[ Benjamin Netanyahus choice of Effi Eitam to lead Yad Vashem is
another sign of how racist hyper-nationalism is the mainstream of
Israeli politics. ] [[link removed]]

RIGHT-WING RACIST TO HEAD ISRAEL’S HOLOCAUST MUSEUM  
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Jonathan Cook
December 18, 2020
Mondoweiss
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_ Benjamin Netanyahu's choice of Effi Eitam to lead Yad Vashem is
another sign of how racist hyper-nationalism is the mainstream of
Israeli politics. _

Effi Eitam , Juda S. Engelmayer/Wikimedia

 

For nearly 70 years Yad Vashem, the world-renowned Holocaust museum
established in Jerusalem, has bolstered Israel’s claim to act as
guardian and interpreter of the lessons of the Nazi genocide that
destroyed much of European Jewry during the Second World War.

Before the pandemic, more than a million visitors passed annually
through its doors, and the museum was considered an all but mandatory
stop for world leaders visiting Israel. 

Research by Yad Vashem’s distinguished historians has guided other
museums and research institutes around the world in how they
understand and present the Holocaust. The museum stages influential
conferences for scholars, and produces key texts on the Holocaust. 

And Yad Vashem plays a critical role in shaping the way the Holocaust
is taught in schools in Israel and abroad, as well as to each new
intake of Israeli soldiers. 

All of which helps to explain why there has been uproar in recent
weeks
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from a mix of Holocaust survivors, historians and Jewish organizations
at the preferred candidate to head the museum when the post becomes
vacant at the end of this month.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has selected a former
general turned far-right politician, Effi Eitam, for the role. Eitam,
aged 68, lives in an illegal settlement in the Golan and has long
advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied
territories, as well as the crushing of basic civil rights for
non-Jews inside Israel. 

When Eitam made his name in politics nearly 20 years ago, leading a
far-right party, he represented some of the ugliest trends in
Israel’s hyper-nationalist politics. Today his views have become
mainstream enough to be embraced by a broad swath of Netanyahu’s
ruling Likud party. 

POLITICAL CALCULATIONS

With Yad Vashem’s former chair, Avner Shalev, due to retire within
days, after nearly a quarter of a century in the job, Eitam has
already won the backing of a special committee vetting senior public
appointments. 

All that stands between him and the prestigious position heading the
“World Holocaust Remembrance Center” is a vote by the cabinet.
Approval has been delayed, but apparently not on ethical or
ideological grounds. 

Netanyahu reportedly wants Eitam in place as part of his own naked
calculations domestically: he needs to attract more votes from
settlers to win the next general election, which could be announced as
early as next week. 

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s chief political rival, Benny Gantz, who
serves as defense minister in the coalition government, is holding up
approval
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as leverage in the battle over other senior pubic service
appointments.

‘MOCKERY AND DISGRACE’

Although Eitam is not seen as a particularly controversial choice in
Israel, where he is considered a minor war hero, there has been
growing disenchantment abroad and among some of Yad Vashem’s
staff. 

The museum is in dire financial straits after a near-year of closure
because of the pandemic, while lengthy coalition infighting over the
budget has denied funding to major public institutions. 

And with private foreign donors responsible for half of Yad Vashem’s
income, Eitam’s appointment could prove disastrous. 

A petition from 750 leading Jewish studies and Holocaust scholars
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was published last month. Among the signatories was Deborah Lipstadt,
who famously defeated a libel action launched by the historian David
Irving after she accused him of Holocaust denial.

“Appointing Effi Eitam as Chair of Yad Vashem would turn an
internationally respected institution devoted to the documentation of
crimes against humanity and the pursuit of human rights into a mockery
and a disgrace,” the petition states.

Even the Anti-Defamation League, which has largely served as the US
Jewish community’s “liberal” torch-bearer for Netanyahu’s
Israel, has pointed
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to Eitam’s “problematic moral record.”

That includes an incident in the late 1980s, when Eitam commanded the
Givati brigade, in which four of his soldiers severely beat two
Palestinian brothers, one of them to death. Eitam was reprimanded by
the army chief of staff after the soldiers testified that they were
carrying out his orders. 

The military judges who presided over the soldiers’ case found
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that Eitam’s “violent behavior became the norm, and was taken as
an example by those under his command”.

However, that stain did not hinder his advancement to the rank of
general.

PALESTINIANS ‘A CANCER’

Eitam eventually quit the Israeli army, apparently disillusioned by
Israel’s signing of the Oslo accords. He argued
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instead that the army could “expel the population there [in the
occupied territories] overnight. It’s not a problem to do this. We
have a problem of having the will to do this. As a nation we are
inhibited.”  

Eitam’s continuing vocal incitement against Palestinians, including
as a government minister, has caused the most unease. 

Echoing language used against Jews by the Nazis, Eitam has described
Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens – one in five of
the country’s population – as a “cancer
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grasp the size of the threat, it is already too late to deal with
it.”

On other occasions, Eitam has compared
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Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens to a “dangerous fifth
column” and a “bomb that is going to explode beneath the entire
democratic system in Israel”.

He has demanded [[link removed]] too that the
minority’s elected representatives be ousted from the parliament:
“One day, we will expel you to Gaza from this house.”

‘KILL THEM ALL’

He is no more enamored of the millions of Palestinians in the occupied
territories. He opposed the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. And he has
called for ethnic cleansing – and even genocide – to become
government policy. 

In 2006 he urged
[[link removed]]: “Expel
most of the Judea and Samaria Arabs [West Bank Palestinians] from
here. We cannot be with all these Arabs, and we cannot give up the
land.”

He has called the Palestinians “dark forces”, saying
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“We will have to kill them all… I don’t mean all the
Palestinians, but the ones with evil in their heads.”

And he condemned a supreme court ruling
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that banned the Israeli army’s regular use of Palestinians as
“human shields”. He described the practice as “very moral”.

None of this damaged Eitam’s political career either. In fact,
Netanyahu invited Eitam’s faction into his Likud party in late 2008.
Eitam was later appointed by Netanyahu as his “special emissary”
to US campuses
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under the Jewish National Fund’s “caravan for democracy”
program.

ETHNIC PURITY

Seen in this light, Eitam’s appointment makes more sense. Netanyahu
has been cultivating ties with far-right politicians around the world
who look to Israel as model of what an ethno-nationalist state – one
premised on ethnic peoplehood and purity – can achieve. 

These leaders, many of them known for their racist politics, including
for their antisemitism, or historical links to fascist groups, are
keen supporters of an Israel that has always declared itself to be a
state for Jews alone. 

Israel’s passage of a Nation State Law in 2018
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underscored to them how it is possible to pass overtly racist
legislation, institutionalizing discrimination against minority
groups, and remain respectable in diplomatic circles.

They view Israel as a pathfinder both in breaking international law
with impunity and in undermining the post-war commitment – or at
least lip service – to the principle of universal rights. 

Netanyahu’s allies have included US president Donald Trump,
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte of
the Philippines, Austria’s Heinz-Christian Strache, and Matteo
Salvini in Italy. 

But Netanyahu has often struggled with the optics of forging close
ties with these leaders, in the face of track records in which they
have openly indulged antisemitism or embraced their country’s ugly
past. 

JOKING ABOUT NAZIS

Those tensions have often been most starkly evident as these leaders
have made their way to Yad Vashem, where some staff have balked at the
idea of hosting them. 

In one particularly fraught episode in 2018, Austria’s chancellor,
Sebastian Kurz, made a formal complaint after a visit to the museum,
after a local guide noted current attacks on Jewish communities in
Austria that were earlier targeted by the Nazis. 

Those attacks, the guide observed, had been led by members of the
Freedom party, which was then serving in Kurz’s coalition. Yad
Vashem was forced to apologize
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Weeks later Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban visited the
museum. He was greeted with protests
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including opposition from some staff disquieted by his public praise
for Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s Second World War leader who allied with
the Nazis and collaborated in the murder of the country’s Jews.

Soon afterwards, Yad Vashem hosted Rodrigo Duterte, who has favorably
compared himself to Hitler
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Immediately after a visit last year, Brazil’s Bolsonaro joked
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the Nazis had been left-wing: “Doesn’t the name of the Nazi party
include the word ‘socialist’?”

A Yad Vashem staff member told the _New York Times_
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in late 2018 that there was mounting anger at the museum “because
many of us see a collision between what we believe are the lessons of
the Holocaust and what we see as our job, and between the way Yad
Vashem is being abused for political purposes.”

THE HOLOCAUST AS A TOOL

Netanyahu may see Eitam’s appointment as an opportunity to
decisively refashion Yad Vashem in the image of his own chauvinist
politics. That would remove the museum’s last holdouts, opposed to
his goal of reducing the Holocaust and antisemitism simply to tools
that can be exploited to deflect criticism as Israel flouts
international law ever more flagrantly and moves towards formal
annexation of the West Bank.

Subordinating Yad Vashem to the far-right camp under Eitam would also
cement Netanyahu’s alliance with the emerging ethno-nationalist bloc
of states whose trenchant support will help him weather any of the
resulting diplomatic fallout. 

Liberal, universal lessons drawn from the Holocaust – against
bigotry and racism – serve only to alienate leaders like Bolsonaro
and Orban. Rooting out that tradition at Yad Vashem would ease
relations with these far-right politicians.

Such problems have been evident in ties with Hungary. Two years ago a
Yad Vashem historian caused a diplomatic incident when he accused a
new Holocaust museum in Budapest called the “House of Fates” of
committing “a grave falsification of history”. 

Afterwards, Israeli media reported that Israeli and Hugarian officials
had quietly agreed
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a “consensus regarding the museum’s narrative”.

TENSIONS ERUPT

Far more publicly, tensions erupted at around the same time with the
right-wing Polish government of Mateusz Morawiecki. It planned to
amend local law to make it a crime to attribute to Poland any
responsibility for the death camps or collusion with the Nazis during
the Second World War. 

Apparently under pressure from the US
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the law was eventually watered down to become a civil offense instead.
Nonetheless, the law has made it especially hard for Polish historians
to document or speak about Polish collaboration with the Nazis.

Netanyahu got himself into a tricky diplomatic entanglement, trying to
resolve the issue without upsetting the Polish government. He did so
with the help of apparent allies at Yad Vashem, not least its chief
historian Dina Porat. 

Porat, it later emerged, had secretly assisted Israel’s national
security council – part of Netanyahu’s office – in drafting a
joint declaration with Poland that minimized the role played by Poles
in the Holocaust
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The document mainly raised concern on the small Israeli left. Tamar
Zandberg, chair of the Meretz party, termed it “part of a
disgraceful phenomenon in which Netanyahu and Likud have joined forces
with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi parties around the world”. 

Porat, it should be noted, has also played a parallel role in
instrumentalizing antisemitism to help protect Israel from criticism
in the international arena. According to International Crisis Group
analyst Nathan Thrall, she helped to draft
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“a new definition of anti-Semitism that would equate criticisms of
Israel with hatred of Jews”.

Her work contributed to the later redefinition of antisemitism by the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – a definition that has
been increasingly adopted in other countries – that switches the
traditional focus of antisemitism from hatred of Jews to criticism of
Israel. 

NO UNIVERSAL NORMS

Media reports suggest
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that the reason Yad Vashem’s current chairman waited so long to
stand down – Shalev is now 81 – was out of the fear that any
successor appointed by Netanyahu would be from the far-right and
damage the museum’s international standing.

But much of the current criticism of Eitam glosses over the fact that
his ultra-nationalism accords with the way the Holocaust has been
widely viewed – and taught – in Israel for decades. 

In calling Eitam “unfit” for the post, Shraga Milstein, chairman
of the Israeli Association of Bergen-Belsen Survivors, observed
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“As we know, the Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers. It
started with differentiating between people and seeing some people as
unequal to others.”

That seems a strange criticism of Eitam coming from Milstein, a
longtime mayor of Kfar Shmaryahu, a wealthy community outside Tel
Aviv. Kfar Shmaryahu, along with hundreds of other communities in
Israel
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is maintained as an exclusively Jewish community, denying residence to
the fifth of Israel’s population who belong to its Palestinian
minority.

As a self-declared Jewish state, Israel has always rejected equality
and universal values – in fact, as part of its national mission to
“Judaize” territory, it is constitutionally obligated to
discriminate against non-Jews. 

For that reason, Yad Vashem has had to navigate a tricky path between
recognizing the universal lessons of the Holocaust and
instrumentalizing the Holocaust to provide an aggressively nationalist
justification for a “Jewish state” based on ethnic segregation
from, and supremacy over, non-Jews.

‘US AGAINST THE WORLD’

That has been evident in Yad Vashem’s support for Israel’s school
summer trips to Nazi deaths camp in Europe, especially Auschwitz. 

Soon after these trips began in 1988, the liberal education minister
of the time, Shulamit Aloni, warned
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that they would lead to new generations of xenophobic Israelis
obsessed with Jewish military might. She said she was repelled by the
sight of young Israelis who “march with unfurled flags, as if
they’ve come to conquer Poland”.

Idan Yaron, an Israeli anthropologist who regularly accompanies such
trips, has said one of the program’s chief aims
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is to increase “the students’ motivation to play a significant
role in the Israel Defense Forces” – the Israeli army conducting a
belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory.

“The moment the trip leads to a feeling of strengthening nationalism
and ‘It’s us against the world,’ we achieve the opposite results
of those we wanted,” Yaron has observed.

Another critic of Israel’s approach to the Holocaust is Yair Auron,
a professor emeritus at the Open University and expert on genocides.
He has accused Israeli academics, including those at Yad Vashem, of
averting their eyes from other genocides to prioritize the
Holocaust. 

“You won’t find any of these [genocides] in the Israeli education
system, which is a political system that doesn’t want to expose its
students to the genocides of other peoples,” he has said
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He has castigated Yad Vashem for a “racist” policy that fails to
include commemorations of other major atrocities, such as those in
Rwanda and Cambodia, and against the Armenians. 

ISRAEL’S LAUNDROMAT

Possibly Yad Vashem’s harshest critic in Israel is Daniel Blatman, a
researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and chief historian
for the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

He has described Yad Vashem as
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“a hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every
anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or
politician like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo
Duterte and Italy’s Matteo Salvini”.

These leaders, he has said, come to the museum to “receive
absolution in the name of Holocaust victims in exchange for adding a
pro-Israel vote at international institutions.” 

Blatman’s comments were made before Eitam’s selection to head Yad
Vashem. If Eitam wins approval, as seems likely, he could enjoy more
than a decade in the post remaking the museum in his own image. 

That will compound the racist, chauvinist, militaristic lessons
Israelis increasingly draw from the Holocaust. 

It will allow the Holocaust, like antisemitism, to be weaponized
against human rights activists and left-wing critics of Israel’s
policies towards the Palestinians. 

And it will embolden dictators and fascist politicians around the
globe who seek to cosy up to Israel. They will be able to secure
Israel’s absolution from their countries’ ugly recent past, and
join Israel in glorifying ethnic supremacist policies that could usher
in a repetition of the very same crimes the memory of the Holocaust
was supposed to proscribe.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair”
(Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net
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