JAMES E. YOUNG
595
now identifying figuratively with the generation of survivors pre–
ceding them:
We tend to forget those days before the war, and perhaps rightly
so - yet those were the days in which we came closest to that
Jewish fate from which we have run like haunted beings all these
years. Suddenly everyone was talking about Munich, about the
holocaust , about the Jewish people being left to its own fate.!
Questioned later by a slightly incredulous Abba Kovner, who led the
Vilna partisans during the Holocaust and came to Israel with the
Zionist belief that by definition, Israel made the possibility of
another Holocaust "unthinkable," another soldier revealed that not
only was it thinkable, but it was in fact the
governing
thought under–
lying his very
raison detre
as a soldier:
It's true that people believed that we would be exterminated if we
lost the war. They were afraid. We got this idea-or inherited
it - from the concentration camps. It's a concrete idea for anyone
who has grown up in Israel, even if he personally didn't exper–
ience Hitler's persecution, but only heard or read about it.
. . . Did you really get the feeling that extermination could hap–
pen here? [asks KovnerJ .
. . Yes, certainly . I think it's an idea that everyone in Israel
lived with.
This is the great irony of the Israelis' grasp of their predica–
ment. On the one hand, only a people fighting another Holocaust
will survive with Israel's tenacity. On the other hand, the
sabra
has
been educated to believe that Israel is the only safe haven for Jews in
the world, the only guarantee against another Jewish Holocaust,
and that the "holocausts" happen only in the Diaspora. Thus, the
soldier is compelled to fight by the memory of what happened in the
Diaspora, precisely and paradoxically because it could also happen
in Israel. But this is not the only paradox. Of more serious conse–
quence is that expressed by Muki Tzur at the end of his opening
meditation :
1. The Seventh Day: Soldiers' Talk About the Six-Day War,
recorded and edited by a
group of young Kibbutz members. Middlesex. Penguin Books, 1971, p. 38.
