Chapter 8: 2. “Nasser is Hitler”: Israel on the Eve of the Six Day War
Exclusive Excerpt from 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East
During the first years of Israel’s existence, the events of the Holocaust were shrouded in a great silence, making the topic virtually taboo. Parents would not tell their children what had happened to them, and children dared not ask. But after the April 1961 kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann and the trial that followed, Israelis became more open with respect to the Holocaust, ultimately making it a part of their identity.
In the middle of 1966, some young Israelis went on a tour of the death camps. One of them, Mordehai Kremnitzer, wrote an article about the trip. “Israelis in Auschwitz. Tears in their eyes; gloomy, silent. Wanting vengeance. Promising to remember and not to forget—Israelis who feel they are the children of those who were murdered, who feel they are Jews, Jews at the graves of their fathers, the graves of their brothers. And there was also a sense of victory: we are the living.” The three weeks spent in Czechoslovakia and Poland, wrote Kremnitzer, turned these young people into proud and sensitive Jews, but also into better Israelis: “Everywhere I went, the word ‘homeland’ called out to me.”
These were the first voices in a fairly slow learning process. Israelis began to internalize the foundations of their past, including their history in the Diaspora, and gradually stopped being ashamed of it, unlike the previous generation. At the culmination of the process it would be hard to find a young Israeli who would use the name Warhaftig as an insult. In January 1967, a few hundred students at the Lady Davis school in Petach Tikva gathered to hear impressions of the young Israelis who had been to Poland. Their elderly teacher told the children not to forget the Holocaust, and the next speaker explained why this was important: so that they would be strong.
This was the emerging attitude, lucidly expressed in a 1963 letter written by a young man, Ofer Feniger, to his girlfriend following the Eichmann trial. “I feel that from all the horror and the helplessness, a hugely powerful strength is growing in me. Strong to the point of tears; sharp as a knife; quiet and terrible; that’s how I want to be! I want to know that never again will hollow eyes look out from behind electric fences! . . . Not if I am strong! If we are all strong! Strong, proud Jews! Never again to be led to the slaughter.”
Politicians, educators, and media figures repeated the lesson often. A small minority tended to emphasize the universal lessons of the Holocaust, such as the duty to protect democracy and human rights and the obligation to fight racism and refuse manifestly illegal orders. This was yet another arena of the conflict between “the two peoples of Israel.”
The story of Israelis and the Holocaust alternates between true emotion and manipulative argument, which are not always easily distinguished. As soon as the crisis of war began, the press began comparing Nasser to Hitler. In the past, other Arab leaders had been compared to Hitler, but this had been done to insult them, not as part of the situational assessment and a reason to attack. “Nasser speaks clearly, as Hitler did on the eve of the Second World War,” wrote Ze’ev Schiff. Nasser’s speeches, Radio Cairo broadcasts, and the anti-Semitic cartoons in the Egyptian press prompted this assertion. Ha’aretz published an article by Eliezer Livneh called “The Danger of Hitler Is Returning.” Livneh, a former Knesset member for Mapai, also sent a note to Eshkol: “Nasser is Hitler.”
Many compared Israel’s situation to Czechoslovakia’s prior to World War II, when it was abandoned to the Nazis. They recalled that the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had forsaken the Czechs in the Munich accord, and they likened his appeasement policy to Eshkol’s approach. Letters and articles to this effect were published in Yediot Aharonot and Maariv. One editor, Shalom Rosenfeld, read a book about the dismantling of Czechoslovakia written by Israeli historian David Vital, and became so worried that he could not sleep all night.
David Ben-Gurion said, “None of us can forget the Nazi Holocaust, and if some of the Arab leaders, with the leader of Egypt at their head, declare day and night that Israel must be destroyed . . . we should not take these declarations lightly.” This was also Israel’s official propaganda line. The Foreign Ministry instructed the Israeli embassy in Washington to ask for an urgent meeting with James Reston, associate editor of the New York Times, to persuade him that the only difference between Nasser and Hitler was that Hitler had always claimed he wanted peace, while Nasser was explicit about his aim of destroying Israel. Minister Mordehai Bentov asked Eshkol to set up a “center for psychological warfare” that would focus on the comparison between Hitler and Nasser.
Baruh Nadel, a prominent journalist at Yediot Aharonot, published impressions from a visit to reserve soldiers posted in the Negev. One soldier he met, apparently a Holocaust survivor, was sitting in the last row of trenches, “a little Pole, illuminated by red twilight, his black shadow cast far back to the hills, where the tanks, hidden under netting, point their threatening mouths of steel toward Gaza.” Nadel returned home calm and reassured. This was the Holocaust as propaganda.
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But the existential anxiety that gripped Israelis when the crisis erupted was real. Someone no doubt organized citizens to send care packages to soldiers, perhaps to unite the people around their army, but there is no reason to assume that anyone solicited the letter written by a woman who sent a package of goods to the soldier Arnon David Grabow. She told him she had been in Auschwitz, where her husband and four children were murdered. After many tribulations, she had reached Israel and managed to start a new family. She had small children, and she trusted the IDF and prayed for its welfare every night. There is also no reason to doubt what members of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot told their sons in a newsletter for enlisted soldiers. While digging defensive trenches on the kibbutz, the members recalled doing the same thing in 1939, in preparation for the Nazis’ invasion of Poland. They believed there was no choice but to go to war with Egypt. When the situation was explained to young Amosi, one of the “second generation” kibbutz children, he responded, “This means that if Nasser wins, we were all born in vain.”
“The situation is terrible,” wrote Naomi Shukri from Ramatayim to a classmate living in Los Angeles. “You cannot imagine how lucky you are not to be in Israel right now.” It wasn’t the recession, she wrote, it wasn’t money, it was life. People were walking around hunched over; the stress was exhausting. Who could think of work? The country was paralyzed. “No one knows what will happen tomorrow, in the next hour, the next minute. People keep asking each other: What will happen? What will happen? Only God knows.” Sometimes she thought she was having a nightmare, that she would wake up and everything would be back to normal. But no, she wrote, this was cruel and terrible reality, and it had been going on for almost two weeks. “I suppose this is the fate of the Jews, even in our time, in our land. Will we also be a generation of war?” Her letter was not written to persuade James Reston. It was written from the heart and soul of Naomi Shukri, and she expressed the feelings of countless Israelis. “Who would have believed it?” she continued. “Who? Who could have imagined that all the stories about the fear before war would happen in our own lives?” Her husband had been called up for reserve duty. “Don’t even ask how I stood there and packed his bag. May you never know such a thing your whole life. Your whole life.” She wanted to believe that if, God forbid, “something happens,” they could rely on the army; but, she enjoined her friend, “Don’t dare regret not being in Israel.”
Rabin, who believed that Israel faced its most difficult trial since the War of Independence, instructed schools and other public buildings to be readied to serve as hospitals and casualty centers. Zerah Warhaftig later recalled asking the chief of staff how many deaths he thought the IDF might sustain, and Rabin estimated perhaps tens of thousands. Ten rabbis from the chief rabbinate and the Tel Aviv Hevre Kaddisha went through the public parks sanctifying them to serve as cemeteries. Only a society drenched in the memory of the Holocaust could have prepared so meticulously for the next one.
All at once, it had become clear how vulnerable and desperate Israelis were. It was not Nasser’s threats that had brought this about—or, at least, not only his threats—but the quicksand of depression that had pulled so many people down for so many months. It was the disappointment and the feeling that the Israeli dream had run its course. It was the loss of David Ben-Gurion’s leadership, the father of the nation, coupled with the lack of faith in Eshkol and the general mistrust of politics. It was the recession and the unemployment; the decline in immigration and the mass emigration. It was the deprivation of the Mizrahim, as well as the fear of them—the fear that they would erode Israel’s European society and culture, that they threatened the Ashkenazi elite. It was the difficulty communicating with the younger generation. It was the boredom. It was the terrorism; the sense that there could be no peace. All these feelings welled up in the week before the war, sweeping through the nation in a tide of insanity. The people had not felt this wretched and isolated since the Holocaust.
And so the ideas being put forth in the meantime by more stable minds in Israel, Washington, and New York never had much of a chance. There were a few proposals, all meant to provide a two- or three-week cooling-off period, during which it was suggested that Israel not try to move ships bearing its flag through the Gulf of Aqaba, and that Egypt not hinder the passage of other ships. Arthur Goldberg, U.S. ambassador to the UN, suggested a settlement to Johnson that could both maintain Nasser’s standing and assure the passage of ships to Israel: Israel would stop sailing under its flag, and Nasser would stop conducting searches of ships making their way to Eilat under foreign flags. Israel would have a difficult time accepting this, the ambassador wrote, but one must remember that in any case oil was shipped to Eilat in tankers that did not bear Israeli flags. The State Department suggested a similar plan, pointing out that over the past two and a half years only one merchant ship flying the Israeli flag had gone through the Straits.
The majority of Israelis knew nothing of the proposals to end the crisis without war. They listened to the Voice of Thunder from Cairo, an Egyptian radio station that broadcast propaganda in Hebrew. “Your leaders will not help you—they will bring a Holocaust upon you!” roared the broadcaster. One Tel Aviv woman wrote to Boston that “anyone who can pick up Cairo television must have been wetting themselves with fear over the past few weeks.” Many Israelis felt they should believe the broadcasts, just as people should have believed Hitler. Countless letters from Israelis to friends overseas, as well as letters written by soldiers at the front, reflect a desire to avoid war. But the military leaders insisted there was no way out of it, and they were the only people most Israelis still trusted.
