[40] Jewish Social The Holocaust: Private Studies Memories, Public Memory Anita Shapira ver the past 15 years it has been the penchant among histori- ans—myself among them—to present the first couple of de- Ocades following World War II as a period during which the Holocaust was suppressed in Israeli national consciousness. It has been claimed that, throughout this period, the Holocaust played no more than a marginal role in shaping the Israeli national identity, that it was never at the center of the public discourse, that it was not internalized by the education system. People did not want to hear about the Holocaust. People did not wish to discuss the Holocaust. The struggle preceding the founding of the state and, later, the War of Independence suppressed the shock of the Holocaust and the impact it had. There was no room in the newly formed heroic state for exhibitions of weakness and humilia- tion. Some historians have been able to understand this attitude, even excusing and explaining it away. Others were enraged by it and regarded it as a crude expression of heartlessness on the part of the veteran Israeli population toward the new immigrants, survivors of the devastation. But as for actually pushing aside the Holocaust issue to the edges of the Israeli agenda, there was no dispute: this assumption has been accepted as fact by historians and writers alike, and it has received wide coverage in the popular press and television. It served as a central factor in a scathing accusation against David Ben-Gurion—who is identified as the state’s founding father—and against the first native generation, the Sabras, for ignoring or erasing deliberately the memory of the Holo- caust. On the other hand—so goes the accusation—they over-empha- sized the role played by the all-powerful Israeli “macho” in building the nation and the country, and they nurtured the myth of heroism. This convention was to become one of the battering rams in attacks on the Israeli entity.1 It is now widely agreed that the age of marginalizing the Holocaust in Israeli awareness is past. There is no agreement, however, as to the exact moment at which it came to an end. Some see the Eichmann trial in 1961 [41] as the event that brought the Holocaust into Israeli public awareness. Others point to the waiting period that preceded the Six Day War in 1967 Anita as the turning point on this issue. Still others reckon that this change Shapira took place immediately following the trauma of the Yom Kipur War in • 1973. And there are also those who would go so far as naming the 1977 The Holocaust political takeover by the Likud Party as the time of Israel’s revised self- awareness with regard to the Holocaust. Anchoring the end of the moratorium in each of these events is the direct result of individual points of view with regard to the factors that brought about the repres- sion of the Holocaust in the first place and is therefore also connected to the timing of the end of this repression. Those who saw the Eichmann trial as representing the end of the repression period related this repression simply to a lack of knowledge and understanding of the significance of the Holocaust from a factual point of view. The accusations and testimonies presented in the trial brought the Holocaust into every household in the country. According to this version, it was knowledge that brought about awareness. Those who considered the change in awareness to have been caused by the waiting period prior to the Six Day War focused on the collective fear of annihilation that, at the time, was shared by the entire population of Israel. The sense of helplessness, of there being no way out, that had hitherto been identified only with the Holocaust and life in exile was seen now as being possible in the free Jewish state as well. The feeling of Jewish solidarity, the ability to identify with the annihilated Jewish people, was no longer mere rhetoric referring to another reality but had became part of a collective Israeli experience. Another dimension was added by the Yom Kipur War: for the first time, footage was shown on television of Israelis taken prisoner, of weakness and of degradation. These phenomena, which had so far been considered characteristic of the Diaspora Jew in the negative sense, received an overnight legitimacy, becoming part of the Israeli experi- ence. The heroic self-image of the Israeli Sabra, as personified by Moshe Dayan, lost much of its glamour: the independent, forceful aura that had made the Sabra so attractive turned out to be no more than an aura, unable to protect its owner against human weakness, defeat, surrender, and humiliation. The downfall of the Sabra as society’s ideal self-image in the wake of the war, together with the shock waves it caused, opened the door to legitimizing other types of Israeliness and legitimizing an Israeli identity that appropriates experiences of the Holocaust as its own. Those who attributed the change in awareness to the 1977 political overthrow saw the key to this process in the replacement of the country’s [42] governing political elite. Until 1977 the Israeli ethos had been shaped by the Labor culture. A direct line existed between the governing elite of Jewish the veteran pre-state Yishuv and that of the young state. This left its stamp Social on major aspects of the country’s identity, formulating the legitimate Studies images of “Israeliness,” the country’s cultural symbols, and the accepted conventions of memory. Anyone who had not been part of that social- political entity—the Israeli right-wing circles, known as the “fighting family” of the Irgun (IZL) and Lehi underground organizations, orien- tal Jews, and Holocaust survivors—tended to feel discriminated against and alienated. The political revolution, then, was also a cultural one in that it brought to power new elites and lent legitimacy to their cultures and to their claims of representing a different kind of Israeliness. Doors were thus opened to a new awareness of the Holocaust and its survivors. These four versions of the point at which the Holocaust penetrated Israeli awareness do not necessarily contradict one another. The process of creating a new Israeli identity gained strength and achieved depth with each new experience and change. Common to them all was the assumption that there had been an earlier period of silence, a suppres- sion—either passive disregard or active attempts at repression—of the consciousness of the Holocaust in Israel’s collective history. The accusation of “silence/silencing” did not appear until after the screen separating the awareness of the Holocaust and the collective Israeli memory had faded away. In other words, it was only after the Holocaust had become an integral, central component in the Israeli self- image that the criticism appeared regarding the period when this important component was not included in the Israeli identity. Accusa- tions against the past are usually aimed at achieving changes in the present. Thus any debate on this issue should also look at the question of what and whose interests were to be served by these changes in the national identity and collective memory. The terms “collective memory” and “national identity” gain signifi- cance from within a cultural consensus; both the speaker and the listener understand the issue at hand for the simple reason that they both have access to a common world of codes and associations. A debate on such vague terms raises complex problems of definition: how are we going to define the components of national identity during Period A as opposed to Period B? What were the experiences that were included or excluded in the collective memory? What signs will prove to us that a certain component exists or does not exist? What are the characteristics of collective memory at one time versus another? The method has not yet been found whereby an historian can ascertain that the data at his or her disposal covered the whole collective experience. This problem should bother all historians, but it should be of special interest to those [43] involved in researching “national identity” or “collective memory,” since they are trying to reflect the essence of the society in question. The Anita difficulty of encompassing the entire collective experience by using Shapira existing methodological tools casts doubts on the viability of defining a • “national identity” or “collective memory.” Each definition is based on The Holocaust the historian’s choice of part of the data on the era at the expense of other aspects. Paradoxically, the richer the material at hand, the more groundless is our pretense at presenting a complete picture. Therefore, it is hard to draw an extensive picture of processes that are close to us in time, not only because of a lack of perspective but also because of the wealth of material available. The frequency of public debate on certain issues is held as proof that these issues are central or secondary components in the collective memory or national identity. Official ceremonies, annually repeated standard texts, the involvement of the media in various aspects of these issues, all kinds of memorial projects (from headstones to research projects to the publication of testimonials and memoirs), cooperation with the educational system in an attempt at “bequeathing” the collec- tive memory—all of these are seen as evidence of the central role attributed to the issue in the national identity. Likewise, a dearth of these elements proves the opposite. This evidence is not based on hard fact but rather on impressions that help the historian to analyze society.