THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

have their own problems to worry about beside nation building and history.When Tamir called up his witnesses and aired his arguments, he turned his attentionto the masses. “They did not want you!” he cried, and people heard and listened.Survivors who were physically and mentally impaired, immigrants from Muslimcountries, and other refugees who had arrived here for lack of other places startedfeeling that there could be an alternative to the Israeli-ness that was embodied byBen-Gurion and the ruling native-born elite. The path to the New Israel started at theKastner Terminal. It took them few more years to assemble the coalition of thespurned and to bring it to power in 1977.It is hard to believe that Ben-Gurion, ever alert and suspicious, had misread theprocess. He knew and lived history and read it daily. He knew what Tamir wasdoing, saw the cracks, and did everything to put the house in order. Today I have nodoubt that Ben-Gurion searched and found a powerful way to offset the damage fromthe Kastner trial. He did have sincere reasons for bringing Eichmann here and tryinghim publicly and extravagantly; one of them was the battle for history and his reply tohis anti-Mapai detractors. The Eichmann trial was the most aggressive defense thatBen-Gurion presented before the court of Israeli history. Eichmann thus extended hispresence from the glass cage to the internal politics of the state. The trial delayed fora few years the erosion process that began with the Kastner trial.Ben-Gurion captured Eichmann and fulfilled his wish. The leader seized his preyand did not let go until the Nazi died. He succeeded, for an historic moment, tocreate the impression that he was the one who retroactively won against both Adolfs,Eichmann and Hitler. Against the line of witnesses who turned the Grunwald libel trialto the trial of Kastner, his party and the Zionist establishment, Ben-Gurion andHausner summoned a line of witnesses who testified on the Shoah and heroism,whether they had anything to do with the Nazi bureaucrat or not. Dozens ofwitnesses described in gory detail their personal and communal atrocities. Thedestruction of European Jewry was laid extensively, with the amplified ghettouprisings and heroism receiving ample time. The trial was a turning point from nationalrhetoric to personal histories, then back to a very different national level.The Eichmann trial was meant to hit several targets in one go, just as theNuremberg trials were meant to cleanse Germany and legitimize it as a “kosher”partner of the West against the Soviets and Stalin. Our goal was to punish the villain,to shape a new Israeli generation that had begun to forget the Shoah, to raise the