ALPHABET OF JUSTICE
421
In
short, in dealing with the conduct of the trial, though Miss
Arendt
is
convincing about the lachrymose excesses in the courtroom–
yet given the cirmumstances could such emotionalism have been avoided?
-her real quarrel is not with the conduct of the trial but with the
nature of the indictment. And that is a far different issue, which I
shall discuss in a different context.
II. THE ISRAELI MOTIVE
It is quite clear that the Israelis intended to try Eichmann not
as a person, but as a symbol. Before the trial Ben-Gurion said, "It
is not an individual that is in the dock at his historic trial, and not the
Nazi regime alone, but anti-semitism throughout history."
The motives behind the Israelis intention were several: to demon–
strate to the world the fate of the Jews, and so establish a lien on the
conscience of nations as a means of defending the Israeli state; to
demonstrate to the Jews in
Galut
the debilitating quality of life in
the Diaspora, led as a minority existence; to demonstrate to the
Israelis the validity of the Zionist answer as the restoration of Jewish
heroism.
The Israeli leadership today is a tough-minded group with few
illusions about the idealism of the Powers. They are prepared-for
the sake of survival-to engage in preventive war and to commit
provocations. (The Lavon affair is a striking instance. Some years ago,
Israeli intelligence agents in Cairo set fire to a U.S. information
agency building, in order to blame the Egyptians for the act and arouse
anti-Nasser sentiment in the U.S. When the plot miscarried, members
of the Israeli service forged papers to demonstrate that Pinchas Lavon,
then Minister of Defense, had approved of the action. Lavon was
forced to resign and, although he was subsequently cleared over the
opposition of Ben-Gurion, his political career was ruined. For more
than a year, Israeli censorship prevented any discussions of the story
and the full details are still not clear today. For a people scarred by
the Dreyfus case, the Lavon affair poses a painful question on the
relationship of morality to political expediency.) The Eichmann trial,
with its potential boomerangs-the unbearable recollections it would
provoke about the submissiveness of so many Jewish victims, and the
dilemmas arising from the inescapable revelations that the present
German government is supplying arms to the Israelis-was embedded
in all these political calculations.
Miss Arendt's criticism of the Israeli motives--one of the very
few to probe so openly and strongly on those points-was bound to
