Across the world, religions have ascribed a certain energy to countless seemingly mundane sites. But as patches of dirt go, the spiritual vibe surrounding Israel and Palestine is stronger than most. And landing in Tel-Aviv, even the grandiose arrival hall at Ben-Gurion airport bustles with an air of religious significance. In one queue Orthodox Jews don varying levels of traditional and religious dress, peering quietly over ancient looking Torah’s whilst colourful flocks of American and African tour groups, each with their own Christ-themed t-shirts, herd themselves towards the gates. The point of most interest here is not the surprising number of ways there are to be unoriginal (something that religion has always illustrated), but Israel-Palestine’s unique spiritual weight. To the Abrahamic religions, Jerusalem houses some of the most important religious sites in the world, and acts as the epicentre for prophecies stretching back thousands of years. Road signs point to scriptural destinations like Bethlehem and Nazareth, and to someone from Southern England, who has hardly even seen mainland Europe, the Judean desert looks as otherworldly and biblical as you can imagine. Yet, as interconnected as they often are in the Holy Land, my trip to Israel-Palestine began with the political rather than the religious.
The road to Mount Herzl afforded me my first daytime views of Israel, passing loud and crowded markets, the walls of the Old City, and the overgrown and abandoned villages that pepper Jerusalem’s western outskirts on my way to this rather unassuming hilltop. Here, nestled on the green hillside, sits Yad Vashem – Israel’s official Holocaust museum. The significance of this museum is truly difficult to overstate. Not only are the totalitarian experiments of the 20th century some of the most important events in human history, but by providing one of the fullest accounts of the Holocaust anywhere in the world, the museum also manages to deliver one of the most powerful justifications for a Zionist state you are ever likely to stumble upon. Admittedly, this was a rather morose place to tart my trip. But given the significance of the history, not to mention my own innate aversion to any form of religious nationalism, Yad Vashem seemed as good a place as any to start my trip.
Understandably, much of the memorial stands as a bleak and painfully detailed reminder of human evil – a collection of images, accounts, and videos that should not exist. But, from a more academic perspective, what is interesting about Yad Vashem is that its exhibit does not begin in the 1940s with the opening of the Nazi death camps, or even with Hitler’s power grabs and the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.
Rather, the museum rightly places the Holocaust within a long history of European antisemitism, tracing the years of progressive discrimination that, by dehumanising and degrading Jewish people, laid the groundwork for the genocide itself.
The Holocaust did not hatch spontaneously with Hitler’s regime. Instead, European antisemitism evolved slowly from its middle-age Christian format, into the more social-economic racism of the 19th century that, itself culminating with Drefus’ farcical trial, paved the way for the more complete, quasi-scientific race theories of the 20th century.
And in our fast-paced, 280 characters or less age, this more scholarly approach is especially valuable. Today, any mention of the words “Nazi” or “Fascist” pollute our minds with images of the death camps of Eastern Europe. And to a point this is the right reaction, given that mass murder is so often the conclusion of these systems. But this same association leads us to dismiss comparisons between modern politics and that of the 20th century as over-dramatic simply because most states lack an industrialised system of murder as refined as that of Nazi Germany, or even Stalinist Russia.
But looking at history and modern politics through this myopic lens blinds to the true story of the Holocaust as much as it does an accurate evaluation of our political reality. We forget that the final solution was just that, a final solution. The sadistic climax of decades or even centuries of systematic dehumanisation and discrimination against the Jewish people. Auschwitz was not built in a day, and wherever the concentration camps of the future pop up, they will be built on similarly subtle foundations, and dug in gradually over the years.
Also interesting however, is how the Yad Vashem’s chronicling of European Antisemitism emphasises the principle argument supporting the creation of a Zionist state. And strangely, this point is hit home by one of the museum’s least demoralising displays.
Serving to immortalise the actions and memories of non-Jews who risked their lives to protect the Jewish people from genocide and torture, the most uplifting curation on Mount Herzl is a collection of heart-warming tales from one of the darkest periods in human history. Among them is the story of the Danish Resistance movement, whose heroic actions to evacuate Denmark’s Jewish population saved over 90% of Danish Jews from the Nazi onslaught.
But even this touching memorial alludes to a rather more depressing reality. As heroic as those Danes’ were, their actions are only made more inspiring by the failure of so many others to stand up to Nazi totalitarianism. As we are constantly reminded, the most common response in the face of oppression is not resistance, but compliance.
This, in fact, is one of the principle arguments put forward for the creation of a Zionist state. Faced with one of the most abhorrent crimes in human history, European states still struggled to protect Jewish refugees. Feeling Nazi concentration camps, these families and communities often found themselves unwanted, stateless refugees in Allied internment camps.
Combined with the seemingly constant threat of antisemitic violence, (not only from Christian and Islamic groups that refuse to forgive the Jewish people for rejecting their chosen messiahs, but left and right-wing conspiracy theorists) the failure of non-Jewish nations to protect European Jewry continues to drive Jewish people away from their historic strategy of assimilation.
Instead, since the late 1800s many have come to the conclusion that Jewish self-determination and the establishment of a Jewish state is the only way to ensure the security of the Jewish people. Walking through Yad Vashem, and starring into its Well of Souls, I feel inclined to agree.
Unfortunately however, this seemingly rational suggestion is almost invariably infected with the religious and ethnic influences that so often poison human relations (and religious nationalisms in particular).
After all, the Israeli settler movements that first established a Jewish presence in Palestine, and continue to illegally expand Israeli territory, are predicated on a fundamentalist reading of the Book of Genesis. And even the 1917 Balfour declaration, that first accelerated Jewish immigration into Palestine, was motivated in part by Lord Balfour’s own fundamentalist Christianity, prophesising that Christ’s long-awaited encore will begin only once the Jews have returned to Israel (worryingly, this same apocalyptic fanaticism continues to guide a depressingly high number of US policymakers). Of course, European powers have always found it easier to give away other peoples’ land than their own, but Israel’s placement in Palestine makes little logical sense outside of a fundamentalist worldview.
Nor is this the most worrying instance of religious/ethnic fanaticism in and around Israel. To this day radical Israeli rabbis debate whether God’s genocidal instruction to destroy the Amalekites applies to modern day Palestinians, and since its conception, Israeli policy has toyed with these violent commandments.
As it happens, the abandoned and decrepit villages I passed en-route to Yad Vashem were once home to local Palestinians who, in 1948, were driven away from what was then Palestine in the organised program of ethnic cleaning known as Plan Dalet.
In fact, less than two miles north of Yad Vashem, just out of view from the museum’s northwest facing balcony, lies the (formerly) Palestinian village of Deir Yassim (now the Israeli town of Giv’at Sha’ul B). In 1948, this site saw the murder, rape and mutilation of over one hundred Palestinian villagers at the hands of Irgun militiamen – a Jewish extremist group that laid the ideological foundations for Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Plan Dalet, of which this was a part, saw similar fundamentalist militias (that were later absorbed into the IDF) carry out an organised series of attacks and executions so as to drive local Palestinians from their land and create a Jewish majority in Palestine – which was seen as a prerequisite for Jewish self-determination. This saw over half a million Palestinians abandon their homes, and became stateless refugees in the neighbouring Arab countries. As labels go, the term “terrorist” carries more political baggage than most. But however we define it, the men who orchestrated and carried out these crimes were, in every sense of the word, terrorists.
I left Mount Herzl hungry, sad and conflicted; a mix of sympathy for the Jewish wish of self-determination, and frustration that the victims of genocide and ethnic violence saw ethnic cleansing as the best policy to ensure their own protection. As I reflected on my first day in the Holy Land, I couldn’t help but long for a world in which ordinary men could be transformed into heroes as easily as they are monsters.