Realpolitikand the Burden of the Past: Israeli Diplomacy and the ?Other Germany?

Abstract

POLITICAL SCIENTISTS C.S. LIEBMAN and E. Don-Yehiya, in their pioneering studies on the role of Holocaust memory in Israel's formative years, asserted that the memory of the Holocaust was not a major component of Statism, the ideology of Ben-Gurion and the Mapai governments that enshrined the state and state-building as of prime importance. Hence the Holocaust found little place in the myths and the ceremonies of Israel in the 195os.' Maoz Azaryahu, researcher of Israeli culture, in State Cults, also emphasized the marginality of the official commemoration of the Holocaust as opposed to the centrality of the Day of Independence and the creation of what historian George L. Mosse called the of fallen soldiers.2 Although the idea of the marginality of Holocaust commemoration in the state's cult in the 1950os appears in various sources,3 the attitude toward the Holocaust held by Ben-Gurion and the leadership of Mapai was not unequivocal. On the one hand, the government, from the beginning of statehood, recognized their historical and moral connection with the memory of the Jewish communities that had been annihilated and with the millions murdered in the wake of the Final Solution. Ben-Gurion held