Politics of Memory

The Israeli Underground's Struggle for Inclusion in the National Pantheon and Military Commemoralization

Udi Lebel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135098087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Nacionalismo y patriotismo

This book illustrates how a dominant political party, the Mapai, under the leadership of P.M. David Ben-Gurion, chose to 'hug, ' honor and commemorate 'Her Fallen' and 'Her Bereaved Families, ' whilst simultaneously ignoring the fallen that were identified with the rival political party, Herut, led by Menachem Begin. Designing legislation and cultural policy designated for Teaching the public that those who sacrificed themselves in the Israeli War of Independence – were Hagana Members, one of three Israeli undergrounds movements, associated with Mapai specific ideological viewpoint. By that - the Israeli state created political legitimacy and dominance for Mapai – which was framed as the only political party which were involved with the struggle for national independence. "Her" fighters, battles and casualties became part of the collective memory and national ethos. This project was implemented by refusing to acknowledge "the Other" casualties of the Eztel and Lehi underground movements wich were ideological identified with Herut Party. The state excluded their bereaved families from the wider official military bereavement circle and forced them to experience "disenfranchised grief", With no access to official commemoration or to rehabilitative support. It was only after the Likud's (ex-Herut) victory in the 1977 elections that enabled P.M. Menachem Begin to correct this "exile from national identity" and to initiate the inclusion of "His" fighters and casualties to the military cemeteries, to the history books and to the state commemorations, as recognizing their families as part of the National Military Bereavement circles entitled to Honors and support.

A thought provoking study about the dark side of the Israeli nation building era, Politics of Memory explores the politics of historiography, bereavement and military commemoration, and the confrontation over boundaries of national pantheon, examining the effects of these factors on Israeli national identity and politics.

With introductions by Moshe Arens, former Israeli Minister of Defense and Minister for Foreign Affairs, and by Yehiel Kadishai, P.M. Menachem Begin's chief of staff, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Israeli history; military studies; memory and heritage studies; the study of loss and bereavement, and politics in general.

Part I

Theoretical and historical framework

1 The politics of memory

Theoretical framework and basic concepts

A remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 202

When Howard Zinn criticized Henry Kissinger's claim that “history is the memory of states”, he was charging state memory with being exclusive by not “disclosing those hidden episodes of the past” that exhibited resistance. Zinn undertook a forgotten history of the United States. Paul Ricoeur regarded forgetting as “the disturbing threat that lurks in the background of the phenomenology of memory and the epistemology of history” and, turning to everyday life, he cited “the prime danger” as residing “in the handling of authorized, imposed, celebrated, commemorated history – of official history” (Ricoeur 1996: 412, 448).

Zinn, a historian, had no pretensions of rectifying the historical record. There were no objective histories sub specie aeternitatis. What he wanted to write was a new history from the perspective of the excluded social strata, from the classes, races and gender orientations that have been ignored by the official narrative. Ricoeur wrote in part because he was troubled by the impact of commemorations and the exploitation of forgetfulness. For Ricoeur, forgetting forms the horizon of memory and is not merely its nemesis. In the omissions and commissions of state-endorsed accounts there is a fluctuating cognizance of the memorable. Although the scope of memory is strongly shaped by the fading of recollections and triggers that often, in a seemingly mysterious way, suddenly bring traces into consciousness – what we wistfully and sometimes agonizingly call “memory loss” – it is the manipulation of remembrance by dominant narratives that motivates these two authors. These two approaches, then, the historical and the philosophical, conceptually inform the political formulation of collective memory.

Our concern is primarily with collective memory construed as history and its construction through political means.¹ It addresses not only the selection and embellishment of events but the question of why and how events become non-events or are judged as marginal historical occurrences. The subterranean sphere of collective consciousness has its agents of release who match in their therapeutic and interrogative tools of the trade what psychologists have developed for the penetration of cathected memory.² Just as “the psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual”, so the historical liberation of collective memory through historiography shatters the seamless web between “inviolate social memory” (Nora 1996: 2) and the reconstructed events known as “history”.³ For Nora, living memory-history, marked by the continuity and flow of tradition, has been replaced by discrete critical-history which attempts to capture a dead and distant past. The core of this latter history has the source of its rationality in the ideological orientation of its author, whether it be an individual historian or the political will-formation of the decision-making power. Historiography, then, is a self-conscious history of history, undermining the conventional wisdoms of historical traditions which are generally composed of authenticated versions of national or universal heritages, as well as personal and communal memories. In its examination of memorials and monuments, its national character disintegrates and becomes a form of social consciousness, of concern with identity. Thus, the demand for inclusion, which infuses this study, is not only a cry that justice be done; it is a call for a “fusion of horizons” through a politics of recognition.

The quotation from Walter Benjamin which heads this chapter lays bare the high stakes entailed in the determination or recollection of memorable events. Recollections serve as markers between the past and future, of the way we were and the way we became what we are. They are both caesurae and bridges in our life course. Halbwachs reinforces this insight by drawing upon its import for collective memory. Referring to family life reminiscences, Halbwachs asserts that “events and figures … which serve as landmarks … become pregnant with all that has preceded them just as they are already pregnant with all that will follow” (Halbwachs 1992: 61) Pierre Nora, in his seminal work on collective memory, contends that the signifying markers in which remembrance is embedded extend beyond the transitory content of the historical: “Museums, archives, cemeteries, collections, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, private associations – these are relics of another era, illusions of eternity” (Nora 1996: 6). Thus, the politics of memory appears as a struggle in public space for the representation of the immemorial and it is in this context that the tensions in its social construction are so forceful. The Israeli milieux du memoire provide an exemplary case of the turmoil surrounding the production and appropriation of a not-so-distant history.

When Menahem Begin, the leader of Herut, wrote the account of his Underground movement's role in the military effort to found the State, he opened with the evocative motif: “lest the Jew forget again”; and he concluded by urging that “every act performed for the liberation of our people [be] recorded and remembered.”⁴ (Begin 1950: xi, 379). Aware of the Underground's exclusion from this history, he insisted that “everybody … in the struggle for liberation should be singled out and remembered.” Moreover, “the chronicles should be written in their entirety.” The final phrase of the book affirms that the martyrs of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) will be recorded in “memory eternal” (Begin 1950: 380). Here was an avowed call to preserve for the collective memory what witnesses experienced and observed. At the time, the fragility of conserving remembrances of the independence struggle by various participant groups was self-evident. Not only were some of these groups, such as Etzel and Lehi, a small proportion of the Yishuv's combatant forces, and thus liable to be overlooked or relegated to the margins of the war narrative; of greater import was the tangible awareness that the proportion of the population who lived through the hostilities was rapidly diminishing because of the mass wave of immigration during the first years of the State. This attenuation could only intensify the struggle among the eyewitnesses to imprint the “authentic” version of past events on minds whose recollections of the War of Independence were a blank slate.

The battle for the official version of collective memory was, of course, dominated by the ruling regime during the thirty years of its political tenure (1948–77). It is this canonical formulation and inculcation of a national narrative relating to sacrificial loss and its commemoration that constitutes the canvas for the struggle for recognition and inclusion by the state of politically dissident elements who had participated in the effort for national reconstitution of the Jewish people. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, too, undertook in his speeches and writing the task of presenting the sanctioned history of the fledgling state. Ne'aman claims that

Ben Gurion is not only a man who made history, but also through his writings a man who sought to determine its content; he also exemplified the cunning of history, in so far as the intended outcomes of his actions were changed, sometimes unrecognizably.

Shapira, too, found that most of the historiography of the War of Independence is based on Ben-Gurion's writings, principally, his diaries; he not only was “the leader of the War – he even wrote its history.” She adds that

very few dared to present versions opposed to those of the prophet, the legislator, the Leninist-style leader. … With the passing of time … his shortcomings were forgotten. … Even his weaknesses were presented as advantages, as were his tendencies to unlimited government while condemning his domestic rivals and presenting them as enemies of Israel.

(Shapira 1985: 9)

At the end of her book Shapira added that “the question of what Ben Gurion chose to list and what he preferred not to list is subject to research in itself.” (Shapira 1985: 23). Israel's first Prime Minister sought “to secure the hegemony of labour throughout the Zionist movement. Without this hegemony,” he warned, “the Zionist movement may stray from its course and emasculate its historical content in the process of realizing its goal” (Ben-Gurion, 1974). When Ben-Gurion retired from parliamentary politics, he devoted much of his time to writing his memoirs and summarizing the accomplishments of the Labour movement.⁵

The litterateurs among political leaders, from Solon and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle were not averse to placing themselves at the centre of their accounts, frequently bending history to the perfection of language and themselves. Churchill's oft-repeated aphorism that “history will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself” comes to mind, as does de Gaulle's account of France's liberation entitled Salvation. When the makers of history undertake to be its literary authors, the ambiance of the historical account is inevitably triumphant; it becomes a ready-to-hand monument to national acclaim. His story lays claim to a preferred place in history. If well-written or well-publicized, it becomes a beacon illuminating the landscape of public memory. As we shall indicate below, such a history is, following Gramsci, a tool of domination and exclusion.

Individual recollection raises a most difficult issue, namely whether the intimacy and interiority of personal memory can establish any relationship with collective memory. Halbwachs affirmed that our individual memory is primordially collective rather than an individual recall and recognition of our personal memory traces. We acquire our memories through a being-with others. For Halbwachs, “a person remembers only by situating himself within the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents of collective thought” (Halbwachs 1980: 33). The implication for our current study is that memory is generated within a social setting and places of memory must be collectively captured in order to have mnemonic resilience. The latter notion is Pierre Nora's contribution since it is through places that we recall others. Nora regarded his excursion into realms of memory as an exposure of “national memory”, which had distorted the nation's true history. Thus, the more pragmatic issue is the acts of transference which convert memory into history and thereby fashion a common memory.⁶

In order to bring about a convergence or happy detente between conflicting collective memories, a reconciliation or mode of forgetting must take place. Begin addressed this possibility in his early writing, borrowing the notion of “black memories” from his Revisionist mentor, Zev Jabotinsky.

Don't let your memory dwell on … mistakes or … chatter. And if the good of the people requires that you stretch out your hand … , don't let your memory be “black”. Forget what must be forgotten and give him your hand.⁷

(Begin 1950: 137)

It is doubtful whether the politics of memory can make a smooth bridge among the operations of memory, history and forgetting. Forgiveness and reconciliation are arduous psychological and political processes which even the passing of generations may not overcome. The reluctance to exonerate the person who has been cast as “other” nourishes identity. Moreover, the narrative of alterity, of positing the other as an historical outsider, serves as a trope supporting the saliency and authenticity of the authorized version of events. Through misrecognition or defamation of the other, collective memory takes on the appearance of a defence of the homeland against invasive influences foreign to national aspirations. Forgetting, as noted above, is a horizon, and not a moment, of memory. We can only remember that we forgot. But in historiography, forgetting is more often than not deliberate excision – exclusion of the other. In Ricoeur's phenomenological description of forgetting, this is termed manipulated memory (Ricoeur 1996: 80–86, 448 ff.). For Ricoeur, manipulated memory is primarily effected through ideology, which is selective and eliminative. When communal identity serves an ideological end, it is determined by a “canonical narrative” imposed “by means of intimidation or seduction, fear or flattery” (Ricoeur 1996: 448).

The subject of manipulated memory returns us to the theme of regime supremacy. The Labour Party's building and maintenance of political hegemony, spearheaded by party dominance in the Yishuv (the pre-state period), set the stage for the sharp reaction of Herut following the first Knesset elections in 1951. Ben-Gurion's guiding dictum in forming the first Government coalition was “neither Maki nor Herut” – neither the communists nor the right-wing dissidents. This became the watchword for political exclusion and set the parameters for the de-legitimization of the opposition. Its effectiveness was marked by the structural conditions of Israel's political development as parteistaat. The role of one-party dominance in liberal democratic states has been conceptually developed along quite independent paths by Antonio Gramsci and Maurice Duverger.

Viewed from the position of cultural Marxism, the conventional image of ruling elites as interested in establishing and reproducing their preferential political status implied the desire to attain and preserve political hegemony through cultural supremacy. Antonio Gramsci was the leading proponent of this approach.⁸ He maintains that social control exerted through beliefs and ideas become so common and “natural” that they appear to reflect an uncontested order of things. The autonomy that he granted to the ideological and political superstructure challenged the economic determinism of the dialectical materialists and expanded on Lenin's party praxis in What is to Be Done? For Gramsci, hegemony refers to the conceptual foundations upon which the political leadership constructs its claims to elevated social status. Belief in the political elite's worthiness and inherent qualifications for this position guarantees the elite's continued hold. Significantly, the situation described is neither that of arbitrary coalition majorities or of random parliamentary victories; on the contrary, Gramsci envisages a coercive group at the apex of the fledgling “ethical state” guiding a new economic order in which “cultural policy will above all be negative, a critique of the past; it will be aimed at erasing from the memory and at destroying” (Gramsci 1971: 263–64). Thus, historiography plays a key role in the revolutionary preliminaries. On these programmatic grounds, hegemony's active stimulant towards a new order is both repressive and accommodating. Antagonist groups are liquidated or subjugated whereas allied groups are incorporated into the hegemonic system through democratic and concessionary means. To sustain the compliant image of hegemony, dissension is diluted or circumvented, for dissension creates doubt, an attitude that undermines the “taken-for-granted” character of the dominant ideology. The “game” played by these societal actors – intellectuals, broadly interpreted by Gramsci – represents a cognitive process that entraps not only the ruled, but also the rulers, for both groups perceive the political elite as committed to the interests of all and the society's genuine rulers. Hegemony represents, in effect, the reverse of what the functionalists, the proponents of pluralism, call consensus, the normative agreement they perceive necessary for society's survival. In contrast, the cultural Marxists interpret consensus, now dubbed hegemony, as the product of a system of control that serves narrow interests using terms of universalistic discourse. Only through a concurrence of values between classes, between leaders and led, can society remain viable. (See Thompson 1986).

Gramsci divided his hegemonic concept between civil society and the state, attributing the means of influence to the former and the means of domination to the latter. Among the tools of domination were the educational system and the armed forces. Without unduly overloading the analogy, Ben-Gurion established political hegemony through labour-Zionist influence on civil society and dominance of his party through the policy of mamlachtiut (statism). Soldier commemoration ceremonies and war remembrance projects became part of a general mobilization not only for forging national unity but placing the ruling party at the centre of this effort.

An understanding of the centralizing impact of a political party in early Israeli society is illuminated by drawing upon an empirical school of political sociology. Like Gramsci, Duverger (1972), indirectly influenced by Michel's “iron law of oligarchy”, introduced the notion of a dominant political party defined by the fact that its prospects for electoral defeat in the foreseeable future were deemed unlikely.⁹ The Liberal Democrats in Japan, the Indian National Congress in India, and the Kemal Ataturk legacy in Turkey were among the examples cited of this phenomenon. The Israeli Labour Party, too, may be included in this category, its tenure of rule extending from 1948 to 1977. The strategic interest of every political party holding the reins of government in a democratic order is to guarantee the continuity of its regime through continued re-election. This political goal determines the current behaviour and future decisions of every party in power. Adopting the terminology of dominant party theory, we can state that the aim of every party in power is to convert itself into the nation's dominant party.

Duverger maintained that party dominance is not confined to parliamentary superiority. In his view, a clear electoral majority is not a requisite for the enforcement of dominance. A party's sway over cultural rather than political phenomena, what he calls the zeitgeist, is a sufficient condition. Also known as the sociological factor, this variable represents the spiritual superiority held by the party and by those who identify with it, a condition that allows the party to maintain the loyalty of its adherents over extended periods of time. Stated differently, the sociological factor provides cultural and psychological advantages because of the way in which the general public perceives the party. “The party is dominant,” according to Duverger, “when it is iden...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Politics of memory
• Israeli History, Politics and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword I: Divided in their deaths
• Foreword II: “Righting a distortion is a righteous deed”
• Preface: “Private Loss”
• Introduction: Israeli politics of memory, bereavement and military commemoralization
• PART I Theoretical and historical framework
• PART II The exclusion from national pantheon
• PART III Penetrating the gates of national pantheon and collective memory
• PART IV Politics of memory and the changing boundaries of national pantheon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index