The Quest for a 'Land for Peace'
Gilad Halpern explores Israel's continued exploitation of the Holocaust for political ends. This rhetoric keeps Israel focused on the past, he writes, and prevents the achievement of Zionism's original intent: to create a Jewish state living in peace with its neighbors. Focusing on Iran and away from domestic issues will not serve Israel's future as a democracy.
It was 1969. Israel had just come jaw-droppingly victorious out of the Six Day War, where it had dealt a swift and fatal blow to three Arab armies and occupied territories that were three times its size. The United Nations Security Council had subsequently passed Resolution 242, which would pave the way to a settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict, coining the famous phrase "land for peace." Israel was about to see one of the underlying principles of Zionism realized: a Jewish state living in peace with its neighbors.
The pill, it seems, was too hard to swallow. Israel was to give up territories that it had occupied and seen as parts of its homeland, and return to the armistice borders established in 1949; according to them, in some parts of the country, the distance between the Mediterranean Sea and Israel's eastern border was a mere 15 kilometers. When asked about the plan by a German magazine, then-Foreign Minister Abba Eban replied that those borders reminded Israelis of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp.
These comments, made actually by one of the more moderate members of the Israeli cabinet, have become symbolic of Israel's exploitation of the Holocaust for political ends. How on earth could these situations be comparable? How can the Jews of Israel, assembled in a sovereign country that, though small, boasted a formidable military power, be likened to the stateless, defenseless Jews of Europe who were murdered in the millions?
