?” In other words, the future is fixed: a permanent struggle for survival against a hostile world.

The change began, I believe, with the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Otto Eichmann in 1961, which brought both the Holocaust and the survivors out of the Israeli closet. Older people were forced to reexamine their feelings, and the new generation of Israelis, who intently followed the gripping testimony of the survivors, developed an interest in this previously unmentionable chapter in the family album.

“For the first time in public the stories of the survivors came out and were legitimized,” said Firer. “Every day people heard in the court and read in the papers the stories of the survivors. They were no longer seen as sheep led to slaughter. It turned out that many of them resisted, many of them were heroes—heroes we Israelis could understand. Theirs was a fight to survive and we could honor it.

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