“A few words on my personal biography: I was born in Berlin in September 1935. I was born into the Nazi regime. My father, Dr. Shmuel Spiro, later the director of the medical service of the Youth Aliyah under the leadership of Henrietta Szold (for me Henrietta Szold is not the name of a street, but a flesh-and-blood person on whose lap I sat as a child), immigrated in 1938 to Jerusalem, then part of British Palestine, after the licences of Jewish doctors were withdrawn. My mother, Greta Spiro, a photographer, remained with me and my brother in an attempt to save what she could. We got through the Krystallnacht pogrom in Berlin without physical harm thanks to my mother’s ingenuity. We immigrated to Palestine in March 1939. From this you will understand that I am a refugee who survived the Krystallnacht pogrom. I assume that if not for the Nazi regime, my family, which had been in Germany for generations, would have stayed in Germany, and I can raise many scenarios about what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Germany. From this you will understand that I am interested in the subject not only from the point of view of an engaged person and political journalist, but also from the thoroughly personal perspective of a German Jew. The Eichmann trial is a good point of departure for the thesis that I submit, which is that Israel has not learned the appropriate lessons from the Holocaust period, the main ones of which are democracy, human rights, the struggle against racism, respect for the rights of minorities, support for refugees and international solidarity with the forces that are struggling to eliminate racism and tyranny. Already at the Eichmann trial, the tendency, which has intensified over the subsequent years, to press the Holocaust into service for the current requirements of Israeli policy, was manifest. Hanna Arendt observed it in her report on the Eichmann trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem by pointing to the question that the prosecutor Gideon Hausner flung at more than one of the witnesses: ‘Why did you not resist?’ As if there was such an option for civilians, including women, children, old people faced with an armed military force in the valley of death. Hausner continued to ask the question, even though it had clearly been no different among other nations. But that question had a clear Zionist message: in the Holocaust you did not resist, but here in the State of Israel with the Jewish army, it will not happen again. That was confirmed this week with the publication of the protocols from the cabinet meetings after the abduction of Eichmann, according to which the main priority of then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was to exploit the trial for Israeli hasbara. [4]There is a straight line from the Eichmann trial to the youth delegations the Ministry of Education sends to the death camp at Auschwitz. The visits by young people to Auschwitz before their military service are infused with Israeli Jewish nationalism, and are intended to increase their motivation to join the army. In these visits there is no mention of the universal human aspect of the Holocaust period outside the Jewish experience. Eichmann was in fact convicted of crimes against humanity, but that was given very little expression in the trial. Those who planned the trial were not interested in non-Jewish humanity. And it is also thus in the visits of Israeli youth to Auschwitz. Indeed, a researcher from Tel Aviv University has found that there was a higher rate of willingness to join combat units among the youths who visited Auschwitz. Mission accomplished. And the program of sending IDF officers to visit Auschwitz, which has involved thousands of officers so far, is also an expression of contempt for the Holocaust. Officers are taken from their duties of Occupation and violation of human rights in the Occupied Territories straight to Auschwitz, whence they return full of motivation to continue their duties, seeing no contradiction between the visit and their activities in the framework of an army of occupation. This is the militarization of the Holocaust, if you will. A creature from outer space who landed in Israel and studied the official Israeli approach to the Holocaust would get the impression that to the Israelis, the Nazis were not an enemy of humanity, but only the enemy of the Jewish people. On one of my visits to Germany, a German told me in a personal conversation that in his opinion the Nazis made a terrible mistake with the Jews. Instead of destroying them they should have enlisted the Jewish genius in the service of the Nazi regime. If they had done that, he added, everything would have been different. Germany would have won the war. I sometimes hear an echo of that same viewpoint in Israel too. That could explain the friendly and intimate relations between Israel and the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa, with its Nazi laws. As long as the Apartheid laws did not affect Jews, but only Blacks, Israel was an ally of that regime. That attitude was expressed by the invitation to Israel of South African Prime Minister John Vorster as the guest of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. After the Likud’s rise to power, known as the revolution of 1977, South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha visited Israel as the guest of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan. There was no difference between the Labour Party and the Likud when it came to friendship with the regime with Nazi laws. Ironically, both leaders from racist South Africa visited Yad Vashem, [5] and nobody saw that as contempt for or desecration of the Holocaust. It was the same with the fascist dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, to which Israel exported arms. The policy of exporting arms to dictatorial regimes continues to this day. Since the Reparations Agreement was signed by David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer, Israel has exhibited a great deal of flexibility in its relations with Germany in everything related to the service of Nazis in its governmental, judicial and military apparati. As long as the money and political support flowed, Israel lived in peace with people who had been members of the Nazi Party. That is how it was with Hans Globke, Adenauer’s secretary and advisor, who participated in drafting the Nuremberg Laws, and that is how it was with Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger, who had been a member of the Nazi Party. When in 1971 Gerhard Schröder, the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag, visited Israel as the guest of the Foreign Minister Abba Eban, I filed an appeal at the Supreme Court to have him put on trial under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, because he had been a member of the Nazi Party and the SA! The appeal was rejected. I was a student at the time and Yoel Zussman, the acting president of the Supreme Court (and later its president), suggested that I concentrate on my studies and not concern myself with politics. A very democratic suggestion. When Willy Brandt of the Social Democratic Party replaced Kiesinger, concern was expressed in Israel that because Brandt had fought the Nazis in exile, maybe his anti-Nazi past would liberate him from feelings of guilt and he would be less friendly towards Israel. That was not the case regarding East Germany, with the pretensious name of the DDR (German Democratic Republic). There, there were indeed fewer former Nazis in governmental positions, but the DDR’s membership in the Communist bloc and its refusal to pay reparations prompted Israel to preach hypocrisy-laden morality to it, from which West Germany was spared. The Holocaust also served as an effective instrument for justifying Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The State of Israel has become a Garden of Eden for the production of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, biological and chemical. Hence the absurdity, that in the name of the last Holocaust, Israel is exposed to a new holocaust, a nuclear holocaust – at its own hands. The government of Israel uses the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as a weapon to suppress criticism of its politics. It has proven to be a useful tool whenever Germany is concerned, but not only Germany. Even in the German left-wing party they tread very lightly whenever it comes to criticizing Israel over the Occupation. That and more: the government of unified Germany, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (not the one from the appeal) and his deputy, Green Party leader and Foreign Minister Yoschka Fischer, provided Israel with submarines (as a gift) that can carry nuclear-tipped missiles. The Green Party was founded as a movement against nuclear arms. When I asked Yoschka Fischer (who before he became Foreign Minister signed a petition in support of Moredechai Vanunu) to condition the transfer of the submarines on their not being nuclear-armed, I received no reply. And thus was created another absurdity, that Germany is donating the next holocaust to us as compensation for the previous Holocaust. The Yad Vashem institute is well integrated into the picture that has been described here, maybe because for most of its existence it has been headed by retired generals. It is a fact that during all 44 years of the Occupation Yad Vashem has not seen fit to come out against the violations of human rights and the apartheid regime that exist in the Occupied Territories. The late philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Liebowitz coined the term ‘Judaeo-Nazi’, which caused a lot of controversy. It was his somewhat provocative way of challenging the political establishment and its followers. If I understood Liebowitz correctly, he wanted to say that the Nazis are not specific to any one people, but a dangerous political phenomenon that can exist in any nation, and the Jews are no exception. And that is my opinion as well. When I interviewed him for the Jewish German monthly called Semit, he gave a concrete example of what he meant. A female Palestinian prisoner about to give birth. She was taken to a hospital in Israel, and there, on the orders of the ISA or the police, she was chained to a bed, where she gave birth. ‘That is Nazism’, stormed Liebowitz in his familiar voice, and the willingness to obey such a barbaric order is the essence of Eichmannism – hiding behind the excuse that ‘I was only following orders.’ The willingness to carry out any order is one of the characteristics of Israeli military society today. The lessons have not been learned. The life of Rosa Luxemburg, who was the inspiration for this conference, and her essential outlook, are for me the model of a different Germany but also for a different Israel.”
