THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Three young men lay in wait near his Tel Aviv home for him to return from work at theHungarian-Language daily Uy Kelt. When he left the car, a few minutes pastmidnight, an assassin approached him, asked if he was indeed Dr. Kastner, and shota bullet to his head. This was the first political murder in Israel, and since then,weapons have become a normal aspect of the country’s political life.On January 17, 1958, the Supreme Court overturned Halevi’s verdict andcriticized it sharply. The decision cleared Kastner posthumously of the main chargeof collaboration with the Nazis and facilitating the annihilation of Hungary’s Jews. Itwas too late for Kastner and for many others.The first to accuse the pre-state Israel’s leaders of inaction during the Shoah,Tamir continued fishing in muddy waters. It is unlikely that more people could havebeen rescued: the state did not exist, nor any political capabilities. Ben-Gurioninvested the little resources available in building the state-to-be. He assumed that itwas impossible to both rescue the dead and build the future, and therefore preferredsetting up an infrastructure for those who were to come to wasting resources on animpossible task. But Tamir was rich with words, and there was a wealth of victims,survivors, and their family members who heard for the first time that there had been a“Zionist selection” in the rescue effort, and found an easy scapegoat.Israel’s public opinion, not the general but the private, was prone to shifts in thosedays. Just as the state’s early years were euphoric and joyous for the long-awaitedredemption, they were also days of suppressed pain caused by the great losses ofWorld War II and the War of Independence, and the frequent skirmishes on theborders. In those days the people embraced Ben-Gurion, the father of the nation, hisvision, manner, and acts. When Israelis needed a strong, determined leader, he was aram before the herd, no one questioned his judgment. Only with the passage of time,with the realization that Israel, a fantasy just a few years earlier, now existed, didpeople start opening their eyes and relating differently to Ben-Gurion and hiscolleagues. Tamir blinded those wide-opened eyes with his searchlight ofdemagoguery. He turned it around and illuminated dark, unsettled corners. When hedid his trick over Kastner’s soul, he caused not just Kastner’s murder, but conjuredsandstorms and chaos for the future.After the Kastner trial and Tamir’s heyday, Mapai’s rule started to crumble. Thetrio of Tamir, Avnery, and Grunwald was a coalition of the spurned right, the extremeCanaanite left, and the yearling of religious fanaticism. They opened Pandora’s box.