Rubric ‣ Education
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I've read or reread over a dozen books for my long review article, and I also mentioned another one in passing, which I have now also digested. I had focused primarily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Tom Segev’s “The Seventh Million” only scratched the surface of that subject. But its descriptive subtitle “Israelis and the Holocaust” suggested a related topic of inquiry that proved very fruitful.

Born in 1945, Tom Segev is generally considered one of Israel's greatest journalists, author of many popular stories about Israel's origins and its various wars. Although his 1991 bestseller was controversial, the back cover contained praise from prominent Israeli figures such as Abba Eban and Amos Elon, as well as leading Holocaust scholars such as Professor George L .Mosse and leaders of the Jewish diaspora such as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. I found this book very informative, although perhaps not quite in the way the author intended.

Even aside from its main theme, the first chapter provides extremely useful information. In 2018, I had already drawn inspiration from the shocking research found in the books of left-wing maverick Lenni Brenner to publish a long article on the surprising relationship between the various Zionist factions and Nazi Germany, which spent most of 1930s to work together in a close economic partnership that laid the foundation for the creation of the State of Israel.2

Although Brenner's documentary research seemed rock solid and had never been seriously questioned, I had always had some slight doubts in the back of my mind. I had wondered whether such astonishing facts could really be true and remain completely concealed for generations by almost all of our journalists and academics, but Segev's brief discussion completely put an end to those doubts. Segev is a very classic pro-Zionist Israeli writer and he probably despised Brenner, a radical anti-Zionist Trotskyist, never mentioning the latter's name in the approximately 600 pages of his text. But Segev drew on the same underlying archival sources to fully confirm all of Brenner's most inflammatory historical claims and even added a few, although all of this similar material was obviously presented in a very different way .

In the 1920s, the left-wing Zionist movement was heavily influenced by Marxism and led by Russian-born David Ben-Gurion, who was inspired by Lenin, but these Zionists still enthusiastically formed an economic partnership with the Nazi Germany in the 1930s, based on an obvious community of interests. Hitler was eager to encourage the departure of Germany's problematic 1% Jewish minority, while the Zionists were just as eager to welcome them and the enormous infusion of financial and industrial capital they could provide. During this period, important SS leaders, notably Adolf Eichmann, were invited to Palestine as honored Zionist guests and subsequently published their flattering accounts of the successful development activities of their Zionist partners in the main Berlin Nazi newspaper of Joseph Goebbels. Some Zionist leaders reciprocated by going to Germany for very friendly meetings with their Nazi counterparts, and they reported how well the Jews there seemed to be doing despite Hitler's supposedly harsh new regime.

Indeed, Segev's figures demonstrate the enormous prosperity of German Jews, which explains why Zionists were so eager to organize their resettlement in impoverished Palestine. The Nazis agreed that each Jewish emigrant would take with them the current equivalent of $200 in foreign currency, plus $000 or more in German goods. These were considerable sums for the desperately poor society of Weimar Germany, and this Jewish wealth was clearly one of the main sources of anti-Semitic resentment in that country.

If the main Zionist groups cooperated with Nazi Germany for purely utilitarian reasons, their right-wing Zionist rivals had more ideological motivations since they had modeled their movement on that of Mussolini and always considered themselves fascists, like their bitter adversaries. Many of these Zionists even viewed Hitler's notorious anti-Semitism as a mere political stain rather than an intolerable obstacle to their admiration. In 1933, a leading Zionist writer ranked the German dictator among the world's "brilliant names", alongside Mussolini, Atatürk and his movement's various other right-wing heroes, while another Zionist figure loudly declared and strong that “Hitler saved Germany”. Even after the start of World War II, one of these Zionist factions, led by a future Prime Minister of Israel, repeatedly sought to enlist in the Axis powers, hoping to joining the military alliance led by Hitler and Mussolini.

One of the interesting points Segev makes is that although a large majority of ordinary Jews around the world were intensely hostile to Hitler's regime, the leaders of most of the various Zionist factions quietly became fierce competitors for German patronage, with those who lost sometimes hypocritically denouncing the Nazi affiliations of their more successful rivals. These bitter remarks led to the assassination in 1933 of one of the main Zionist leaders in Palestine by his right-wing detractors.

Although this Nazi-Zionist partnership was controversial at the time, it became even more so after the defeat of the Axis and the concerted effort by the Allies to demonize the Nazis through the Nuremberg trials and other propaganda spectacles, so the new State of Israel has tried hard to conceal this dark secret from its recent past. When these historical facts from the 1930s threatened to leak out in the mid-1950s due to the legal troubles of a prominent Israeli political figure, the man was assassinated, and Segev suggested that the Israeli government had probably organized the murder in order to permanently shut his mouth.

After this rather surprising first chapter, the bulk of Segev's narrative shifts to a very different subject, namely Israel's tangled relationship with the Holocaust, the deliberate extermination of some six million defenseless Jewish civilians by the Nazi Germany, mainly in the gas chambers of various World War II concentration camps. On these basic facts, the author's view seems entirely conventional, and on several occasions he emphasizes the bestial cruelty of the Nazis' evil plan to eliminate all the world's Jews. But although references to the Holocaust, gas chambers or the most famous concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau are sprinkled across much of all these pages, Segev largely avoids discussing the details of this industrial massacre, apparently assuming that all of his readers are thoroughly familiar with the standard narrative produced by modern Holocaust research, which began in the wake of Raul Hilberg's seminal work in 1961. Ironically, Segev notes that 'At the time of its writing, Hilberg's classic work remained untranslated into Hebrew, probably because it indicated that all those millions of Jews had willingly gone to their deaths, guided by the leaders of their own community and without ever showing signs of active resistance.

However, Israeli society is unusual in that a significant fraction of its founding population consisted of postwar Holocaust survivors, "the seventh million" of Segev's title, individuals who were themselves passed through the various Nazi death camps. Consequently, their vivid personal accounts appear to have allowed the Israeli public, including Segev himself, born just weeks before Hitler's suicide and the collapse of his German regime, to largely understand these momentous events.

Perhaps because Segev's first chapter documents the close collaboration between the Nazis and Zionists in the 1930s, which might disconcert his readers, he prefaces this discussion with a prologue that recounts the horrors of the Holocaust which followed shortly thereafter in chronological order. He focused on the books of an Auschwitz survivor named Yehiel De-Nur, who had spent two years in that infamous death camp, and although this writer's name does not mean much to United States today, he became a famous post-war author in Israel.

Although all of De-Nur's autobiographical volumes were published under a pseudonym and his true identity remained hidden for many years, his works are among the earliest literature on the Holocaust in Israel and have had considerable influence in drawing the attention of the Israeli public to the horrific details of this catastrophe, with a special literary prize established in his honor, awarded every two years by the Israeli president.

Indeed, Segev explained that he and most Israeli teenagers of his generation learned the extremely disturbing details of the Holocaust from De-Nur's books, so that when he managed to arrange a personal interview with the The author did so with great trepidation. De-Nur's writings have always focused on the sadistic acts that were part of daily life at Auschwitz, including the widespread sexual abuse of young Jewish boys and girls by their Nazi captors, and Segev describes the works as considerably pornographic.

According to Segev, De-Nur was a young Yeshiva student in pre-war Poland, with great literary pretensions, who was desperately trying to get his writings published when the war came and he found himself in Auschwitz . De-Nur later claimed that Eichmann had personally condemned him to this fate. So he was one of the key witnesses at Eichmann's trial in 1961, and his testimony ended with him fainting, meant to reflect the unspeakable personal memories that still haunted him, even decades later.

I also happened to recently read Hannah Arendt's 1963 classic, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," and De-Nur was one of the few witnesses she also focused on, treating his testimony very less kindness than Segev. According to his account, De-Nur's bizarre and rambling monologue included topics such as astrology and all sorts of other strange things, which greatly embarrassed the serious legal proceedings. When the prosecutor finally interrupted him to ask some basic factual questions, De-Nur immediately collapsed into a fit of hysteria, allowing the judge to save the day by ordering that the witness be permanently removed. of the bar. Arendt suggested that De-Nur's testimony demonstrated the enormous difficulty emotional eyewitnesses sometimes have in distinguishing between their actual memories of events that occurred many years before and the products of their own vivid imaginations.

Indeed, Segev appears to confirm Arendt's observation by explaining that De-Nur was so emotionally broken by his experiences at Auschwitz that he required many years of psychiatric follow-up and also began a series of treatment sessions on LSD, during which he recalled visions of his days in the camp. He eventually produced a new manuscript on the Holocaust, which included presumably imaginary scenes of brutal events such as an SS guard murdering the Jewish boy who had been a victim of his sexual perversions, then grilling the boy's body on a spit and devouring the flesh piece by piece.

These bizarre prologue pages apparently represent a large part of the Holocaust narrative as understood by most Israelis and I found it rather disconcerting that they were immediately followed by the chapter describing the mundane details of the Nazi partnership -Zionist a few years ago, an extremely strange juxtaposition of such radically different situations. Thus, according to Segev's apparent reconstruction, the friendly and respectful trade agreements between German Nazis and Zionist Jews of the late 1930s were suddenly replaced in the early 1940s by a diabolical, sadomasochistic effort by the Nazis to exterminate totally every Jew in the world, an extremely strange transformation that raised serious questions in my mind.

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