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Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge Middle East Studies)

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For anyone who is interested in the field largely known as 'holocaust studies', as well as in the middle-eastern conflict, this is a must read. Zertal explores aspects of Israeli nationalism and national identity, tracing it to events in the past (Tel Hai, the death of Y. Trumpledor etc) but also, more centrally to the book's theme, tracing it to more recent historical events such as the second world war and the holocaust.

Her main argument has to do with the close, entangled relation between considerations of the holocaust and the state of Israel. She shows, with a lot of interesting and thought provoking documentation, how this relation manifests itself. The holocaust, she believes, not only informs but actively shapes israeli national identity, and is negotiated constantly within Israeli society, often in the justification of military actions.

A large part of her book has to do with Hannah Arendt's work and the way it has been received (especially in the past, around the time of Eichmann's trial) in Israel. According to Zertal, Arendt has been greatly misunderstood in Israeli society, and her work has been unfairly treated, possibly because it does not 'fit' into the religiously-inspired schema of absolute evil vs. absolute good that is an important construction, serving as a framework to understand the holocaust (and, Zertal argues, Israeli society itself sometimes). Arendt's work moves away from a monodimensional, religious understanding of the Jewish people as eternally doomed to be victims, and this is not, it seems, an easily acceptable argument for parts of Israeli society.

For me, the most interesting part of Zertal's book had to do with the way she thinks about the identity of the victim that seems to be a constant shadow within Israeli nationhood, and the implications of such an identity for Israeli life. Her book, all in all, is an excellent and provocative read, and very imporant in light of recent events.

This is a fantastic book -- it actually starts before the Holocaust with the battle of Tel-Hai and the death of Yosef Trumpledor and touches also on the ghetto fighters, the Exodus affair, the Kastner trial, the Eichmann trial, the 1967 war, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin -- focused on exploring the treatment of the Holocaust and related issues by the Israeli political elite (especially Ben-Gurion) in their quest to craft an "Israeli national identity." As mentioned, the book touches on a number of different incidents and issues, but the keystone is the Eichmann trial and Hannah Arendt's book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and the controversy that accompanied it. It is quite clear that Zertal is an admirer of Arendt, and has published on Arendt and her work before. It is well footnoted and very accessable (that is, you don't have to be an academic to really get a lot out of this book).

Israeli journalist Idith Zertal has written a penetrating, definitive study of the politics of blood sacrifice as sanctifying the Israeli state; and of the general political manipulation of officially sanctioned death, the state's "murder of its sons."

Beginning with the founding mythology of Yosef Trumpeldor at Tel-Hai, through the Warsaw Ghetto, into the trial of Eichmann and on into the Six-Day War, we see how Israeli nationhood and victimhood became, from the first, two sides of the same coin; that questioning the former is silenced as an act of betraying the latter. Of course there is nothing particularly Israeli in this process - the Cuban Revolution comes to mind also - but no modern state has made this such an unquestioned bedrock of its national psyche and had it so completely accepted on face value in the larger world. It has even spawned imitators, as witness the state-sanctioned mythology now shrouding the "Holodomor" of Ukraine (ironic in view of Ukrainian nationalists' own role in Nazi-occupied Europe.)

It is evident, also, that there is really no hope for a practical solution to the grave issues of Israel and the Middle East until the mythology of sacred sacrifice is secularized, and the principle of living for one's country is seen as the higher goal.

This is an incisive and powerful critique of the historical, metaphysical, and political damage done by the conflation of Jewish identity and Zionist Nationalist identity - a.k.a. the creation of the state of Israel. To site Talal Asad's reading of this book:

"Idith Zertal describes the ideological use made of those who survived the Nazi mass murders--that is, the symbolic identification of their traumatic experience with Israel as a nation-state. The nation's leaders were not content to point to the many victims who survived the genocidal experience and who now lived in Israel but went on to claim the Israeli state as the symbolic survivor of that experience, as its historic fulfillment and redemption. Among other things, this has enabled the Palestinians (failed resisters of Israeli state power, defeated enemies of the Zionist project) to be represented as the present representatives of Nazi extremism."

"Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood" is beautifully researched -- consistently using Knesset minutes and primary news sources -- and is an invaluable tool to anyone who wishes to disentangle their Jewish identity from Zionism. Also useful is Tom Segev's, the Seventh Million.