THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

“nationhood,” including its intelligentsia, the standard-bearers of Polish nationalism.Hitler hoped to annex Polish lands to Germany and to populate them withVolksdeutche, Aryans, and ethnic Germans who lived in the Baltic States and EasternPoland. “A place under the sun,” in the Judeo-German lexicon, means something veryspecific and sinister.Why, then, did former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, name his book(in Hebrew), of all names, A Place under the Sun? Is it because the narrativespeaks of the rightist, paranoid belief in nothing but power and settlements tocounterbalance the Arab demographic threat? Is this a subliminal admission that withthe expansion to the east and the de facto annexation—an Anschluss—of Judaea,Samaria, and the Golan, an Israeli Empire was born? Is it a manifestation ofclaustrophobic pangs in the Jewish ghetto mindset that seeks relief by breaking outinto a broader living space? It may just be literary insensitivity on Netanyahu’s part,another instance of the endless paradoxical expressions that Hitler and the Shoah leftus to struggle with.During the Nazi regime and World War II, the leaders of the pre-state of Israel(Yishuv) did very little in response to the annihilation of Europe’s Jews. There waslittle knowledge and awareness “here” about the events “there” in distant Europe. Thelocal Zionist politicians, most of them Eastern European Jews, were also unable toact. Headed by the pragmatic David Ben-Gurion, they did not wish to wasteemotional resources that could otherwise be channeled into building the Jewish state.“The answer to the disaster of Germany’s Jews,” Ben-Gurion told the Jewish AgencyExecutive in 1935, “must be Zionist: to convert the disaster into a resource forbuilding the land, to save the lives and the property of Germany’s Jews for the land.This salvation comes before anything else.” During the early days of danger, beforethe violence became deadly, the Jewish Agency, representing the local Israeli-Jewishpopulation, negotiated with the Nazis. It was a cynical meeting of interests: neither theZionists nor the Nazis wanted the Jews to remain in Germany. The Nazis wantedthem far away, and the Zionists wanted them in their own, not-yet born state. Thisdialogue produced economic agreements between the Zionists and the Nazis thatenabled the transfer of funds and goods to the would-be state. This resulted ineconomic prosperity and the building of much of the infrastructure that served thepre-state Israel in the 1930s, some even during the Great Arab Revolt. Israelihistorian and journalist Tom Segev writes on this topic in his book The Seventh