In March 1988, the late Israeli historian Yehuda Elkana, an Auschwitz survivor, published an explosive op-ed in Haaretz on “the need to forget.” He wrote that although he often spoke of the Holocaust to his four children and freely shared his personal recollections of it with them, he had refused to accompany them on visits to Yad Vashem. He had been reluctant to follow the Eichmann trial and he opposed the trial of John Demjanjuk, who had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp and was awaiting sentencing then. Elkana was convinced that the memory of the Holocaust had been co-opted for destructive ends, that it had been maliciously harnessed to fuel hatred and violence against the Palestinian people.
He published his piece when he did—in the midst of the first intifada, not long after footage emerged of Israeli soldiers beating bound and blindfolded Palestinians—perhaps hoping there was still time to reverse course. He explicitly argued that “had the Holocaust not penetrated so deeply into the national consciousness,” the conflict between Jews and Palestinians would not have produced acts of terrorism and abject violence; he even conjectured that the peace process might not have stalled. For Elkana, the time had finally come for the Jewish people to abandon the belief “that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim.” While the wider world could very well continue to remember the Holocaust, Israelis now had to forget: “Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied, morning to night, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust.” Democracy, Elkana warned, was at risk when “the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process”—when politics becomes a pathway for unending revenge.
The essay was an attempt to prevent his nation from continuing down a catastrophic path of inexcusable violence fueled by existential pain and panic.
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