Remember the Lesson of Yad Vashem
The lesson of Yad Vashem is especially poignant in the wake of last Saturday’s observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Walking through Yad Vashem a few weeks ago, I counted more attendants than visitors to the fortress-like museum on Mount Herzl’s western slope. Whether there or inside the Old City, or other fabled Jerusalem sites, an eerie, wartime quiet prevailed.
Yad Vashem has since 1953 immersed visitors in the lives of Jewish men, women, and children killed by the Nazis in the Second World War. Wading among the personal effects and historical accounts, I was waylaid by a map on the wall. It traced the 1939 voyage of an ocean liner, the St. Louis, bound from Hamburg to Havana with hundreds of Jewish passengers seeking escape from Europe.
The St. Louis made it to Cuba but was not allowed to stop there, or at other Caribbean ports of call, or in Florida. The ship had to recross the Atlantic, docking at Antwerp on June 17, 1939. This was before the Final Solution was implemented. But of course it would be, turning the St. Louis refugees’ vexation and desperation into their doom at the hands of Hitler.
The lesson: In a world that recycles antisemitism endlessly, the safe haven established in 1948 must survive. While the Jewish State’s critics have “painted a picture of a country bent on annihilation” in Gaza (to quote Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis), the truth is it is a safe haven trying to protect itself. Its enemies protect themselves by wrapping themselves with civilians. The Israeli Defense Forces have inadvertently killed thousands of Gazan children and other noncombatants. More casualties are to come, until, says Israel, Hamas is vanquished.
“They are people,” an IDF soldier told me, referring to the Palestinians. “Most of them just want to live.” I met this soldier, whose name was Nadav, in the south of Israel not far from the border with Gaza, which about 3,000 Hamas fighters breached to execute their devastating attack on October 7.
I had come down from Jerusalem on a bus, tagging along with some visiting American college students. An Israeli journalist, Haviv Rettig Gur, took us to Nadav’s artillery post in an area of the Negev Desert called Hevel Shalom. Gur also led us through the wreckage of Kibbutz Be’eri, where at least 97 Israelis were killed by Hamas and 14 were taken hostage (many of whom died in the crossfire).
There we met Rotem Bachar, a young man whose mother and brother died during the day-long siege of their house. A few streets away, outside another bullet-riddled home, a group of IDF reservists were meeting with another Be’eri resident. So the place has become a pilgrimage site not only for foreigners—to prove to a doubting world that the massacre happened—but also for the fighting force, to remind itself of why it is fighting.
As we were leaving Be’eri, Gur pointed to a two-story house set back from the road. Gur said a friend of Bachar’s, a soldier, had his weapon with him on October 7. Firing from the upper-floor balcony from behind the foliage, Bachar’s friend killed at least 10 of the Hamas attackers.
Every act of defense that was mustered during that humiliating day for the people of Israel is accentuated, to lift spirits.
At the same time, Israelis aren’t ones to sugarcoat reality. They pride themselves on being no-nonsense and in full possession of their democratic right to rip incompetent leaders. I asked Nadav, at the artillery post, how Israel could have been taken so unawares. “I really don’t know. I hope that we have a nice investigation of what happened,” he replied. “After the Yom Kippur War, in ’73, in which both Syria and Egypt surprised us and attacked us, we had a huge committee. They wrote two huge books, I read them both.” That needs to happen now, he said.
Nadav considered it more than a governmental failure. His description of his countrymen—half affectionate, half exasperated—was: “We are usually just, ‘Okay trust me, it’s gonna be fine, it’s gonna be fine.’ That’s kind of the Israeli mentality.” His words hinted at a general disinclination to plan or prepare. Now, as in 1973, Israel is paying for it. I picked up bitter comments about having to scramble to respond to this grave threat, mixed in with expressions of resolve to carry on the war effort while persisting in daily life as normally as possible.
A tour guide who led us down the Tayelet, a promenade overlooking Jerusalem, was a case in point. He regaled us with biblical scenes and 20th century military exploits that had taken place on the hills stretching before us. A New Yorker by birth who had worked for the late Teddy Kolleck, Jerusalem’s mayor, our guide was the first to bring up what happened in the south on October 7. “We’ve already lost,” he said. He repeated the declaration more vehemently. But then he added, “We’ll stay put, we’re not going anywhere.” Passing a thick-trunked olive tree on the path, he pointed it out as one his grandson loved to climb.
The fullest critique I heard was from Hannah Lebenthal, a fellow visitor to the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. Tourists formed more of a critical mass at the Center than I’d seen elsewhere. For her part, Hannah had only traveled a few miles from her home in a Jerusalem suburb. The 83-year-old wanted to pay her respects to the late prime minister.
Begin, whose election in 1977 broke the domination of the country’s political life by the Labor Party, was too rightwing for Hannah ever to have voted for, she told me. She was a collectivist and he an individualist in economics; nor did she share Begin’s biblical view of “Greater Israel.” However, she said, “he had a dignity. He was humble. The country, he put before himself.” She was glad to learn of his exploits during the 1948 War of Independence and pored over every display of every period in the life of the statesman, including the facsimile of the Nobel Peace Prize he won along with Egypt's Anwar Sadat, when Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David Accords of 1979.
Hannah had been formed by the Socialist Youth movement that built Israel’s kibbutzim. Nowadays the Left’s program held little appeal. She did attend street demonstrations before the war that were led by the Left, in protest of judicial reforms proposed by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the latest of Begin’s Likud Party successors.
Hannah had no use for Netanyahu. By whom should he be replaced? She didn’t offer any names.
“Israel is not a villain,” said this veteran of the IDF, whose late husband served, whose children served, and whose grandchildren are now serving. She mentioned the leaflets that the military dropped to warn Gazan civilians away from areas where it sent bombs against Hamas. Hamas could have helped the people of the Gaza Strip but blew the development money on arms and tunnels from which to conduct their assaults on Israelis, she said. For Hamas to be holding, at this point, over 130 hostages including women, children and elderly, is unthinkable to Hannah, and it’s why, if it were up to her, she would deny aid to Gaza—“no food, no water, no nothing”—until Hamas gave up its captives.
Do you believe the world is too hard on Israel? I ask. “It’s nothing new,” she responded. “We don’t have too many choices, we have to win it.” The world wants negotiation with Hamas toward a ceasefire, I said.
“No, no, no. No ceasefire.” She was adamant.
