THE EICHMANN EFFECT
Allan Gould
National Post, June 1, 2012
Today, the first of June, marks exactly 50 years since one of the most infamous men of the past century, Adolf Eichmann, was hung by the State of Israel—the first and only time that the death penalty was civilly imposed in that country.…
As a young man, passing through Israel on a youth pilgrimage during the summer of 1961, I witnessed Eichmann’s trial, and have been haunted by what I witnessed ever since. But I also have come to realize that the Eichmann trial eventually raised the consciousness of the world, and thereby changed humanity for the better.
When Adolf Eichmann was captured by the Mossad in 1961 and flown to Israel, most of the world was furious.… Perhaps these pundits already had forgotten the flaws that vitiated an earlier exercise in international law, merely 16 years before: the Nuremburg Trial.
That trial failed in crucial ways because the victors of the Second World War placed dozens of Hitler’s top Nazis in the dock just weeks after Germany’s collapse.… At trial, the killers of 80% of European Jewry were charged with general “crimes against humanity.” And so the procedures lacked a specific moral focus. This was a mistake that Israel did not want to see repeated with Eichmann.
At Eichmann’s Jerusalem trial, many Holocaust survivors spoke publicly for the first time, giving “a voice to the victims that they had not had before, and would compel the world to listen to the story of the Final Solution in [an unprecedented] way,” as historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote in…The Eichmann Trial.…
At the time of the trial, some people had a vague awareness of the mass killing of Jews under Hitler. But the world’s consciousness had not yet been raised.… Anne Frank’s diary had been translated into English only a few years earlier. And Eli Wiesel’s Night had been out for only a year, in its English edition. The word “genocide” was rarely heard, and the term “The Holocaust” had not yet entered the vocabulary of the world. Eichmann’s trial changed that: Unlike at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, television was now watched by hundreds of millions. In the United States [and Canada], the major channels…showed excerpts from the Eichmann trial every weeknight for months. All in all, there were 750 international journalists in Jerusalem covering the trial.
The Israeli prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, was eloquent when he opened the proceedings in April of 1961: “As I stand here before you to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. With me stand six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger. For their ashes are piled up in the hills of Auschwitz and in the fields of Treblinka, or washed away by the rivers of Poland; their graves are scattered over the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voices are not heard.…”
In the course of the 1,350,000 words spoken at trial, the world learned from Eichmann’s own notebooks that he had no remorse, that he bemoaned the fact that the Nazi regime had not killed more Jews, and that he expressed great satisfaction about how smoothly the deportation process had run. In particular, he regretted that he did “not achieve my ultimate aim, which was to free Hungary of all its Jews.…”
On a cold December day in 1961, the Israeli judges issued their judgment: Eichmann was found guilty of the destruction of millions of Jews. The Nazi bureaucrat was sentenced to hang on June 1, 1962, 50 years ago today.
The Eichmann trial accelerated the growth of a new field of study around the world: genocide. And the German government reversed its opposition to extending the statute of limitations, allowing more war criminals to be prosecuted. For the first time, there was a consensus among democratic states that genocidal killers cannot take refuge behind claims of obedience to superior orders. There was a proliferation of museums and annual commemorations around the world.…
One of the 613 commandments in the Five Books of Moses teaches: “You shall not stand idly by when your neighbour’s life is in danger” (Leviticus 19:16). The Eichmann trial of 1961 helped teach us all the truth of that lesson.
A NEW DILEMMA IN HOSTING A GERMAN PRESIDENT
Efraim Zuroff
Jerusalem Post, May 28, 2012
Ever since the end of World War II, the shadow of the Holocaust has naturally strongly influenced German-Jewish relations, and since the establishment of Israel, that subject is a permanent factor in the relations between the Federal Republic and the Jewish state. Thus a visit of a German president to Israel is unlike that of any other head of state and is of unique significance to both sides.
Over the years, such visits have contributed to the slowly-evolving process of reconciliation and cooperation which has developed between Germany and Israel and helped strengthen the ties between the two countries, despite the horrific and unforgivable crimes committed by the Third Reich against the Jewish people.
In that context, the visit to Israel this week of recently elected (this past March 18) German President Joachim Gauck poses a serious dilemma for Israeli leaders. For the first time ever, the visiting German head of state does not share the heretofore-accepted narrative of the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its recognition as a sui generis event in the annals of mankind.…
Gauck’s divergence from the narrative accepted by previous German presidents became public almost four years ago when he signed the Prague Declaration of June 3, 2008. This document, which was signed by more than two dozen mostly East European intellectuals and political leaders, promotes the canard of equivalence between Nazi and Communist crimes. It calls for specific practical steps which, if implemented, would undermine the justified current status of the Holocaust as a unique case of genocide unprecedented in human history.
Thus, for example, the Declaration calls for the designation of August 23 as a joint day of commemoration for all the victims of totalitarian regimes. In other words, all those murdered by the Nazis and the Communists. The choice of date in this case is indicative of the agenda.
August 23 was the date of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1939 by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The message conveyed by the choice of that date is that the Soviet Union, by signing the treaty with the Third Reich, in effect shares equal responsibility for the atrocities of World War II, a distorted view of the history of that conflict, which purposely ignores the indispensable role of the Red Army in defeating Nazi Germany, and falsely equates the regime which conceived, planned, built and ran the Auschwitz death camp, with the country whose armed forces liberated that death factory and effectively halted the mass annihilation conducted there.
Needless to say, should this proposal ever be implemented, and a non-binding resolution calling for the designation of August 23 as a joint day of commemoration was already passed by a huge margin in the European Union, the future of the International Holocaust Memorial day established by the United Nations in 2005 would look extremely bleak.
Other initiatives called for by the Declaration would also pose a danger to the accepted Holocaust narrative, whether it is the call to rewrite European textbooks in the spirit of the equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes or the desire to establish a “European Institute of Memory and Conscience,” which would include a museum which would reflect that false equivalency and support the work of Eastern European research institutes, which since their establishment have focused exclusively on Communist crimes and purposely ignored those of the Nazis.…
While there is a legitimate case to be made for greater recognition of Communist crimes and additional commemoration and concern for their victims, the attempt to do so by creating a false symmetry with the Holocaust is not only misguided, it is rooted in the dishonest ulterior motives of its main proponents in the post-Communist world, and particularly the Baltic countries, one of whose major goals is to rid themselves of the guilt for their extensive collaboration with Nazi Germany in the mass murder of Jews.…
After his election, President Gauck was quoted in the German daily Tageszeitung as saying that in the wake of the debate over his candidacy, he would “engage himself with new issues, problems, and people.” His visit to Israel is therefore an excellent opportunity for our political leaders to enter into dialogue with him and present the serious dangers posed by the Prague Declaration and the potentially terrible long-term effects of its practical proposals.
The question is, however, whether President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman are fully cognizant of this issue and willing to bring it to the table during their meetings with Gauck. Until now, Israel has refrained from actively seeking to thwart the adoption of the Prague Declaration and its various recommendations, even in its bilateral contacts with far-less important countries like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia which are its major proponents. It remains to be seen whether the Jewish state can finally take a major active step in this direction and not squander the opportunity presented by the visit this week of German President Joachim Gauck.
(Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
and the director of its Israel Office.)[German President Joachim Gauck sparked controversy this week during his visit to Israel, after seemingly undercutting Chancellor Angela Merkel’s pledge to uphold and defend the Jewish state’s security positions. When asked whether Israel’s ongoing security constitutes a German national interest, Gauck answered that Merkel’s current policy could create “enormous difficulties” or a crisis situation in the Federal Republic. In response, the Berlin-based office of the American Jewish Committee called on Gauck to “clarify his stance on Israel,” due to his failure “to express support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s position that the defense of Israel is a [raison d’etre] for Germany”—Ed.]
WHAT HAPPENED TO ISRAEL’S REPUTATION?
Michael Oren
Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2012
“This year Israel is celebrating…a series of accomplishments that have surely exceeded the expectations of its most visionary founders. It is one of the most powerful small nations in history.… [It] has tamed an arid wilderness [and] welcomed 1.25 million immigrants.… The Israelis themselves did the fighting, the struggling, the sacrificing in order to perform the greatest feat of all—forging a new society…in which pride and confidence have replaced the despair engendered by age-long suffering and persecution.”
So Life magazine described Israel on the occasion of its 25th birthday in May 1973. In a 92-page special issue, “The Spirit of Israel,” the magazine extolled the Jewish state as enlightened, robustly democratic and hip, a land of “astonishing achievement” that dared “to dream the dream and make that dream come alive.”
Life told the story of Israel’s birth from the Bible through the Holocaust and the battle for independence. “The Arabs’ bloodthirsty threats,” the editors wrote, “lend a deadly seriousness to the vow: Never Again.” Four pages documented “Arab terrorist attacks” and the three paragraphs on the West Bank commended Israeli administrators for respecting “Arab community leaders” and hiring “tens of thousands of Arabs.” The word “Palestinian” scarcely appeared.
There was a panoramic portrayal of Jerusalem, described as “the focus of Jewish prayers for 2,000 years” and the nucleus of new Jewish neighborhoods. Life emphasized that in its pre-1967 borders, Israel was “a tiny, parched, scarcely defensible toe-hold.” The edition’s opening photo shows a father embracing his Israeli-born daughter on an early “settlement,” a testament to Israel’s birthright to the land.
Would a mainstream magazine depict the Jewish state like this today, [after recently celebrating] its 64th birthday? Unlikely. Rather, readers would learn about Israel’s overwhelming military might, brutal conduct in warfare and eroding democratic values—plus the Palestinians’ plight and Israeli intransigence. The photographs would show not cool students and cutting-edge artists but soldiers at checkpoints and religious radicals.
Why has Israel’s image deteriorated? After all, Israel today is more democratic and—despite all the threats it faces—even more committed to peace.
Some claim that Israel today is a Middle Eastern power that threatens its neighbors, and that conservative immigrants and extremists have pushed Israel rightward. Most damaging, they contend, are Israel’s policies toward the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, toward the peace process and the Palestinians, and toward the construction of settlements.
Israel may seem like Goliath vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but in a regional context it is David. Gaza is host to 10,000 rockets, many of which can hit Tel Aviv, and Hezbollah in Lebanon has 50,000 missiles that place all of Israel within range. Throughout the Middle East, countries with massive arsenals are in upheaval. And Iran, which regularly pledges to wipe Israel off the map, is developing nuclear weapons. Israel remains the world’s only state that is threatened with annihilation.
Whether in Lebanon, the West Bank or Gaza, Israel has acted in self-defense after suffering thousands of rocket and suicide attacks against our civilians. Few countries have fought with clearer justification, fewer still with greater restraint, and none with a lower civilian-to-militant casualty ratio. Israel withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza to advance peace only to receive war in return.
Whereas Israelis in 1973 viewed the creation of a Palestinian state as a mortal threat, it is now the official policy of the Israeli government. Jewish men of European backgrounds once dominated Israel, but today Sephardic Jews, Arabs and women are prominent in every facet of society. This is a country where a Supreme Court panel of two women and an Arab convicted a former president of sexual offenses. It is the sole Middle Eastern country with a growing Christian population. Even in the face of immense security pressures, Israel has never known a second of nondemocratic rule.
In 1967, Israel offered to exchange newly captured territories for peace treaties with Egypt and Syria. The Arab states refused. Israel later evacuated the Sinai, an area 3.5 times its size, for peace with Egypt, and it conceded land and water resources for peace with Jordan. In 1993, Israel recognized the Palestinian people ignored by Life magazine, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the perpetrator of those “Arab terrorist attacks.” Israel facilitated the creation of a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza and armed its security forces. Twice, in 2000 and 2008, Israel offered the Palestinians a state in Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. In both cases, the Palestinians refused.…
Israel has built settlements (some before 1973), and it has removed some to promote peace, including 7,000 settlers to fulfill the treaty with Egypt. Palestinians have rebuffed Israel’s peace offers not because of the settlements—most of which would have remained in Israel anyway, and which account for less than 2% of the West Bank—but because they reject the Jewish state. When Israel removed all settlements from Gaza, including their 9,000 residents, the result was a terrorist mini-state run by Hamas, an organization dedicated to killing Jews world-wide.…
Given all this, why have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? How can we explain the assertion that an insidious “Israel Lobby” purchases votes in Congress, or that Israel oppresses Christians?…
The answer lies in the systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state. Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism, Israel’s enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel’s ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.
It began with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech to the U.N., when he received a standing ovation for equating Zionism with racism—a view the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the following year. It gained credibility on college campuses through anti-Israel courses and “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” It burgeoned through the boycott of Israeli scholars, artists and athletes, and the embargo of Israeli products. It was perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres.
Israel must confront the acute dangers of delegitimization.… “The Spirit of Israel” has not diminished since 1973—on the contrary, it has flourished. The state that Life once lionized lives even more vibrantly today.
(Michael Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.)
WAS COLUMBUS SECRETLY A JEW?
Charles Garcia
CNN, May 24, 2012
[Last week] marked the 508th anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus. Everybody knows the story of Columbus, right? He was an Italian explorer from Genoa who set sail in 1492 to enrich the Spanish monarchs with gold and spices from the orient. Not quite. For too long, scholars have ignored Columbus’s grand passion: the quest to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims.
During Columbus’s lifetime, Jews became the target of fanatical religious persecution. On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain. The edict especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had never converted, and gave them four months to pack up and get out.
The Jews who were forced to renounce Judaism and embrace Catholicism were known as “Conversos,” or converts. There were also those who feigned conversion, practicing Catholicism outwardly while covertly practicing Judaism, the so-called “Marranos,” or swine.
Tens of thousands of Marranos were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. They were pressured to offer names of friends and family members, who were ultimately paraded in front of crowds, tied to stakes and burned alive. Their land and personal possessions were then divvied up by the church and crown.
Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.
Columbus, who was known in Spain as Cristóbal Colón and didn’t speak Italian, signed his last will and testament on May 19, 1506, and made five curious—and revealing—provisions. Two of his wishes—tithe one-tenth of his income to the poor and provide an anonymous dowry for poor girls—are part of Jewish customs. He also decreed to give money to a Jew who lived at the entrance of the Lisbon Jewish Quarter. On those documents, Columbus used a triangular signature of dots and letters that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. He ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity.
According to British historian Cecil Roth’s “The History of the Marranos,” the anagram was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish, a prayer recited in the synagogue by mourners after the death of a close relative. Thus, Columbus’s subterfuge allowed his sons to say Kaddish for their crypto-Jewish father when he died. Finally, Columbus left money to support the crusade he hoped his successors would take up to liberate the Holy Land.
Estelle Irizarry, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, has analyzed the language and syntax of hundreds of handwritten letters, diaries and documents of Columbus and concluded that the explorer’s primary written and spoken language was Castilian Spanish. Irizarry explains that 15th-century Castilian Spanish was the “Yiddish” of Spanish Jewry, known as “Ladino.” At the top left-hand corner of all but one of the 13 letters written by Columbus to his son Diego contained the handwritten Hebrew letters bet-hei, meaning b’ezrat Hashem (with God’s help). Observant Jews have for centuries customarily added this blessing to their letters. No letters to outsiders bear this mark, and the one letter to Diego in which this was omitted was one meant for King Ferdinand.
In Simon Weisenthal’s book, “Sails of Hope,” he argues that Columbus’s voyage was motivated by a desire to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of their expulsion from Spain. Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews’ holy Temple.…
Scholars point to the date on which Columbus set sail as further evidence of his true motives. He was originally going to sail on August 2, 1492, a day that happened to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av, marking the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples of Jerusalem. Columbus postponed this original sail date by one day to avoid embarking on the holiday, which would have been considered by Jews to be an unlucky day to set sail. (Coincidentally or significantly, the day he set forth was the very day that Jews were, by law, given the choice of converting, leaving Spain, or being killed.)
Columbus’s voyage was not, as is commonly believed, funded by the deep pockets of Queen Isabella, but rather by two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew. Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez advanced an interest free loan of 17,000 ducats from their own pockets to help pay for the voyage, as did Don Isaac Abrabanel, rabbi and Jewish statesman.…
As we witness bloodshed the world over in the name of religious freedom, it is valuable to take another look at the man who sailed the seas in search of such freedoms—landing in a place that would eventually come to hold such an ideal at its very core.
