THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Canaanite left, and the yearling of religious fanaticism. They opened Pandora’s box.They spoke over the head of the court and behind the back of the tightly organizedpolitical establishment. They spoke directly to the people and opened the worstfestering wound in Israel’s young body. They manipulated the survivors’ feeling ofguilt.In her book Trauma and Recovery, aut hor Judit h Loy is Herman explains thatthe phenomenon of survivor’s guilt is common among survivors of war, naturaldisasters, and nuclear holocausts. Guilt is especially hard for survivors who witnessedthe suffering and deaths of others. Survivors who endured war and disaster arehaunted by images of the dying. They feel that they did not do enough in order tosave others. Traumatic events undermine the bond between individuals and theircommunities and generate a crisis of trust. As long as the trauma of the Shoah wasexpressed collectively, Israeli society provided a positive alternative and hope. Thecracks that Tamir and Avnery made in the new fragile Israeli ethos facilitated thebreakup of solidarity, and consequently guilt surfaced among the masses of Shoahsurvivors. The dam broke and it was impossible to stop the deluge of mistrust in thecommunity and the perceived false world. The community was Mapai and itschapters; the world was Mapai and its government. In the Kastner trial, the falsityclaim was argued forcibly, and everything seemed to disintegrate.I imagine that few at the time were aware of the criticism that is expressed today,retroactively, against the Zionist leadership of those times. True, Ben-Gurion focusedhis efforts in setting the foundations and the scaffolding for the construction of thestate at the first available geopolitical moment. He turned his attention away fromeverything else and did not misspeak once, testifying much more to his Zionistdevotion than to his opinion of the annihilated Jews. Had he given it a secondthought, I believe he would have spoken differently. Yet one issue is agreed: theZionist movement took advantage of all opportunities to reinforce the small butgrowing pre-state of Israel. The leaders did Zionist selections, favoring the young andhealthy. “Every lad good for arms, every lad on guard,” says the Palmah Anthem. Notonly did they select in Europe the fittest to pull the plough of the Zionist Revolution,they also did not welcome the Jewish masses from the shtetls or from the luftgescheften(literally, air businesses, meaning nonproductive wheeling and dealing) ofEastern Europe. They despised them, as they themselves had come from there andknew precisely what they did not want. Individuals, whether survivors or otherwise,cannot always grasp the big picture of national planners and strategists. Individuals