Eichmann and Jewish Identity:

...What more then can be said...

...The Israeli reaction to the trial has been described and redescribed...

...Only 34 per cent of the present Jewish population in Israel was born there...

...One basic factor in Israel's political life, I believe, has been the country's fundamental suspicion of the gentile world...

...and finally, that in order to survive, Jews must depend on themselves as Jews rather than on the rights they believed they had as citizens of Germany, Austria...

...The bitterness that developed over this order of priorities has been a peripheral subject for discussion at the Eichmann trial, but it is continually apparent outside the courtroom...

...Where were they to go, these pitiful remnants of European Jewry...

...It's the phrase, "you people," that makes this kind of American Jew very edgy, since he does not really believe that he is any different from other Americans...

...Hungary and most other European countries, with the exception of Holland and the Scandinavian nations...

...I have learned, also, to withhold easy judgment on both those European Jews who passively died without attempting to kill their Nazi tormenters and on those who survived the Holocaust...

...Still another group of American Jews is made up of people like myself, who try to be neither foolishly uncritical of Israel nor foolishly resentful when Israel acts in its own national interests...

...There is far less pessimism in Israel about the relationship of the American Jew to the American gentile than there is about Jews in other countries...

...Occasionally, he would make a note or pull out a file to check a detail and then jot down a reminder to himself...

...There were agonizing moments in the courtroom, made even more painful by the peculiar, almost surrealistic atmosphere which Eichmann created inside the dock...

...because merely to ask the question was to judge them...

...And the detailed reporting will continue as the weeks go by with new horror piled on new horror until, somehow, some way, Eichmann is finished...

...but I believe we all might have done more...

...They almost delight in the Eichmann trial because it demonstrates to them, just as Uris's mythical heroes do, that the anti-Semitic image of the Jew, an image they may unconsciously have accepted about themselves, is wrong...

...But even though I now understand something of why I behaved as I did in the past, I still cannot rid myself of the guilt I felt the moment I saw Eichmann walk into his cage the day the trial opened, a guilt based on the feeling that I did not do enough, not for Israel, not even for Jews as such, but for six million human beings...

...The fact that Israel and refugee Jews have survived because leading Israelis were either forced by circumstances, or were willing by choice, to use secret or ugly political instruments has marked present Israeli life with political tendencies I find very disquieting...

...that important Western countries were willing, perhaps uneasily, to allow Jewish refugees to be sacrificed to national political interests...

...The guilt of the living Jew as he confronts the dead has been analyzed and reanalyzed, all the psychological strains the trial created for refugees discussed and rediscussed...

...Paul Jacobs is a freelance writer who has recently returned from Israel...

...Being at the trial forced me to recognize how ignorant I have been about the history both of Israel and the Jews of Europe, and to wonder why, for example, the Spanish Civil War was far more important to me...

...The real meaning of these figures is that personal identification with the horrors being revealed in the Eichmann trial is an agonizing reality for an enormous segment of Israel's population...

...No country seemed to want them...

...Any criticism of Israel made in the United States was immediately responded to by the American Zionists with hysterical denunciations of "anti-Semitism...

...The "Jewish question" was of little significance to us, and the idea of a Jew, as a distinguishable identity, was part of the past—only a footnote in modern politics...

...The radical movement presented an excellent framework within which this rejection of Jewishness could be made without suffering any of the guilt usually associated with denying one's past...

...I do not mean that the actual proceedings either lacked substantive content or were devoid of drama...

...Fortunately, there is a growing number of intelligent Israelis who today recognize the disservice being done their country by the projection of an image that needlessly repels many people...

...In fact, of course, Israel is a far more interesting and intellectually exciting country than that fake place the fund raisers and Zionists continually seek to project...

...once asked a British high commissioner in Palestine in the face of attempts to open the country to more refugees...

...During the Eichmann trial, very few of Israel's internal tensions have come through in the news reports to the outside world...

...It is no wonder, then, that the older generation is apprehensive and distrustful of a world in which they face the danger of being gassed and cremated because of the religion to which they were born...

...Then, for many years after World War II, Israel, as a reflection of the Jewish question, seemed to be the private property of the American Zionists and the professional fund raisers who projected a completely distorted image of the country...

...But for those American Jews who do not identify with Israel, the Eichmann trial has been more of a problem, especially since so many gentiles feel self-consciously compelled to press the hand of a Jew and say to him, "You people should be congratulated for kidnapping Eichmann and putting him on trial...

...The Holocaust, as the Nazi annihilation of European Jewry is called in Israel, confirmed all the fears and suspicions of the Palestinian Jews...

...I have always believed I was an American who was also incidentally Jewish...

...This is what lacerated me...

...The present generation of Israeli leaders are the pioneers who went to Palestine precisely because they were uncomfortable and uneasy as Jews living in what they believed were dominantly gentile countries and cultures...

...Thus, a combination of factors caused a fundamental feeling of distrust for many of us about the nature of World War II—a war we never really accepted as ours in the same way we accepted the Spanish Civil War...

...For the rest of the day, he sat there in his glass-enclosed office cubicle, listening to the testimony, surrounded by papers and files...

...The Eichmann trial has revealed how deep the strains of trouble run...

...And I believe that unless the world recognizes the reality of this basic tension in Israel, no real understanding of the country's policies and actions is possible...

...Now, I realize that I know very little about how the refugee Jews were smuggled out of Europe, and, even worse, that I did not care as much nor as deeply about their fate as I had about the fate of the Spanish Loyalists...

...When the Eichmanns began slaughtering six million Jews, not many brave gentile hands were raised to help, nor was rescuing Jews from Hitler's concentration camps high on the priority list of the Allies in relation to the overall military objectives of the war...

...Distrust of the gentiles is still perhaps the only bond in Israel shared by the ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Mea Shearim quarter of Jerusalem, who are so fanatic they are even opposed to the existence of Israel, and the completely irreligious Jews of the kibbutzim who are completely scornful of any manifestation of religious belief...

...Within a few weeks after the trial had started, he had succeeded in converting the prisoner's booth into a kind of office where he came to work every morning at 8:50...

...It was as if he were the chief clerk in a large office, not a man on trial, and to strengthen the illusion he never once glanced out at the people in the courtroom or in any way even acknowledged their existence...

...By this time, millions of newspaper readers, radio listeners and TV viewers all over the world are familiar with every detail of the trial...

...It was emotionally lacerating, psychically bruising...

...Next year there will be some other wonder for them to talk about, to derive vicarious satisfaction from after they return to the United States—satisfied that in one country, at least, there are Jews who fly jet fighters, drive heavy tanks, run railroad trains, sail ships and work the land...

...First, the struggle of the Spanish Loyalists against the Spanish Fascists was a much simpler one for American radicals and liberals to identify with than were the efforts of the Jews in Palestine to build an army, especially since so many of us rejected Zionism as an ideology...

...Once more, Jews trying to survive were opposed by the British, who had their own problems in the Middle East with the Arabs, and by the Communists, who wanted to halt immigration from their countries...

...The Eichmann trial forced me to think about why I was so ignorant and insensitive to the Jewish problem...

...Obviously, these people felt an urgent need to be citizens of their own land because they believed something important was lacking in their lives as Jews in their original countries...

...And the Eichmann trial also raised, in a very painful fashion, the validity of the easy judgments I have been prone to make on the nature of the political instruments used to create Israel...

...Now I have started to wonder if the American gentile world has always regarded me as a Jew who is also incidentally an American...

...His articles have appeared in the Reporter, Commentary, the Economist and Commonweal...

...Perhaps an interesting sidelight on the way in which this unconscious desire manifested itself was that many Jewish radicals adopted Christian surnames as cover identities...

...That almost inhuman question has never been forgotten by the older generation of Israelis, and the Eichmann trial is reminding the younger ones of the status their parents had in the gentile world...

...And many of the increasing number of American Jews who visit Israel each year fail to see the real strains inside Israeli society...

...For him, the reaction of the non-Jewish world to the Eichmann trial is fraught with danger because it may identify him too closely with Israel...

...These pioneers survived in Palestine not because of assistance from the gentile world but more often despite it...

...Before 1948, 90 per cent of the immigrants to Israel came from Europe, and since 1948, nearly 50 per cent of the population have been European immigrants...

...And it is extremely difficult for these American Jews to understand, from their position of security in a country never touched by wholesale horror, why many Israelis are affected so deeply by the trial that they refuse even to listen to the nightly radio broadcasts lest the agony conjured up completely overwhelm them...

...After only five weeks of reporting on the trial, I left Israel feeling battered and deeply fatigued...

...But I suspect, too, that in my own case, the rejection of the "Jewish question" may have been an unconscious reflection of my own desire not to be encumbered by my Jewishness but instead to wear it only lightly, with a sentimental nostalgia about Yiddish culture and an appetite for spicy foods...

...I still disapprove of it...

...What shall I do with a million Jews...

...and I still believe it is very dangerous for the country's future as a free society...

...The attitude taken by the religious Jews in Palestine toward the British during the immediate postwar period illuminates certain basic feelings in Israel...

...It was revealed in the Eichmann trial during the opening speech of the Attorney General when he described, in some detail, how Hitler's anti-Jewish campaign met no open opposition from other non-Nazi countries...

...every Israeli action brings a glow of pride, and the Eichmann trial is merely an extension of what they have learned to expect from the tough, brave, fighting Israelis exemplified so falsely and crudely by Leon Uris's Exodus...

...I still believe this...

...What more could I or anyone else have done...

...Nor is it any satisfaction to me that my guilt should be shared by millions of others in the world, Jews and gentiles alike...

...But now, at least, I understand better the reasons for Israeli parochialism, chauvinism and distrust...

...There is one important caveat, one key exception to the generally accepted belief among Israelis about the nature of the gentile world, and that is with respect to the United States...

...It is their own parents and families who were shot, gassed and burned...

...The anti-gentile trauma of the trial has a statistical basis, too...

...Before I went to the trial, I had some very clear ideas about it in relation to freedom and justice...

...I know that the struggle to live was fought not only bravely in the sewers under the Warsaw Ghetto, but often miserably in the sewers of men's souls...

...The old arguments about whether the trial was an error in political judgment on Israel's part, about whether Israel had proper legal jurisdiction to try Eichmann—those questions ceased to have much importance the moment the accused stepped into the bullet-proof, glass-enclosed prisoner's dock...

...After the Holocaust ended, it was followed by a period when the surviving Jews, living skeletons, were carried from the Nazi camps or crept out from their dark hiding places into daylight...

...Stein, for example, became Stone, never Cohen...

...And the trial is deepening the apprehensions of Israelis about gentiles: it is demonstrating, day after day, in an extremely traumatic fashion, that brutal and sadistic anti-Semitism is possible in the 20th century, even among extremely "civilized" people...

...I am not sure, and it's too late to find out...

...They portrayed it either as a land where little children were always on the verge of starvation or as one where bigger children continually danced the horah in the green fields accompanied by a man playing Hebrew melodies through a reed...

...Generalized Israeli suspicion of the gentile is historically understandable...

...And here I must become somewhat more personal than I like to be and embarrassingly reveal some of my own trauma...

...I can remember how frightened I was when I was beaten during a strike, and I know that there are dark patches in my own life that I rarely think about except with shame...

...I am not sure whether it is because we Jews still represent a problem to the world, or because of the peculiar history of modern Israel, or whether, as is more likely, it is a combination of both...

...Even those refugees who, encouraged by the Zionists, tried to get to Israel had to go illegally by devious routes, in devious ways...

...But as far as one can safely generalize about a nation's political character, Israel today is an extremely troubled country...

...Even though many of my original objections remain valid, I think the Israelis were probably right to subject us to it...

...In this atmosphere, no intelligent discussion of Israel and its relationship to the world was possible...

...In the past, it has seemed to me that politics in Israel was conducted in an unnecessarily vicious manner...

...I do not know whether this will make a difference in my future life, if it is true, but I shall certainly be troubled until I find out...

...Indeed, I think it is what has been revealed outside the courtroom, rather than inside, that demands discussion—what the trial revealed about Israel and about American Jews and gentiles, about my generation of American Jewish radicals...

...The country was created by idealogues committed, above all else, to the political need for a Jewish state...

...Instead, he focused on the witnesses or up at the judges, almost trustingly, as if to say, "You understand, don't you, your honors, that what I was trying to do was only efficiently, eagerly and imaginatively to carry out the mission with which I was charged by the Fuehrer...

...all the protagonists profiled and reprofiled...

...In a sense, the trial is simply another of Israel's many tourist attractions this year...

...For this group of American Jews, the Eichmann trial represents no real problem...

...Because the picture they have of Israel is essentially false, the reality they never have to face raises no problem for them...

...Even when Nazism was on the rise, in 1936-39, the Jews in Palestine, who believed they might have to defend themselves in the Middle East, were forced to train secretly because the British, the goyim, opposed the existence of a Jewish army in Palestine...

...When an Orthodox youth finally came to accept the need for the use of armed forces against the British, he nearly always joined a fanatically anti-British terrorist group like the Irgun or the Stern Gang, and when that youth with earlocks bombed a British installation, he was cursing the whole gentile world...

...Now, too, because of the trial, there are wisps of uneasiness inside me about my identity, a sense of malaise I never felt before I began sitting in the Eichmann courtroom...

...For a variety of reasons, I was opposed to the trial but now I am no longer so sure...

...In any case, some Jews resent Israel for raising the whole problem of Jewish identity, and the conflict about Israel within American Jewry shows signs of growing sharper now than it has ever been before...

...I know better now how the Nazis dehumanized the Jews, and I discovered during the Eichmann trial that I had no right to ask anyone who came out of a concentration camp alive, "How did you survive...

...Nothing has been left unreported, from such minutiae as how Eichmann washes out his shirt every night to such major problems as the broad outlines of Jewish history...

...Distrust and suspicion of the gentile world is a fact of Israeli life, officially denied for obvious reasons, but a fact nevertheless...

...But for me, at least, the really agonizing impact of the trial lay outside the courtroom...

...I can still recall the discussions of Nazism in which I participated during my very brief stay at the City College of New York: the knots of students clustered around two or three of us as we heatedly analyzed Nazism as only another form of decaying capitalism, largely ignoring its unique form of anti-Jewish terror...

...To these American enthusiasts, Israel is still a state of euphoria...

...This is especially true for the large group of American Jews who are far more uncritical of Israel than most Israelis...

...And among the other baggage that they carried with them to Palestine was the group memory of an ancient and continuous history of persecution by the gentiles...

...I know the horrible truth of how they survived...