From the Ashes of History by Adam B. Lerner

Author:Adam B. Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Victimhood Nationalism in Israel

The Eichmann Trial’s Role in Israeli Foreign Policy Discourse

Introduction

World War II was a deeply traumatic period for the transnational Zionist (Jewish nationalist) movement and its leadership in Palestine. Although many Jews immigrated to Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Europe and retained strong connections to their countries of origin, they were largely unable to combat the Nazi genocide sweeping across Europe.1 The British Mandate government’s 1939 white paper restricted immigration to 75,000 over five years,2 and only 46,000 successfully made the journey.3 These policies enraged the Zionist movement’s leadership, which lacked the means to organize a military force to combat the German war machine. It launched a global public relations campaign decrying the British restrictions and arguing that the Zionist movement’s inability to combat Nazi violence constituted a potent rationale for statehood.4 Ultimately, though, the effort proved tragically ineffective during the war, failing to meaningfully slow the genocide of six million Jews in Europe.

Following the end of hostilities, international changes led to a climactic period of triumph and anguish that drastically altered the Zionist movement’s fortunes. The triumph followed quickly, as Zionist leaders were able to parlay international sympathy into significant donations and political concessions. Most notably, in November 1947, the newly formed UN voted to partition Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states, securing for the Zionist movement its long-stated goal.5 The newly independent state of Israel received a disproportionately large share of the land relative to its population and, upon independence, quickly opened its borders to Jewish refugees across the globe, expanding its population significantly. Within five years of Israel’s independence, it had welcomed more than 700,000 immigrants—numbers that would only increase in subsequent years as Jews fled Arab countries for Palestine.6

Still, mass violence continued to plague the Zionist movement. Israel’s independence was almost universally condemned by Arabs within Palestine and in neighboring countries. Fighting broke out between the Jewish community and local Arabs following the UN’s partition decision, and after the British departure in May 1948, multiple Arab League states, including neighboring Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, launched an invasion. Although Israel prevailed in the nine-month conflict that ensued and expanded its borders, the new state lost more than 6,000 of its citizens (approximately 1 percent of the population).7 After its victory, Israel’s successes existed in tension with underlying psychic trauma that persisted among so many survivors, which reverberated in immense poverty, institutional mistrust, and issues of social cohesion inherent in integrating refugees and migrants from across the globe. Despite armistice agreements ending the conflict, the new state’s neighbors became sworn enemies that threatened to launch new attacks in the future.

Given these circumstances, during its first decade of independence, the Israeli state mobilized its population around building up its military, economy, and political institutions, promoting a Zionist identity based on strength and resilience. This state-sponsored identity entailed repressing collective trauma narratives in official discourse, as Israeli leaders believed public mourning might expose vulnerability. Instead, the newly formed Israeli state pressed survivors to move on and focus their energies on state-building.

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