Negotiating truth: the Holocaust, Lehavdil, and Al-Nakba (1).

• Author: Lustick, Ian S.
• Position: THE LEGACY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

As Americans are accustomed to remembering the "quagmire" of Vietnam, so Israelis have referred, since the debacle of the 1982 Lebanon War and its eighteen-year aftermath, to the "Lebanese mud." Many critics of Israel's recent adventure in Lebanon have bemoaned Israel's return to ha-botz ha-Levanoni, where no matter how heroic or massive are the Jewish state's exertions, and no matter how justified they may appear to Israelis desperate to feel safe in a hostile neighborhood, the result is the same--Israel sinks deeper into a morass of destruction and bloodshed, planting thereby the seeds for greater threats against it in the future.

Over two generations, the question of Palestine had become, via Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) achievements and failures, wars and armistices, treaties and peace processes, intifadas and limited withdrawals, a matter of dividing historical Palestine so that Palestinians could establish a sustainable national existence. By gaining Israeli evacuation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, it was widely believed, or at least hoped, that the Middle East was being made safe for a general Arab, if not Muslim, willingness to accept Israel as a demographically Jewish state in the region.

It is commonplace for peacemakers in the Middle East to wonder if the extent of Israeli settlement activity in the Palestinian territories, the separation barrier erected along and through the West Bank, the dynamics of internal Israeli politics, and/or the inefficacy of Palestinian leadership, has rendered a workable "two-state solution" impossible. But now, in the aftermath of the Israel-Hizbullah war in Lebanon, new and old questions are being raised, not about whether a two-state solution could still, practically and politically, be considered a realistic objective, but whether Israel, as a Jewish country, can be stomached by the vast Arab and Muslim majorities of the Middle East. Have the fury, hatred and resentment against Israel's use of its military power to pulverize parts of Lebanon while maintaining a punishing siege on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank reached such profound levels that for Middle Eastern Muslims no future for Israel can be politically or psychologically plausible to both Arabs and Muslims other than the fate of the Crusaders? In other words, has the entire template understanding Arab-Israeli relations since 1967 been rendered irrelevant?

This paper is not an attempt to answer this question. It is, however, based on the premise that if Israel is to find a way to integrate peacefully and permanently into the region it will have to find ways to address directly the wrenching, profound and pervasive sense in the region that its actions, and even its very creation and existence, constitute an unbearable injustice. This will mean, at the very least, that Israel will have to move beyond the demand that Arabs swallow their true beliefs and accept Israel's existence as fact simply because of its strength and ability to hurt others if they do not. More than that, Israel's permanent and stable incorporation into the Middle East will require Israel and Israelis to face their history frankly and be willing, in some fashion, to publicly acknowledge the validity, if not the determinativeness, of certain Arab, and especially Palestinian, claims. In this effort, it will be impossible to avoid the single most painful wound in the Palestinian and Arab body politic inflicted by the creation of the state of Israel vis-a-vis the transformation of 750,000 Palestinians and millions of their descendants into refugees barred by Israel since 1948 from returning to their homes or gaining compensation for the loss of their property.

Some may think that Israel will never deal straightforwardly with an issue so painful and so likely to raise fundamental questions about the country's founding. But careful consideration of preparations made by the Ehud Barak government for the negotiations at Camp David in the summer of 2000 suggest otherwise, especially when considered in comparison to the ability of truth to emerge in the context of the Israeli-German relationship after the Second World War. Indeed the ability of Israelis and Germans to deal effectively with a history marked by much greater horrors than those perpetrated and remembered by Israelis and Palestinians can shed new and hopeful light on the prospects, or at least the possibility, of a permanent Israeli presence in the Middle East.

THE REFUGEE ISSUE, CAMP DAVID AND TABA

In the debates and recriminations that followed the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Camp David in the summer of 2000, and the inconclusive follow-up discussions at Taba, attention has been directed primarily to issues concerning leadership, settlements, withdrawals, the disposition of Jerusalem and Palestinian demands for the return of refugees. Mostly ignored, however, was one particular demand made by the Palestinian side regarding the refugees. Although most commentators focused on the demand for return itself and the complex set of options that might be used to parse, distribute and effectively limit that right, it is worth exploring the implications of the separate demand that Israel formally acknowledge its moral responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948.

The evidence suggests that the Barak government was prepared to issue a statement announcing Israel's regret for the suffering entailed and perhaps acknowledge a share of responsibility for the tragedy. On the other hand, Israel would not agree to accept "moral or legal responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem." (2) According to David Schenker, in an article published during the Camp David summit itself, Israel rejected Palestinian demands for a "formal Israeli apology and admission of responsibility for the refugee crisis" out of a belief that to do so "would leave the Jewish state exposed to future financial and emigration claims." (3)

What is interesting about this rationale is that the Palestinian claims were not rejected because they were deemed to be false. Nor were they rejected because it was considered that to accept them, acknowledge responsibility and offer an apology would not have contributed toward peace and reconciliation. On the contrary, official Israeli arguments, which state that too many economic and legal liabilities would arise from offering such public and official statements, appear to support an implicit acceptance of the justice and appropriateness, if not the practicality of the Palestinian demand. In this light, it is unsurprising that in the follow-up negotiations at Taba in the fall of 2000, attention was focused directly on the practical means for addressing the refugee problem, including the kind of language that would be included in an Israeli declaration regarding the events of 1948. (4)

This essay seeks to highlight the political significance of these discussions by considering the negotiations between Israel, the World Jewish Congress and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1951 prior to the beginning of German reparations payments and prior to the onset of diplomatic relations between Israel and West Germany. After saying lehavdil, we may yet see in the agony of Jews, wrestling with the challenge of settling for infinitely less than the justice and retribution for which they yearned, an instructive "limiting case" for analyzing the distress of the Palestinians, a people called upon to abandon their struggle for justice, who seek public acknowledgment by Israel of the evil inflicted on them as an element in a comprehensive peace package. (5) We may also learn from the artful avoidances and measured doses of truth contained in Konrad Adenauer's speech before the Bundestag in September 1951. From that carefully orchestrated speech, we can learn something about how necessary, but in all likelihood how limited and symbolic, the Israeli proclamation will be enabling a practical solution to the Palestinian refugee problem and the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Such an analysis and such comparisons are similar to those used by Israel's first Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett. In 1952, he suggested "transferring some of the money [from German reparations] to the Palestinian refugees, in order to rectify what has been called the small injustice (the Palestinian tragedy), caused by the more terrible one (the Holocaust)." (6)

GERMANS, JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST: FINDING JUST ENOUGH TRUTH

As early as 1945, Chaim Weizmann and others had considered the possibility of obtaining substantial financial support for building the Jewish state and for its economic consolidation by demanding compensation for the property of murdered European Jews. Just one month after the end of the Second World War Weizmann sent the four powers occupying Germany a demand for title to what he estimated to be $8 billion worth of property whose owners had died in the Holocaust. (7) The allies did respond to this overture, though only in the amount of $25 million, to be allocated to many Jewish relief organizations. Of more significance than the amount of the demand and Weizmann's failure was that it was not directed toward the Germans but toward the allied powers occupying Germany. Thus, there was no question of receiving property directly from the German state, nation or collectivity and no issue, at that point, of whether acceptance of economic support from Germany was morally acceptable.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the attitudes of many Israelis were hysterically anti-German. The dominant view in Israel was categorical rejection of any contact with Germany or Germans and a strong tendency to view the Germany of Chancellor Adenauer, who himself had been anti-Nazi, as no more acceptable a point of contact for Jews than the Nazi regime. (8) As Tom Segev reports, "[t]he foreign ministry stamped on...