Dual Loyalty’

CHAPTER EIGHT ARGENTINE JEWS AND THE ACCUSATION OF ‘DUAL LOYALTY’ Although the State of Israel had defi ned itself from the very beginning as a Jewish state and declared its commitment to defending the interests of all Jews, the interests of Israeli foreign policy were not always congruent with those of local Jewish communities. The dynamics at each of these levels were different. Moshe Sharett, the fi rst foreign minister of Israel, met Argentine President Juan Perón in 1953 and expressed his satisfaction at “the existence of a triangular harmony: between the Argentine government and its Jewish citizens; between Argentine Jews and Israel; and between the Argentine government and its Israeli counterpart,”1 but in practice, of course, the situation was more complex.2 This explains why, for example, President Perón (1946–1955) could succeed in cultivating close relations with the State of Israel while failing to mobilize signifi cant support in the Argentine Jewish community. The disparity between Israel’s interests and those of Argentine Jews was also notable during the presidency of Arturo Frondizi, leader of the centrist Radical Party, whose democratic credentials and sympathy for the Jewish minority were never in doubt.3 Frondizi’s election in 1 Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, vol. 8 (1953) (Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1995), 248 2 On the Jewish aspect of Israel’s foreign policy and on the intrinsic tension between the defi nition of Israel as a Jewish state and its role in the international arena as a state like any other that wanted to promote and safeguard specifi c interests, see Michael Brecher, The Foreign Policy System of Israel (New Haven, Conn., 1972), 233–244; Shmuel Sandler, “Is There a Jewish Foreign Policy?” The Jewish Journal of Sociology XXIX, no. 2 (Dec. 1987): 115–122; Yitzhak Mualem, “Between a Jewish and an Israeli For- eign Policy: Israel-Argentina Relations and the Issue of Jewish Disappeared Persons and Detainees Under the Military Junta, 1976–1983,” Jewish Political Studies Review 16, no. 1–2 (2004). 3 On Frondizi and his presidency, see Celia Szusterman, Frondizi and the Politics of Developmentalism in Argentina, 1955–62 (Pittsburgh, 1993); Daniel Rodríguez Lamas, La presidencia de Frondizi (Buenos Aires, 1984); Isidro J. L. Odena, Libertadores y desarrollistas (Buenos Aires, 1977); Emilia Menotti, Frondizi: Una biografía (Buenos Aires, 1998); Félix Luna, Diálogos con Frondizi (Buenos Aires, 1998). 170 chapter eight February 1958 was welcomed by both the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the leaders of the organized Jewish community. Soon after the new president took offi ce, their expectations seemed to have been justifi ed. Argentine Jews felt an increasing sense of security and well- being, in part because several Jews had been appointed to high posts in the government—posts that Jews had never held before in Argentina. Relations with Israel, too, grew closer. Foreign Minister Golda Meir’s visit to Buenos Aires in 1959, for example, allowed the Frondizi government to display its sympathy for Israel publicly.4 A year later, however, all this changed. In May 1960, at the height of the celebrations to mark 150 years of Argentine independence and the Republic’s liberation from the yoke of Spanish colonialism, Mossad agents kidnapped the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann and took him to Israel for trial.5 In Buenos Aires this violation of Argentina’s national sovereignty aroused great anger. Although various foreign-policy con- siderations ensured that the ensuing diplomatic crisis was resolved within a few weeks and relations with Israel quickly returned to nor- mal, violent manifestations of anti-Semitism threatened the position of Argentine Jews, whose number at the time was estimated at just above 300,000 out of a population of about 21 million—in other words, less than 2 percent of the total population.6 The Argentine Jewish community, just then marking the 100th anniversary of its existence, became the target of a wave of anti-Semitic terror and nationalist attacks that, 4 On Frondizi’s foreign policy, see María de Monserrat Llairó and Raimundo Siepe, Frondizi: Un nuevo modelo de inserción internacional (Buenos Aires, 2003). 5 On the kidnapping operation, see the book by the former head of the Israeli secret service (the Mossad), Isser Harel, The House on Garibaldi Street (London, 1997); also Zvi Aharoni and Wilhelm Dietl, Operation Eichmann: The Truth about the Pursuit, Capture and Trial (New York, 1997); Peter Z. Malkin, Eichmann in My Hands (New York, 1990). For an interesting historiographical essay, see Ignacio Klich, “Four Decades After the Capture in Buenos Aires of an Austrian from Linz: The Eichmann Affair in Memoirs, Argentinian Testimonies and Journalism,” in Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy: Coming to Terms with Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation, and Restitution, ed. Oliver Rathkolb (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 259–309. 6 American Jewish Year Book (hereafter AJYB) 63 (1962): 474. On the characteristics and structure of the Jewish community in those days, see Haim Avni, Argentine Jewry: Social Status and Organizational Profi le [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1972); Irving Louis Horo- vitz, “The Jewish Community of Buenos Aires,” Jewish Social Studies 24, no. 4 (October 1962): 195–222; Daniel J. Elazar and Peter Medding, Jewish Communities in Frontier Societies: Argentina, Australia and South Africa (New York, 1983), part 2. For a pioneering study of the Jewish leadership in Argentina in that period, see Haim Avni, “Jewish Leadership in Times of Crisis: Argentina During the Eichmann Affair (1960–1962),” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 11 (1995): 117–135..

Load more