Dr. Yehiam Sorek
https://www.hayadan.org.il/soreq190404.html
It is very interesting to examine the changes in reference to the Holocaust, and especially the reference to Holocaust Day in our districts.
When the survivors of the Holocaust and their refugees invaded the young state of Israel, which had just been established, there existed between the two sides, the survivors and the Israelis, a kind of agreed bond of silence (you want, call it a kind of "denial of the Holocaust"). The first ones remained silent because they feared that they would not be believed, because they themselves refused to digest the essence of the horror, because they would claim against them that they went "like sheep to the slaughter", because they would throw sentences like: "We told you so!", "Why did you delay to come up", "Did you fall in love with the meat pot?!" , because in the face of the roughness of the Sabar, in the face of the skin of youth, in the face of the operations and the war, what will they say, the exiles, the alienated and more. The latter remained silent because they did not believe, because they did not want to believe, because they were afraid of the opposite claim: "And you, the people of the settlement in the land, what have you done for us" and more. A phenomenon of silence ("denial") of this kind was reflected, by the way, in the Palestine press during the world war, during the Holocaust itself. A kind of cooperation was created, an alignment between the press of the settlement and the position of the establishment (they don't want to know/not so much want/can act). Information about the Holocaust was relegated to the margins of the inside pages in the press and underwent a deliberate series of informational softening.
The Eichmann trial (1960-1962) cracked the double dam of silence and a tremendous burst of information about the Holocaust washed over Israeli society in particular, and the world in general. The Israeli establishment then decided, "with no other choice", to appropriate the Holocaust and its components to the point of oppressive nationalization in order to serve its national goals, which stood out in the field of education and ceremonies in general. The day of the Holocaust then took on amplified dimensions, and from it burst forth (intentionally) symbolic messages of the obligation to unite, to concentrate around the tribal fire, otherwise our end would be bad and bitter. The affair of the history of the Holocaust with its endless details became a burden on the back of the state, because the behavior "as a sheep to the slaughter" contradicted the rock of the powerful existence of the people and its establishment.
As a result, they added a new phrase to the box "Holocaust Day", a kind of powerful phrase, and called it "heroism", and together: "Holocaust Day and Heroism". Society and the establishment did not so much seek the heroism of the Jew, who waged a terrible war of survival, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, in terms of the "sanctification of life" in the ghetto, for example. The establishment was looking for the "action" - the rebellion, the resistance, which undoubtedly served the security syndrome in the country. The result was the creation of a myth of general Jewish rebellion in almost every ghetto, in every concentration and extermination camp, to the point of being formulated in the style of the "ghetto revolt", and this despite the fact that the only revolt that took place in the Holocaust was in the Warsaw ghetto. Moreover, the nationalization of the Holocaust and its appropriation by the establishment meant that the activity of non-Zionist personalities in the underground activity and this prominence of the Zionist activists were deliberately minimized, all within the framework of the appropriation of the Holocaust for national, state and political purposes. This national-nationalist trend stands out in the strengthening of the claim that if the state had been established before its time, the Holocaust would have been avoided; By avoiding defining "Holocaust" as the tragedy of the Armenian people; in dragging, almost forced, high-profile foreign personalities who visit Israel, to visit Yad Vashem; In ritualistic journeys of teenagers, high school students, to the sites of extermination in Poland and even in harnessing the Holocaust for the benefit of the struggle for the Palestinian people and their ambition to establish a sovereign state for them, alongside the State of Israel (remember the terrible, chilling expression of the "boundaries of Auschwitz" in response to the Oslo Accords plan and more). Let the Holocaust and the details of its horrors seep into the veins of our consciousness and do not appropriate it on the one hand and trade in it on the other.
Dr. Yehiam Sorek, Historian, Beit Berel College
