The Eichmann Trial – 50 Years Later

For Israelis, and perhaps the Jewish community at large, the most significant obituary issued this past week may not be the one that you are thinking of. While the world was waking up to the news from Pakistan, my dear colleague, Rabbi Zuckerman, had slipped the obituary of Judge Moshe Landau under my office door. Moshe Landau, the fifth president of the Israeli Supreme Court and presiding judge in the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, died at the age of 99 in his Jerusalem home on Sunday evening – poetically, on the eve of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It was precisely fifty years ago that Eichmann was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Captured by Mossad agents where he lived secretly in Argentina, Eichmann was brought back to Jerusalem to stand trial in Israel’s Beit Ha’am, a courtroom big enough to house the over 750 journalists present. Judge Landau opened the trial with a 15-count indictment of the man who had carried out Hitler’s Final Solution; Eichmann stood inside a bulletproof glass box as each charge was translated from Hebrew into German. After eight months and the testimony of over 100 survivors, the Eichmann trial came to a verdict. On December 15, 1961, Landau read the sentence:

The dispatch by the accused of every train carrying 1,000 souls to Auschwitz or to any of the places of extermination amounted to direct participation by the accused in 1,000 acts of premeditated murder.
Even had we found that the accused acted out of blind obedience, as he alleges, yet we would have said that one who had participated in crimes of such dimensions for years on end has to undergo the greatest punishment known to the law.

It is a prickly and hotly debated question what was the impact of the Eichmann trial on Israeli identity. Indeed, in her new (and absolutely terrific) book on the Eichmann trial, Deborah Lipstadt persuasively argues that long before the Eichmann trial, Israelis were altogether aware of the Holocaust. From explicit acknowledgement in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, to legislative discussions on establishing a Holocaust Remembrance Day, to public debates regarding Israel’s reparations from West Germany, to the famed Kasztner trial (and assassination), Lipstadt makes clear that Israelis were hardly unaware of the Shoah long before 1961. In Lipstadt’s words, “If one looks at the historical record, the notion of a “black hole” about the Holocaust prior to the trial seems to be more imagined than real.” (Lipstadt, 189-90) And while aspects of Lipstadt’s thesis remain a matter of some contention, certainly on this, the Shabbat between Yom Hashoah and Yom Ha’atzmaut, the fundamental question remains the same –– namely, what was the watershed effect of the Eichmann trial, if any, on the Israel consciousness?

Part of the answer is that it was only with the Eichmann trial that the Holocaust received sustained public attention in Israel. The trial was on the front page of every newspaper, it was broadcast live and listened to by the entire country. Most importantly, it was the first time that the human dimension of the Holocaust had pierced the Israeli national consciousness. By all accounts, the trial was about far more than Eichmann himself. By framing the charges in the victim’s names, Gideon Hausner, Israel’s attorney general and the chief prosecutor of Eichmann, saw in the trial an opportunity to give voice to the Six Million. Listen to Hausner’s words before Landau: “When I stand before you, Judges of Israel in this court, to accuse Adolph Eichmann, I do not stand alone. Here with me at this moment stand six million prosecutors.” Some years later Hausner would write that it was Ben Gurion’s intention that the trial would unite Israeli society, serving as a national and collective history lesson. In this matter they succeeded, as the private traumas of survivors were translated into public space. In his memoirs, Hausner would share an exchange with the editor of a leading newspaper who told him that after listening to the shattering testimony of a woman witness in court, he was transformed. “’For years I have been living next to this woman,’ the man said, ‘without so much as an inkling of who she was.’ It now transpired that almost everyone in Israel had such a neighbor.” (S. Felman, “Theatres of Justice,” Critical Inquiry, 2001, p. 233) Somehow, the Eichmann trial had a cathartic effect on Israeli society in that it gave permission to survivors to speak, it demanded that non-survivors listen, and it made Israelis as a whole engage with their Diaspora past.

All this may be true, but I think the watershed and enduring effect of the Eichmann trial was not so much about catharsis as it was about justice. In a sentence, the Eichmann trial was the historical pivot by which the persecuted became the prosecutor. Hannah Arendt best explained the landmark nature of the trial in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem. In answer to the question of what exactly was significant about the trial, she wrote:

…for Israel the only unprecedented feature of the trial was that, for the first time (since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans), Jews were able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people, that, for the first time, they did not need to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon the compromised phraseology of the rights of man – rights which, as no one knew better that they, were claimed only by people who were too weak defend their [rights] and enforce their own laws. (Arendt, p. 271)

Yes, there had been the Nuremberg trials immediately after the war – but those had been administered by an International Military Tribunal, not by the Jewish state. Yes, Israel had enacted the Nazis and Nazi Collaborator (Punishment) Law in 1950, but those laws had less to do with the Eichmanns of the world and more to do with Jews alleged to have been Nazi collaborators, an issue which was, and frankly remains, altogether difficult to adjudicate. As America learned this week, commemorations, reparations, legislation and otherwise, however important, are no substitute for justice. Only here did the Jewish state bring charges against a Nazi war criminal for crimes against the Jewish people. Only here did the persecuted become the prosecutor. It was a transformative act whereby survivors were no longer as victims but prosecution witnesses.

According to Yale professor Shoshana Felman, the Eichmann trial served as a folktale of justice. In fact, while in an entirely different context, the trial’s social reverberations and ramifications are not entirely dissimilar to the judicial proceedings described at the tail end of this week’s parashah. A crime (homicide) is committed by a non-Israelite against an Israelite. A public trial takes place, the sentence is issued and the law is affirmed – followed by a public execution. Felman explains that a victim is one who is robbed of the language to articulate his or her own victimization. While the camps may have been liberated by the Allies, it was only when the perpetrator of crimes against the Jewish people was prosecuted by the Jewish people, that Jews could claim what Felman calls “semantic authority over themselves.” Only here did the Israelis become the subject of their own sentence rather than the object of someone else’s. Only now could the victims truly claim to be writing their own history.

I understand, especially given their proximity on the historical and yearly calendar, why it is natural to bring the Shoah and the establishment of the state of Israel into conversation together. And yet, as I have counseled again and again, we must be overly cautious about making too close a link. While there is no question that the condition of the Jewish people in 1947 shaped international sentiment, the roots of modern Zionism date back to over 70 years prior to the Shoah, and by my count, back to Genesis Chapter 12. Israel is not an outgrowth of the Holocaust, and for that matter, the Holocaust is an historical event that must be understood on its own terms – independent of the establishment of the State of Israel. That said, it was the Eichmann trial that signaled a sea change in Israeli identity, because it gave rise to a sense of self-determination and empowerment that had hitherto been unexpressed in Israeli society. Would the Israelis have attacked pre-emptively in 1967 if not for the Eichmann trial a few years before? Would Israel’s retaliation over Munich have happened in quite the same way? What about Entebbe? What about the Osirak nuclear reactor? What about the Syrian reactor two years ago or Stuxnet last year? It was as if, writes Lipstadt, someone had inscribed Hillel’s maxim “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” over the entry to the courthouse. For the first time, a Jew’s security was in Jewish hands.

On Tuesday evening, our community will be celebrating Yom HaAtzmaut – 63 years since the establishment of the State of Israel. In the months and years ahead, Israel will be facing difficult choices, coming under scrutiny by the world community and the Jewish community for the decisions it makes. And depending on the decision, and depending on who you are – you may or may not agree with everything Israel does. But should you differ, which I imagine you may, just remember what lies at the heart of the matter. The modern state of Israel, if nothing else, gave and continues to give its citizens the ability to do what had not been and could not be done for thousands of year – the ability to say “never again,” and then to actualize those words. Lihiyot am hofshi b’artzeinu, to be a free people in our land, Eretz Tzion vi-yerushalayim, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.