THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Europe’s Jewish population, the human reserves who were to inhabit the land andbuild the state, had been liquidated. They were gone forever.The Zionist reaction followed soon enough. Israel declared itself the heir of thevictims, their sole official representative in the world, and appointed itself as thespeaker of the slain millions. We naturalized six million dead citizens. Young Israel,which was meant to be the healthy alternative to the ailing Diaspora, had scolded theHolocaust victims, posthumously, “We told you so,” and transplanted their severedorgans into its young body. From a new alternative to the Diaspora in EasternEurope, the young trailblazing Israel metamorphosed into a country with the samementality of an old, small, Jewish town, forever persecuted, in the heart of theMiddle East.The Zionist movement and its daughter Israel, founded on revolutionary ideals,severed themselves from the Jewish past and created a new national entity, adoptingthe body and soul of the Shoah victims and survivors. Soon enough they reconnectedin full force not only to the pain and mourning of the victims, but also to the sameexilic degenerative disease from which they had escaped just a few decades earlier.In the new and innovative Israel, the radical movement of total renewal that promiseda spring of nationhood and a new society was compelled to redefine itself bymemory and the past. Israel went beyond mourning; it was no longer a futureorientedstate, but a society connected to its bleeding, traumatic past. The dramaticproximity of 1945 to 1948, the years of grief and of utopia, depression and mania,fused two monumental events, the Jewish massacre in Europe and the building of theJewish state of Israel, into one single entity. They became intertwined andinseparable.Processes like this are by nature lengthy and subject to modification, so I find itvery difficult to point to the exact turning point when optimism and exhilaration turnedinto pessimism and grief. Melancholy, like ivy, climbs upward and covers everything,including the native-grown plants.The songs of the war, the Jews’ poems, the fighters’ anthems and the songs of thedead invaded the Zionist hall of hope. They became slogans that pass from onegeneration to the next. Fifty years of an optimistic Israeli struggle—from Herzl to thestormy 1940s—were suddenly replaced with desperation and admonishment. Thepowerful lyrics of a Yiddish protest song that Hirsh Glick wrote in the Vilna ghetto in1943, upon hearing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, later became the hymn of the