Is it?
Maybe Karsh, Shapira, etc are right and Tom Segev is a liar, but that bit about the Nazi holocaust and 1950s Israel comes from Segev's Seventh Million. But even before Segev, I recall having read about it elsewhere, in other writings -- Arendt?
It also appears to have support from Daim Hasberg, an Israeli psychiatrist. The concluding paragraphs of a lecture he gave in 1999, available at http://www.holocaustechoes.com/dasberg.html, read in part:
"With the Exodus, "Massada," and the Warsaw insurrection as background myths, the early Israeli society, defending itself with its back against the wall, had no place for nonheroes. It turned its back on the remnants of the all-too-painful and demoralizing Holocaust as well. The faith in the new sabra-superman was unshakable, whereas Diaspora meant shame. Over the next fifty years of military trauma, terror, and cultural shake-up, taboos broke and myths were remodeled.
The central thesis of this paper is that doctors, including psychiatrists, share the myths and taboos of their societies. Their attitudes changed from rejection, denial, therapeutic neutrality, and fragmentation (with focus on the graver forms of psychopathology and epidemiological statistics) toward rehumanization and reindividuation of former victims and toward a new narrative."
And the opening paragraphs:
"There was no place in the prevailing national myth in Israel in the fifties for nonheroes. Those who had gone like "sheep to the slaughter" in Europe (and what remained of them) were not respected and were almost treated as taboo, as nontouchable.
Thus, the individual fates of Holocaust survivors were dehumanized: one spoke of sheep, of "human dust," when relating to the formless ones from "there." Alternately, survivors were spoken of as "Ood mutsal mey'eysh," that is, a brand plucked from the fire. (These examples and those that follow are as quoted by T. Segev, 1991.)
Itzhak Greenbaum, the representative of Polish Jews on the presidium of the prestate Jewish Agency, the Palestine Jewish community's governing council, spoke of the necessity to "knead the faceless physiognomy" of those from "there," reshaping them into a human shape, said in bitter contempt and shame.
During the 1940s and '50s, Israelis felt helpless vis-à-vis the Shoah, did not want to hear, felt guilty. Their belief in the new "sabra-superman" was unshakable (Amnon Rubinstein's expression, 1977). After many years, the sabra hero and chronicler of the humor of the Palmach (the fighter-commandos of the kibbutz movement who fought in 1948), divulged his most personal secret: his original name was not Ben-Amotz ("son of courage") but Tehillimsaigar; he was not a native-born, joking Sabra but in fact a sad Polish child survivor.
Yossi Peled, an outstanding and much-admired general, disclosed in a recent interview that in the 1950s he had claimed that his father had perished as a Polish ghetto fighter, while the truth was that he had died in Auschwitz, one of the "sheep" who had gone to slaughter. This is only one example of how myth and taboo can distort.
The change began to become evident after the Eichmann trial in 1962. Chaim Goury, the Palmach's national poet, publicly apologized for his previously negative attitude toward the Holocaust survivors (T. Segev, 1991).
After 1967's Six-Day War and its staggering victory, a general euphoria prevailed. The "Final Solution" to the endless threat to Israel's existence had at last been achieved. It was now the OTHER who had to bear the massive losses. This was indeed a mythic, biblical victory. The disillusionment came as soon as 1973. After the Yom Kippur War, it was again our turn to suffer massive grief and losses. The phantom of the possibility of Israel's annihilation again appeared on the horizon.
In 1982 came the "Peace for Galilee" campaign with our attack on Lebanon, when we had to deal with the slaughtered mothers and babies of Sabra and Shatilla on our doorstep. Our Christian allies in Lebanon brutally mass-murdered Palestinian civilians right under our eyes. This occurred precisely on the holy day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, in 1982.
The "sheep-to-the-slaughter" metaphor now became especially dissonant. This was followed by the endless guerrilla war in Lebanon, the intifada, the suppression of civilians. Then, in 1991, Israelis were forced to wait passively for German-gas-filled Scuds to fall on Israeli population centers as families hid behind plastic-lined windows in their sealed rooms during the Gulf War.
In years following, Israelis were put into the position of constantly waiting passively for yet the next suicide bomb to explode on buses or in the streets, anywhere and anytime. Amid this period of incessant fear and tension, Israel and the world suffered the trauma of the murder of Israel's first sabra-hero prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in November 1995, a mythic death, on the threshold of touching the unreachable peace.
These events along with, most recently, anxiety over the peace process and the cultural shakeup during the mass Russian and Ethiopian immigration, all led to the total breakup of the once-monolithic Israeli ideology.
These changes went hand-in-hand with a total reversal and change of image of the Holocaust and its survivors. A change of myth and taboo occurred; hubris ended and antiheroism returned, along with a readiness to listen to and understand even Holocaust survivors. The individual in the concentration camp or the prisoner of war is now the Moral Man. "This is a man," said Primo Levi. A change of myth occurred."
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