THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Kippur War became the watershed years.“I must announce to the Knesset,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said one dayin May 1960, “that some time ago the Israel Security Services found one of theworst Nazi criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who is responsible with the Nazi heads forwhat they called ‘the Final Solution to the Jewish problem,’ namely the annihilation ofsix million Jews in Europe. Adolf Eichmann is under arrest in Israel and will stand trialin Israel according to the law of trying the Nazis and their collaborators.” 1I can imagine the tumult in the house assembly, in the hearts of the members, and inthe tortured souls of the survivors. The announcement was history in the making. Thepublic was caught by surprise; there had been no leaks. It is unlikely that such adramatic announcement will ever take place again.At once the genies were released; matters that had been hidden in people’s heartscame out to the open. Israel’s personal silence on the Shoah, its terror and dilemmas,erupted privately and collectively. Everyone talked about the Shoah. The tough nativeIsraelis sat quietly in the corner of the hall while the Jews from “over there” tookcenter stage.Mountains of words have already been written on Eichmann and his trial, includingon the staging of the event and Ben-Gurion’s role as producer and director, decidingthe political aspects of the trial. Attorney General Gideon Hausner played the leadingman and used all possible means to transform the hall into his stage. Adolf Eichmannwas cast as the most unlikely supporting actor: a gray, boring bureaucrat, perhapseven stupid, and very different from the blond, blue-eyed Aryan stereotype. K.Zetnik and Abba Kovner led the march of witnesses who talked about the Shoah butwho were clearly not related to the charges against the defendant. They were cast asrepresentatives of the Israeli and Jewish expressions for the decades to come, asEichmann and his trial were merely used for the education of that and futuregenerations. Under this heavy Zionist cover and tight political control, the story wastold the way they wanted us to hear it. The few other voices, like Hannah Arendt’s—a German-born Jewish philosopher who went to Jerusalem to cover the trial forthe New Yorker magazine—were hushed, silenced and banished from us. She did nothesitate to cut the Ben-Gurion “show” to shreds and as a consequence facedincredible resentment and hostility. The choir had difficulty with the few dissentingvoices, which included German-born Israeli philosopher Martin Buber. Their voicessounded out of tune to the national ear, which only wanted to hear a single anti-