Our American Israel 4 “NOT THE ISRAEL WE HAVE SEEN IN THE PAST”

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CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
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4 

 

“NOT THE ISRAEL WE HAVE SEEN IN THE PAST” 

 

“THE ISRAEL WE SAW yesterday is not the Israel we have seen in the past.” So concluded a dismayed John Chancellor of 

NBC news, in his commentary from a rooftop in West Beirut on August 2, 1982, with smoke billowing in the background. Anyone 

watching the nightly news after Israel invaded Lebanon in June of that year would have agreed, but they would not have agreed on the 

reason. Some believed that Israel’s militarism was ruining its reputation. Others pinned the blame on journalists like Chancellor, claim- 

ing that media bias was tarnishing Israel’s image. 

Chancellor decried the “savage Israeli attack on one of the world’s big cities.” The “stench of terror all across the city” raised ques- 

tions about Israel’s stated military goal of stopping terrorist incursions into northern Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization 

(PLO). Shaking his head, Chancellor asked, “What in the world is going on?” If Israel’s security problem was fifty miles to the south, 

“what’s an Israeli army doing here in Beirut?” He then answered his own rhetorical question: “We are now dealing with an imperial Is- 

rael, which is solving its problems in someone else’s country, world opinion be damned.”¹ 

“Much of what you have read in the newspapers and newsmagazines about the war in Lebanon—and even more of what you have 

seen and heard on television—is simply not true.” So claimed Martin Peretz in the New Republic that same week. Peretz had visited 

southern Lebanon in June at the invitation of the Israeli government. In “Lebanon Eyewitness,” he accused journalists of exaggerating 

civilian casualties and ignoring the true story of Israel liberating the Lebanese people from the PLO stranglehold.² 

The invasion of Lebanon precipitated a crisis in American perceptions of Israel. The nightly spectacle of jets bombing a densely 

packed city, vistas of collapsed apartment buildings, close-ups of maimed and traumatized civilians, all shocked an American audience. 

How could—or should—one frame these events? Some framed the Lebanon War in terms of the continued efforts of a small, belea- 

guered country to defend its fragile security and sovereignty. These voices invoked familiar, heroic stories of Israel’s past military con- 

flicts: the swift victory over vast armies bent on its annihilation in 1967, the relief of repelling the surprise attack that made it appear so 

vulnerable in 1973, and the celebration of the daring rescue mission in Entebbe in 1976. Other commentators highlighted the parallels 

with America’s recent quagmire in Southeast Asia. They began calling Lebanon “Israel’s Vietnam,” noting the common features: burnt- 

out villages, high civilian casualties, “rolling thunder,” and an antiwar movement at home. Shock at day-to-day violence turned to moral 

outrage in September, after the massacre of civilians in refugee camps. 

The Lebanon War dealt a blow to the popular consensus that had crystallized in 1967, one that appealed to liberals and conservatives 

alike. The invasion appeared to shatter the narrative of Israel as the beleaguered underdog, wielding force only to defend itself from ex- 

termination. The siege of Beirut, when Lebanese and Palestinian civilians became visible as victims of Israel’s bludgeoning force, se- 

verely tainted Israel’s image as the invincible victim. Israel had, of course, faced international condemnation before. But in 1982, for the 

first time, criticism rang out from the center of American society, from mainstream media, politicians, intellectuals, and leaders of Jew- 

ish organizations. Israel would now face such criticism again and again, especially during the eruption of the first intifada in 1987. 

What was different about the response to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was not only the startling vision of what Chancellor called 

“imperial Israel.” Equally important, and possibly more enduring, was the vociferous and well-organized reaction to the criticism— 

exemplified by Peretz’s articles. The fierce backlash aimed to counter disillusionment with Israel by monitoring and censuring the media 

for anti-Israeli bias. Pro-Israel organizations stepped up their lobbying for direct U.S. aid to enhance Israel’s security and simulta- 

neously attempted to secure the narrative of Israel’s existential vulnerability in the face of Palestinian resistance. 

 

 

Israeli shelling of West Beirut, August 2, 1982. 

 

The 1980s witnessed more polarization in American public discourse about Israel than ever before. At the same time, the Reagan 

administration significantly increased U.S. financial aid, military cooperation, and diplomatic allegiance, presenting Israel as a “strategic 

asset” in a reheated Cold War. The public battles over the legitimacy of Israel’s use of force and of Palestinian grievances were waged 

not over policy alone, but over the stories and images deployed to represent Israelis and Palestinians, over what literary critic Edward 

Said called the “permission to narrate.”³ By the end of the decade a new consensus was taking shape among American liberals, who 

started to acknowledge Palestinian narratives and national aspirations. This recognition, they believed, was necessary for resuscitating 

Israel’s moral health and guaranteeing its political survival—in addition to being an imperative of social justice. At the same time, 

conservatives increasingly condemned all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic and denied the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or even 

the existence of the Palestinians as a people. The Lebanon War has receded from American popular memory, but the battle over the 

media portrayal of that war drew the major dividing lines that would frame debates about Israel and Palestine into the present. 

 

Crisis 

 

On June 6, 1982, Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon launched an invasion into southern Lebanon, under the command of Prime Min- 

ister Menachem Begin. In a campaign dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee, troops from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) crossed the 

border, with the stated self-defensive purpose of destroying the PLO’s capacity to attack the population of northern Israel. Within days, 

the IDF had moved past the stated goal of establishing a twenty-five-mile buffer zone; Israeli forces destroyed Syrian planes and mis- 

siles in eastern Lebanon and advanced to the outskirts of Beirut. During a nine-week siege of Beirut, Sharon ordered intensive air, naval, 

and artillery bombardment of Palestinian strongholds, pummeling civilian neighborhoods and refugee camps in West Beirut and the 

city’s southern outskirts. In August, the United States brokered a truce that required the PLO to abandon Lebanon and installed an in- 

ternational peacekeeping force—including U.S. troops—to protect the Palestinian civilians in refugee camps. By September 1, Pales- 

tinian forces had left Beirut for other Arab countries, and President Reagan withdrew the American troops. When the Israeli-backed pres- 

ident-elect and Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel was assassinated, Sharon ordered Israeli troops back into West Beirut, which set the 

scene for massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Israeli troops withdrew to a buffer zone in southern Lebanon in 1985, 

where they remained until withdrawing from the country completely in 2000. Although estimates of casualties from the Israeli invasion 

through the subsequent occupation vary widely, the numbers of Lebanese and Palestinian dead and wounded—the vast majority civil- 

ians—far outpaced those of Israeli soldiers. Fatality figures range as high as 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, and close to 700 Israeli 

soldiers.⁴ 

In the first days of the invasion, the U.S. media hewed closely to the Israeli government’s narrative of retaliation, defense, and liber- 

ation. Palestinian terrorism, reporters duly explained, had triggered Israeli strikes. Newscasts displayed caches of captured PLO 

weapons. When Israeli tanks swiftly barreled to the outskirts of Beirut in mid-June, reporters faithfully conveyed Israel’s account of its 

larger goals: to liberate Lebanon from the chaos of civil war and the stranglehold of “foreign forces,” including the PLO and Syria, and 

to install a friendly government led by Israel’s Christian allies. Television reports showed Lebanese civilians welcoming Israeli troops 

with flowers and songs.⁵ 

The official Israeli framing of the war was quickly belied by evidence on the ground. Within days of the invasion, news outlets began 

to report harrowing scenes of civilian suffering in areas beyond clear-cut military targets. In ABC’s June 10 broadcast from the coastal 

city of Sidon, the camera surveyed flattened neighborhood blocks, while the correspondent stated that “in destroying PLO infra- 

structure,” Israel had “destroyed in the process the infrastructure of all civilian life in cities where the PLO was based.” Other stories 

told of a mass burial of over eighty Lebanese civilians, and hospitals where Israeli troops had arrested doctors and nurses on the suspi- 

cion that they were terrorists. Images of homeless and terrified civilians soon supplanted those of Lebanese warmly greeting Israelis. As 

Newsweek reported, while “some Lebanese welcomed the defeat of the PLO, they also regarded Israelis with suspicion, if not fury.”⁶ 

The Israeli press office pushed back in response to these stories, accusing the press of exaggerating causalities and blaming the PLO 

for jeopardizing civilians by embedding military installations among noncombatants. In turn, correspondents juxtaposed official gov- 

ernment statements with the scenes they had witnessed. David Shipler, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, quoted an Israeli 

reporter stating that “dozens of journalists physically present on the scene and witness to the disparity between the official announce- 

ment and the truth no longer believe what they are officially told.” Israeli soldiers, he added, often listen to Lebanese radio stations for 

more credible news of the war.⁷ 

In early July, at a time when the government was accusing news organizations of exaggerating the destruction, Shipler visited south- 

ern Lebanon and witnessed Israel’s methodical demolition of Palestinian homes in refugee camps. Noting that the IDF had barred the 

press from seeing the more extensive damage in the camps, he explained that the connotation of “camp” as a collection of makeshift 

dwellings did not adequately describe the “sprawling towns of narrow streets and jumbled concrete houses, built gradually over the 

years since the refugees from Palestine were driven here by the fighting in Israel’s 1948 war of independence.” The Israelis were now 

razing these towns, he explained, because the PLO had been “integrating military installations in the camps’ civilian settlements,” there- 

by “exposing the Palestinian civilians to Israeli attack.” Shipler then compared the Israeli demolitions to U.S. tactics in Vietnam, where 

he had served as a correspondent: “The Israelis want to deny any future guerrillas use of the shelters and the camps for military pur- 

poses, much as the American troops in Vietnam obliterated villages to deny their use to the Vietcong.” This analogy might have raised 

alarms for Americans who remembered the strategy of “destroying a village in order to save it,” especially when Shipler compared the 

psychology of Israeli and American soldiers, both of whom failed to distinguish between fighters and noncombatants on the grounds 

that “they are all terrorists.”⁸ 

Among international correspondents, the Vietnam War had left a legacy of skepticism toward official press briefings and wariness 

about government censorship. Stories on Israeli censorship became a recurring news item. Newspaper dispatches were at times head- 

ed with notices indicating Israeli or Syrian censorship, and television broadcasts used more dramatic means to notify viewers. On June 

26, NBC gave a harrowing account from West Beirut of an intensive day of shelling, in which U.S.-made weapons had hit neigh- 

borhoods and killed or injured two thousand people. Against a darkened background appeared the words “Casualty Pictures Removed 

by Israel Censors.” Israel attempted to prohibit the transmission of an ABC News interview with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. When ABC 

defied the ban, its struggle with the Israeli censors received at least as much media attention as the interview itself.⁹ 

The media’s focus on Israeli censorship highlighted the fact that Israel had a particular point of view, and that, like any other nation, 

its perspective on events was partial, self-interested, and politically motivated. Israel had lost the claim to innocence that it had main- 

tained during prior wars. Its messaging was no longer unassailable, and its worldview no longer smoothly nor automatically reflected 

that of the American news audience. 

For the first time in an Israeli-Arab conflict, journalists experienced the war from the perspective of an Arab country alongside that of 

Israel. In contrast to the situation in 1967, when Egypt threw out foreign journalists before the outbreak of war, all the major news out- 

lets had correspondents in Beirut, the long-standing nerve center for the international press in the Middle East. Some correspondents 

had been covering the Lebanese civil war for several years, so they knew the terrain well and would arrive at the site of a bombing before 

the ambulances and local police. Many experienced the bombardment of the city first hand, since the majority of reporters lived in West 

Beirut, home to PLO headquarters and leftist Lebanese factions.¹⁰ 

Anchors on nightly network news programs would routinely introduce the day’s fighting in two separate segments from different 

points of view. Audiences could watch Israeli tanks firing from the heights of East Beirut, and then see close-ups of shells hitting neigh- 

borhoods in West Beirut. On July 2, NBC Evening News reported on Sharon’s visit to East Beirut, where he vehemently announced to 

reporters that Israel’s goal was to “destroy”—a word he used three times—the “terrorist PLO Palestinian organizations.” The next seg- 

ment interviewed a physician in a West Beirut hospital and showed children who had been injured by shrapnel.¹¹ 

In addition to contrasting images, access to different sides of the conflict provided correspondents with competing narratives. On 

June 9, Thomas Friedman, Beirut bureau chief for the New York Times, interviewed Rashid Khalidi, whom he identified as a spokesman 

for the PLO. The Israeli goal to “crush the P.L.O.” in Lebanon, claimed Khalidi, was a step toward the ultimate aim of controlling Pales- 

tinians in the West Bank and Gaza and destroying their “idea of an independent Palestinian state.” The Israelis hoped, he said, that in 

the absence of PLO leadership, they would be able to quash resistance to their rule in the occupied territories and to establish a quies- 

cent leadership there that would agree to some form of limited autonomy allied with Jordan.¹² 

During the first few weeks of the invasion, correspondents challenged the Israeli government’s credibility in its official accounts of 

specific incidents. The impact of reporting on the devastating nine-week siege of Beirut put cracks in Israel’s image as a vulnerable na- 

tion deploying military power with humane restraint. As reports depicted civilian suffering under daily aerial strikes and artillery bar- 

rages, the media foregrounded the human cost of “Israel’s war machine.” Cameras surveyed “whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble,” 

where there was “no time to find bodies before the next bomb fell.” Reporters described the physical experience of the bombardments 

that “touched all the senses,” the “terrifying sounds,” the persistent “stench of death,” and the pervasive feeling that “nowhere is safe.” 

Showing piles of garbage between collapsed apartment buildings, reporters told of Israel cutting off electricity, water, and food to the 

entire population of West Beirut. In a telling linguistic reversal, correspondents repeatedly used the word “terror,” a label long identified 

with Palestinian violence, to describe life under siege. “West Beirutis,” wrote a reporter in the Washington Post on July 18, “consider the 

Israelis masters of terrorism.” After fourteen hours of continuous bombing on August 11, an NBC correspondent concluded that “every 

day has its moment of terror.”¹³ 

The modern urban setting of Beirut brought the war close to home for American viewers. John Chancellor described Beirut as half 

the length of Manhattan, and the New York Times referred to a neighborhood of Beirut as its “Gramercy Park,” now a “sunlit horror of 

dazed people.” Images of Israel’s previous conflicts had focused on tanks crossing the desert or soldiers moving single file through 

Jerusalem’s ancient passageways. Beirut presented a radically different setting, where viewers now witnessed a city “shelled to death 

from without and within.” In “Beirut: A City in Agony,” Newsweek described how “at times the once grand city of Beirut simply disap- 

peared in the smoke of its own devastation.” After waves of bombing shook the capital, “15-story buildings crumpled like cereal boxes. 

The streets became skating rinks of broken glass and the splash of phosphorous bombs spread a scalding blaze of orange.” Since 1975, 

the ongoing Lebanese civil war had shattered the image of Beirut as the Paris of the Middle East. In 1982, journalists compared Beirut to 

other European cities ravaged by military assaults, such as Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, and Stalingrad and Berlin during World 

War II.¹⁴ 

The urban setting shifted American perceptions of Lebanese and Palestinians in particular, and of Arabs more generally. On the tele- 

vision screen, viewers saw middle-class city-dwellers wearing Western-style clothing, working as teachers or bankers, walking through 

rubble to thinly stocked grocery stores. Amid the wreckage, they were holding together fragments of everyday life that would look famil- 

iar to the average American viewer. Reporters told the life stories of ordinary Arab citizens, and in interviews they tallied their personal 

losses and inveighed against the violence. These images did not fit stereotypes of Arabs as murderous terrorists, nomadic shepherds, 

or wealthy robed sheiks. On July 9, for example, NBC aired a news segment titled “One Family’s Tragedy” that featured a family named 

the Kasiers, whose apartment building was bombed in the middle of a family reunion, killing the grandmother and a seven-year-old 

child. And that was not their only loss. Sitting with his wife in the ruins of a modest living room, the father, an interior designer, related 

in English the chilling story of searching through hospitals and morgues for his sister, only to find her body in six pieces. Separating the 

human story from the political context, the reporter concluded, “the Kasiers are Lebanese, not Palestinian. They weren’t really involved 

in this conflict—until—a family reunion.”¹⁵ 

Although “Palestinian” was still used by Israelis and Americans as a synonym for terrorist, this equation began to come apart. 

Palestinian victims of Israeli violence increasingly took the stage as sympathetic characters in the American media. As it became clear 

that the Israelis aimed not only to oust the PLO but to destroy the refugee camps and disperse their inhabitants, correspondents put to- 

gether reports on Palestinian homelessness. On July 15, an ABC reporter interviewed Palestinians who had been trapped by the invasion. 

They described their support for the PLO, their fear of Lebanese reprisals, and their concern for their young sons, who were armed to 

fight. “Where am I to go?” cried a woman who had come to Beirut thirty-four years ago from the Galilee.¹⁶ 

“The Palestinians: Where Do They Go From Here?” read the cover of Newsweek on August 16. The stories in this issue conveyed an 

image of a Palestinian community that was united by a shared sense of nationhood but diverse in terms of class, religion, politics, citi- 

zenship, and history. The issue included interviews with refugees in camps, professionals in the Palestinian diaspora, a PLO 

spokesman, and an outspoken journalist on the West Bank. To humanize the Palestinians, these articles used a strategy, common in 

press coverage at this time, of comparing Palestinians to Jews: to their heroic resistance at Masada and in the Warsaw Ghetto, to their 

experience as refugees after World War II, to their longing for a nation, and to their professional successes. These comparisons made 

Palestinians appear less foreign and more familiar, emphasizing their similarity with Israelis rather than their enmity.¹⁷ 

The question “Where do they go from here?” conjured a historical shadow: the issue of how the Palestinians got to Lebanon to begin 

with. Reports on destroyed refugee camps invariably pointed back to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, to the story of dispossession and 

exile that led to these camps. American correspondents often repeated the Israeli narrative that blamed the Arab nations for not “taking 

in” the Palestinians in order to make Israel “look bad.”¹⁸ Nonetheless, the sight of Palestinians losing their homes in Lebanon at least 

raised the question of where they belonged today. The Newsweek issue highlighted several aspects of the Palestinian experience that 

suggested answers: that Palestinians from Beirut to Detroit maintained a deep attachment to the homes they had lost in 1948; that they 

supported the PLO in its stand against Israel; and that moderates wanted to see a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. In short, 

a war that set out to destroy Palestinian nationalism had the ironic effect of introducing the idea of a Palestinian homeland to an Amer- 

ican audience. 

Another influential aspect of the media coverage was the portrayal of the PLO in a more sympathetic light. Journalists reported on the 

political and familial ties between ordinary Palestinians and PLO members, and described the organization’s establishment of social 

institutions such as schools, hospitals, and libraries. By the second week of the war, journalists had started calling PLO combatants 

“fighters” rather than “guerrillas,” and occasionally interviewed armed young men who did not conform to the stereotype of a hate-filled 

terrorist.¹⁹ On July 1, CBS interviewed a handsome nineteen-year-old PLO member who had studied mathematics in school and read a 

poem on camera. On August 13, NBC interviewed Palestinians in the Shatila refugee camp as they rummaged through the ruins of their 

homes. A PLO fighter spoke quietly in halting English: “Israel cannot destroy all the Palestinian people—they can destroy home and 

building—but they cannot destroy the people—and we are still here.” By the time the PLO fighters left Beirut at the end of August, their 

narrative of resistance had gained more credibility in the American media, which showed Palestinians heralding them, even in defeat, for 

surviving the onslaught of a more powerful army.²⁰ 

Overall, the media coverage of the invasion widened the lens on Palestinians to hint at fragments of a new narrative for an American 

audience. As Philip Geyelin of the Washington Post wrote, “There’s more to the ‘Palestinian cause’ than a PLO covenant with clauses 

calling for Israel’s extinction, more to it than the person of Yasser Arafat. There’s a grievance and a goal—an independent homeland— 

that most of the nations of the world (and many Americans) think is reasonable.”²¹ 

“War Has Cost Israel Its Underdog Image,” read a headline in the Los Angeles Times on June 30, 1982. As Palestinian suffering be- 

came more visible, Israel’s reputation suffered, too. When the IDF captured over six thousand prisoners, it faced international criticism 

for refusing to grant them the status of prisoner of war, as required under the Geneva Convention. “Israelis are sensitive to world public 

opinion,” explained an article in the Washington Post, “and the presence of thousands of Palestinians in internment camps creates a dis- 

tasteful image”—particularly, it noted, for a country with many citizens who had themselves been in concentration camps. Americans 

were also sensitive to world opinion, and an editorial in the same paper expressed concern that “high civilian losses challenge the wide- 

ly held belief in this country that Israel is a special nation with a moral mission, deserving of its special relationship with the United 

States and the massive military and economic aid it receives.” Commentators repeatedly expressed disappointment at the diminishment 

of Israel’s moral stature. Alfred Friendly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Six-Day War, expressed his disappointment 

with Israel, noting the decline of the nation he had once admired: “Perhaps it was expecting more than was possible—that Israel should 

remain the country with a conscience, a home for honor, a treasury for the values of mind and soul. At any rate it is no longer.” Friendly 

mourned the loss of a romantic image that journalists like himself had had a hand in creating.²² 

As it had in 1967, the Vietnam War provided a reference point for understanding Israel’s military conduct, but this time journalists 

pointed out the similarities rather than the differences. The Israeli military no longer stood out as a sterling alternative to the American 

way of war. Israel was “paying the price in damage to its international image,” wrote David Lamb in the Los Angeles Times, for using 

“overwhelming military power against an outgunned guerrilla army.” In the Middle East, as in Southeast Asia, he wrote, television 

brought home the horrors of war; and just as the United States had done, Israel denounced the coverage rather than its army’s destruc- 

tion of civilian lives.²³ 

Soon after the June invasion, a burgeoning antiwar movement, Peace Now, brought thousands of Israelis into the streets in protest. 

These demonstrations also evoked parallels with the American experience. In “Some Israelis Fear Their Vietnam Is Lebanon,” David 

Shipler described the protesters’ concern that this war “would stain the national honor, obliterating recent boasts of having the world’s 

most humane army.”²⁴ Israel appeared to be sinking in a quagmire of its own making. This analogy with Vietnam, however, also cast Is- 

raeli disillusionment in a familiar mold. Comparing Israel’s peace movement to America’s antiwar movement burst one romantic bub- 

ble at the same time that it inflated another one—that of the moral integrity of Israel’s citizenry, which resonated with those liberal 

Americans who were reckoning with the legacy of Vietnam. 

The invasion of Lebanon provoked strong responses from American Jews, some of whom began to break the traditional taboo 

against criticizing Israel in public. While the major organizations pledged verbal and financial support for Begin’s war effort, especially 

at the outset, progressive journalists and liberal leaders increasingly broke ranks to voice their dissent out loud. In “The Silence of 

American Jews,” published in the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff lambasted a Jewish congressman who “kvelled over the brilliant success of 

the Israeli Defense Force” while ignoring news that dozens of bodies had been dumped in a pit in Sidon. Stories about discord among 

Jews became a news item. The New York Times described the “disgust” and “shame” Jews felt about Israel’s callousness toward civilian 

lives, and their recoil at seeing the Israeli flag flying in a suburb of Beirut.²⁵ Opposition to the war occasionally crossed political lines; I. 

F. Stone noted that defenders of Israel who used to call him and Noam Chomsky “stooges of the P.L.O.” were now signing the same 

petitions. On July 4, sixty-six prominent American Jews, including seven rabbis, published a full-page advertisement in the New York 

Times in support of Israel’s Peace Now movement. The ad condemned the fighting as “contrary to the original Zionist vision,” and it 

advocated “self-determination” for the Palestinians. Signatories included well-known intellectuals with varied political approaches to 

domestic issues, including authors Saul Bellow and E. L. Doctorow, critics Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, political theorist Michael 

Walzer, and the sociologists Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, who had penned an op-ed in the New York Times strongly 

opposing the war.²⁶ These self-identified Zionists rejected Israel’s military aggression because it did not fit their understanding of the 

nation as engaging only in just wars of self-defense. 

Jewish critics of the war often brought a sense of personal and communal betrayal to the narrative of Israel’s declining morality. 

Some expressed fear that Israel was “losing its soul” as well as its position as a counter to American imperialism. Columnist Richard 

Cohen compared Israel’s lies about its war aims in Lebanon to America’s secret bombing of Cambodia and its covert support for the 

coup in Chile that toppled Salvador Allende. The “widespread slaughter of civilians,” he wrote, “has undermined Israel’s claim to moral 

superiority, once its richest political asset in the West.” He also felt personally deceived: “Maybe it was just me—naïve me—but Israel 

was supposed to be the place where the truth was told, where idealism thrived, where things were different from other countries. The 

country was founded not on some lust for gold or for territory, but for moral reasons.”²⁷ In expressions of disillusionment, both Jews 

and non-Jews attested to the moral exceptionalism that lay at the heart of their vision of Israel. Their focus on Israel’s betrayal of its own 

values often overshadowed their attention to the damage it did to others. 

This sense of disillusionment, however, did not fundamentally challenge these critics’ support for Israel or make them rethink its his- 

tory. Indeed, the sense of betrayal provoked by the war provided the foundation upon which to rebuild the idea of Israel’s exceptional 

morality. Lamenting the loss of Israeli idealism in Lebanon made it possible to rejuvenate the founding myth of Israel’s virtuous origins. 

Commentators treated the regime of Sharon and Begin as an aberration that temporarily sullied the essential “good name of Israel, built 

by sacrifice, restraint and principles of justice.” In this context, critics praised Israeli protesters as the guardians of the nation’s endur- 

ing ethical values. Hentoff called attention to a soldier, interviewed on Israeli TV, who asked whether “we have some kind of double 

standard for our own suffering and those of other people.” This soldier, in Hentoff’s view, represented the true Zionist ethos, as it had 

been articulated by David Ben-Gurion, that the nation could only survive if “Israelis maintain their moral, spiritual and intellectual stan- 

dards.” For many liberals, an idealized vision of Israel’s past and essential identity was still salvageable from the rubble of Beirut, even if 

it had been veiled for a time by the smoldering ruins.²⁸ 

This recuperation even managed to survive the horrific events that occurred three months into the war, when over eight hundred 

Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were massacred between September 15 and 18. Following the assassination 

of Bashir Gemayel, the Israeli-supported present-elect of Lebanon and leader of the Phalange party, Sharon directed his army to reoc- 

cupy West Beirut in violation of an international agreement to withdraw. Israeli troops that were surrounding the refugee camps per- 

mitted their right-wing allies from the Phalange to send more than one hundred well-armed militia members into the camps for the stat- 

ed purpose of rounding up remaining terrorists. In a three-day rampage, the militia butchered and mutilated defenseless Palestinians, 

including women, children, and the elderly. Israeli soldiers lit the way at night with flares, and Israeli guards on surrounding rooftops 

were close enough to observe the slaughter. The encircling Israeli troops made no effort to stop the massacre, which their commanders 

knew of within hours, and they blocked screaming women from fleeing the camps. The atrocities provoked worldwide condemnation, 

as did Begin’s self-righteous refusal to accept any responsibility. International denunciation and domestic protests led Begin reluctantly 

to appoint a limited commission of investigation.²⁹ 

Israel’s involvement in this depravity unsettled the strict moral hierarchy that provided the basis for an American identification with 

the Jewish state. “Palestinians have now had their Babi Yar,” wrote conservative columnist George Will. The very possibility of com- 

paring the massacre of Palestinians to the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Russian Jews in World War II “has altered the moral 

algebra of the Middle East, producing a new symmetry of suffering.” The idea of equivalency between Palestinians and Jews upset Will’s 

belief “that Israel incarnates the response—the reproach—of intelligence to animalism.” He identified this moral superiority with Amer- 

ican principles of democracy and decency.³⁰ 

The focus of the American media quickly shifted from the suffering of Palestinians to the anguish of the Israelis. The cover of the 

September 27 issue of Time shows a chilling black-and-white photograph of huddled corpses in bloodied everyday clothes, strewn 

across a narrow alley. The banner reads in large black letters: “Massacre in Lebanon: Palestinian Civilians Are Slaughtered.” A week 

later, Newsweek featured a very different cover. Under the banners “Israel in Torment,” and “The Anguish of American Jews,” a blue-and- 

white Star of David on an Israeli flag frames a dead dove lying upside down with a blood-flecked breast and an olive branch in its 

mouth.³¹ 

 

 

Aftermath of massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, cover of Time magazine, September 27, 1982. 

 

 

Cover of Newsweek, October 4, 1982. 

 

A new narrative of the massacre had taken hold: Israel’s innocence may have died in the refugee camps of Lebanon, but national 

soul-searching led to moral rebirth, and self-scrutiny reaffirmed Jewish values. To be sure, American journalists did join their interna- 

tional colleagues in painstakingly reconstructing the details of the massacre, combing through bulldozed evidence and interviewing 

traumatized witnesses. Inside the Newsweek issue, readers found detailed reportage from Beirut, as well as U.S. opinion polls that 

showed support for Israel plummeting to a record low.³² The Newsweek cover pictured the death of Israel’s innocence as the narrative 

framework for piecing together the fragments of this gruesome tale. 

In an astonishing turnabout, the massacre became widely known as Israel’s tragedy because it dealt a near-death blow to its hallowed 

image as invincible victim, an image that had been unraveling throughout the war. The massacre threatened to turn upside down the 

reigning paradigm of vicious terrorists and innocent victims. In the Jerusalem Post, Wolf Blitzer called the massacre a “disaster for Israel 

in Washington—indeed throughout the United States. It will take many years—if ever—to regain its once very high moral image in 

America.”³³ Like Deir Yassin in 1948, Sabra and Shatila in 1982 became a public relations problem, but one that offered the opportunity 

for a cathartic expression of moral reprobation. Just as Labor Zionists once distanced themselves from the Irgun’s savagery, portraying 

its violence as an aberration, so Israel’s liberal supporters in 1982 distanced themselves from both Begin’s craven leadership and the 

Phalangists’ heinous acts. The sincere outpouring of moral revulsion had the double-edged effect of isolating the massacre from other 

incidents of civilian casualties throughout the war and redeeming faith in the nation’s moral character. 

In the weeks following the massacre, the media focused on Israel’s “crisis of faith” and its soul-searching to recover its moral bear- 

ings. “The best proof that morality is still alive in a people is the sense of shame,” wrote Anthony Lewis, and journalists did their best to 

find evidence of Israel’s shame. Even Martin Peretz, who blamed media lies for Israel’s declining prestige, ended an editorial in the New 

Republic that week—while reasserting support for the war—“not in praise of Israel, but in praise of its shame.” This story of shame dis- 

tinguished the nation’s citizens in torment from its leaders in denial, and Israel’s introspection reestablished its ethical superiority to its 

Arab allies and enemies. Palestinian anguish dropped out of this story, except as an object of compassion that enabled Israel’s moral 

growth.³⁴ 

Jews and non-Jews alike contributed to the narrative of ethical rejuvenation. For Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, leader of the Conservative 

movement and a respected scholar, this meant purging the leadership that had led Israel astray. In his widely circulated New York Times 

op-ed “Begin Must Go,” he denounced Sharon for having “sullied” Israel’s principled armed forces and reaffirmed the belief that Israel 

essentially “is not a militaristic country.” He claimed that the majority of its citizen-soldiers sympathized with protesters against the war 

and opposed “the handful who obeyed Sharon’s orders to close their eyes last week in Beirut.” Hertzberg stirred up controversy by at- 

tacking Israeli leaders, but at the same time, he salvaged a treasured image of Israel’s humane military.³⁵ 

Editorials similarly rediscovered Israel’s antimilitary nature in the turmoil on its streets, in the “agitated, demanding protesters in Tel 

Aviv” who became “the true ‘defenders of Israel.’ ” The Christian Science Monitor viewed the Peace Now demonstrations as evidence of 

“regeneration” in a nation built on the principles of “political democracy and humane religion.” Israeli “anguish,” opined the New York 

Times, gave the lie to “the charge that militant Zionism, as exemplified in Israel’s expansionist moves, has destroyed the traditional 

moral conscience of the Jews.”³⁶ 

An additional fear had been that Israel’s moral stance had degenerated to the level of the surrounding “Arab” culture, viewed as 

primitively brutal. “Maybe the ultimate tragedy of the seemingly nonstop war in the Middle East,” lamented Richard Cohen, “is that Is- 

rael has adopted the morality of its hostile neighbors.” Meg Greenfield warned that Israel’s moral failure in Sabra and Shatila might be 

the PLO’s best revenge, “measured as much by whatever success they have in corrupting Israeli sensibilities and emotions as in killing 

Israeli citizens and friends.” For Israelis to act inhumanely meant that the nation had succumbed to the low ethical standards of its ene- 

mies. This similarity with its enemies, rather than its own military aggression, threatened to make Israel unworthy of the “moral claim it 

makes to nationhood and survival.”³⁷ 

The American press breathed a collective sigh of relief when Begin agreed to appoint a commission to investigate the massacre. The 

intention alone eased the moral conscience of Israel’s liberal supporters and confirmed that the nation had not sunk to the level of its 

neighbors. In its lead editorial on September 29, entitled “Israel Finds Its Voice,” the New York Times asked rhetorically, “Are there peo- 

ple of comparable honor and courage in the Arab world who can appreciate Israel’s revulsion?” The formation of a commission of in- 

quiry showed that Israel’s better nature had prevailed and lifted it above the moral swamp of the surrounding Middle East. For the 

Washington Post, the commission had a cathartic value that would prove Israelis to be “true to their deepest impulse of compassion for 

people as innocent and defenseless as once—many times—they were themselves.” Israelis would restore their exceptional morality by 

reclaiming the legacy of Jewish persecution. The same editorial agreed with President Reagan’s assessment that the Israelis are “proving 

with their reaction to the massacre that there’s no change in the spirit of Israel.”³⁸ 

 

Backlash 

 

Israel’s anguish helped to restore its moral luster for liberals. But conservative supporters had a different response—they believed that 

Israel had done nothing to be ashamed of in Lebanon and blamed the media for the negative images of Israel’s military conduct. “For 

sheer intensity and breadth,” wrote Roger Morris in the Columbia Journalism Review, “the controversy fueled by coverage of the Israeli 

invasion seems to have few parallels in recent journalistic history.”³⁹ Although American Jews were divided about the war, mainstream 

Jewish organizations closed ranks with right-wing supporters of the Likud Party and neoconservative intellectuals to criticize what they 

saw as media bias and to defend Israel’s damaged reputation. New watchdog organizations emerged during the conflict and would con- 

tinue to monitor coverage of Israel long after the war’s end. 

As the war raged, critics bombarded news outlets with letters, protests, and angry delegations. They did not target editorial opinions 

alone, but also sought to discredit the reporting by correspondents on the ground. They blamed television news for inflicting more 

damage on Israel than its enemies’ militaries had. News executives took unprecedented measures to respond. NBC Nightly News aired 

letters reacting to John Chancellor’s commentary, and the Washington Post invited a representative of the Jewish community to observe 

its foreign desk for a week. Soon after the fighting ended, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) released a study of the night- 

ly news on all three networks. The study charged that the news coverage contained many inaccuracies, especially about casualty figures, 

and that it lacked balance and objectivity, as evidenced by the focus on graphic scenes of suffering to the exclusion of broader political 

and historical context. The study concluded that television news stories had unfairly generated “revulsion at the war’s violence among 

viewers—violence that was implicitly and explicitly associated with Israel.”⁴⁰ 

A year after the invasion, the American Jewish Congress convened a conference in Jerusalem called “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: 

Problems and Remedies.” The Hebrew word hasbara, which means “explanation,” is widely used to refer to public information efforts 

designed to promote a positive image of Israel. At this meeting, chaired by an American advertising executive, participants from the 

United States and Israel treated the invasion of Lebanon as a public relations disaster of major proportions, one with possible long- 

term repercussions. Their discussion focused on how best to repair the damage to Israel’s reputation, and what could be learned from 

this fiasco about how to better market Israel’s image in the future.⁴¹ 

“The world has changed since 1967,” observed one participant, Ehud Olmert, a parliament member from the Likud Party and future 

prime minister, who trenchantly diagnosed the problem: “We now appear to the rest of the world to be a military superpower.” And that 

view, he acknowledged, “is not totally incorrect.” As evidence, he pointed to Israel’s destruction of an atomic reactor in Iraq in 1981 and 

of Russian missiles in Syria during the Lebanon War. Americans, he joked, wish they could have sent Israelis to Tehran in 1979 to save 

the hostages taken during the Iranian Revolution. But Israel’s power presented a dilemma: it led the world to expect “certain political 

concessions—as is deemed appropriate for a military power.” Olmert was referring to concessions to the Palestinians proposed by Rea- 

gan, which included relinquishing occupied territories and halting the construction of settlements there. “The tragedy is,” Olmert ex- 

plained, “that while we are strong, we are also weak and vulnerable in ways that no other country in the world is vulnerable. Hasbara’s 

main challenge is to reconcile these two extremes, to present our weakness to the world realistically.”⁴² After the Lebanon War, this was 

indeed a challenge for those rallying to Israel’s defense—how to represent to the world an image of Israel’s special vulnerability in the 

face of its demonstrable power. 

The imperative to reclaim this view of Israel lay at the heart of the attack on news coverage in 1982. The media, according to its crit- 

ics, was unfairly brandishing images and words against a vulnerable nation. In “Lebanon Eyewitness,” Martin Peretz wrote that sea- 

soned journalists had become dupes of PLO manipulation. After a quick tour of southern Lebanon sponsored by the Israeli Army, he re- 

peated the claims of Ze’ev Chafets, American-born director of Israel’s Government Press Office, who labeled the foreign press corps in 

Beirut “Chairman Yasser’s Best Battalion.” Western journalists were gullible prey, adduced Peretz, because of their romantic images of 

Third World guerrillas as freedom fighters, a delusion they had picked up in Vietnam.⁴³ 

Anti-Semitism offered some critics a deeper explanation of media bias. Thus argued Norman Podhoretz, neoconservative editor of 

Commentary Magazine, in his widely circulated essay “J’Accuse” (a title he borrowed from Émile Zola’s impassioned defense of the Jew- 

ish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been unjustly accused of treason in 1898). His article advances the idea of the “new 

anti-Semitism,” a term that had been developed by the ADL in the 1970s to explain what the group believed was undue condemnation of 

Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Leaders of the organization believed that bigotry against Jewish people, traditionally asso- 

ciated with the right, was generally on the wane in America. Yet they saw a resurgence of prejudice on the left, which unfairly targeted Is- 

rael as the “Jew among the nations.” In the wake of Lebanon, Israel’s defenders in the United States had to explain how this anti- 

Semitism of the left had infected mainstream newspapers and broadcast networks, which included many Jewish journalists.⁴⁴ 

In “J’Accuse,” Podhoretz renders political critique as thinly veiled anti-Semitism by invoking Israel’s unique status as a persecuted 

state. Although Israel may have triumphed militarily, he argues, the unprecedented “explosion of invective” triggered by the war proves 

its existential vulnerability. “Vilification of Israel,” he writes, “is the phenomenon to be addressed, and not the Israeli behavior that sup- 

posedly provoked it.” Words, rather than armies, now offer the greatest threat to Israel’s security, and to defend Israel means to police 

the boundary of acceptable public discourse.⁴⁵ 

Podhoretz narrates the history of Israel’s invasion in a way that reestablishes its role as victim. He denounces those liberals who pro- 

fess concern for Israel’s soul in order to exaggerate “the evils Israel was committing against others” and to blame “Israeli intransigence 

and / or aggressiveness and / or expansionism” for causing the conflict. Podhoretz positions the Lebanon War as the most recent 

chapter in a continuous narrative of Arab aggression and Israeli innocence that started in 1948. As in 1967 and 1973, Arab attacks forced 

Israel to defend itself—this time against PLO raids—and Israel once again reacted with restraint and utmost regard for human life. 

Thus, the word “invasion,” he claims, is actually a misnomer for a war of self-defense and liberation.⁴⁶ 

Podhoretz excoriates commentators for their choice of language as much as the content of their writings. He condemns author John 

le Carré for claiming, “It is the most savage irony that Begin and his generals cannot see how close they are to inflicting upon another 

people the disgraceful criteria once inflicted upon themselves.” Edward Said outrages him by accusing Israel, in its massive bombing of 

Sidon and Tyre, of pursuing “an apocalyptic logic of exterminism.” And Anthony Lewis, of the New York Times, comes in for attack for 

writing that Israeli’s goal in Lebanon was “to exterminate Palestinian nationalism” in a bid to annex the West Bank. Podhoretz criticizes 

their selection of words that connote parallels between the Israeli invasion and Nazi genocide. He uses a similar idiom himself, how- 

ever, in calling for the “elimination of the radical rejectionist Palestinians—whether or not they call themselves the PLO.”⁴⁷ 

It is not only Holocaust references that Podhoretz objects to, but also most other historical and political analogies. He ridicules writ- 

ers who compare Israeli militarism to Sparta, its generals to Caribbean dictators, its bombing of Beirut to a “blitzkrieg,” or its expan- 

sionist goals to those of communist Vietnam. He rebuffs the very possibility of analogizing Israel to any other nation. Israel, he implies, 

is incomparable. Only anti-Semitism could account for the inflated language of such irrational critiques, he claims; but first, he provides 

a broader definition of the term. Anti-Semitism is at work, he writes, when people apply a “double standard” whereby Jews as a people, 

or Israel as a Jewish state, “are condemned when they claim or exercise the right to do things that all other people are accorded an un- 

challengeable right to do.” Thus, all states are considered to have the right to protect their borders or pursue self-determination, but 

when Israel does so, it is accused of “committing the crimes of racism and imperialism.”⁴⁸ 

This new definition of anti-Semitism casts a wide net that includes those Jews who hold Israel to a higher standard than other na- 

tions. Such utopianism, he claims, imposes on Israel a suicidal yardstick of perfection and betrays a misunderstanding of Zionism, 

which aims to “normalize the Jewish people, not to perfect them.” The “refusal of the Arab world” to accept the Jewish state presents the 

only obstacle to this “normal and peaceful life” and forces Israel to “live in a constant state of siege.” In such conditions, Podhoretz 

finds it remarkable that Israel has not become “a garrison state or a military dictatorship.” Instead he celebrates its vital democracy, “the 

only one in the Middle East and one of the few on the face of the earth.” Ironically, as Podhoretz himself admits, “Israel has become a 

light unto the nations.” In striving to be normal, Israel has indeed became exceptional.⁴⁹ 

The neoconservative defense of Israel’s operations in Lebanon contributed to the argument for reviving American power during the 

Reagan presidency. Podhoretz had just published the book Why We Were in Vietnam, in which he endorsed Reagan’s interpretation of 

the Vietnam War as a “noble cause.” Israel’s action in Lebanon epitomized the same noble commitment to fight for a cause and refuse 

to back down under criticism. Israel’s democracy, in his view, was a shining rebuke to surrounding Third World nations, and its military 

commitment acted as a reproach to the anemic antiwar sentiment that had held sway over Americans since Vietnam. In the “glare of 

that light, the current political complexion of the Western democracies takes on a sickly, sallow, even decadent look.” The war in 

Lebanon repulsed only the faint-hearted, according to Podhoretz, who exhorted Americans to be ashamed not of Israel’s brutality but of 

their own failure of nerve.⁵⁰ 

“J’Accuse” brands critics of Israel as anti-American. The same journalists, charges Podhoretz, who had hysterically opposed the war 

in Vietnam were now opposing the American fight against communism in Central America and were advocating appeasement of the So- 

viet Union. They did not appreciate the service Israel was providing in destroying the Soviet Union’s proxies in the Middle East. For 

neoconservatives, Israel became an exemplar to follow. “We in the West confront in the Soviet Union a deadly enemy sworn to our de- 

struction,” Podhoretz declaims with a key analogy, “just as Israel does in the Arab world.” The essay concludes by accusing critics of Is- 

rael “not merely of anti-Semitism but of the broader sin of faithlessness to the interests of the United States and indeed to the values of 

Western civilization as a whole.”⁵¹ 

It was not just neoconservatives, however, who agreed with Podhoretz’s premise that “vilification of Israel” was the main problem 

unleashed by the war in Lebanon. New organizations sprouted up to defend Israel from criticism and repair the damage done to its 

reputation. Mainstream Jewish American organizations also stepped up their public relations efforts to influence public opinion, ex- 

panded their surveillance of Israel’s critics on college campuses, and developed new strategies to control the narrative about Israel’s 

relationship with the Palestinians. 

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America led the charge. CAMERA was founded in 1982 “to respond to the 

Washington Post’s coverage of Israel’s Lebanon incursion, and to the paper’s general anti-Israel bias.” After the war, it opened chapters 

in major American cities, spawned new organizations, and expanded its surveillance to all forms of media, including newspapers, TV 

networks, the wire services, radio, film, and the Public Broadcasting Service, a favorite target. It pressured media outlets not to air adver- 

tisements, documentaries, or news segments, warning them to monitor themselves in advance in order to avoid criticism. Publishing a 

relentless parade of what the group saw as falsehoods from mainstream news sources also worked to affirm Israel’s beleaguered status 

in the war over representation.⁵² 

As Podhoretz’s rhetoric demonstrates, criticism of the media and support for Israel’s military activities did not take place in a vac- 

uum, but in the intensifying Cold War atmosphere under Reagan. Conservatives attacked media bias against Israel as part of a broader 

critique of the “liberal media.” Since the Vietnam War, their argument ran, the media had been overly critical of the use of force. Open 

societies, like Israel and the United States, had their hands tied unfairly in military maneuvers because of the kind of media scrutiny that 

totalitarian societies did not allow. They accused journalists of exaggerating the violence against civilians of American-supported dicta- 

tors in Central America and of romanticizing the guerrillas, just as they did the PLO. CAMERA took cues from Accuracy in Media, a 

conservative organization that in 1982 had attacked the credibility of journalists who exposed the massacre of civilians in El Mozote, El 

Salvador.⁵³ 

In addition to CAMERA, two well-established organizations, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the ADL, ex- 

panded their own efforts to monitor Israel’s critics and to counter the damning narratives that had emerged from the Lebanon invasion 

with pro-Israel narratives. Although AIPAC is a lobbying organization focused on foreign relations and U.S. governmental support for Is- 

rael, and the ADL’s mission is to combat prejudice in America, their interests in defending Israel from criticism started to converge in 

the 1970s, and they took similar steps to dampen support for Palestinian perspectives that had begun to emerge in reaction to the 

Lebanon War. 

AIPAC shifted gears in the 1980s, both institutionally and strategically. In addition to enlisting greater grassroots participation, its 

leadership developed a new emphasis on generating authoritative narratives about Israel: policy narratives to shape the way Washington 

insiders understood Israel’s importance to the United States, and cultural narratives to mold public opinion. Public discord over the 

invasion of Lebanon intensified the discomfort that many American supporters of Israel had felt when the right-wing government of 

Begin came into power in 1977. In the face of his belligerent policies, lobbyists could no longer appeal to the old consensus about a 

movement of democratic pioneers seeking a new life in a homeland free from persecution, and a nation that only wanted peace with 

those seeking to destroy it. During the Reagan administration, AIPAC emphasized the idea that Israel was America’s “strategic asset,” a 

politically stable and technologically advanced bulwark against Soviet aggression in the region. This concept offered a policy-oriented 

version of Podhoretz’s image of Israel as the savior of Western civilization.⁵⁴ 

Promoting Israel’s strategic value, however, was not enough to undo the damage that the Lebanon War had inflicted on Israel’s repu- 

tation. Both AIPAC and the ADL published pamphlets designed to counter criticism of Israel and warn against what they saw as pro- 

Arab propaganda: The Campaign to Discredit Israel and the AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign (AIPAC), and Pro-Arab 

Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices (ADL).⁵⁵ Both organizations had been monitoring pro-Palestinian and Arab-American groups 

since the 1970s, and the invasion of Lebanon gave these projects new urgency in the arena of public opinion. 

All three publications opened with the war in Lebanon, announcing that it had left Israel newly vulnerable to pro-Arab propaganda in 

the United States. They warned that after the PLO lost its base in Beirut, its supporters had shifted their propaganda war to focus on 

America. Arab supporters, they charged, exploited the distorted media coverage to characterize Israel as a “militaristic,” “brutal,” and 

“oppressive” nation and to promote the “myth of an ‘aggressive’ and ‘imperialistic’ Israel.” The pamphlets described a well-funded anti- 

Israel network consisting of Arab nations, Arab-American organizations, PLO representatives, foreign students, former American 

ambassadors, radical activists, and Arab and Jewish intellectuals. More than half the pages in these pamphlets consist of the names of 

individuals and organizations, along with detailed accounts of their publications, activities, connections, and speeches. The criterion for 

inclusion in the lists was any conceivable contact with the PLO. The authors justified the publication of names on the grounds that it 

would help pro-Israel activists to thwart the network’s long-range goal of “destroying Israel’s positive image” and causing the United 

States to recognize the PLO and curtail military and economic aid to Israel.⁵⁶ 

The pamphlets expressed concern about the growing sophistication of anti-Israel propaganda, pointing out that its aim was to repre- 

sent Israel not as David, but as Goliath, to show that Israel is “the aggressor, not the defender; the executioner, not the victim; the 

superpower, not the underdog.” This view would in turn support a dangerous new perception of the conflict as between “an aggressive 

and powerful Zionist state” and “the weak Palestinian Arabs.”⁵⁷ 

The “Palestinian problem,” countered one of the AIPAC pamphlets, had no basis in reality. It existed only as an “effective public rela- 

tions weapon, and the attention given to it is probably the greatest single achievement of anti-Israeli propaganda to date.”⁵⁸ To turn 

attention away from the Israel-Palestine axis, the pamphlet insisted that Arab aggression had created the refugee problem in 1948, and 

that Israel had since then been besieged by the Arab states, “supported by the Communist bloc and the Islamic world.” In its lobbying 

efforts, AIPAC worked to hold the U.S. government to the 1975 pledge, made by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, not to recognize the 

PLO or to speak with its representatives. These pamphlets explain why any acknowledgment of the Palestinians seemed so damaging to 

Israel’s public image. 

Both AIPAC and the ADL feared that anti-Israel propaganda was making headway on college campuses, but they conveyed a contra- 

dictory sense of the power of pro-Palestinian groups. The AIPAC College Guide warned that pro-Palestinian speakers had succeeded in 

“defining the parameters within which much of the campus debate about Israel and the Middle East takes place,” even though they were 

failing to sway the hearts and minds of most American students. AIPAC claimed victory but called for continued vigilance. A program 

with Hillel, the organization for Jewish students, trained students to monitor and create files on speakers, and—if they couldn’t cancel 

the events outright—to interrupt, challenge, and write negative reviews in student newspapers. Most important, students should learn 

to “restore balance” and correct the erroneous description of the conflict as “one between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs” and to reject 

the idea that the roots of the conflict lay in the “refusal of Israel to grant Palestinians their rights.”⁵⁹ 

A number of academics and journalists criticized AIPAC and the ADL for tactics that they said smacked of McCarthyism. The Middle 

East Studies Association, the main organization of scholars and educators in the field, voted unanimously to condemn what they called 

“blacklisting.” In two New York Times columns, Anthony Lewis admonished both organizations for underhanded attacks on Professor 

Walid Khalidi, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut and visiting fellow at Harvard, who, in 1978, had written an article 

in Foreign Affairs that advocated for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The head of ADL, Kenneth Bialkin, refused to back down, claim- 

ing that Khalidi could not be a true “moderate” because he had not publicly disavowed the PLO. By declaring that Khalidi, like everyone 

else on the list, was not a moderate, the ADL claimed the right to define acceptable discourse and reasserted the image of Israel as a 

victim. Even if it was no longer besieged by powerful Arab armies, it was being threatened by people uttering—or refusing to utter— 

specific words.⁶⁰ 

The monitoring and blacklisting of critics of Israel did indeed have chilling effects on individuals and institutions, but these strate- 

gies alone were not sufficient to restore the story of Israel as the underdog or to erase the new images of Palestinians that Americans 

had glimpsed in the Lebanon War. The events of 1982 had posed a severe challenge to the standard narratives about Israel’s founding 

in 1948 and its triumph in 1967. Israel’s conservative supporters now found it necessary to create a new account of an old story of the 

founding of Israel, one that would actually make the Palestinians disappear. 

In 1984, a book appeared seemingly out of nowhere to perform this magic act: From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish 

Conflict over Palestine, by the little-known journalist Joan Peters. After the Lebanon War, it took a heavily documented six-hundred-page 

tome to argue what Prime Minister Golda Meir had remarked in 1969, that “there were no such thing as Palestinians.” Peters claimed to 

have proven that the Arabs known as “Palestinians” were in fact not native to Palestine. Based on demographic data, she argued that 

Palestine had been thinly populated when Jewish settlers first arrived, and that Arabs had migrated into the area only after these settlers 

had cultivated the land, developed industries, and raised the standard of living. The founders of Israel, according to Peters, did not 

expel a people from their homeland—they merely displaced some recent economic migrants.⁶¹ The book was eventually exposed as 

error-filled and fraudulent, but it was at first warmly received and has had a lasting impact. 

From Time Immemorial aimed to restore the foundational narratives of Israel’s origins that the war in Lebanon had severely under- 

mined. The invasion had unsettled more than the humane image of Israel’s military; it had also reopened thorny questions about his- 

tory, especially as they bore on the present. About 1948: How did the Palestinians end up in refugee camps in Lebanon? Where did they 

come from and where did they belong? And about 1967: Who would rule the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza? In Israel, 

in response to these questions, historians had begun reexamining the archival record and debunking the myths of Zionist histori- 

ography. These “new historians,” a loosely knit group, revised the account of 1948 to include the Palestinian history of the Nakba. They 

revealed that the nascent Jewish state at the time of partition was less vulnerable, militarily and diplomatically, than commonly thought; 

that it bore some responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians and the subsequent refugee problem; and that the new state had re- 

sisted international efforts at peace-making, a failure traditionally blamed on Arab intransigence.⁶² 

Peters reinvigorated the very myths that these Israeli historians were unraveling. In the introduction to the book, she cast herself in 

the role of a scholarly David wielding unpopular truths against an Arab Goliath who had usurped the historical record. In a nod to 

George Orwell, she coined the term “turnspeak” to describe the “cynical inverting or distorting of facts, which for example, makes the 

victim appear as the culprit.” The most egregious inversion, she claimed, was the one that had turned Palestinians into the dispos- 

sessed casualties of Zionism. To set the historical record straight, Peters returned Jews to their rightful role as victims, and Arabs to 

theirs as culprits.⁶³ She restored the image of Palestine as an uninhabited wasteland until Jewish pioneers regenerated the land. In as- 

serting that Arab migrants were drawn to the economic opportunities created by Zionist settlement, she revived the narrative of Jewish 

colonization as modernization that had been so important to the liberal supporters of Zionism in the 1940s and 1950s. She shored up 

Podhoretz’s claim that all conflict stemmed from the Arabs’ violent rejection of Israel. And she expanded this narrative back in time to 

the Ottoman Empire, to undo the “turnspeak” about Jews living peaceably in a Muslim world that tolerated and protected them. She 

claimed, on the contrary, that Arab countries had always mistreated Jews because of Islam’s inherent anti-Semitism. She endorsed the 

right-wing belief that Jews who had been expelled from Arab lands were the real refugees of 1948, not Palestinians. She thus described 

the events of 1948 as a “population exchange” rather than a violent displacement of Palestinians from their homes. Peters revived the 

founding narrative of the Jewish national revolt against the British Empire, which Exodus had enshrined in the American imagination. 

She came close to blaming the British for complicity with the Holocaust, asserting that they had encouraged Arab immigration into 

Palestine in order to keep out those Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Peters’s book breathed new life into myths that have persisted into the 

present.⁶⁴ 

Before publication, Harper and Row secured testimonials from many respected Jewish intellectuals; the jacket featured encomiums 

by Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, and others. A blurb by journalist Paul Cowan stated bluntly, “I can 

never again think of the Arabs as the Palestinians. If readers take it as seriously as they should, it would literally reformulate the terms of 

debate on the Middle East.” American reviewers for the most part applauded Peters for what they described as historical truths that she 

had uncovered through detailed demographic and historical research. “This book is the intellectual equivalent of the Six-Day War,” en- 

thused the National Review. “If the pen is mightier than the sword, Joan Peters has done more to destroy Arab claims to Palestine than 

all the derring-do of the Israeli Army since—well if not from time immemorial, then at least from 1948 to the foreseeable future.”⁶⁵ 

But serious concerns about Peters’s scholarship soon emerged. Norman Finkelstein, a graduate student at Princeton University, 

painstakingly exposed the book’s numerous errors, from misinterpretation of sources to outright plagiarism, and his findings were cor- 

roborated by other historians. British scholars panned the book’s shoddy scholarship, and Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath described 

it as “sheer forgery,” noting that Israelis dismissed it as a “propaganda weapon.” In the New York Review of Books, Porath wrote, “What 

is surprising is that Joan Peters still writes as if the Zionist myths were wholly true and relevant, notwithstanding all the historical work 

that modifies or discredits them.” Critics showed, most damningly, that her major conclusions about the population of Palestine in the 

early twentieth century were based on faulty interpretation of demographic data. Edward Said described the book’s reception as “a case 

of orchestrated compliance by which the history and actuality of an entire people are consigned to non-existence.” Harper and Row 

nevertheless reprinted the book several times without requiring Peters to correct the errors. In “There Were No Indians,” Anthony Lewis 

summarized the outrage of the books’ critics: “neither Miss Peters nor any of her supporters has answered a single one of the charges 

of distortion and fraud made against it.”⁶⁶ 

It is not surprising that Leon Uris at the same time returned to the history of Palestine in his 1984 novel The Haj. He felt compelled 

to revisit the founding tale of Exodus from what he considered to be “the Arab perspective.” The novel’s first-person narrator, Ishmael, 

tells his family’s dark story of social and psychological degeneration, against the background of Zionism’s progressive ascent. Uris’s 

goal in fiction was similar to Peters’s history. He used a kind of ventriloquism to acknowledge Palestinians in order to erase them from 

the landscape as historical actors. Uris portrayed Arabs living in Palestine as recently settled nomads, and he blamed their displacement 

in 1948 on the backwardness and venality of Islamic culture, not on dispossession by Jewish settlers, who only tried to uplift them. The 

book musters every imaginable Orientalist stereotype. It represents Arabs as driven by fanaticism, mutual mistrust, and sexual derange- 

ment, and it depicts their irrational hatred of Jews as inherent to Islam’s warring creed.⁶⁷ 

Reviewers roundly panned The Haj as a literary failure and as offensively prejudiced. Though it spent thirty weeks on the bestseller 

list, it had less impact on public discourse than From Time Immemorial. Both works are instructive failures. They sprang to the defense 

of Israel in the aftermath of the Lebanon War, which dealt a blow to the reigning Exodus narrative. After Lebanon, neither author could 

ignore the presence of Palestinians, and each felt compelled to represent Palestinians in order to make them disappear. Peters and Uris 

expressed in historical and fictional form the backlash against the media portrayal of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. They incorporated 

the arguments of Podhoretz, AIPAC, the ADL, and the Hasbara conference, which held that the plight of the Palestinian refugees was 

nothing but propaganda, and that in reality Israel continued to be the innocent victim of Arab violence. Despite the combined strength 

of these campaigns to sway public opinion, their shared narrative of Israel as the invincible victim could not entirely erase the searing 

images from Lebanon or efface Palestinians from the political landscape. 

 

New Liberal Consensus 

 

The war in Lebanon provoked a new awareness of Palestinians among American liberals, in spite of the intense backlash from the right. 

Even liberals with strong attachments to Israel felt the need for stories that could account for Palestinians as a people with political 

grievances and national aspirations. A new narrative became even more urgent with the eruption of the first intifada at the end of 1987, 

when Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began to protest the Israeli occupation in collective acts of civil disobedience 

that continued for five years. Television again brought the crisis home to Americans. This time, viewers were not seeing bombs dropped 

from a distance on a foreign city or dazed victims digging through the rubble. They had close-up views of Palestinians demonstrating in 

the streets of their own towns, coming face to face with Israeli soldiers. They watched men, women, and children marching, chanting, 

throwing stones, and raising Palestinian flags. The anxiety of conservatives that the media had turned Israel into Goliath became a 

graphic reality on the screen. Palestinian youths wearing jeans and keffiyehs threw stones at heavily armed Israeli soldiers, who re- 

sponded with live ammunition, severe beatings, mass arrests, and deportations. Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin, a hero of 1967, now 

was calling for “force, might and beatings.”⁶⁸ American reactions to coverage of the intifada echoed those that had followed the 

Lebanon War, with outrage at the violence, cries of media bias, and anguish about Israel’s soul. But in the intifada, viewers encountered 

images of Palestinians not only as victims, but as political actors protesting oppression and advocating for a nation of their own. 

 

 

Children throwing stones at Israeli soldiers during the first intifada, Am’ari refugee camp near Ramallah, February 1, 1988. 

 

A liberal consensus emerged in the 1980s around a narrative of two peoples fighting over one land, and a belief that only mutual 

recognition could resolve the conflict between them. This narrative could lead to a variety of political conclusions, and it would under- 

gird proposals for the peace process and a two-state solution through the end of the twentieth century. Proponents of this focus on two 

sides believed that including Palestinians would not result in distancing the United States from Israel, as conservatives feared; rather, it 

would repair the damage done to Israel’s reputation in Lebanon and reaffirm Israel’s affinity with America. 

Two major contributions to this narrative were made by journalists who had covered the invasion of Lebanon for the New York Times. 

In 1986, David Shipler received a Pulitzer Prize for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in the Promised Land. Three years later, Thomas Fried- 

man’s From Beirut to Jerusalem won the National Book Award. Their titles announced that they had two intertwined stories to tell—a tale 

of two cities, and a tale of two peoples. A seasoned correspondent who had reported from Moscow and Vietnam, Shipler served as the 

Times Jerusalem bureau chief from 1979 to 1984. Friedman arrived in Beirut in 1979 for his first assignment and in 1982 became the 

Times bureau chief there. In 1984, he replaced Shipler in Jerusalem. The two shared a George Polk Award in Journalism for their report- 

ing on the invasion of Lebanon. Friedman received two Pulitzers, one for his detailed account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and a 

second for his reporting on the first intifada. Shipler’s reissued Arab and Jew became the basis of two well-regarded PBS documentaries, 

in 1989 and 2001. From Beirut to Jerusalem launched Friedman’s career as a Middle East expert and one of the best-known U.S. colum- 

nists on global affairs.⁶⁹ 

Both books are travel narratives with an American reporter as protagonist. Shipler introduces himself as “neither Arab nor Jew,” but 

an outsider living in Jerusalem, who has come to care about the suffering of both groups and to feel frustrated by their intolerance to- 

ward one another. Explicitly abjuring politics, he maps the psychological landscape where Jews and Arabs encounter one another with 

stereotypes, prejudice, and misunderstanding, stemming from a history of mutually inflicted traumas. At the heart of the matter, Shipler 

sees “a clash between two nationalisms, each coveting the same land.” The chapters toggle back and forth to treat every topic from the 

perspective of both Arabs and Jews. Shipler eloquently portrays the histories and dreams that propel both, and does not shy away from 

discussing the terrorism and atrocities that each have committed against the other. The conflict, he avers, cannot be resolved by treaties 

alone, but only when the two peoples are willing to recognize both their mutual mistrust and their interdependence “by looking into 

each other’s eyes.”⁷⁰ 

Friedman is a more ebullient main character in his tale of a fall from innocence into experience. He starts with his disillusionment as 

a young American Jew infatuated with an idealized image of Israel after the Six-Day War. He frames his reportage from Lebanon and 

Syria within his personal odyssey of reimagining his relationship with Israel. In contrast to Shipler’s insistence on the distance of the 

objective observer, Friedman introduces himself as an avowedly interested party and makes his confessional honesty a source of au- 

thority. He describes how his frankness about Israeli brutality in Lebanon led to a public fight with his editor, who deleted the word 

“indiscriminate” from his account of Israeli bombing, and how it also got him into trouble with Jews at home, to his parents’ dismay. 

He reacts to the massacre in Sabra and Shatila as a “personal crisis,” a blow to the image of “the heroic Israel I had been taught to iden- 

tify with.” Anger at the IDF’s betrayal (“How could you do this to me,” he asks) motivates his prizewinning articles detailing the Israeli 

involvement in the massacre.⁷¹ 

Both authors attempt to debunk myths about Israelis and Palestinians for American readers. They ridicule as equally outdated the 

Arab opposition to Israel’s existence and the Jewish denial of Palestinian nationalism. Both portray the Israeli looting of the PLO Re- 

search Center in Beirut in September 1982 as a powerful symbol of this denial. Breaking into what looked like a nondescript office build- 

ing but was in fact an academic research center, Israeli troops carted off thousands of books and irreplaceable archival records, leaving 

behind only broken furniture and offensive graffiti. The Israelis faced something “more dangerous” than ammunition there, writes 

Friedman: the center contained “books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs 

about Arab life in Palestine … and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village before the state of Israel 

came into being and erased many of them.” The center was “like an ark containing Palestinians’ heritage … their credentials as a na- 

tion.” To Shipler, this effort to “steal the Palestinians’ past and identity” was part of a larger effort that included outlawing the Pales- 

tinian flag and any expression of support for the PLO, including most uses of the word “Palestine.”⁷² 

Shipler relates this suppression of Palestinian identity to the stereotypes and prejudices that have become deeply ingrained in Israeli 

language, culture, and everyday life, and are matched in kind by Arab denigration of Jews. Friedman focuses on the dehumanizing im- 

pact of war and occupation. In response to the Shatila massacre, he writes, Israeli soldiers “did not see innocent civilians being massa- 

cred and they did not hear the screams of innocent children going to their graves.” Instead, they saw a “ ‘terrorist infestation’ being 

‘mopped up’ and ‘terrorist nurses’ scurrying about and ‘terrorist teenagers’ trying to defend them.” In the Israeli psyche, he explains, 

you “don’t come to the rescue of ‘terrorists,’ ” for “there is no such thing as ‘terrorists’ being massacred.”⁷³ 

The idea of symmetry frames both books, which strive to represent Palestinians as equal to Israelis and to juxtapose parallel stories 

from both sides of the conflict. Symmetry offered a powerful corrective to the dehumanization of Palestinians and to the predominance 

of Israeli perspectives in American discourse. Shipler’s was one of the few American books at the time to include lengthy interviews 

with “Israeli Arabs” (Palestinians with Israeli citizenship). He empathically depicted the widespread discrimination they faced from gov- 

ernment laws and everyday interactions. Friedman focused on Palestinians in the occupied territories and sympathetically portrayed 

their expression of national identity during the intifada. 

Symmetry, however, also worked to obfuscate the underlying power dynamics that structured interactions between Israelis and Pales- 

tinians. To be sure, both Shipler and Friedman understood the monopoly of power that the Israeli state wielded over Palestinian lives. 

They wrote of symmetry primarily in terms of group psychology and culture; but as a result, they relegated institutional hierarchies to 

the margins. They conveyed the impression of Israelis and Palestinians as equally vulnerable and equally threatening to one another. 

Shipler writes that “much of the everyday friction at the points of Arab-Jewish contact is cultural, a conflict of East and West, a bad 

chemistry of mixed styles.” Examples range from hospitality codes, to shopping styles, to “the bureaucratic encounter” for Arabs cross- 

ing the Allenby Bridge between the West Bank and Jordan after 1967. He reports that members of the local aristocracy felt insulted by 

being strip-searched at that crossing, especially by having their shoes dumped in a pile with those of mere commoners. This resent- 

ment he attributes to a “clash of values” between “the Arabs’ sense of honor and class consciousness” and the “Israeli Jews’ egalitar- 

ianism,” which has bureaucrats treating everyone alike. Focusing on the contrast between Arab traditionalism and Israeli modernity, he 

overlooks the obvious control that Israeli border guards wield over Arab bodies and mobility.⁷⁴ 

By exploring psychological and cultural landscapes, Shipler is able to ignore political geography. In a chapter on the stereotype of the 

“alien, superior Jew,” which follows one on the “primitive, exotic Arab,” he visits a small village in the West Bank whose inhabitants be- 

lieve this stereotype even though they have had no direct contact with Jews. Although Shipler acknowledges the villagers’ fear of the set- 

tlements encroaching on the surrounding countryside, he then proceeds to show how the image of the Jew as alien arose from theo- 

logical and historical sources in the textbooks and newspapers of the wider Arab world. Power drops out of his analysis.⁷⁵ 

In Friedman’s book, too, symmetry obscures relations of domination. In a poignant tale of two funerals, he shows how the conflict 

has effaced the boundary between soldiers and civilians on both sides. In one case, an unarmed Israeli woman settler on her way to buy 

groceries was killed by Palestinians, who view all settlers as soldiers of the military occupation. In the other case, an unarmed Pales- 

tinian student demonstrating at his university was shot by Israeli soldiers, who see protesters not as students, but as a lethal threat to 

their security. At a state funeral for the Israeli, Friedman describes a government minister eulogizing the woman as a soldier who died 

to defend her country. He notes that Palestinian leaders similarly extolled the dead student as a national martyr, at a funeral that resem- 

bled a political festival. Both groups suffer, he contends, when mourning transforms the death of individuals into political symbols. 

Yet Friedman also describes how much more difficult it was for the Palestinian student’s family to bury him. To prevent political 

gatherings, the Israeli army was impounding slain Palestinian bodies and compelling the families to bury their loved ones alone at mid- 

night. In this case, Friedman tells an adventurous tale of friends sneaking the body out from under Israeli guard. His main point is a 

symmetrical one, to show how both groups manipulate mourning for nationalist ends. Yet he does not comment on the vast asymmetry 

of power evident in these funerals. The Israeli government officially sanctioned a state funeral for a settler in occupied territory. The 

same state prohibited the Palestinian family from burying their dead on their own time and on their own lands.⁷⁶ 

Symmetry is also fundamental to Friedman’s account of the intifada, which he narrates as a war of rage on both sides. Palestinian 

protests against the occupation “set off an equally intense explosion of rage on the Israeli side of the fault line,” writes Friedman, and 

“just as a rage began to simmer and bubble to the surface among Palestinians vis-à-vis the Israelis, who never let them feel at home, a 

similar rage grew inside Israelis vis-à-vis Palestinians, who never let them relax and enjoy their country.” In a representative confronta- 

tion, Friedman reports Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers hurling the same vulgar curses at one another. The Israeli soldiers, ex- 

plains Friedman, felt as much frustration as the Palestinian youths, not because of physical danger, but because Palestinians made Is- 

raelis feel insecure, as though they did not belong in their own homes. What’s more, uncomfortable in the role of policeman, the Israeli 

soldiers felt stymied by being restrained from deploying the full military force at their disposal. Even though the fatality figures dramat- 

ically belie this depiction of symmetry and restraint, Friedman considers Israeli feelings of insecurity to be as significant as their phys- 

ical assaults on Palestinians.⁷⁷ 

This narrative of equivalence relies on potent analogies with America that kept Palestinians from capturing the moral high ground in 

the battle for representation. At the beginning of the uprising, when the Israeli army faced criticism for firing live ammunition at protes- 

tors, Friedman instructed television viewers on how to view the violence. They were not watching the “equivalent of Birmingham in 

1960 or Berkeley in 1968,” he wrote, but the “equivalent of Bull Run in 1861.” It would no more occur to them “to use rubber bullets 

against the Palestinians than it would have occurred to the North to use rubber bullets against the South in the Civil War.” The civil 

rights analogy compares Palestinians to black Americans fighting for equal rights against violent police power. The Civil War analogy, in 

contrast, conveys the impression of two matched military forces capable of doing equal harm to each other.⁷⁸ 

Friedman, to be sure, acknowledges the “asymmetry in firepower in the clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths,” not- 

ing that “Israelis had vastly superior weapons compared to the Palestinians.” Nonetheless, “there was not an asymmetry in the stakes,” 

he insists. Friedman finds equivalence in group psychology, averring that “Israelis felt just as deeply as Palestinians that their com- 

munal survival was at stake in what was happening in the streets.” He recognizes the brutal record of Israel rage “in the X-rays of the 

hundreds of Palestinians who had their arms or legs or ribs broken by Israeli soldiers.” Yet he wants his readers to understand the “real 

fear behind the Israeli clubs,” the fear of never feeling truly at home in a land claimed by others.⁷⁹ 

For Friedman, the acknowledgment of two sides at war foregrounds Israeli vulnerability as a physical and psychological reality—an 

ancient wound as painful as Palestinian deaths, and a grievance as valid as Palestinian protests. Conservative reviewers criticized Fried- 

man for eschewing the older narrative of Israel menaced by the entire Arab world. But his new narrative of symmetrical rage and equal 

insecurity restored the perception of Israelis as victims, even as their clubs and bullets told a contrary tale. 

Friedman draws on the paradox of vulnerability and invincibility to explain Israeli reluctance to negotiate with the Palestinians. At the 

end of 1988, in response to the intifada, Yasser Arafat publicly recognized Israel’s right to exist and stated that the PLO “renounced all 

forms of terrorism.”⁸⁰ Most Israelis, claimed Freidman, experienced themselves as either too weak or too strong to take advantage of 

this historic announcement. On the one hand, they felt too insecure to negotiate away a single parcel of territory. On the other hand, 

they felt too powerful to have an incentive to concede any land. Friedman places the burden of reassurance on the Palestinians in the 

occupied territories. Only in “their original method of civil disobedience,” he declares, could they make themselves “so indigestible to 

the Israelis that they want to disgorge them into their own state, while at the same time reassuring the Israelis that they can disgorge 

them without committing suicide.” Without acknowledging Israel’s vigorous repression of the many acts of civil disobedience at the 

heart of the intifada, Friedman attributes to Palestinians the ultimate power both to force the hand of the Israelis and to assuage their 

existential angst.⁸¹ 

Friedman’s attention to both sides—to Beirut and Jerusalem, Palestinians and Israelis—ultimately teaches him to “identify with and 

feel affection toward an imperfect Israel.” This is his journey’s destination: after weathering his disillusionment in Lebanon, and putting 

the intifada in perspective, he concludes: “Well, she ain’t perfect. I’ll always want her to be the country I imagined in my youth, But what 

the hell, she’s mine, and for a forty-year-old, she ain’t too shabby.” Although he riled some readers by drawing parallels between the 

governments in Beirut and Jerusalem, he confirmed his belief in Israel’s exceptional character: “The day when going from Beirut to 

Jerusalem means not going anywhere at all is a day Israel will rue forever.” Symmetry yielded to hierarchy. Friedman’s personal narrative 

of disenchantment and reconnection demonstrated how other Jews, and Americans in general, could move beyond their disap- 

pointment and lingering shame about Israel’s behavior in Lebanon and during the intifada. They, too, could adopt Friedman’s mature 

understanding of Israel’s superior—albeit flawed—position in the Middle East and thus restore their special relationship.⁸² 

Although Shipler had less invested in this romance, he, too, searched for symmetry and discovered moral hierarchy. With equal inter- 

est in the psychology of both Arabs and Jews, he discovered more depth in the Israeli Jewish psyche. Both groups have terrorists, he ex- 

plains, but Israelis punish theirs, while Palestinians hail theirs as heroes. Both groups have religious fundamentalists, but only Jews 

agonize over the relationship between religion and nationalism. Neither group understands the historical traumas of the other. Israel 

does not accept that “some of its finest heroes expelled Arabs” in 1948 or committed massacres after the state was founded, but he ac- 

cuses Palestinians of inflating their suffering to make it “parallel with the Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis.” In a rare expres- 

sion of personal outrage, he excoriates them for chanting “Ansar is Auschwitz” to protest conditions in a notorious prison camp in 

southern Lebanon.⁸³ 

Shipler extolls the Israeli response to Sabra and Shatila, when “the citizenry itself mobilized into an explosion of conscience unpar- 

alleled in the modern history of Western democracy. Nothing like it ever happened in the United States after American soldiers massa- 

cred Vietnamese at My Lai.” Even though this response soon gave way in the general population to a hardening of racist attitudes to- 

ward Arabs, he values the Israeli conscience that is being preserved by a flourishing community of writers and artists. In contrast, he 

notes, “One can look in vain for comparable writing on the Arab side. What theater and literature exists among the Palestinians in Israel, 

the West Bank, and Gaza is rarely self-critical, usually polemical within the limits of Israeli censorship, and never—that I could find— 

touched with that fine sense of decency around which the dissenting Jews spin their works.” Even the Arab theater he admires is “shal- 

lower than the search for ethics you see in Jewish theater.” Although he mentions censorship, his comparative framework excludes the 

question of how state power limits artistic production, including the resources to translate literature and disseminate it internationally.⁸⁴ 

Both authors aimed to establish a kinship between their American readers and the Israelis they portray. To Shipler, Israel resembled 

the America that was trying to right its own history of racial oppression. As one reviewer wrote, “Like so many of his countrymen— 

gentile or Jew—who have spent time in Israel, Mr. Shipler clearly has been attracted by the openness, energy and often cantankerous 

individualism of this brash little democracy that can often seem a far-flung extension of America itself, so redolent of both its virtues 

and its faults.” In an interview, Shipler mentioned receiving angry letters about his criticism of Israeli racism. He replied that Americans 

had to relinquish their idealized images and understand the traumatic meaning of 1948 for Palestinians. “It’s a bit like us and the Indi- 

ans. It’s only recently that we came to grips with what the white men did to the Indians.” Shipler also compared Israeli racial attitudes 

with those of whites toward blacks in the United States, viewing the solution to discrimination against Israeli Arabs in the light of an 

American model of desegregation.⁸⁵ 

Shipler concludes his book with a chapter melding American and Israeli ideals, starting with an epigraph from Theodore Herzl, Zion- 

ism’s founder: “If you will it, it is not a dream.” The chapter focuses on rare, innovative programs that bring together Arab and Jewish 

youth to confront their own prejudices and foster mutual understanding. Most of these groups were organized by idealistic American 

Jews. Though Shipler explicitly avoids political proposals to resolve the conflicts he explores in such depth, he implicitly posits a medi- 

ating role for Americans—whether in the role of these young idealists or in his own role as objective observer—who can imagine a 

bridge that the two parties cannot create on their own. 

Friedman expresses skepticism about these same young idealists. In the face of outright conflict during the intifada, he saw Jewish 

Americans in Israel, like everyone else in the Middle East, falling back on their primary tribal allegiance. Friedman does, however, advo- 

cate a strong role for the U.S. government in resolving the conflict, a role that would replicate on a national scale his own position as a 

dispassionate observer of both sides and a passionate advocate for Israel. 

His journey from Beirut to Jerusalem ends in Washington, where he implores the United States to take the lead as a tough peace- 

maker. But the toughness should be tempered by respect for Israel’s vulnerability, he advises, because confronting Israel in public or 

threatening to withdraw aid would be counterproductive. Friedman writes that Washington has “too many strategic, emotional and reli- 

gious interests” not to take the lead, and that it could “still bring Arabs and Israelis the best of America’s outlook, without being de- 

voured by the feuds and passions that consume them.” American optimism conveys the message that the “past is dead,” a crucial mes- 

sage for both Arabs and Israelis, trapped as they are by “paralyzing features of their past.” Friedman ends his book with a pitch for 

American exceptionalism—a belief in American innocence, in its power and diplomacy as moral force for good. He concludes with a 

rhapsodic, if somewhat forced, analogy between the United States and Moses: just as Moses saw the Promised Land as the future, so 

the United States could liberate Israelis and Arabs “from the chains of their past.”⁸⁶ 

If readers accepted the premises so eloquently presented by Shipler and Friedman, they would recognize that to fully understand Is- 

rael, they would need to listen to the Palestinian story as well. But the liberal insistence on two sides also created boundaries and hierar- 

chies. In 1989, PBS broadcast a two-hour documentary based on Shipler’s book Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. As 

the narrator, Shipler interviewed many of the individuals featured in his book, and he added younger Israelis and Palestinians involved 

in the intifada. Reviewers praised the documentary for its balance and depth, and many commented on the chilling interviews with 

youths on both sides who voiced the desire to kill their enemies. The symmetrical expression of hatred, fear, and prejudice made the 

documentary appear realistic and balanced, and the conflict politically unsolvable. 

That same year, an accomplished producer, Jo Franklin-Trout, directed a PBS documentary about the intifada from the perspective of 

Palestinian youth, “Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians.” The documentary became controversial before it was even aired. Pro-Israel 

groups, including the ADL and CAMERA, obtained advance copies and pressured PBS to keep it off the air, disparaging it as biased and 

bigoted because it did not include the Israeli side and omitted the longer history of Jewish persecution. In addition, a smear campaign 

accused the director of accepting secret funding from Arab groups. PBS finally did air the ninety-minute documentary, but in a conces- 

sion to its critics, the broadcast enveloped the documentary in a “wraparound” format, with a panel of speakers preceding and following 

the documentary to “balance the pro-Palestinian slant.”⁸⁷ 

A representative review in the New York Times contrasted “Days of Rage” unfavorably to Shipler’s documentary. Walter Goodman 

praised Arab and Jew for its powerful exploration of “the emotions on both sides of a seemingly intractable issue,” while he criticized 

“Days of Rage” as a “pure propaganda piece,” which tendentiously presented Palestinians as victims and heroic fighters for liberation. 

In Shipler’s favor, according to Goodman, he did not link “human equivalence” to a call for political equivalence, and “did not assume 

to judge the claims or perils of Palestinian nationalism or the desirability of a Palestinian state.” Goodman dismissed Franklin-Trout’s 

documentary for breaching the boundaries of the genre—as advocacy rather than documentary, because it filled the entire ninety min- 

utes with stories of Palestinians. Although the director included Israeli human rights advocates and government spokesmen alongside 

interviews with protesting youth and their families, Goodman criticized her for only showing Israelis as “armed soldiers pushing around 

defenseless villagers.”⁸⁸ 

The liberal framework of “human equivalence” did not guarantee that the Palestinian struggle for a homeland would be accorded ei- 

ther the moral or political equivalence of Israeli arguments for security or land rights. The controversy over “Days of Rage” demon- 

strates what the conservative backlash and liberal consensus had in common: the refusal to listen to a Palestinian narrative that was not 

balanced by or incorporated into a broader Israeli one. The expectation that every story about Palestinians include an Israeli counter- 

point was not the norm for reporting on other international conflicts. As Franklin-Trout argued in the New York Times, no one would ex- 

pect a documentary on protesters in Poland or South Africa to “show the other side.”⁸⁹ In the case of Israel, however, showing both 

sides did not entail including Palestinians on the same level as Israelis in the field of representation. “Balance” served to remind viewers 

and readers that Israel remained vulnerable, even when it appeared indomitable, and morally exceptional even when it committed im- 

moral acts. 

The attack on “Days of Rage” was an attempt to deny Palestinians permission to narrate their own story from their point of view. By 

seeking symmetry in the human equivalence of two sides—unstructured by political power relations—liberals like Shipler and Friedman 

implicitly rejected the perspective Said called “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.” Instead, they expanded the Zionist stand- 

point to incorporate Palestinian perspectives—but these perspectives were dependent on Israeli-identified narratives. A few left-wing 

academics and journalists did try to tell a story from a Palestinian point of view, one that showed the United States as an abettor of Is- 

raeli aggression rather than as an arbiter of balance. In the 1980s, Edward Said became a public figure beyond the academy, and he 

started writing for the opinion pages of mainstream newspapers. In 1982, Noam Chomsky published his account of the invasion of 

Lebanon in The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and Palestine. Said and Chomsky did not view the invasion of Lebanon as a 

break in Israel’s behavior, as John Chancellor did, but rather as a continuation of a history of Israeli aggression that had been displacing 

Palestinians since before the founding of the state. The idea of two symmetrical stories of suffering and rage relegated their analysis, 

and that of other radicals, to the margins of American discourse.⁹⁰ 

The conservative backlash and the new liberal consensus worked in tandem to resolve the crisis of Israel’s reputation that had been 

precipitated by the invasion of Lebanon and was intensified by the intifada. The liberal narrative of two warring nationalisms helped re- 

store the positive image of Israel that John Chancellor saw shattered in the bombing of Beirut. Israel might no longer fit the heroic 

narrative of Exodus, “the Israel we knew in the past,” but the liberal two-sided narrative was even more effective in restoring its moral 

sheen than was AIPAC’s effort to deny the reality of Palestinians. This narrative of “both sides” would continue to frame the idea of the 

two-state solution and the concept of a peace process between two groups with equivalent negotiating power. 

In the aftermath of 1982, the conservative monitoring of criticism of Israel and the liberal framework of symmetry together demon- 

strated to Americans that Israel remained existentially insecure. They also emphasized that even when Israel exercised overwhelming 

military force, its citizens agonized over the damage done to the nation’s soul. As criticism of Israel became more mainstream, defense 

of its special relationship with the United States took on heightened moral resonance and increasingly apocalyptic dimensions. Another 

development at the same time worked to enhance the image of Israel as both exceptionally vulnerable and distinctively humane: the 

growth of Holocaust consciousness in the United States. 

4

NOT THE ISRAEL WE HAVE SEEN IN THE PAST

THE ISRAEL WE SAW yesterday is not the Israel we have seen in the past. So concluded a dismayed John Chancellor of NBC news, in his commentary from a rooftop in West Beirut on August 2, 1982, with smoke billowing in the background. Anyone watching the nightly news after Israel invaded Lebanon in June of that year would have agreed, but they would not have agreed on the reason. Some believed that Israel’s militarism was ruining its reputation. Others pinned the blame on journalists like Chancellor, claiming that media bias was tarnishing Israel’s image.

Chancellor decried the savage Israeli attack on one of the world’s big cities. The stench of terror all across the city raised questions about Israel’s stated military goal of stopping terrorist incursions into northern Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Shaking his head, Chancellor asked, What in the world is going on? If Israel’s security problem was fifty miles to the south, what’s an Israeli army doing here in Beirut? He then answered his own rhetorical question: We are now dealing with an imperial Israel, which is solving its problems in someone else’s country, world opinion be damned.¹

Much of what you have read in the newspapers and newsmagazines about the war in Lebanon—and even more of what you have seen and heard on television—is simply not true. So claimed Martin Peretz in the New Republic that same week. Peretz had visited southern Lebanon in June at the invitation of the Israeli government. In Lebanon Eyewitness, he accused journalists of exaggerating civilian casualties and ignoring the true story of Israel liberating the Lebanese people from the PLO stranglehold.²

The invasion of Lebanon precipitated a crisis in American perceptions of Israel. The nightly spectacle of jets bombing a densely packed city, vistas of collapsed apartment buildings, close-ups of maimed and traumatized civilians, all shocked an American audience. How could—or should—one frame these events? Some framed the Lebanon War in terms of the continued efforts of a small, beleaguered country to defend its fragile security and sovereignty. These voices invoked familiar, heroic stories of Israel’s past military conflicts: the swift victory over vast armies bent on its annihilation in 1967, the relief of repelling the surprise attack that made it appear so vulnerable in 1973, and the celebration of the daring rescue mission in Entebbe in 1976. Other commentators highlighted the parallels with America’s recent quagmire in Southeast Asia. They began calling Lebanon Israel’s Vietnam, noting the common features: burnt-out villages, high civilian casualties, rolling thunder, and an antiwar movement at home. Shock at day-to-day violence turned to moral outrage in September, after the massacre of civilians in refugee camps.

The Lebanon War dealt a blow to the popular consensus that had crystallized in 1967, one that appealed to liberals and conservatives alike. The invasion appeared to shatter the narrative of Israel as the beleaguered underdog, wielding force only to defend itself from extermination. The siege of Beirut, when Lebanese and Palestinian civilians became visible as victims of Israel’s bludgeoning force, severely tainted Israel’s image as the invincible victim. Israel had, of course, faced international condemnation before. But in 1982, for the first time, criticism rang out from the center of American society, from mainstream media, politicians, intellectuals, and leaders of Jewish organizations. Israel would now face such criticism again and again, especially during the eruption of the first intifada in 1987.

What was different about the response to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was not only the startling vision of what Chancellor called imperial Israel. Equally important, and possibly more enduring, was the vociferous and well-organized reaction to the criticism—exemplified by Peretz’s articles. The fierce backlash aimed to counter disillusionment with Israel by monitoring and censuring the media for anti-Israeli bias. Pro-Israel organizations stepped up their lobbying for direct U.S. aid to enhance Israel’s security and simultaneously attempted to secure the narrative of Israel’s existential vulnerability in the face of Palestinian resistance.

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5 

 

THE FUTURE HOLOCAUST 

 

FOR MANY AMERICANS, the horror of the Holocaust serves as the basis for their support of Israel. Others believe that the 

tragedy has been politicized in order to sustain that support. The clash between these views intensified during the 1982 Lebanon War, 

when advocates and opponents of the invasion argued over which combatants were acting like Nazis. The paradoxical view of Israel as 

an invincible victim never lost its allure in the United States, even in the face of Israel’s military dominance in Lebanon and in the occu- 

pied territories during the first intifada. Israel’s status as an eternal victim actually gained strength throughout the 1980s, as the Holo- 

caust became a more prominent feature of the American cultural landscape. 

Official commemorations, presidential speeches, mass culture, and school curricula taught Americans not only about the historical 

catastrophe that befell Jews in Europe, but also about the Holocaust as a chapter of their own history in World War II. A museum of the 

Holocaust was built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As the Holocaust was becoming part of America’s national heritage, its 

temporal significance in relation to Israel was changing as well. The Holocaust began to represent more than the horrific suffering of 

the Jewish people in the past—now it also signified an imminent threat to the future of the Jewish state. A past atrocity in Europe came 

to foreshadow an impending apocalypse in the Middle East. 

New narrative bonds were forged between America’s newfound past and Israel’s precarious future. Interest in Holocaust memory 

boomed at a time when both countries were facing crises of wars gone awry—indeed, Israel was said to have had its own Vietnam in 

Lebanon. These crises had created internal divisions and international opprobrium, and challenged the belief in the moral authority of 

military power, a bedrock of their shared exceptionalism. The birth of Israel might be understood as the redemption of Jewish suffering, 

but the discovery of Holocaust memory as an American national concern also confirmed American exceptionalism and renewed the 

bond between the two nations. 

 

Remembering the Future 

 

In 1978, two events propelled the Holocaust to the center of American consciousness. An NBC television miniseries called Holocaust 

was viewed by more than 100 million Americans in April. And a month later, President Jimmy Carter initiated plans for what would ulti- 

mately become the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

On May 1, 1978, Carter hosted a celebration for Israel’s thirtieth anniversary in the Rose Garden of the White House, where he wel- 

comed Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin along with six hundred leaders of American Jewish organizations. For a birthday party, 

the tone of the ceremony was notably somber, as was the “gift” Carter presented to his guests. He announced the formation of a presi- 

dential commission charged with planning an American memorial “to the six million who were killed in the Holocaust.” He soon ap- 

pointed noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as chairman, and the commission embarked on the process of designing a memorial to 

commemorate, on American soil, the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe.¹ 

Carter’s commission aimed to rescue the memory of genocide victims from the oblivion of the past. But the timing addressed a 

more immediate controversy over his Middle East policy. In 1977, Carter became the first American president to utter the phrase “Pales- 

tinian homeland.” He antagonized the Israeli government and its American supporters by proposing to include the Palestine Liberation 

Organization (PLO) in an international peace conference cosponsored by the Soviet Union. Begin expressed outrage at a press confer- 

ence, denouncing PLO members as “Huns,” its policy as “an Arab Mein Kampf,” and its diplomacy as a subterfuge for its true goal: “to 

destroy a people; to annihilate people. The method: genocide—to kill man, woman, and child.”² Negotiating over territory and recog- 

nition of Palestinian rights was, in Begin’s terms, tantamount to exposing Israel to a second Holocaust. In less inflammatory rhetoric, 

American supporters of Israel also criticized Carter for putting Israel at risk by proposing to negotiate with the PLO and planning to sell 

fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. 

In a bid to mollify Carter’s critics, his aides recommended that he propose the creation of a national memorial to the Holocaust. In 

his Rose Garden speech, he vowed that America’s “total absolute commitment to Israel’s security” would “ensure for all times that the 

Jewish people will not be condemned to repeat the Holocaust.” In response, Begin called Carter’s address “one of the greatest moral 

statements ever.”³ 

After Carter’s announcement, four different presidents pledged their commitment to the project during a period that witnessed the 

end of the Cold War. Democrats and Republicans alike vowed that the memory of the Holocaust would remind Americans of their 

enduring obligation to the State of Israel. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors to the public. The 

museum has deeply affected millions of visitors from all over the world. It serves to document the rise of Nazism and the ghastly meth- 

ods of slaughter, to memorialize the dead and preserve the traumatic memories of survivors, and to transmit the profound meanings of 

the Holocaust to communities across generations. But when we look back at the history of the memorial, it becomes clear that this na- 

tional institution of memory, dedicated to facing the ultimate evil of the past and to imparting universal values to the future, bears in- 

delible traces of its origins in America’s Middle East policies, especially its commitment to support Israel. 

At the 1978 White House ceremony announcing the formation of the presidential commission, Carter related a narrative of the ori- 

gins of the special relationship, claiming that it was born “out of the ashes of the Holocaust,” alongside the Jewish state. Moral outrage 

at Nazi atrocities, he claimed, led the United States to recognize the new state in 1948—before any other nation did. Penance as well as 

pride drove this allegiance, for Carter acknowledged that Americans had turned their backs on Jews seeking refuge from Nazi brutality. 

In founding a state, Jews valiantly created for themselves a home that the world had denied them. Celebrating Israel’s thirtieth anniver- 

sary, Carter focused not on its pioneering spirit or its modern accomplishments, but on its “indomitable will” to survive, and he equat- 

ed Israel’s survival with its capacity to avert a second Holocaust. Carter asserted that America’s commitment to establishing the nation 

of Israel and to protecting it from future threats arose spontaneously from the encounter with the death camps at the end of World War 

II and had continued unbroken into the present.⁴ 

Carter’s speech sounds so familiar today that it may be hard to believe how novel it was at the time. Carter was the first American 

president to place the Holocaust at the center of America’s commitment to Israel and to claim culpability for past inaction as a moral 

guide to present policy. His predecessors in the Oval Office rarely called attention to the Holocaust. As the first U.S. president to visit 

Israel, Richard Nixon only reluctantly agreed to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He understood the rearming of Israel 

during the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a strategic move against the Soviet Union and did not describe it as a mission to save Israel from 

destruction. President Lyndon Johnson, in his warmest professions of friendship, identified Israel as a frontier state like Texas, and in 

the lead-up to the Six-Day War, neither he nor his advisors referred to Israel as a potential victim of genocide. Only after Carter’s presi- 

dency did U.S. presidents routinely invoke the Holocaust as the ethical foundation of their relationship with Israel. This change re- 

flected a shift that was going on in American culture about how the Holocaust was viewed, a shift that began in the 1960s and accel- 

erated in the 1970s. In this way, American presidents have followed public discourse about the Holocaust as much as they have shaped 

it.⁵ 

“The Holocaust” as an overarching concept and a proper noun for the systematic Nazi extermination of European Jews did not come 

into general American circulation until the 1970s, as historian Peter Novick and others have shown. At the end of World War II, the 

American public did not single out the “Final Solution” as a Jewish catastrophe separate from the overall Nazi carnage that afflicted Eu- 

rope. Jews mourned their dead within their own communities, while the wider public incorporated Jewish suffering into a broader con- 

ception of Nazi barbarism and the universal horrors of war. According to this narrative, the United States and its allies soundly defeated 

the Nazi regime, brought its crimes to justice, and consigned its atrocities to the dark ages of the past. Postwar anxiety about the future 

focused on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which evoked fears of imminent catastrophe—that American cities 

could be subject to the same inferno. Although it is a common assumption that World War II led to the universal determination to pre- 

vent future genocides, in the United States at the time, victory over Nazism was regarded as representing the end of an era; it was Hi- 

roshima that had inaugurated a fearsome new age.⁶ 

Outrage at the Nazi slaughter of Jews was indeed central to postwar support for establishing a Jewish state and to the subsequent 

narrative about its founding, as we saw in previous chapters. But supporters of the Zionist movement and the early Israeli state did not 

express fear of a resurgent genocide. Liberal Zionist supporters in the 1940s did not rest their case for a state on the need to protect 

Jews from future extermination, nor did their accounts of the battles of 1948 raise the threat of annihilation. Leon Uris’s Exodus was not 

haunted by the specter of a new Holocaust. For supporters of Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, the Nazi genocide explained the historical 

origins of the Jewish state but did not represent a threat to its ongoing existence. 

As Nazi atrocities receded into the past, the emergence of Holocaust consciousness involved an important shift in its temporal 

meaning. The Holocaust entered public awareness not only as a horrific event in the past, but as an event that might be repeated in the 

imminent future. A related geographic shift from Europe to the Middle East made the Jewish state the locus of this threatening new 

catastrophe. This fear of a second Holocaust started in Israel in the 1960s after the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1962 and 

during the lead-up to the Six-Day War in 1967.⁷ The idea entered American public discourse along with the growth of Holocaust mem- 

ory in the following decade. According to this way of thinking, the Nazi extermination of Jews not only explained Israel’s historical ori- 

gins, but also signified an impending threat to its future survival. In 1948, Americans celebrated Israel’s creation as the death knell for 

Nazism, but three decades later, they treated the Holocaust as a timeless template for Israel’s existential vulnerability, with Arabs 

viewed as reincarnated Nazis. 

The Holocaust came to represent the precariousness of Israel’s survival at a time when the new country was becoming more mili- 

tarily secure in the region. Seeing Israel as the legacy of the Holocaust contributed to the sense of its vulnerability as a perpetual victim 

of Arab aggression. Novick contends that the Yom Kippur War awakened fears of Israel’s demise among American Jews because of the 

surprise attack, launched on the holiest day of the year, and the unexpectedly high number of Israeli casualties—despite the fact that 

Egyptian and Syrian troops never advanced beyond their own territories that had been captured in 1967, and that the United States came 

to Israel’s aid with a massive airlift of weapons. As in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, talk of annihilation increased in proportion to 

the decisiveness of Israel’s victory. As deeply felt as these fears were, pro-Israel organizations were equally alarmed by international crit- 

icism of Israel as an oppressive occupying power, and by the international consensus that Israel should relinquish to Palestinian rule 

the territories it had conquered in 1967. A representative publication is The New Anti-Semitism, written by Arnold Forster and Benjamin 

Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League and published in 1974, which argued that condemnation of Israel arose not from opposition to 

Israeli policy in the occupied territories, but from the world’s forgetting about Jewish victimization in the Holocaust. Forster and Ep- 

stein insisted that the world needed to be reminded of the Holocaust, for fear that failure to remember it would diminish support for Is- 

rael and thus threaten Jews with a new genocide in the Middle East.⁸ 

The idea that a second Holocaust threatened to destroy Israel did not abate with the massive increase in U.S. aid under Presidents 

Nixon and Reagan, or when the peace treaty with Egypt removed its military threat in 1979, or when the Israeli government annexed the 

Golan Heights in 1981, or when it invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. On the contrary, talk of a new Holocaust increased as Israeli mili- 

tary power grew, and Holocaust analogies often justified the exercise of that power. When Menachem Begin became prime minister in 

1977, his fiery rhetoric introduced this way of thinking to the American media. Begin’s worldview had been shaped profoundly by his 

personal losses in the Holocaust, and he saw any threat to Israel in the present through the lens of the Nazi genocide. Begin’s views of 

the Holocaust strongly influenced the basic doctrine of the Israeli government, and this doctrine also became central to American views 

of Israel.⁹ 

In 1979, Israel launched a surprise attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor and received widespread condemnation for violating 

international law. Begin justified the attack as a preemption of future genocide. The lesson he took from the Holocaust was not only 

that Jews were eternal victims, but also that it was impossible to trust anyone else to protect them. Israel alone had both the moral obli- 

gation and the right to defend itself by any means necessary. In this way of thinking, if total annihilation always imperiled Israel, then no 

military action could ever be judged as excessive. When the Reagan administration announced that Israel might have breached an arms 

agreement by using American fighter jets in the raid, Begin responded by claiming that Israel had a right to guard its children, since one 

million children had been killed with poison gas by the Germans and “radioactivity is also poison.” If Israel hadn’t bombed the plant, he 

argued, “another Holocaust would have happened to Israel and her people.”¹⁰ Even though the association between nuclear power 

plants and gas chambers may have seemed dubious, this way of framing Israel’s military ventures appealed to the moral clarity of a 

struggle against evil epitomized by the Holocaust. 

Begin made his most impassioned appeals to Holocaust memory during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, equating Palestinians with 

Nazis intent on committing genocide and identifying Israelis as the true victims in the war. In a widely publicized letter to President Rea- 

gan, Begin wrote, “I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, 

Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface. My generation, dear Ron, swore on the altar of God that whoever 

proclaims his intent to destroy the Jewish state or the Jewish people seals his fate so what happened in Berlin … will never happen 

again.” In this intimate public address, Begin blamed civilian causalities on the current unnamed Hitler. World War II was more than a 

metaphor for Begin, more even than an example of the past illuminating the present. A potential Holocaust hid beneath the surface of 

the present, poised to rear up at any moment if Israel failed to stop it. At a time when Israeli forces faced international criticism for bru- 

tality, Begin deemed them “valiant” because they were battling Nazis to avert another Holocaust.¹¹ 

To claim exclusive possession of the Holocaust as a living analogy entailed policing its usage by others. In an August 1982 interview, 

Begin expressed outrage at Reagan for using the word “holocaust” to describe Israel’s day-long bombardment of West Beirut. Although 

one sense of the English word does mean massive destruction especially by fire, and would be a fitting description for the conflagration 

caused by the bombing that day, Begin claimed that the word should only be used in its more exclusive sense, to refer to the Nazi geno- 

cide of Jews. He accused Reagan of personally hurting him by using that word and asserted that only he knew “what is a holocaust.” As 

proof he displayed the iconic photograph of a frightened young boy, hands raised in the air, taken during the roundup of Jews in the 

Warsaw Ghetto. Begin explained that Israelis never intentionally targeted civilians, but that the PLO placed them in danger by hiding 

military installations among them. Israelis always mourned the killing of children, he asserted, in stark contrast to both Nazis and Pales- 

tinian terrorists, who celebrated the murder of Jewish children.¹² 

In 1982, Begin used the high moral ground of the Holocaust to deflect widespread criticism of Israel’s use of force against Pales- 

tinian and Lebanese civilians. He also drew on Nazi analogies to explain why he would not negotiate with the PLO leaders, even if they 

accepted Israel’s right to exist: “I wouldn’t believe Hitler, or Goering or Goebbels, and I will not believe Mr. Arafat, or Farouk Khad- 

doumi, or Abu Iyad.” For Begin and his Likud Party, which had every intention of keeping the occupied territories—land that they called 

Greater Israel—nothing was more threatening than the Palestinians’ willingness to compromise. Begin thus placed out of bounds any 

negotiations with a group of men who, he claimed, had no other aim than to exterminate Jews once again.¹³ 

Begin’s righteous deployment of the Holocaust provoked a backlash. Critics of the war used their own Holocaust references to 

undercut his high moral ground, particularly after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. “To a country that rose out of Hitler’s death 

camps,” wrote journalist David Shipler, “the answers ‘We did not do it’ and ‘We did not know’ are not enough.” But the focus on Be- 

gin’s rhetorical excess did not succeed in dislodging the narrative that Israel was threatened by a second Holocaust. It had taken hold 

before the invasion of Lebanon in distinctly American idioms that would continue to invest Begin’s strident nationalism with universal 

significance. That the first American president to endorse Palestinian rights tried to assuage Israeli and Jewish objections by proposing 

a Holocaust memorial suggests how the Holocaust would be used in portraying a Palestinian homeland as an existential threat to the 

Jewish homeland.¹⁴ 

In 1978, as we saw, the presidential commission established by Carter helped to impress upon the American public the idea that the 

Holocaust was not only a past event of immeasurable terror, but that it also inextricably linked the United States to the birth of Israel 

and to current threats to the country’s existence. The other major event that brought the Holocaust to the attention of Americans that 

year was the miniseries Holocaust, which tens of millions of Americans watched on TV for four consecutive nights in April 1978. For 

many viewers, the epic story of an upper-class, assimilated Jewish family from Berlin would have provided their first encounter with an 

overarching narrative of the Holocaust that tied together the different landmarks of the Nazis’ mass extermination of European Jews: 

Kristallnacht, Babi Yar, the Warsaw Ghetto, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz. Although the nine-and-a-half-hour series ends 

where Exodus begins, with the sole surviving Jewish character about to take a group of orphans to Palestine, Israel’s impending creation 

is foreshadowed throughout the series.¹⁵ 

In the final scene, a Mossad agent—someone much like Ari Ben Canaan—recruits the only remaining member of the Weiss family, 

Rudi, to escort the orphaned refugees on an illegal voyage to Palestine. The agent tells Rudi that the Jewish Agency in Palestine already 

knows his history and has singled him out for this role. The audience has similarly viewed Rudy as a proto-Israeli throughout the film 

because of his actions during the war. In contrast to the rest of his family, who remain naïvely loyal to German culture and are unable to 

resist their fate, Rudy’s independent fighting spirit spurs him to flee Germany and join a band of Ukrainian Jewish partisans, with whom 

he later leads an armed rebellion in Sobibór concentration camp. Rudy, however, knows little of the Zionist movement. When he teases 

his young Czech wife about her silly dreams of growing oranges in Palestine, viewers understand that these dreams will indeed come 

true. Rudi’s ignorance of Zionism lends an organic quality to the idea that he is emigrating to his true homeland. That Jewish fighters in 

Europe would naturally become Israelis is suggested by scenes in the Warsaw Ghetto, where leaders of the uprising unfurl an Israeli 

flag. Although the story ends three years before the founding of the state, its conclusion gestures to the birth of the nation as the 

inevitable redemption of immeasurable suffering. 

The miniseries linked the Holocaust to Israel’s founding as a historical and moral necessity. It was accompanied by a torrent of 

promotional publicity, guides for schools and churches, and follow-up polls, and much of the pedagogical material included infor- 

mation about the significance of present-day Israel. The playwright of the miniseries, Gerald Green, wrote a novelized version, serialized 

by many newspapers, with over a million paperback copies sent to bookstores two weeks in advance of the broadcast. The novel em- 

phatically connects the Holocaust to Israel’s current danger. It begins in Israel with an older Rudi Weiss teaching guerrilla warfare to his 

sons, who are defending their kibbutz from Syrian bombardment. The American Jewish Committee commissioned a nationwide survey 

on the viewing experience of the miniseries. In addition to questions on what viewers had learned about history and how the series af- 

fected their attitudes toward Jews, it included questions about how the series affected viewers’ attitudes toward the current situation in 

the Middle East. Results of the survey showed that “viewers are more sympathetic to Israel than nonviewers” and that viewers “see 

some sense in American Jewish support of Israel.” In another informal survey, a Lutheran magazine asked its readers the question: 

“How has Holocaust affected or focused your faith?” To “many Christians and non-Christians the answer was simple”: now they “under- 

stand the passion behind the Jewish sentiment behind Israel.” Recognition of the Holocaust as a traumatic memory did more than ex- 

plain the psychology of American Jews—why, for instance, they might fear attacks on Israel. It also explained how the Holocaust signi- 

fied a living threat to Israel’s existence and why non-Jews should feel obligated to support Israel.¹⁶ 

This was the message promulgated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which sent a copy of the novel to every 

member of Congress as part of an intense lobbying campaign against a plan to sell aircraft to Saudi Arabia. An editorial in AIPAC’s bi- 

weekly journal stated that Green’s novel and the miniseries “should make all Americans more aware of the moral imperative of Amer- 

ica’s commitment to Israel’s capacity to defend its citizens.”¹⁷ For AIPAC, the Holocaust was a new item in its promotional repertoire. 

The word first appeared in the index of its biweekly Near East Report in 1979. Not until 1983 did the “AIPAC Policy Statement” include a 

reference to the Holocaust. To earlier assertions about shared ideals and strategic assets, the 1983 statement added that “the United 

States recognized Israel’s role in providing a safe home for victims of the Holocaust and for Jews persecuted everywhere.” As popular 

culture was becoming more widely acquainted with the Holocaust, AIPAC mustered these associations to identify Israel with the sur- 

vivors of the Holocaust, the same year it was countering pro-Palestinian views on American campuses in the wake of the Lebanon 

War.¹⁸ 

 

Never Again 

 

Elie Wiesel was the public figure who most forcefully conveyed to the American public the living presence of the Holocaust and the 

continuing threat that it posed to the existence of Israel. He drew on the authority of his personal trauma as a young prisoner at 

Auschwitz and Buchenwald and on his life’s commitment to bear witness to the unspeakable atrocities inflicted on Jews. With his numi- 

nous presence, his expression of moral angst, his haunted voice, and the anguish etched in the lines of his face, he personified the au- 

thenticity of the Holocaust survivor. His own rise to public prominence was inseparable from the rise of Holocaust memory in Amer- 

ican public awareness. Millions of schoolchildren read his autobiographical book, Night; he advised American presidents and in 1985 

famously chastised President Reagan for planning a state visit to a German military cemetery. He accompanied world leaders and cele- 

brities on pilgrimages to the sites of concentration camps, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Wiesel insisted on the uniquely Jewish nature of the Holocaust. He often stated that the Holocaust should transcend politics and 

that its representation in popular culture, such as in the TV miniseries, trivialized its significance. He spoke of the Holocaust in semire- 

ligious terms as an ineffable and timeless catastrophe that eternally threatened to recur. Wiesel related the exceptional evil of the Holo- 

caust to Israel’s exceptional morality and to the unique threats to its existence. He shared Begin’s vigorous nationalism and right-wing 

views, but at the same time, he translated Jewish nationalism into the language of universal humanism. By attributing both uniqueness 

and exemplarity to the Holocaust, he turned it into a historical yardstick by which to measure other human suffering. 

The first National Civil Holocaust Commemoration Ceremony was held on April 24, 1979, at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Both Wiesel 

and President Carter addressed the gathering. Wiesel’s speech was entitled “The Holocaust: Beginning or End?” His questions implied 

the answer: “Was it the final convulsion of demonic forces in history? A paroxysm of centuries-old bigotry and hatred? Or, on the con- 

trary, a momentous warning of things to come?” Wiesel pointed to violence against Israel as primary evidence of the beginning of a new 

horror. Thirty years after the liberation of the camps, he said, we witness “more wars, new racial hostilities, and an awakening of Nazism 

on all five continents. Little did we know that, in our lifetime, books would appear in many languages offering so-called ‘proof’ that the 

Holocaust never occurred, that our parents, our friends did not die there. Little did we know that Jewish children would again be mur- 

dered, in cold blood, by killers in Israel.” Wiesel implied that acts of terrorism against Israel, in addition to Holocaust denial, were signs 

that the Holocaust had not fully ended.¹⁹ 

 

 

Elie Wiesel (right), chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, presents President Jimmy Carter (left) with the panel’s 

final report, September 27, 1979. 

 

At this same ceremony, President Carter took a more universal approach than Wiesel, who emphasized the uniqueness of Jewish suf- 

fering and the culpability of those who had abandoned the Jews to the slaughter. For Carter, the memory of this same failure taught that 

“human rights and human dignity are indivisible. America must, and always will, speak out in the defense of human rights not only in 

our own country, but around the world.” Carter agreed with Wiesel about the looming risk of a new genocide—but not only to Jews in 

Israel. Carter urged the Senate to “take a long overdue step” and ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, 

which had been adopted by the United Nations in 1948. “Without concrete action,” he stated, “our words are hollow. Let us signify by 

deed as well as by word that the American people will never forget.”²⁰ 

In these founding speeches and documents for the national memorial, Carter and Wiesel wove together a powerful public idiom of 

Holocaust awareness that would resonate for years to come. They conjoined the particularity of the mass slaughter of Jews under the 

Nazis with the ongoing threat to Israel, and they tied the universal imperative to prevent future genocides with an American obligation 

to lead an international movement for human rights. As Carter declared at the presentation of the commission’s final report, “Out of 

our memory and understanding of the Holocaust we must forge an unshakeable oath with all civilized people that never again will the 

world stand silent, never again will the world look the other way or fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.”²¹ 

The slogan “Never Again” resounded for many who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s as a stirring ethical imperative to fight for 

human rights and to prevent future genocides, and young human rights activists denounced their governments’ hypocrisy for failing to 

uphold this imperative in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.²² “Never Again,” however, did not originate in this universalist milieu; it 

was invented in 1970 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a right-wing Jewish nationalist from Brooklyn, to serve as the motto of the militant Jewish 

Defense League (JDL). The phrase, which was often used by the Save Soviet Jewry movement, expressed the JDL’s confrontational spir- 

it, urging combative retaliation rather than powerless capitulation. When Kahane emigrated to Israel, his views were deemed so extreme 

that Israel banned the political party he founded there for its “Nazi-like,” “racist,” and “undemocratic positions.”²³ 

In the transformation of its use from advocating Jewish self-defense to preventing genocide anywhere on earth, the inspiring refrain 

“Never Again” made a conceptual leap that showed its ability to conform to different political meanings. What the nationalist and univ- 

ersalist paradigms do share is the characterization of the Holocaust both as a historical catastrophe that is never quite past, and as a 

portent of evil that is ever imminent. In the JDL’s original nationalist meaning, the heritage of the Nazi genocide as the culmination of 

centuries of persecution demanded vigilance and justified violence to defend Jews everywhere and to avert the annihilation of the Jewish 

state. In its adaptation by human rights advocates, knowledge of the Holocaust as the universal paradigm of evil required international 

vigilance and intervention—diplomatic or military—to prevent the occurrence of future genocides worldwide. The nationalism that 

spawned this phrase, however, would never be completely purged from it, even when used in a universalist sense. This strange geneal- 

ogy of “Never Again” points to certain tensions that came into play in the political mobilization of Holocaust memory as a harbinger of 

the future. One is the contradiction between nationalist and universalist applications; another is that between viewing Jewish victim- 

hood as the universal standard for measuring genocide and exempting Israel from those universal standards that it deems threaten its 

survival.²⁴ 

Elie Wiesel played a key role in propagating the different meanings of “Never Again” among various religious and human rights or- 

ganizations and political contexts. He skillfully managed—or juggled—the tension between the universal and the particular by espous- 

ing the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and privileging Israeli vulnerability, even as he expanded the Holocaust’s lessons to other human 

rights causes and made “Never Again” a slogan for the worldwide prevention of genocide. 

As a universal symbol, the Holocaust garnered what Alan Mintz has called “moral prestige,” becoming the standard for all other 

mass suffering. For Wiesel, this moral prestige related to his view of Israel as both exceptionally vulnerable and morally superior. For 

him, the exemplary evil of the Holocaust could be redeemed by the exemplary morality of the State of Israel. Wiesel made this linkage 

less jarring than Begin had by speaking in the idiom of universal humanism rather than aggressive nationalism. The uniqueness of Jew- 

ish victimization in the Holocaust, Wiesel taught, had universal significance, and the redemption of humankind after the war was insep- 

arable from the specific deliverance of the Jewish people in Israel. As he stated when he presented the report of the president’s commis- 

sion to President Carter in 1979, “Birkenau arouses man’s most secret anguish. Jerusalem symbolizes our most fervent hope, and, 

therefore, we are attached to Jerusalem in such love and admiration.” Avoiding the political conflict over Israel’s plans to annex East 

Jerusalem, he implied that universal “anguish” sanctioned attachment to a particular place. Wiesel saw no contradiction between the 

particular and the universal, between “Never Again” as a vow to protect Israel from existential threats and as an imperative to prevent 

genocide around the world.²⁵ 

Wiesel used his moral authority to support victims of contemporary atrocities: he spoke out on behalf of starving Biafrans, the mil- 

lions of Cambodians murdered by the Pol Pot regime, Vietnamese refugees, the indigenous Aché people being exterminated in 

Paraguay, and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia. But when it came to the situation in the Middle East, he prevaricated. 

Wiesel’s commitment to the paradigmatic nature of the Holocaust put him in a double bind: he would have to acknowledge Pales- 

tinian suffering, even as he disavowed it. In his 1978 essay “To a Young Palestinian Arab,” Wiesel draws on his own losses in the Holo- 

caust to express sympathy for the Palestinian tragedy of displacement and homelessness. In striving for balance, he faults Arabs for not 

recognizing that the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust gave them the right to a sovereign state. His essay professes an aversion to 

“scorekeeping” for comparative pain, but he nonetheless constructs a moral hierarchy in which Palestinian suffering has devolved into 

vengeful violence, while Israelis have transformed their traumatic past into a higher spiritual calling. Jewish virtue, he claims, lies in the 

survivors’ refusing to take vengeance on their oppressors in Europe and in the special Jewish capacity to turn their own trauma into 

empathy for the suffering of others. Wiesel exemplifies this sentiment himself: “I do feel responsible for what happened to you, but not 

for what you chose to do as a result of what happened to you. I feel responsible for your sorrow, but not for the way you use it, for in its 

name you have massacred innocent people, slaughtered children.” Ignoring Israeli violence against innocent people and Palestinian 

children, Wiesel claims that the Holocaust taught Israelis to respect the sanctity of life, while the Palestinians’ tragedy debased them 

into supporting the murder of innocents.²⁶ 

Wiesel chose not to speak out against the invasion of Lebanon or the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Instead, he mobilized the excep- 

tionalism of the Holocaust to defend Israel as the victim of anti-Semitism. In an interview with People magazine in November 1982, he 

said that that year had been the hardest one in his life since 1945, not because of the war, but because of the global resurgence of anti- 

Semitism that it had unleashed. When asked how he felt about Begin using the Holocaust to justify Israeli actions, he responded that he 

objected to anyone using the Holocaust for political reasons, and that the word had become too “fashionable” and thus too widely 

available. He believed that only people who loved Israel had the right to criticize it, while all others condemned it with suspicious “rel- 

ish.” Wiesel never mentioned Begin; rather, he condemned the PLO observer to the UN for “speaking about ‘Judeo-Nazis’—my God, 

the blasphemy, the obscenity of putting these words together.” He did not mention that this term had first been used by an Israeli 

scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who created a stir by describing the war as a “Judeo-Nazi policy.”²⁷ For Wiesel, the worst sin in using 

Nazi analogies was the attempt, in his words, to “demystify the Holocaust. Meaning, in a way, to take it away from the Jewish people.” 

Indeed, the Holocaust could provide the basis for empathy with the suffering of others; but “paradoxically,” as he said, “only when we 

tell the story of what happened to the Jewish people can we save other people.” Thus, he believed that using Holocaust analogies to de- 

pict Palestinian and Lebanese suffering at the hands of the Israeli military amounted to a kind of theft and was evidence of a resurgence 

of anti-Semitism.²⁸ 

Wiesel’s moral authority derived from his status as a Holocaust survivor, an identity that was gaining prestige in American society 

with the spread of Holocaust awareness. In the People interview, Wiesel backed up his own observations by noting that friends of his 

who were also survivors were having nervous breakdowns, and even committing suicide, “all reacting to the anti-Semitism that was a 

reaction to Lebanon and the massacre.” The image of the survivor played an important role in rehabilitating Israel’s moral image in the 

wake of Lebanon, as the country became no longer primarily identified with its youthful pioneers, or idealistic soldiers, but with the 

noble survivors who had rebuilt their lives along with the country. Indeed, the Report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust iden- 

tified the United States along with Israel as a site of rebirth for Holocaust survivors, and it cited the need to preserve their memories as 

a primary reason for creating an American memorial to the Holocaust. 

In April 1983, at the first American meeting of the Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, Vice President 

George H. W. Bush presented to Elie Wiesel a symbolic key to the proposed new Holocaust museum. The conveners cautiously as- 

serted that the event was “strictly a nonpolitical affair” in relation to Israel. But they nonetheless underlined Israel’s vulnerability as the 

key message. An organizer told the Washington Post that the Holocaust was “a lesson to the world that it can happen again if we will not 

be watchful. If we will not pay attention to small incidents.” He explained that “years ago they used to call it anti-Semitism; today they 

call it anti-Zionism, but actually it’s the same thing.”²⁹ 

In the Jerusalem Post, Wolf Blitzer wrote of this gathering as though the Holocaust had always formed the basis for American attach- 

ment to Israel, support that transcended all strategic and political considerations. Although he had recently called the Sabra and Shatila 

massacre a disaster for Israel’s “high moral image in Washington,” which would take years to repair, he clearly saw the rejuvenating po- 

tency of this reunion of Holocaust survivors. The organizers “did not have to use a sledgehammer to press their point for strong U.S. 

backing for Israel,” he wrote. In the closing ceremony at the Washington Monument, President Reagan linked America and Israel as 

sites of redemption, promising the survivors that “the security of your safe havens, here and in Israel, will never be compromised.” The 

mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, condemned the PLO as terrorists “attempting to finish what Hitler had started.” Though thousands 

of attendees had other concerns—to share their traumatic stories, to locate lost friends and relatives—the public face of this “nonpo- 

litical” event placed Israel at the top of the agenda. As the figure of the survivor gained public visibility and social esteem, the aura of the 

survivor amplified Israel’s existential peril. Any danger faced by the country was rendered as threatening its very existence rather than as 

threatening the kinds of losses that any people would dread as a result of armed conflict: loss of lives and territory, damage to its army, 

its cities, or its economy. In Israel’s case, evocation of the Holocaust transformed the fear of loss into the prospect of extinction.³⁰ 

The equation of criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and Nazism intensified with the temporal shift in the signif- 

icance of the Holocaust. In the context of an imminent threat, anti-Semitism started to be viewed less as a prejudice that education and 

awareness could undo, or as a form of discrimination that could be legally challenged, and more as an ever-present genocidal urge to 

kill Jews and destroy their state. 

In the 1980s, as Palestinians became visible to more Americans as victims of Israeli aggression and as a people struggling for human 

rights and a national homeland, Israel’s staunchest supporters pushed back to portray them as Nazis intent on committing a second 

genocide. During the groundbreaking ceremony for the Holocaust Museum in 1985, for instance, Wiesel invoked the Holocaust to 

decry the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish American who was shot and thrown off the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille 

Lauro by members of the Palestine Liberation Front. A Washington Post story on Klinghoffer’s funeral bore the headline “Holocaust of 

One.” Equating terrorist acts committed by Palestinians with the Nazi Holocaust mustered great emotional power through the shared 

focus on innocent Jewish victims.³¹ 

Terrorist violence by nonstate actors, no matter how heinous, lacks the powerful state organization behind the systematic industri- 

alized violence that characterized the Nazi slaughter of millions. Nonetheless, the repeated analogy between terrorism and the Holo- 

caust had the powerful effect of tarring the entire Palestinian cause as a hateful reincarnation of the Nazi project to exterminate the Jews. 

At a time when the Carter and Reagan administrations continued Kissinger’s pledge to Israel not to speak directly to the PLO, the confla- 

tion of Palestinians with terrorism and Nazism contributed to the public perception of the illegitimacy of the PLO and the cause it 

represented.³² 

In a universalist mode, Wiesel pulled back from this equation when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 as a “messenger to 

mankind,” one of the world’s “most important spiritual leaders and guides.”³³ He interwove a plea for Israel into his most passionate 

appeal for universal human rights. In his acceptance speech, he stated that having endured the world’s indifference to the Nazi geno- 

cide, he “swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” His particular trauma as a 

Jewish survivor of the death camps made him abhor the abuse of human rights across the political spectrum, from apartheid in South 

Africa to the repression of dissidents in the Soviet bloc, to the situation of the Palestinians. Yet he qualified his sympathy for the Pales- 

tinians, “to whose plight I am sensitive, but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence.” Though he expressed sorrow for the 

losses on both sides and advocated peace between the two peoples, he condemned Palestinian terrorism alone for prolonging the con- 

flict, and defended Israel with reference to the threat of a future Holocaust: “Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be re- 

moved from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land. Please understand my deep and total commitment to 

Israel: if you could remember what I remember, you would understand. Israel is the only nation in the world whose very existence is 

threatened.” In this speech devoted to the universal message of the Jewish catastrophe, Wiesel evoked Holocaust memory as evidence 

of Israel’s future vulnerability, and he portrayed Israel, under the eternal shadow of the Holocaust, as the exemplar of universal 

suffering.³⁴ 

Two years later Wiesel found himself in a sticky moral dilemma, in the face of Israel’s aggression toward Palestinians during the first 

intifada. Substituting “feeling” for the real danger he had insisted upon in 1986, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “Israel is the 

only country that feels its existence threatened.” Describing his visit to Gaza during the uprising, Wiesel acknowledged the Palestinian 

right to fight for self-determination and criticized what he saw as the occasional excesses of Israeli violence. But his essay defends the 

essential morality of Israel against doubters. He writes, “Israel has not ‘lost its soul.’ Its soldiers are not sadists. They do not enjoy 

fighting stone-throwing adolescents. But confronted by them, what should a soldier do? Retreat? How far? Run away? Where?” The 

implication is that the soldiers are fighting for their existence. They have nowhere else to go. Although Wiesel contends that Israel 

should not be above criticism, he roundly criticizes its critics for describing the state as a colonial power, like France in Algeria or the 

United States in Vietnam. Even worse are those who compare Israeli’s policies to Hitler’s in Nazi Germany: “How are we to convince Is- 

rael’s political adversaries that the Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies?” he asks. For Wiesel, to see Israel as being 

under the existential threat of a new Holocaust was not a political analogy, but a truth that united feeling and reality. By disavowing the 

political uses of the Holocaust, he deployed the Holocaust politically to exempt Israel from censure and to police legitimate Holocaust 

references. Wiesel found the desire to annihilate Jews lurking in every form of Palestinian resistance, including not only terrorism and 

stone-throwing, but even poetry. He read Mahmoud Darwish’s impassioned poem “Those Who Pass between Fleeting Words,” which 

calls for Israelis to abandon Palestine to its people, as akin to violence and murder. Israel remained morally heroic to Wiesel because of 

its willingness to sue for peace despite the looming specter of the Holocaust that Palestinians represented.³⁵ 

Many Americans saw through Wiesel’s defense of Israel’s policies, and some accused him of hypocrisy. On the same page of the 

New York Times on which Wiesel’s editorial appeared, Anthony Lewis blamed Israel for intransigence and urged it to negotiate with the 

PLO. In a letter published in the New York Review of Books, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg challenged Wiesel to apply to Israel the moral stric- 

tures he had gleaned from the Holocaust. The Holocaust taught Wiesel that one should never again remain silent in the face of human 

suffering, but Wiesel remained silent in the face of Israelis beating and shooting unarmed youth, and in the face of racist character- 

izations of Palestinians by a chief of staff of the IDF as “drugged cockroaches.” Hertzberg implored him to break a silence that consti- 

tuted a defense of Israel’s right-wing policies, and to speak out against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Where Wiesel mobilized Holo- 

caust memory to defend Israel from its critics, Hertzberg joined other Jews who advocated that the memory of their own traumatic past 

should guide them toward empathy and acceptance of responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli rule.³⁶ 

Some American Jews went even further and called for separating the Holocaust altogether from the politics of the Middle East. In 

spite of the origins of the proposal for a national Holocaust memorial, some of its planners wanted to divorce its mission from overt 

partisanship for Israel. One proponent of this separation was Michael Berenbaum, who drafted the original report of the President’s 

Commission on the Holocaust, served as project director from 1988 to 1993, and played a vocal role in interpreting its purpose to the 

public. Berenbaum had a strong attachment to Israel: he volunteered there during the Six-Day War, and he was the Jewish community 

representative in Washington, D.C., who observed the foreign desk of the Washington Post during the Lebanon War in 1982. Later in the 

1980s, however, he witnessed Israel losing its mystique among American Jews and becoming a controversial issue filled with moral 

ambiguity. The Holocaust, he believed, could take Israel’s place as the moral center that unified American Jews. The planning and con- 

struction of the Holocaust Museum, wrote Berenbaum, accompanied “the events of the 1980’s [which] will slowly bring to an end the 

Israeli-centered period for American Jews.” For his generation, those events included the Lebanon fiasco, the Palestinian uprising, and 

the espionage scandal of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American intelligence analyst who was sentenced to life in prison for spying on the 

United States for Israel. With Israel having become a divisive subject among American Jews, Holocaust memory appeared to supply a 

more secure anchor point for bringing the Jewish community together around a shared traumatic past.³⁷ 

 

Liberation or Abandonment? 

 

To raise a memorial to a European genocide on the secular but sacred space of the National Mall required enormous cultural work— 

nothing less than the transformation of the Holocaust into an element of American heritage. Berenbaum, for one, believed that the 

Holocaust could provide a center of moral unity not only for Jews, but for all Americans. He made the case that a national museum 

would transform the history of a uniquely Jewish catastrophe into a universal civics lesson. The story of the Holocaust, he wrote, “had 

to be told in such a way that it would resonate not only with the survivor in New York and his children in Houston or San Francisco, but 

with a black leader from Atlanta, a midwestern farmer, or a northeastern industrialist.” Americans from different social spheres with di- 

verse values could unite against a common enemy in their recognition of the Holocaust as the paradigm of ultimate evil. Instruction in 

the Holocaust could teach the American values of “democracy, pluralism, respect for differences, individual responsibility, freedom 

from prejudice, and an abhorrence of racism.” It could also help recalibrate America’s moral compass, fractured by the social upheavals 

of the 1960s and 1970s and the depredations of the powerful in the Vietnam War and Watergate.³⁸ 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the concrete symbol of the Americanization of the Holocaust, where visitors can 

see enlightened American values represented in stark contrast with the evil darkness of the Nazis. The Americanization process had two 

strands: a national narrative framed Americanism, with its values of democracy and tolerance, as the antithesis of Nazism, and a uni- 

versal narrative framed the Holocaust as a paradigm of absolute evil, bearing lessons for protecting human rights and preventing future 

genocides. These narratives came together in a redemptive vision of the United States as the global guarantor of human rights and the 

protector of the Jewish state from future Holocausts.³⁹ 

Many of the members of the president’s commission tasked with planning the memorial wanted to keep it free from overt parti- 

sanship for Israel, and some even objected to having the president of Israel speak at the opening ceremonies in 1993.⁴⁰ America’s spe- 

cial relationship with Israel, however, was inseparable from the conception of the memorial and was woven into the framework of the 

exhibits. The idea of the Holocaust’s unique relation to Israel—as the condition of its birth and the threat of its apocalyptic end—was 

not superseded by Americanization or universalization. By presenting Nazism as the antithesis of American values, the museum paired 

Israel and America as sites of redemption, democratic havens where survivors were reborn and memory was revered. The U.S. commit- 

ment to Israel proved essential to two basic themes of the museum: America’s opposition to Nazism, and vigilance against future geno- 

cide. 

At the grand opening of the museum in 1993, speakers articulated its contradictory and complementary meanings. President Clinton 

made explicit an organic connection between the Holocaust’s nationalist and universalist implications. “The Holocaust gave rise to the 

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter of our common humanity,” he asserted; “and it contributed, indeed made certain, 

the long overdue creation of the nation of Israel.”⁴¹ In this double myth of origins, the birth of an individual nation was imbued with the 

same lofty value as the creation of a global community that transcends national boundaries. 

Clinton and the other international dignitaries spoke before a backdrop of fifteen brightly colored flags representing the units of the 

American armed forces that had liberated the concentration camps in 1945. The flags, which would become part of the permanent ex- 

hibit, represented a central narrative in the Americanization of the Holocaust. “Our military forces,” stated Clinton, “alongside the allied 

armies, played the decisive role in bringing the Holocaust to an end. Overcoming the shock of discovery, they walked survivors from 

those dark, dark places into the sweet sunlight of redemption, soldiers and survivors being forever joined in history and humanity.”⁴² 

On the same stage, Elie Wiesel presented a darker version of America’s role in the war. He castigated the U.S. government for having 

failed to liberate Jews by refusing to bomb the concentration camps in Poland. “Why weren’t the railways leading to [Auschwitz- 

]Birkenau bombed by Allied bombers?” he asked. “As long as I live I will not understand that. And why was there no public outcry of 

indignation and outrage?” According to this equally resonant narrative, the United States was not a liberator, but a guilty bystander that 

abetted the Nazi genocide by abandoning the Jews. Both narratives were part of the museum’s rationale from the start.⁴³ 

Liberator or failed rescuer? Which best describes America’s role in the Holocaust? These two stories describe different historical mo- 

ments with different actors, and they rely on different ways of thinking about history. “Liberation” might describe what ordinary soldiers 

witnessed at the war’s end, and it offered a coherent framework for making sense of the brutal scenes that the soldiers and journalists 

first encountered in the death camps.⁴⁴ The decision not to bomb Auschwitz describes a government decision made at the highest ech- 

elon during the war. Both stories contributed retrospectively to making the Holocaust central to the American memory of World War II 

by giving Americans major roles to play in ending the slaughter—in one case a role that they carried out, and in the other a role that they 

failed to fulfill. Together, both narratives convey the same message not only about the past but also about the present and future: Amer- 

ican military might is a virtuous force for liberating the oppressed from tyranny. 

For the United States as well as Israel, Holocaust memory could restore an honorable picture of military force, which was suffering 

from disillusionment in both countries. For Israel, its identity as a community of Holocaust victims—in the past and potential future— 

justified its righteous exercise of violence during the Lebanon War and the first intifada. For the United States, the role of liberator and 

the imperative to rescue contributed to the idealization of World War II as the “good war” and its soldiers as the “Greatest Generation,” 

to counteract deep cynicism about the overwhelming abuse of military power in Southeast Asia and to burnish the tarnished images of 

both the American soldier and the nation’s military command. 

The commemoration of American soldiers as liberators of concentration camps was made official in 1979, just as the president’s 

commission presented its plans for the memorial. To mark the thirty-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Dachau by American troops, 

Congress designated April 28 and 29 as Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust. President Carter asked Americans to 

“observe this solemn anniversary of the liberation of Dachau with appropriate study, prayers and commemoration as a tribute to the 

spirit of freedom, justice and compassion which Americans fought to preserve.”⁴⁵ Americans were being asked to remember not only 

the victims of the Nazis’ murderous regime, but also the nobility of American opposition to that regime. 

In actuality, Americans were not the only, or even the primary, liberators of the death camps, and the operation was more haphazard 

than the word “liberation” implies. The Soviet Army was the first to reach a major extermination camp, Madjanek, and then to enter 

Auschwitz and other sites in the east, months before U.S. troops reached Buchenwald and Dachau. The U.S. Army command initially 

had no plans to free camp inmates, and soldiers who stumbled across the death camps reported feeling overcome, dazed, and even re- 

pulsed by the survivors they found there. At first, the army continued to use some of the camps as displaced persons camps. Retro- 

spectively, the idea of liberation allows Americans to imagine their own intimate presence in history, to touch an unspeakable but 

monumental reality, and it offers glorification of the nation’s altruistic purpose in fighting the war. 

This idealization of the American soldier had great appeal during the Reagan era. As a presidential nominee, Reagan rejected the 

“Vietnam syndrome” and called that war a “noble cause.” In his Days of Remembrance speech, Reagan proudly referred to the liberation 

of the camps as evidence of America’s exceptional “genius for great and unselfish deeds,” and he proclaimed that “into the hands of 

America, God has placed an afflicted mankind.”⁴⁶ Reagan never failed to link America’s magnanimity to its contemporary defense of Is- 

rael from the threat of a new Holocaust. Having rescued the Jews from the horrors of Nazism, America had an ongoing obligation to “a 

people whose country was reborn from the ashes of the Holocaust—a country that rightfully never takes its security or its survival for 

granted.”⁴⁷ In the rhetoric of the Cold War, Reagan tied the American liberation of Jews from Nazi concentration camps to the current 

movement to free Soviet Jews from communist tyranny. In his speech at the ceremony laying the cornerstone of the Holocaust Mu- 

seum, he called on the Soviet Union to “let these people go!”⁴⁸ 

This theme is most dramatically embodied in the monument Liberation, created by sculptor Natan Rapoport and dedicated in May 

1985 in Liberty State Park, New Jersey. The larger-than-life bronze sculpture depicts a young American soldier trudging with his head 

bowed and carrying a gaunt concentration camp victim in his arms, cradling him in a pieta-like position. The soldier’s youthful chest 

merges with the emaciated ribs of the victim, “as if sharing one heart,” according to the Department of Defense’s Guide to Days of 

Remembrance. With the Statue of Liberty on its cover, this guide explains that the monument is “a symbol of the strong helping the 

weak, not persecuting them. It is a tribute to the best of America’s dreams, freedom, compassion, bravery.”⁴⁹ The official state reso- 

lution dedicating the monument explains that its purpose is “to recognize that our servicemen fought, not to conquer nor to be aggres- 

sors, but rather to rescue and restore freedom to those persecuted and oppressed.”⁵⁰ This monument to the liberators of Holocaust 

victims displaces still-vivid memories of American war-making in Southeast Asia with an idealized model of the American GI from 

World War II as a strong and caring savior.⁵¹ 

Celebrating the liberation of Jewish survivors enhanced the belief in the good war as the standard of American virtue. George W. 

Bush, campaigning for president in 1999, claimed: “No one during World War II questioned what it meant to be ‘American’ ”—it meant 

that “we were liberators, not conquerors. And when American soldiers hugged the survivors of death camps, and shared their tears, and 

welcomed them back from a nightmare world, our country was confirmed in its calling.”⁵² The theme of liberation accompanied a geo- 

graphic shift in the focus of popular history and fiction about World War II from the Pacific to the European theater. At a time when the 

Greatest Generation was rediscovered as a national legend, one could imagine from such statements that liberating the death camps 

had actually provided the motivation to enter World War II. 

 

 

Liberation, statue by Natan Rapoport, depicting a soldier carrying a World War II concentration camp survivor, at Liberty State Park in 

Jersey City, NJ. 

 

The union of American soldiers and Jewish survivors provides an overarching framework for the United States Holocaust Memorial 

Museum. The permanent exhibition starts with American GIs encountering Buchenwald and ends with concentration camp survivors 

rebuilding their lives in Israel and the United States. In the architecture of the building itself, the narrative of liberation offers a stable 

reference point for the visitor’s unsettling encounter with the history of Nazi atrocities. One entrance is flanked by the flags of the liber- 

ating troops, and presidential statements about the arrival of American soldiers at the camps are engraved on the other side. The van- 

tage point of American GIs provides the opening image: visitors encounter shocking, wall-sized photographs of charred corpses in 

Buchenwald through the horrified eyes and bewildered commentaries of American soldiers. The museum represents American troops 

as paradigmatic witnesses to history, and witnessing becomes a heroic and morally imperative act. The story of liberation concludes 

with the survivors’ deliverance to the twin havens of America and Israel. At the end of the exhibit, the story of liberation takes on an inti- 

mate domestic dimension through a touching interview with a middle-class American couple who met when his army unit liberated the 

camp where his future wife was being held. A video of the interview is shown in a small amphitheater lined with Jerusalem stone. This 

personal story takes place against the background of historical markers that unite America and Israel as welcoming sites of redemption. 

The exhibit of the postwar rebirth includes artifacts related to the founding of Israel—including photographs of the SS Exodus and a six- 

foot facsimile of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The journey through the darkened exhibit space concludes as visitors ascend 

into the Hall of Remembrance. There an eternal light burns over buried soil from Holocaust sites and Arlington Cemetery, comingling 

for eternity the memory of the victims and the American troops who liberated the camps.⁵³ 

The Holocaust Museum does not unreservedly celebrate the American role as liberator. It also indicts the United States for failing to 

rescue Jews by refusing to bomb Auschwitz. The question of whether bombing the gas chambers and railroad lines in 1944 was mili- 

tarily feasible or could have saved lives is controversial among historians. No one, after all, can evaluate with certainty the effects of an 

event that did not occur. In honor of the opening of the Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Mu- 

seum cosponsored a conference on the topic, where the debates were intense and the participants divided.⁵⁴ When the museum 

opened, it nonetheless enshrined the counterfactual narrative that lives would have been saved if the United States had bombed 

Auschwitz. It displayed an enlarged copy of a U.S. Air Force intelligence photograph of Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1944 and a letter 

from Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCoy rejecting a “request by the World Jewish Congress to bomb the Auschwitz concentration 

camp.” Rather than referring to the historians’ debate, the caption asserted as fact that “although bombing Auschwitz would have killed 

many prisoners, it would also have halted the operation of the gas chambers and, ultimately, saved the lives of many more.”⁵⁵ 

The belief that the Roosevelt administration knowingly abandoned Jews by refusing to bomb Auschwitz operates as a kind of folk his- 

tory with great emotional power.⁵⁶ The museum exhibit also criticizes the Allies for not taking in more refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. 

But outrage about the failure to bomb has had greater endurance than has indignation at restrictive immigration laws. The conviction 

that bombing Auschwitz would have rescued Jews draws on the moral clarity of hindsight and a magical belief in the efficacy of air- 

power. The assumption that the United States bears responsibility for not bombing Auschwitz gives added significance to the phrase 

“Never Again,” and it has been mobilized for different political purposes. In the opening ceremonies for the museum, Wiesel raised this 

failure in order to exhort Clinton to “do something” in Kosovo. And when NATO carried out its controversial air strikes in 1999, Wiesel 

praised the United States for taking the kind of action in Kosovo that it had failed to take during World War II.⁵⁷ In a speech before 

AIPAC in 2012, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, held up copies of the 1944 letters in which the War Department re- 

buffed the request to bomb Auschwitz, to warn of the dangers of negotiating with Iran instead of using force.⁵⁸ 

Liberating the death camps and failing to bomb Auschwitz may evoke starkly conflicting emotions of pride and guilt. But these narra- 

tives worked together to create a shared vision of American military power as a force for salvation—whether cradling the weak or blast- 

ing the strong. Mobilizing the memory of inaction during the 1940s reminded Americans in later decades that the United States has the 

obligation to redeem its past failure by wielding military power to protect the innocent and to defy tyrants. This argument has appealed 

to people across a range of political positions, from neoconservatives dedicated to restoring American imperial might to humanitarian 

interventionists committed to the “responsibility to protect.” 

American presidents have ritually accepted guilt for not doing more to rescue Jews during World War II. They have, however, refused 

to accept guilt for destruction caused by U.S. military action. President Carter, as we have seen, was the first president to express a 

sense of guilt for abandoning the Jews. He presented Wiesel with copies of the aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau when asking 

him to serve as chair of the commission. Yet Carter rejected American culpability for the devastating bombing of Vietnam and neigh- 

boring countries. He not only opposed monetary reparations, but rejected any moral obligation. “The destruction was mutual,” he 

avowed. “We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people.… I don’t feel we ought to 

apologize or castigate ourselves or assume the status of culpability.” George McGovern and his supporters opposed Carter’s position 

during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but their willingness to accept guilt about Vietnam was criticized as a 

symptom of national weakness and divisiveness. Carter claimed to represent a party seeking national renewal and unity.⁵⁹ 

Why would Carter, and many Americans, reject guilt for the damage inflicted by American power in Southeast Asia but accept guilt 

for not wielding that power to stop the Holocaust? An obvious answer is that the latter is cost-free, though it has morally underwritten 

costly obligations to Israel. Historian Barbara Keys has argued that some Americans in the Carter era championed the cause of human 

rights abroad to revive a sense of national virtue that had been tarnished in the Vietnam War.⁶⁰ The American embrace of the Holocaust 

as their own history, with both guilt and pride, may have had a similar effect, allowing Americans to oppose atrocities that others com- 

mitted in the past. A Holocaust Museum on the National Mall provided a painless way to both acknowledge American guilt and redeem 

American virtue. 

The tension between failure and liberation in the story of the Holocaust was part of a bigger controversy about American history dur- 

ing the “culture wars” of the 1990s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to mostly reverent reviews at a time when 

other major exhibits of American history were generating fierce controversy. The museum was not free from criticism—some ques- 

tioned the priority of memorializing a European genocide when there were no national memorials to the genocide of Native Americans 

or the enslavement of African Americans. Others raised questions about whether the museum was turning the Holocaust into a spec- 

tacle. But these questions were mild compared with the criticism that erupted around the same time about two Smithsonian exhibitions, 

one on the western United States, and one on the use of the atomic bomb in World War II. 

In 1991, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art mounted an exhibit titled The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of 

the Frontier, 1820–1920. Conservative critics blasted the exhibit for undercutting the noble myth of Manifest Destiny, and, instead, point- 

ing to the way traditional images veiled the violence and dispossession of Native Americans in the march of westward expansion. The 

suggestion that familiar frontier images included racist depictions and glorified a history of displacement, pillage, and atrocity was an 

anathema to conservatives, who had no trouble accepting a national museum memorializing the victims of genocide committed by 

Nazis in Europe.⁶¹ 

The same year the Holocaust Museum opened, a greater controversy enveloped a Smithsonian announcement to organize an exhibit 

around the display of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The curators planned an exhibit that would 

have explored the multiple causes and ramifications of the bomb, including the political and military reasons for using it, the unprece- 

dented destruction it caused, and its role in ending the war. Veterans’ groups and politicians raised such an outcry that they succeeded 

in shutting down the exhibit before it opened. Their argument, too, relied on a narrative of rescue with a speculative dimension asserted 

as fact: that bombing Hiroshima had saved the lives of thousands, perhaps even a million, American servicemen from dying in what 

would have been a bloody land invasion. These critics believed that to explore the damage wrought by the bomb and raise the question 

of its morality would be an affront to veterans and would desecrate the memory of all those American soldiers who had sacrificed their 

lives during the war.⁶² 

These exhibits generated outrage because they challenged a core belief of American exceptionalism, that the country exercises mili- 

tary force only for righteous ends. No public outcries were raised against exhibits at the Holocaust Museum that criticized the United 

States for failing to bomb Auschwitz or to rescue Jews. On the contrary, this failure became an item of received wisdom about the war, 

and public officials ritually admitted American culpability at Holocaust commemorations. Guilt for not bombing Auschwitz did not de- 

tract from the mythic narrative about American virtue; instead, it contributed to the idea that America has the power and the moral obli- 

gation to exercise force for humanitarian ends. The United States ought to behave as its better self—to act out its essential identity as 

liberator. Since the Holocaust was not only a catastrophe from the past, but an ever-threatening possibility in the future, this narrative 

implied that the United States could get it right this time—by supporting Israel and deploying its firepower to save innocents and pre- 

vent new Holocausts. 

In American popular culture, the best-known savior of Jews from the Nazis is not an American GI but a German businessman, Oskar 

Schindler. Based on a historical novel about a real German entrepreneur and Nazi party member, Schindler’s List (1993), directed by 

Steven Spielberg, tells the story of Schindler’s change of heart and his successful effort to protect the Jewish workers at his factory in 

Krakow, Poland, from being taken to the death camps.⁶³ Two months after the Holocaust Museum opened its doors to the public, 

Spielberg’s film was released to reverential critical acclaim. The media treated the film, the first big-budget Hollywood film about the 

Holocaust, as more of an event than a movie, a “document of witnessing,” as Spielberg told Newsweek. Public officials, including Pres- 

ident Clinton, personally attested to its impact and implored the public to see it. Free public screenings were offered to high school stu- 

dents all over the country, and it has remained a centerpiece of school curricula ever since. As James Young noted, “There are a couple 

of gigantic institutions now, Spielberg being one and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum being another, which are defining a kind of 

public consciousness of the Holocaust.”⁶⁴ Both institutions contributed to a view of the Holocaust as bonding the United States to Is- 

rael. 

The film presents both sides of the American liberation narrative: pride for what was done, and guilt for what was not. The plot re- 

volves around Schindler’s rescue of 1,100 Jews on his celebrated list. As the character that viewers most identity with, Schindler is 

recognizable as a Hollywood protagonist: a heroic individual, a lusty can-do capitalist with a mind of his own, who, upon witnessing the 

suffering of others, rises above political ideology to do the right thing. Viewers also witness his moral growth and awakening, as he 

painfully begins to realize the limits of his efforts to oppose the evil power of the Nazis. Although Schindler saves “his Jews,” he comes 

to recognize his failure to rescue more. In a moving scene at the war’s end, Schindler sinks to his knees under the weight of overpow- 

ering guilt, and he repeats the words expressing his terrible remorse: “I could have saved more. I could have saved more.” 

The film’s narrative of liberation requires Israel as a haven for deliverance. Schindler’s List concludes in Jerusalem as the site of re- 

demption for both Schindler and his Jews. Like the ending of the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Spielberg’s film culminates in the memory 

of Israel’s rebirth out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Yet it ends in a Jerusalem cemetery where the real Schindler is buried. 

Israel may be a conventional destination for popular Holocaust narratives, but Spielberg arrives there by breaking from the docu- 

mentary quality of the rest of the film to transport his characters to Jerusalem through a cinematic feat of magical realism. Unlike the 

end of the Holocaust miniseries, or the beginning of Exodus, no Mossad agent from Palestine leads the survivors to the Promised Land. 

Instead, as they sit listlessly along the railroad tracks, a Russian soldier on horseback tells them that they are not wanted in the East or 

the West, and he points over a hill where they can find food. The group then links arms and marches as a phalanx up the hill, with the 

Israeli song “Jerusalem of Gold” playing in the background, making a contrast with the plaintive violin theme played throughout the 

film. The camera focuses on the weathered yet hopeful faces until they reach the crest of the hill, and then everything changes in one 

frozen shot. The film switches from black and white to color, from past to present, from fiction to reality. The young actors are replaced 

by the actual, now elderly Jews whom Schindler saved, and at the same time, the landscape changes under their feet from the grass- 

covered hill of Poland to the dry stony ground of Jerusalem. The scene then shifts to Schindler’s gravesite in a Christian cemetery on a 

Jerusalem hillside, bathed in bright Mediterranean light. The aging survivors walk haltingly down an incline to place a stone on 

Schindler’s tombstone, which is engraved with a cross and Hebrew writing. They are accompanied by the actors who have played their 

younger selves. 

Israeli previews of the film criticized Spielberg’s choice of “Jerusalem of Gold,” for its historical anachronism and political 

implications.⁶⁵ The song became hugely popular during the Six-Day War and has endured as a national anthem celebrating military con- 

quest and messianic longing. The question of anachronism, however, is moot. The film’s ending posits an ahistorical timeless connec- 

tion between the Holocaust and Israel, with Jerusalem as its mystical uncontested center. The history of 1948 disappears, and the vic- 

tory song magically transports survivors from Poland to Jerusalem. Even though the individuals actually saved by Schindler dispersed 

to many countries, the film brings them all to Jerusalem to memorialize their liberator, as though it were their final destination. What 

links the Holocaust and Israel in the movie is the timeless obligation to honor the dead. The universal message of the film, about 

Schindler overcoming indifference to rescue the weak, merges with the nationalist message, epitomized by “Jerusalem of Gold.” The 

only part of Israel shown in the film is the graveyard visited by elderly survivors. No nation of refugees, pioneers, or fighters appears— 

only a memorial site that unites the liberator and the liberated in a ritual of commemoration. Spielberg’s cinematic magic projects a 

timeless bond between the liberator, the survivor, and the land of Israel. 

5

THE FUTURE HOLOCAUST

FOR MANY AMERICANS, the horror of the Holocaust serves as the basis for their support of Israel. Others believe that the tragedy has been politicized in order to sustain that support. The clash between these views intensified during the 1982 Lebanon War, when advocates and opponents of the invasion argued over which combatants were acting like Nazis. The paradoxical view of Israel as an invincible victim never lost its allure in the United States, even in the face of Israel’s military dominance in Lebanon and in the occupied territories during the first intifada. Israel’s status as an eternal victim actually gained strength throughout the 1980s, as the Holocaust became a more prominent feature of the American cultural landscape.

Official commemorations, presidential speeches, mass culture, and school curricula taught Americans not only about the historical catastrophe that befell Jews in Europe, but also about the Holocaust as a chapter of their own history in World War II. A museum of the Holocaust was built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As the Holocaust was becoming part of America’s national heritage, its temporal significance in relation to Israel was changing as well. The Holocaust began to represent more than the horrific suffering of the Jewish people in the past—now it also signified an imminent threat to the future of the Jewish state. A past atrocity in Europe came to foreshadow an impending apocalypse in the Middle East.

New narrative bonds were forged between America’s newfound past and Israel’s precarious future. Interest in Holocaust memory boomed at a time when both countries were facing crises of wars gone awry—indeed, Israel was said to have had its own Vietnam in Lebanon. These crises had created internal divisions and international opprobrium, and challenged the belief in the moral authority of military power, a bedrock of their shared exceptionalism. The birth of Israel might be understood as the redemption of Jewish suffering, but the discovery of Holocaust memory as an American national concern also confirmed American exceptionalism and renewed the bond between the two nations.

Remembering the Future

In 1978, two events propelled the Holocaust to the center of American consciousness. An NBC television miniseries called Holocaust was viewed by more than 100 million Americans in April. And a month later, President Jimmy Carter initiated plans for what would ultimately become the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On May 1, 1978, Carter hosted a celebration for Israel’s thirtieth anniversary in the Rose Garden of the White House, where he welcomed Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin along with six hundred leaders of American Jewish organizations. For a birthday party, the tone of the ceremony was notably somber, as was the gift Carter presented to his guests. He announced the formation of a presidential commission charged with planning an American memorial to the six million who were killed in the Holocaust. He soon appointed noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as chairman, and the commission embarked on the process of designing a memorial to commemorate, on American soil, the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe.¹

Carter’s commission aimed to rescue the memory of genocide victims from the oblivion of the past. But the timing addressed a more immediate controversy over his Middle East policy. In 1977, Carter became the first American president to utter the phrase Palestinian homeland. He antagonized the Israeli government and its American supporters by proposing to include the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in an international peace conference cosponsored by the Soviet Union. Begin expressed outrage at a press conference, denouncing PLO members as Huns, its policy as an Arab Mein Kampf, and its diplomacy as a subterfuge for its true goal: to destroy a people; to annihilate people. The method: genocide—to kill man, woman, and child.² Negotiating over territory and recognition of Palestinian rights was, in Begin’s terms, tantamount to exposing Israel to a second Holocaust. In less inflammatory rhetoric, American supporters of Israel also criticized Carter for putting Israel at risk by proposing to negotiate with the PLO and planning to sell fighter jets to Saudi Arabia.

In a bid to mollify Carter’s critics, his aides recommended that he propose the creation of a national memorial to the Holocaust. In his Rose Garden speech, he vowed that America’s total absolute commitment to Israel’s security would ensure for all times that the Jewish people will not be condemned to repeat the Holocaust. In response, Begin called Carter’s address one of the greatest moral statements ever.³

After Carter’s announcement, four different presidents pledged their commitment to the project during a period that witnessed the end of the Cold War. Democrats and Republicans alike vowed that the memory of the Holocaust would remind Americans of their enduring obligation to the State of Israel. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors to the public. The museum has deeply affected millions of visitors from all over the world. It serves to document the rise of Nazism and the ghastly methods of slaughter, to memorialize the dead and preserve the traumatic memories of survivors, and to transmit the profound meanings of the Holocaust to communities across generations. But when we look back at the history of the memorial, it becomes clear that this national institution of memory, dedicated to facing the ultimate evil of the past and to imparting universal values to the future, bears indelible traces of its origins in America’s Middle East policies, especially its commitment to support Israel.

At the 1978 White House ceremony announcing the formation of the presidential commission, Carter related a narrative of the origins of the special relationship, claiming that it was born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, alongside the Jewish state. Moral outrage at Nazi atrocities, he claimed, led the United States to recognize the new state in 1948—before any other nation did. Penance as well as pride drove this allegiance, for Carter acknowledged that Americans had turned their backs on Jews seeking refuge from Nazi brutality. In founding a state, Jews valiantly created for themselves a home that the world had denied them. Celebrating Israel’s thirtieth anniversary, Carter focused not on its pioneering spirit or its modern accomplishments, but on its indomitable will to survive, and he equated Israel’s survival with its capacity to avert a second Holocaust. Carter asserted that America’s commitment to establishing the nation

of Israel and to protecting it from future threats arose spontaneously from the encounter with the death camps at the end of World War II and had continued unbroken into the present.⁴

Carter’s speech sounds so familiar today that it may be hard to believe how novel it was at the time. Carter was the first American president to place the Holocaust at the center of America’s commitment to Israel and to claim culpability for past inaction as a moral guide to present policy. His predecessors in the Oval Office rarely called attention to the Holocaust. As the first U.S. president to visit Israel, Richard Nixon only reluctantly agreed to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He understood the rearming of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a strategic move against the Soviet Union and did not describe it as a mission to save Israel from destruction. President Lyndon Johnson, in his warmest professions of friendship, identified Israel as a frontier state like Texas, and in the lead-up to the Six-Day War, neither he nor his advisors referred to Israel as a potential victim of genocide. Only after Carter’s presidency did U.S. presidents routinely invoke the Holocaust as the ethical foundation of their relationship with Israel. This change reflected a shift that was going on in American culture about how the Holocaust was viewed, a shift that began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s. In this way, American presidents have followed public discourse about the Holocaust as much as they have shaped it.⁵

The Holocaust as an overarching concept and a proper noun for the systematic Nazi extermination of European Jews did not come into general American circulation until the 1970s, as historian Peter Novick and others have shown. At the end of World War II, the American public did not single out the Final Solution as a Jewish catastrophe separate from the overall Nazi carnage that afflicted Europe. Jews mourned their dead within their own communities, while the wider public incorporated Jewish suffering into a broader conception of Nazi barbarism and the universal horrors of war. According to this narrative, the United States and its allies soundly defeated the Nazi regime, brought its crimes to justice, and consigned its atrocities to the dark ages of the past. Postwar anxiety about the future focused on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which evoked fears of imminent catastrophe—that American cities could be subject to the same inferno. Although it is a common assumption that World War II led to the universal determination to prevent future genocides, in the United States at the time, victory over Nazism was regarded as representing the end of an era; it was Hiroshima that had inaugurated a fearsome new age.⁶

Outrage at the Nazi slaughter of Jews was indeed central to postwar support for establishing a Jewish state and to the subsequent narrative about its founding, as we saw in previous chapters. But supporters of the Zionist movement and the early Israeli state did not express fear of a resurgent genocide. Liberal Zionist supporters in the 1940s did not rest their case for a state on the need to protect Jews from future extermination, nor did their accounts of the battles of 1948 raise the threat of annihilation. Leon Uris’s Exodus was not haunted by the specter of a new Holocaust. For supporters of Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, the Nazi genocide explained the historical origins of the Jewish state but did not represent a threat to its ongoing existence.

As Nazi atrocities receded into the past, the emergence of Holocaust consciousness involved an important shift in its temporal meaning. The Holocaust entered public awareness not only as a horrific event in the past, but as an event that might be repeated in the imminent future. A related geographic shift from Europe to the Middle East made the Jewish state the locus of this threatening new catastrophe. This fear of a second Holocaust started in Israel in the 1960s after the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1962 and during the lead-up to the Six-Day War in 1967.⁷ The idea entered American public discourse along with the growth of Holocaust memory in the following decade. According to this way of thinking, the Nazi extermination of Jews not only explained Israel’s historical origins, but also signified an impending threat to its future survival. In 1948, Americans celebrated Israel’s creation as the death knell for Nazism, but three decades later, they treated the Holocaust as a timeless template for Israel’s existential vulnerability, with Arabs viewed as reincarnated Nazis.

The Holocaust came to represent the precariousness of Israel’s survival at a time when the new country was becoming more militarily secure in the region. Seeing Israel as the legacy of the Holocaust contributed to the sense of its vulnerability as a perpetual victim of Arab aggression. Novick contends that the Yom Kippur War awakened fears of Israel’s demise among American Jews because of the surprise attack, launched on the holiest day of the year, and the unexpectedly high number of Israeli casualties—despite the fact that Egyptian and Syrian troops never advanced beyond their own territories that had been captured in 1967, and that the United States came to Israel’s aid with a massive airlift of weapons. As in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, talk of annihilation increased in proportion to the decisiveness of Israel’s victory. As deeply felt as these fears were, pro-Israel organizations were equally alarmed by international criticism of Israel as an oppressive occupying power, and by the international consensus that Israel should relinquish to Palestinian rule the territories it had conquered in 1967. A representative publication is The New Anti-Semitism, written by Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League and published in 1974, which argued that condemnation of Israel arose not from opposition to Israeli policy in the occupied territories, but from the world’s forgetting about Jewish victimization in the Holocaust. Forster and Epstein insisted that the world needed to be reminded of the Holocaust, for fear that failure to remember it would diminish support for Israel and thus threaten Jews with a new genocide in the Middle East.⁸

The idea that a second Holocaust threatened to destroy Israel did not abate with the massive increase in U.S. aid under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, or when the peace treaty with Egypt removed its military threat in 1979, or when the Israeli government annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, or when it invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. On the contrary, talk of a new Holocaust increased as Israeli military power grew, and Holocaust analogies often justified the exercise of that power. When Menachem Begin became prime minister in 1977, his fiery rhetoric introduced this way of thinking to the American media. Begin’s worldview had been shaped profoundly by his personal losses in the Holocaust, and he saw any threat to Israel in the present through the lens of the Nazi genocide. Begin’s views of the Holocaust strongly influenced the basic doctrine of the Israeli government, and this doctrine also became central to American views of Israel.⁹

In 1979, Israel launched a surprise attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor and received widespread condemnation for violating

international law. Begin justified the attack as a preemption of future genocide. The lesson he took from the Holocaust was not only that Jews were eternal victims, but also that it was impossible to trust anyone else to protect them. Israel alone had both the moral obligation and the right to defend itself by any means necessary. In this way of thinking, if total annihilation always imperiled Israel, then no military action could ever be judged as excessive. When the Reagan administration announced that Israel might have breached an arms agreement by using American fighter jets in the raid, Begin responded by claiming that Israel had a right to guard its children, since one million children had been killed with poison gas by the Germans and radioactivity is also poison. If Israel hadn’t bombed the plant, he argued, another Holocaust would have happened to Israel and her people.¹⁰ Even though the association between nuclear power plants and gas chambers may have seemed dubious, this way of framing Israel’s military ventures appealed to the moral clarity of a struggle against evil epitomized by the Holocaust.

Begin made his most impassioned appeals to Holocaust memory during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, equating Palestinians with Nazis intent on committing genocide and identifying Israelis as the true victims in the war. In a widely publicized letter to President Reagan, Begin wrote, I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface. My generation, dear Ron, swore on the altar of God that whoever proclaims his intent to destroy the Jewish state or the Jewish people seals his fate so what happened in Berlin … will never happen again. In this intimate public address, Begin blamed civilian causalities on the current unnamed Hitler. World War II was more than a metaphor for Begin, more even than an example of the past illuminating the present. A potential Holocaust hid beneath the surface of the present, poised to rear up at any moment if Israel failed to stop it. At a time when Israeli forces faced international criticism for brutality, Begin deemed them valiant because they were battling Nazis to avert another Holocaust.¹¹

To claim exclusive possession of the Holocaust as a living analogy entailed policing its usage by others. In an August 1982 interview, Begin expressed outrage at Reagan for using the word holocaust to describe Israel’s day-long bombardment of West Beirut. Although one sense of the English word does mean massive destruction especially by fire, and would be a fitting description for the conflagration caused by the bombing that day, Begin claimed that the word should only be used in its more exclusive sense, to refer to the Nazi genocide of Jews. He accused Reagan of personally hurting him by using that word and asserted that only he knew what is a holocaust. As proof he displayed the iconic photograph of a frightened young boy, hands raised in the air, taken during the roundup of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Begin explained that Israelis never intentionally targeted civilians, but that the PLO placed them in danger by hiding military installations among them. Israelis always mourned the killing of children, he asserted, in stark contrast to both Nazis and Palestinian terrorists, who celebrated the murder of Jewish children.¹²

In 1982, Begin used the high moral ground of the Holocaust to deflect widespread criticism of Israel’s use of force against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. He also drew on Nazi analogies to explain why he would not negotiate with the PLO leaders, even if they accepted Israel’s right to exist: I wouldn’t believe Hitler, or Goering or Goebbels, and I will not believe Mr. Arafat, or Farouk Khaddoumi, or Abu Iyad. For Begin and his Likud Party, which had every intention of keeping the occupied territories—land that they called Greater Israel—nothing was more threatening than the Palestinians’ willingness to compromise. Begin thus placed out of bounds any negotiations with a group of men who, he claimed, had no other aim than to exterminate Jews once again.¹³

Begin’s righteous deployment of the Holocaust provoked a backlash. Critics of the war used their own Holocaust references to undercut his high moral ground, particularly after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. To a country that rose out of Hitler’s death camps, wrote journalist David Shipler, the answers ‘We did not do it’ and ‘We did not know’ are not enough. But the focus on Begin’s rhetorical excess did not succeed in dislodging the narrative that Israel was threatened by a second Holocaust. It had taken hold before the invasion of Lebanon in distinctly American idioms that would continue to invest Begin’s strident nationalism with universal significance. That the first American president to endorse Palestinian rights tried to assuage Israeli and Jewish objections by proposing a Holocaust memorial suggests how the Holocaust would be used in portraying a Palestinian homeland as an existential threat to the Jewish homeland.¹⁴

In 1978, as we saw, the presidential commission established by Carter helped to impress upon the American public the idea that the Holocaust was not only a past event of immeasurable terror, but that it also inextricably linked the United States to the birth of Israel and to current threats to the country’s existence. The other major event that brought the Holocaust to the attention of Americans that year was the miniseries Holocaust, which tens of millions of Americans watched on TV for four consecutive nights in April 1978. For many viewers, the epic story of an upper-class, assimilated Jewish family from Berlin would have provided their first encounter with an overarching narrative of the Holocaust that tied together the different landmarks of the Nazis’ mass extermination of European Jews: Kristallnacht, Babi Yar, the Warsaw Ghetto, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz. Although the nine-and-a-half-hour series ends where Exodus begins, with the sole surviving Jewish character about to take a group of orphans to Palestine, Israel’s impending creation is foreshadowed throughout the series.¹⁵

In the final scene, a Mossad agent—someone much like Ari Ben Canaan—recruits the only remaining member of the Weiss family, Rudi, to escort the orphaned refugees on an illegal voyage to Palestine. The agent tells Rudi that the Jewish Agency in Palestine already knows his history and has singled him out for this role. The audience has similarly viewed Rudy as a proto-Israeli throughout the film because of his actions during the war. In contrast to the rest of his family, who remain naïvely loyal to German culture and are unable to resist their fate, Rudy’s independent fighting spirit spurs him to flee Germany and join a band of Ukrainian Jewish partisans, with whom he later leads an armed rebellion in Sobibór concentration camp. Rudy, however, knows little of the Zionist movement. When he teases his young Czech wife about her silly dreams of growing oranges in Palestine, viewers understand that these dreams will indeed come true. Rudi’s ignorance of Zionism lends an organic quality to the idea that he is emigrating to his true homeland. That Jewish fighters in Europe would naturally become Israelis is suggested by scenes in the Warsaw Ghetto, where leaders of the uprising unfurl an Israeli flag. Although the story ends three years before the founding of the state, its conclusion gestures to the birth of the nation as the

inevitable redemption of immeasurable suffering.

The miniseries linked the Holocaust to Israel’s founding as a historical and moral necessity. It was accompanied by a torrent of promotional publicity, guides for schools and churches, and follow-up polls, and much of the pedagogical material included information about the significance of present-day Israel. The playwright of the miniseries, Gerald Green, wrote a novelized version, serialized by many newspapers, with over a million paperback copies sent to bookstores two weeks in advance of the broadcast. The novel emphatically connects the Holocaust to Israel’s current danger. It begins in Israel with an older Rudi Weiss teaching guerrilla warfare to his sons, who are defending their kibbutz from Syrian bombardment. The American Jewish Committee commissioned a nationwide survey on the viewing experience of the miniseries. In addition to questions on what viewers had learned about history and how the series affected their attitudes toward Jews, it included questions about how the series affected viewers’ attitudes toward the current situation in the Middle East. Results of the survey showed that viewers are more sympathetic to Israel than nonviewers and that viewers see some sense in American Jewish support of Israel. In another informal survey, a Lutheran magazine asked its readers the question: "How has Holocaust affected or focused your faith? To many Christians and non-Christians the answer was simple: now they understand the passion behind the Jewish sentiment behind Israel." Recognition of the Holocaust as a traumatic memory did more than explain the psychology of American Jews—why, for instance, they might fear attacks on Israel. It also explained how the Holocaust signified a living threat to Israel’s existence and why non-Jews should feel obligated to support Israel.¹⁶

This was the message promulgated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which sent a copy of the novel to every member of Congress as part of an intense lobbying campaign against a plan to sell aircraft to Saudi Arabia. An editorial in AIPAC’s biweekly journal stated that Green’s novel and the miniseries should make all Americans more aware of the moral imperative of America’s commitment to Israel’s capacity to defend its citizens.¹⁷ For AIPAC, the Holocaust was a new item in its promotional repertoire. The word first appeared in the index of its biweekly Near East Report in 1979. Not until 1983 did the AIPAC Policy Statement include a reference to the Holocaust. To earlier assertions about shared ideals and strategic assets, the 1983 statement added that the United States recognized Israel’s role in providing a safe home for victims of the Holocaust and for Jews persecuted everywhere. As popular culture was becoming more widely acquainted with the Holocaust, AIPAC mustered these associations to identify Israel with the survivors of the Holocaust, the same year it was countering pro-Palestinian views on American campuses in the wake of the Lebanon War.¹⁸

Never Again

Elie Wiesel was the public figure who most forcefully conveyed to the American public the living presence of the Holocaust and the continuing threat that it posed to the existence of Israel. He drew on the authority of his personal trauma as a young prisoner at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and on his life’s commitment to bear witness to the unspeakable atrocities inflicted on Jews. With his numinous presence, his expression of moral angst, his haunted voice, and the anguish etched in the lines of his face, he personified the authenticity of the Holocaust survivor. His own rise to public prominence was inseparable from the rise of Holocaust memory in American public awareness. Millions of schoolchildren read his autobiographical book, Night; he advised American presidents and in 1985 famously chastised President Reagan for planning a state visit to a German military cemetery. He accompanied world leaders and celebrities on pilgrimages to the sites of concentration camps, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wiesel insisted on the uniquely Jewish nature of the Holocaust. He often stated that the Holocaust should transcend politics and that its representation in popular culture, such as in the TV miniseries, trivialized its significance. He spoke of the Holocaust in semireligious terms as an ineffable and timeless catastrophe that eternally threatened to recur. Wiesel related the exceptional evil of the Holocaust to Israel’s exceptional morality and to the unique threats to its existence. He shared Begin’s vigorous nationalism and right-wing views, but at the same time, he translated Jewish nationalism into the language of universal humanism. By attributing both uniqueness and exemplarity to the Holocaust, he turned it into a historical yardstick by which to measure other human suffering.

The first National Civil Holocaust Commemoration Ceremony was held on April 24, 1979, at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Both Wiesel and President Carter addressed the gathering. Wiesel’s speech was entitled The Holocaust: Beginning or End? His questions implied the answer: Was it the final convulsion of demonic forces in history? A paroxysm of centuries-old bigotry and hatred? Or, on the contrary, a momentous warning of things to come? Wiesel pointed to violence against Israel as primary evidence of the beginning of a new horror. Thirty years after the liberation of the camps, he said, we witness more wars, new racial hostilities, and an awakening of Nazism on all five continents. Little did we know that, in our lifetime, books would appear in many languages offering so-called ‘proof’ that the Holocaust never occurred, that our parents, our friends did not die there. Little did we know that Jewish children would again be murdered, in cold blood, by killers in Israel. Wiesel implied that acts of terrorism against Israel, in addition to Holocaust denial, were signs that the Holocaust had not fully ended.¹⁹

Elie Wiesel (right), chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, presents President Jimmy Carter (left) with the panel’s final report, September 27, 1979.

At this same ceremony, President Carter took a more universal approach than Wiesel, who emphasized the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and the culpability of those who had abandoned the Jews to the slaughter. For Carter, the memory of this same failure taught that human rights and human dignity are indivisible. America must, and always will, speak out in the defense of human rights not only in our own country, but around the world. Carter agreed with Wiesel about the looming risk of a new genocide—but not only to Jews in Israel. Carter urged the Senate to take a long overdue step and ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which had been adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Without concrete action, he stated, our words are hollow. Let us signify by deed as well as by word that the American people will never forget.²⁰

In these founding speeches and documents for the national memorial, Carter and Wiesel wove together a powerful public idiom of Holocaust awareness that would resonate for years to come. They conjoined the particularity of the mass slaughter of Jews under the Nazis with the ongoing threat to Israel, and they tied the universal imperative to prevent future genocides with an American obligation to lead an international movement for human rights. As Carter declared at the presentation of the commission’s final report, Out of our memory and understanding of the Holocaust we must forge an unshakeable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world look the other way or fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.²¹

The slogan Never Again resounded for many who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s as a stirring ethical imperative to fight for human rights and to prevent future genocides, and young human rights activists denounced their governments’ hypocrisy for failing to uphold this imperative in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.²² Never Again, however, did not originate in this universalist milieu; it was invented in 1970 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a right-wing Jewish nationalist from Brooklyn, to serve as the motto of the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL). The phrase, which was often used by the Save Soviet Jewry movement, expressed the JDL’s confrontational spirit, urging combative retaliation rather than powerless capitulation. When Kahane emigrated to Israel, his views were deemed so extreme that Israel banned the political party he founded there for its Nazi-like, racist, and undemocratic positions.²³

In the transformation of its use from advocating Jewish self-defense to preventing genocide anywhere on earth, the inspiring refrain Never Again made a conceptual leap that showed its ability to conform to different political meanings. What the nationalist and universalist paradigms do share is the characterization of the Holocaust both as a historical catastrophe that is never quite past, and as a portent of evil that is ever imminent. In the JDL’s original nationalist meaning, the heritage of the Nazi genocide as the culmination of centuries of persecution demanded vigilance and justified violence to defend Jews everywhere and to avert the annihilation of the Jewish state. In its adaptation by human rights advocates, knowledge of the Holocaust as the universal paradigm of evil required international vigilance and intervention—diplomatic or military—to prevent the occurrence of future genocides worldwide. The nationalism that spawned this phrase, however, would never be completely purged from it, even when used in a universalist sense. This strange genealogy of Never Again points to certain tensions that came into play in the political mobilization of Holocaust memory as a harbinger of the future. One is the contradiction between nationalist and universalist applications; another is that between viewing Jewish victimhood as the universal standard for measuring genocide and exempting Israel from those universal standards that it deems threaten its survival.²⁴

Elie Wiesel played a key role in propagating the different meanings of Never Again among various religious and human rights organizations and political contexts. He skillfully managed—or juggled—the tension between the universal and the particular by espousing the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and privileging Israeli vulnerability, even as he expanded the Holocaust’s lessons to other human rights causes and made Never Again a slogan for the worldwide prevention of genocide.

As a universal symbol, the Holocaust garnered what Alan Mintz has called moral prestige, becoming the standard for all other mass suffering. For Wiesel, this moral prestige related to his view of Israel as both exceptionally vulnerable and morally superior. For him, the exemplary evil of the Holocaust could be redeemed by the exemplary morality of the State of Israel. Wiesel made this linkage less jarring than Begin had by speaking in the idiom of universal humanism rather than aggressive nationalism. The uniqueness of Jewish victimization in the Holocaust, Wiesel taught, had universal significance, and the redemption of humankind after the war was inseparable from the specific deliverance of the Jewish people in Israel. As he stated when he presented the report of the president’s commission to President Carter in 1979, Birkenau arouses man’s most secret anguish. Jerusalem symbolizes our most fervent hope, and, therefore, we are attached to Jerusalem in such love and admiration. Avoiding the political conflict over Israel’s plans to annex East Jerusalem, he implied that universal anguish sanctioned attachment to a particular place. Wiesel saw no contradiction between the particular and the universal, between Never Again as a vow to protect Israel from existential threats and as an imperative to prevent genocide around the world.²⁵

Wiesel used his moral authority to support victims of contemporary atrocities: he spoke out on behalf of starving Biafrans, the millions of Cambodians murdered by the Pol Pot regime, Vietnamese refugees, the indigenous Aché people being exterminated in Paraguay, and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia. But when it came to the situation in the Middle East, he prevaricated.

Wiesel’s commitment to the paradigmatic nature of the Holocaust put him in a double bind: he would have to acknowledge Palestinian suffering, even as he disavowed it. In his 1978 essay To a Young Palestinian Arab, Wiesel draws on his own losses in the Holocaust to express sympathy for the Palestinian tragedy of displacement and homelessness. In striving for balance, he faults Arabs for not recognizing that the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust gave them the right to a sovereign state. His essay professes an aversion to scorekeeping for comparative pain, but he nonetheless constructs a moral hierarchy in which Palestinian suffering has devolved into vengeful violence, while Israelis have transformed their traumatic past into a higher spiritual calling. Jewish virtue, he claims, lies in the survivors’ refusing to take vengeance on their oppressors in Europe and in the special Jewish capacity to turn their own trauma into empathy for the suffering of others. Wiesel exemplifies this sentiment himself: I do feel responsible for what happened to you, but not for what you chose to do as a result of what happened to you. I feel responsible for your sorrow, but not for the way you use it, for in its name you have massacred innocent people, slaughtered children. Ignoring Israeli violence against innocent people and Palestinian children, Wiesel claims that the Holocaust taught Israelis to respect the sanctity of life, while the Palestinians’ tragedy debased them into supporting the murder of innocents.²⁶

Wiesel chose not to speak out against the invasion of Lebanon or the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Instead, he mobilized the exceptionalism of the Holocaust to defend Israel as the victim of anti-Semitism. In an interview with People magazine in November 1982, he said that that year had been the hardest one in his life since 1945, not because of the war, but because of the global resurgence of anti-Semitism that it had unleashed. When asked how he felt about Begin using the Holocaust to justify Israeli actions, he responded that he objected to anyone using the Holocaust for political reasons, and that the word had become too fashionable and thus too widely available. He believed that only people who loved Israel had the right to criticize it, while all others condemned it with suspicious relish. Wiesel never mentioned Begin; rather, he condemned the PLO observer to the UN for speaking about ‘Judeo-Nazis’—my God, the blasphemy, the obscenity of putting these words together. He did not mention that this term had first been used by an Israeli scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who created a stir by describing the war as a Judeo-Nazi policy.²⁷ For Wiesel, the worst sin in using Nazi analogies was the attempt, in his words, to demystify the Holocaust. Meaning, in a way, to take it away from the Jewish people. Indeed, the Holocaust could provide the basis for empathy with the suffering of others; but paradoxically, as he said, only when we tell the story of what happened to the Jewish people can we save other people. Thus, he believed that using Holocaust analogies to depict Palestinian and Lebanese suffering at the hands of the Israeli military amounted to a kind of theft and was evidence of a resurgence of anti-Semitism.²⁸

Wiesel’s moral authority derived from his status as a Holocaust survivor, an identity that was gaining prestige in American society with the spread of Holocaust awareness. In the People interview, Wiesel backed up his own observations by noting that friends of his who were also survivors were having nervous breakdowns, and even committing suicide, all reacting to the anti-Semitism that was a reaction to Lebanon and the massacre. The image of the survivor played an important role in rehabilitating Israel’s moral image in the

wake of Lebanon, as the country became no longer primarily identified with its youthful pioneers, or idealistic soldiers, but with the noble survivors who had rebuilt their lives along with the country. Indeed, the Report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust identified the United States along with Israel as a site of rebirth for Holocaust survivors, and it cited the need to preserve their memories as a primary reason for creating an American memorial to the Holocaust.

In April 1983, at the first American meeting of the Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, Vice President George H. W. Bush presented to Elie Wiesel a symbolic key to the proposed new Holocaust museum. The conveners cautiously asserted that the event was strictly a nonpolitical affair in relation to Israel. But they nonetheless underlined Israel’s vulnerability as the key message. An organizer told the Washington Post that the Holocaust was a lesson to the world that it can happen again if we will not be watchful. If we will not pay attention to small incidents. He explained that years ago they used to call it anti-Semitism; today they call it anti-Zionism, but actually it’s the same thing.²⁹

In the Jerusalem Post, Wolf Blitzer wrote of this gathering as though the Holocaust had always formed the basis for American attachment to Israel, support that transcended all strategic and political considerations. Although he had recently called the Sabra and Shatila massacre a disaster for Israel’s high moral image in Washington, which would take years to repair, he clearly saw the rejuvenating potency of this reunion of Holocaust survivors. The organizers did not have to use a sledgehammer to press their point for strong U.S. backing for Israel, he wrote. In the closing ceremony at the Washington Monument, President Reagan linked America and Israel as sites of redemption, promising the survivors that the security of your safe havens, here and in Israel, will never be compromised. The mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, condemned the PLO as terrorists attempting to finish what Hitler had started. Though thousands of attendees had other concerns—to share their traumatic stories, to locate lost friends and relatives—the public face of this nonpolitical event placed Israel at the top of the agenda. As the figure of the survivor gained public visibility and social esteem, the aura of the survivor amplified Israel’s existential peril. Any danger faced by the country was rendered as threatening its very existence rather than as threatening the kinds of losses that any people would dread as a result of armed conflict: loss of lives and territory, damage to its army, its cities, or its economy. In Israel’s case, evocation of the Holocaust transformed the fear of loss into the prospect of extinction.³⁰

The equation of criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and Nazism intensified with the temporal shift in the significance of the Holocaust. In the context of an imminent threat, anti-Semitism started to be viewed less as a prejudice that education and awareness could undo, or as a form of discrimination that could be legally challenged, and more as an ever-present genocidal urge to kill Jews and destroy their state.

In the 1980s, as Palestinians became visible to more Americans as victims of Israeli aggression and as a people struggling for human rights and a national homeland, Israel’s staunchest supporters pushed back to portray them as Nazis intent on committing a second genocide. During the groundbreaking ceremony for the Holocaust Museum in 1985, for instance, Wiesel invoked the Holocaust to decry the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish American who was shot and thrown off the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro by members of the Palestine Liberation Front. A Washington Post story on Klinghoffer’s funeral bore the headline Holocaust of One. Equating terrorist acts committed by Palestinians with the Nazi Holocaust mustered great emotional power through the shared focus on innocent Jewish victims.³¹

Terrorist violence by nonstate actors, no matter how heinous, lacks the powerful state organization behind the systematic industrialized violence that characterized the Nazi slaughter of millions. Nonetheless, the repeated analogy between terrorism and the Holocaust had the powerful effect of tarring the entire Palestinian cause as a hateful reincarnation of the Nazi project to exterminate the Jews. At a time when the Carter and Reagan administrations continued Kissinger’s pledge to Israel not to speak directly to the PLO, the conflation of Palestinians with terrorism and Nazism contributed to the public perception of the illegitimacy of the PLO and the cause it represented.³²

In a universalist mode, Wiesel pulled back from this equation when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 as a messenger to mankind, one of the world’s most important spiritual leaders and guides.³³ He interwove a plea for Israel into his most passionate appeal for universal human rights. In his acceptance speech, he stated that having endured the world’s indifference to the Nazi genocide, he swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. His particular trauma as a Jewish survivor of the death camps made him abhor the abuse of human rights across the political spectrum, from apartheid in South Africa to the repression of dissidents in the Soviet bloc, to the situation of the Palestinians. Yet he qualified his sympathy for the Palestinians, to whose plight I am sensitive, but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence. Though he expressed sorrow for the losses on both sides and advocated peace between the two peoples, he condemned Palestinian terrorism alone for prolonging the conflict, and defended Israel with reference to the threat of a future Holocaust: "Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land. Please understand my deep and total commitment to Israel: if you could remember what I remember, you would understand. Israel is the only nation in the world whose very existence is threatened." In this speech devoted to the universal message of the Jewish catastrophe, Wiesel evoked Holocaust memory as evidence of Israel’s future vulnerability, and he portrayed Israel, under the eternal shadow of the Holocaust, as the exemplar of universal suffering.³⁴

Two years later Wiesel found himself in a sticky moral dilemma, in the face of Israel’s aggression toward Palestinians during the first intifada. Substituting feeling for the real danger he had insisted upon in 1986, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed that Israel is the only country that feels its existence threatened. Describing his visit to Gaza during the uprising, Wiesel acknowledged the Palestinian right to fight for self-determination and criticized what he saw as the occasional excesses of Israeli violence. But his essay defends the essential morality of Israel against doubters. He writes, Israel has not ‘lost its soul.’ Its soldiers are not sadists. They do not enjoy fighting stone-throwing adolescents. But confronted by them, what should a soldier do? Retreat? How far? Run away? Where? The implication is that the soldiers are fighting for their existence. They have nowhere else to go. Although Wiesel contends that Israel

should not be above criticism, he roundly criticizes its critics for describing the state as a colonial power, like France in Algeria or the United States in Vietnam. Even worse are those who compare Israeli’s policies to Hitler’s in Nazi Germany: How are we to convince Israel’s political adversaries that the Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies? he asks. For Wiesel, to see Israel as being under the existential threat of a new Holocaust was not a political analogy, but a truth that united feeling and reality. By disavowing the political uses of the Holocaust, he deployed the Holocaust politically to exempt Israel from censure and to police legitimate Holocaust references. Wiesel found the desire to annihilate Jews lurking in every form of Palestinian resistance, including not only terrorism and stone-throwing, but even poetry. He read Mahmoud Darwish’s impassioned poem Those Who Pass between Fleeting Words, which calls for Israelis to abandon Palestine to its people, as akin to violence and murder. Israel remained morally heroic to Wiesel because of its willingness to sue for peace despite the looming specter of the Holocaust that Palestinians represented.³⁵

Many Americans saw through Wiesel’s defense of Israel’s policies, and some accused him of hypocrisy. On the same page of the New York Times on which Wiesel’s editorial appeared, Anthony Lewis blamed Israel for intransigence and urged it to negotiate with the PLO. In a letter published in the New York Review of Books, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg challenged Wiesel to apply to Israel the moral strictures he had gleaned from the Holocaust. The Holocaust taught Wiesel that one should never again remain silent in the face of human suffering, but Wiesel remained silent in the face of Israelis beating and shooting unarmed youth, and in the face of racist characterizations of Palestinians by a chief of staff of the IDF as drugged cockroaches. Hertzberg implored him to break a silence that constituted a defense of Israel’s right-wing policies, and to speak out against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Where Wiesel mobilized Holocaust memory to defend Israel from its critics, Hertzberg joined other Jews who advocated that the memory of their own traumatic past should guide them toward empathy and acceptance of responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli rule.³⁶

Some American Jews went even further and called for separating the Holocaust altogether from the politics of the Middle East. In spite of the origins of the proposal for a national Holocaust memorial, some of its planners wanted to divorce its mission from overt partisanship for Israel. One proponent of this separation was Michael Berenbaum, who drafted the original report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, served as project director from 1988 to 1993, and played a vocal role in interpreting its purpose to the public. Berenbaum had a strong attachment to Israel: he volunteered there during the Six-Day War, and he was the Jewish community representative in Washington, D.C., who observed the foreign desk of the Washington Post during the Lebanon War in 1982. Later in the 1980s, however, he witnessed Israel losing its mystique among American Jews and becoming a controversial issue filled with moral ambiguity. The Holocaust, he believed, could take Israel’s place as the moral center that unified American Jews. The planning and construction of the Holocaust Museum, wrote Berenbaum, accompanied the events of the 1980’s [which] will slowly bring to an end the Israeli-centered period for American Jews. For his generation, those events included the Lebanon fiasco, the Palestinian uprising, and the espionage scandal of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American intelligence analyst who was sentenced to life in prison for spying on the United States for Israel. With Israel having become a divisive subject among American Jews, Holocaust memory appeared to supply a more secure anchor point for bringing the Jewish community together around a shared traumatic past.³⁷

Liberation or Abandonment?

To raise a memorial to a European genocide on the secular but sacred space of the National Mall required enormous cultural work—nothing less than the transformation of the Holocaust into an element of American heritage. Berenbaum, for one, believed that the Holocaust could provide a center of moral unity not only for Jews, but for all Americans. He made the case that a national museum would transform the history of a uniquely Jewish catastrophe into a universal civics lesson. The story of the Holocaust, he wrote, had to be told in such a way that it would resonate not only with the survivor in New York and his children in Houston or San Francisco, but with a black leader from Atlanta, a midwestern farmer, or a northeastern industrialist. Americans from different social spheres with diverse values could unite against a common enemy in their recognition of the Holocaust as the paradigm of ultimate evil. Instruction in the Holocaust could teach the American values of democracy, pluralism, respect for differences, individual responsibility, freedom from prejudice, and an abhorrence of racism. It could also help recalibrate America’s moral compass, fractured by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and the depredations of the powerful in the Vietnam War and Watergate.³⁸

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the concrete symbol of the Americanization of the Holocaust, where visitors can see enlightened American values represented in stark contrast with the evil darkness of the Nazis. The Americanization process had two strands: a national narrative framed Americanism, with its values of democracy and tolerance, as the antithesis of Nazism, and a universal narrative framed the Holocaust as a paradigm of absolute evil, bearing lessons for protecting human rights and preventing future genocides. These narratives came together in a redemptive vision of the United States as the global guarantor of human rights and the protector of the Jewish state from future Holocausts.³⁹

Many of the members of the president’s commission tasked with planning the memorial wanted to keep it free from overt partisanship for Israel, and some even objected to having the president of Israel speak at the opening ceremonies in 1993.⁴⁰ America’s special relationship with Israel, however, was inseparable from the conception of the memorial and was woven into the framework of the exhibits. The idea of the Holocaust’s unique relation to Israel—as the condition of its birth and the threat of its apocalyptic end—was not superseded by Americanization or universalization. By presenting Nazism as the antithesis of American values, the museum paired Israel and America as sites of redemption, democratic havens where survivors were reborn and memory was revered. The U.S. commitment to Israel proved essential to two basic themes of the museum: America’s opposition to Nazism, and vigilance against future genocide.

At the grand opening of the museum in 1993, speakers articulated its contradictory and complementary meanings. President Clinton made explicit an organic connection between the Holocaust’s nationalist and universalist implications. The Holocaust gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter of our common humanity, he asserted; "and it contributed, indeed made certain,

the long overdue creation of the nation of Israel."⁴¹ In this double myth of origins, the birth of an individual nation was imbued with the same lofty value as the creation of a global community that transcends national boundaries.

Clinton and the other international dignitaries spoke before a backdrop of fifteen brightly colored flags representing the units of the American armed forces that had liberated the concentration camps in 1945. The flags, which would become part of the permanent exhibit, represented a central narrative in the Americanization of the Holocaust. Our military forces, stated Clinton, alongside the allied armies, played the decisive role in bringing the Holocaust to an end. Overcoming the shock of discovery, they walked survivors from those dark, dark places into the sweet sunlight of redemption, soldiers and survivors being forever joined in history and humanity.⁴²

On the same stage, Elie Wiesel presented a darker version of America’s role in the war. He castigated the U.S. government for having failed to liberate Jews by refusing to bomb the concentration camps in Poland. Why weren’t the railways leading to [Auschwitz-]Birkenau bombed by Allied bombers? he asked. As long as I live I will not understand that. And why was there no public outcry of indignation and outrage? According to this equally resonant narrative, the United States was not a liberator, but a guilty bystander that abetted the Nazi genocide by abandoning the Jews. Both narratives were part of the museum’s rationale from the start.⁴³

Liberator or failed rescuer? Which best describes America’s role in the Holocaust? These two stories describe different historical moments with different actors, and they rely on different ways of thinking about history. Liberation might describe what ordinary soldiers witnessed at the war’s end, and it offered a coherent framework for making sense of the brutal scenes that the soldiers and journalists first encountered in the death camps.⁴⁴ The decision not to bomb Auschwitz describes a government decision made at the highest echelon during the war. Both stories contributed retrospectively to making the Holocaust central to the American memory of World War II by giving Americans major roles to play in ending the slaughter—in one case a role that they carried out, and in the other a role that they failed to fulfill. Together, both narratives convey the same message not only about the past but also about the present and future: American military might is a virtuous force for liberating the oppressed from tyranny.

For the United States as well as Israel, Holocaust memory could restore an honorable picture of military force, which was suffering from disillusionment in both countries. For Israel, its identity as a community of Holocaust victims—in the past and potential future—justified its righteous exercise of violence during the Lebanon War and the first intifada. For the United States, the role of liberator and the imperative to rescue contributed to the idealization of World War II as the good war and its soldiers as the Greatest Generation, to counteract deep cynicism about the overwhelming abuse of military power in Southeast Asia and to burnish the tarnished images of both the American soldier and the nation’s military command.

The commemoration of American soldiers as liberators of concentration camps was made official in 1979, just as the president’s commission presented its plans for the memorial. To mark the thirty-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Dachau by American troops, Congress designated April 28 and 29 as Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust. President Carter asked Americans to observe this solemn anniversary of the liberation of Dachau with appropriate study, prayers and commemoration as a tribute to the spirit of freedom, justice and compassion which Americans fought to preserve.⁴⁵ Americans were being asked to remember not only the victims of the Nazis’ murderous regime, but also the nobility of American opposition to that regime.

In actuality, Americans were not the only, or even the primary, liberators of the death camps, and the operation was more haphazard than the word liberation implies. The Soviet Army was the first to reach a major extermination camp, Madjanek, and then to enter Auschwitz and other sites in the east, months before U.S. troops reached Buchenwald and Dachau. The U.S. Army command initially had no plans to free camp inmates, and soldiers who stumbled across the death camps reported feeling overcome, dazed, and even repulsed by the survivors they found there. At first, the army continued to use some of the camps as displaced persons camps. Retrospectively, the idea of liberation allows Americans to imagine their own intimate presence in history, to touch an unspeakable but monumental reality, and it offers glorification of the nation’s altruistic purpose in fighting the war.

This idealization of the American soldier had great appeal during the Reagan era. As a presidential nominee, Reagan rejected the Vietnam syndrome and called that war a noble cause. In his Days of Remembrance speech, Reagan proudly referred to the liberation of the camps as evidence of America’s exceptional genius for great and unselfish deeds, and he proclaimed that into the hands of America, God has placed an afflicted mankind.⁴⁶ Reagan never failed to link America’s magnanimity to its contemporary defense of Israel from the threat of a new Holocaust. Having rescued the Jews from the horrors of Nazism, America had an ongoing obligation to a people whose country was reborn from the ashes of the Holocaust—a country that rightfully never takes its security or its survival for granted.⁴⁷ In the rhetoric of the Cold War, Reagan tied the American liberation of Jews from Nazi concentration camps to the current movement to free Soviet Jews from communist tyranny. In his speech at the ceremony laying the cornerstone of the Holocaust Museum, he called on the Soviet Union to let these people go!⁴⁸

This theme is most dramatically embodied in the monument Liberation, created by sculptor Natan Rapoport and dedicated in May 1985 in Liberty State Park, New Jersey. The larger-than-life bronze sculpture depicts a young American soldier trudging with his head bowed and carrying a gaunt concentration camp victim in his arms, cradling him in a pieta-like position. The soldier’s youthful chest merges with the emaciated ribs of the victim, as if sharing one heart, according to the Department of Defense’s Guide to Days of Remembrance. With the Statue of Liberty on its cover, this guide explains that the monument is a symbol of the strong helping the weak, not persecuting them. It is a tribute to the best of America’s dreams, freedom, compassion, bravery.⁴⁹ The official state resolution dedicating the monument explains that its purpose is to recognize that our servicemen fought, not to conquer nor to be aggressors, but rather to rescue and restore freedom to those persecuted and oppressed.⁵⁰ This monument to the liberators of Holocaust victims displaces still-vivid memories of American war-making in Southeast Asia with an idealized model of the American GI from World War II as a strong and caring savior.⁵¹

Celebrating the liberation of Jewish survivors enhanced the belief in the good war as the standard of American virtue. George W. Bush, campaigning for president in 1999, claimed: No one during World War II questioned what it meant to be ‘American’ —it meant

that we were liberators, not conquerors. And when American soldiers hugged the survivors of death camps, and shared their tears, and welcomed them back from a nightmare world, our country was confirmed in its calling.⁵² The theme of liberation accompanied a geographic shift in the focus of popular history and fiction about World War II from the Pacific to the European theater. At a time when the Greatest Generation was rediscovered as a national legend, one could imagine from such statements that liberating the death camps had actually provided the motivation to enter World War II.

Liberation, statue by Natan Rapoport, depicting a soldier carrying a World War II concentration camp survivor, at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, NJ.

The union of American soldiers and Jewish survivors provides an overarching framework for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The permanent exhibition starts with American GIs encountering Buchenwald and ends with concentration camp survivors rebuilding their lives in Israel and the United States. In the architecture of the building itself, the narrative of liberation offers a stable reference point for the visitor’s unsettling encounter with the history of Nazi atrocities. One entrance is flanked by the flags of the liberating troops, and presidential statements about the arrival of American soldiers at the camps are engraved on the other side. The vantage point of American GIs provides the opening image: visitors encounter shocking, wall-sized photographs of charred corpses in Buchenwald through the horrified eyes and bewildered commentaries of American soldiers. The museum represents American troops as paradigmatic witnesses to history, and witnessing becomes a heroic and morally imperative act. The story of liberation concludes with the survivors’ deliverance to the twin havens of America and Israel. At the end of the exhibit, the story of liberation takes on an intimate domestic dimension through a touching interview with a middle-class American couple who met when his army unit liberated the camp where his future wife was being held. A video of the interview is shown in a small amphitheater lined with Jerusalem stone. This personal story takes place against the background of historical markers that unite America and Israel as welcoming sites of redemption. The exhibit of the postwar rebirth includes artifacts related to the founding of Israel—including photographs of the SS Exodus and a six-foot facsimile of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The journey through the darkened exhibit space concludes as visitors ascend into the Hall of Remembrance. There an eternal light burns over buried soil from Holocaust sites and Arlington Cemetery, comingling

for eternity the memory of the victims and the American troops who liberated the camps.⁵³

The Holocaust Museum does not unreservedly celebrate the American role as liberator. It also indicts the United States for failing to rescue Jews by refusing to bomb Auschwitz. The question of whether bombing the gas chambers and railroad lines in 1944 was militarily feasible or could have saved lives is controversial among historians. No one, after all, can evaluate with certainty the effects of an event that did not occur. In honor of the opening of the Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum cosponsored a conference on the topic, where the debates were intense and the participants divided.⁵⁴ When the museum opened, it nonetheless enshrined the counterfactual narrative that lives would have been saved if the United States had bombed Auschwitz. It displayed an enlarged copy of a U.S. Air Force intelligence photograph of Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1944 and a letter from Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCoy rejecting a request by the World Jewish Congress to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rather than referring to the historians’ debate, the caption asserted as fact that although bombing Auschwitz would have killed many prisoners, it would also have halted the operation of the gas chambers and, ultimately, saved the lives of many more.⁵⁵

The belief that the Roosevelt administration knowingly abandoned Jews by refusing to bomb Auschwitz operates as a kind of folk history with great emotional power.⁵⁶ The museum exhibit also criticizes the Allies for not taking in more refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. But outrage about the failure to bomb has had greater endurance than has indignation at restrictive immigration laws. The conviction that bombing Auschwitz would have rescued Jews draws on the moral clarity of hindsight and a magical belief in the efficacy of airpower. The assumption that the United States bears responsibility for not bombing Auschwitz gives added significance to the phrase Never Again, and it has been mobilized for different political purposes. In the opening ceremonies for the museum, Wiesel raised this failure in order to exhort Clinton to do something in Kosovo. And when NATO carried out its controversial air strikes in 1999, Wiesel praised the United States for taking the kind of action in Kosovo that it had failed to take during World War II.⁵⁷ In a speech before AIPAC in 2012, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, held up copies of the 1944 letters in which the War Department rebuffed the request to bomb Auschwitz, to warn of the dangers of negotiating with Iran instead of using force.⁵⁸

Liberating the death camps and failing to bomb Auschwitz may evoke starkly conflicting emotions of pride and guilt. But these narratives worked together to create a shared vision of American military power as a force for salvation—whether cradling the weak or blasting the strong. Mobilizing the memory of inaction during the 1940s reminded Americans in later decades that the United States has the obligation to redeem its past failure by wielding military power to protect the innocent and to defy tyrants. This argument has appealed to people across a range of political positions, from neoconservatives dedicated to restoring American imperial might to humanitarian interventionists committed to the responsibility to protect.

American presidents have ritually accepted guilt for not doing more to rescue Jews during World War II. They have, however, refused to accept guilt for destruction caused by U.S. military action. President Carter, as we have seen, was the first president to express a sense of guilt for abandoning the Jews. He presented Wiesel with copies of the aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau when asking him to serve as chair of the commission. Yet Carter rejected American culpability for the devastating bombing of Vietnam and neighboring countries. He not only opposed monetary reparations, but rejected any moral obligation. The destruction was mutual, he avowed. We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people.… I don’t feel we ought to apologize or castigate ourselves or assume the status of culpability. George McGovern and his supporters opposed Carter’s position during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but their willingness to accept guilt about Vietnam was criticized as a symptom of national weakness and divisiveness. Carter claimed to represent a party seeking national renewal and unity.⁵⁹

Why would Carter, and many Americans, reject guilt for the damage inflicted by American power in Southeast Asia but accept guilt for not wielding that power to stop the Holocaust? An obvious answer is that the latter is cost-free, though it has morally underwritten costly obligations to Israel. Historian Barbara Keys has argued that some Americans in the Carter era championed the cause of human rights abroad to revive a sense of national virtue that had been tarnished in the Vietnam War.⁶⁰ The American embrace of the Holocaust as their own history, with both guilt and pride, may have had a similar effect, allowing Americans to oppose atrocities that others committed in the past. A Holocaust Museum on the National Mall provided a painless way to both acknowledge American guilt and redeem American virtue.

The tension between failure and liberation in the story of the Holocaust was part of a bigger controversy about American history during the culture wars of the 1990s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to mostly reverent reviews at a time when other major exhibits of American history were generating fierce controversy. The museum was not free from criticism—some questioned the priority of memorializing a European genocide when there were no national memorials to the genocide of Native Americans or the enslavement of African Americans. Others raised questions about whether the museum was turning the Holocaust into a spectacle. But these questions were mild compared with the criticism that erupted around the same time about two Smithsonian exhibitions, one on the western United States, and one on the use of the atomic bomb in World War II.

In 1991, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art mounted an exhibit titled The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920. Conservative critics blasted the exhibit for undercutting the noble myth of Manifest Destiny, and, instead, pointing to the way traditional images veiled the violence and dispossession of Native Americans in the march of westward expansion. The suggestion that familiar frontier images included racist depictions and glorified a history of displacement, pillage, and atrocity was an anathema to conservatives, who had no trouble accepting a national museum memorializing the victims of genocide committed by Nazis in Europe.⁶¹

The same year the Holocaust Museum opened, a greater controversy enveloped a Smithsonian announcement to organize an exhibit around the display of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The curators planned an exhibit that would have explored the multiple causes and ramifications of the bomb, including the political and military reasons for using it, the unprecedented destruction it caused, and its role in ending the war. Veterans’ groups and politicians raised such an outcry that they succeeded

in shutting down the exhibit before it opened. Their argument, too, relied on a narrative of rescue with a speculative dimension asserted as fact: that bombing Hiroshima had saved the lives of thousands, perhaps even a million, American servicemen from dying in what would have been a bloody land invasion. These critics believed that to explore the damage wrought by the bomb and raise the question of its morality would be an affront to veterans and would desecrate the memory of all those American soldiers who had sacrificed their lives during the war.⁶²

These exhibits generated outrage because they challenged a core belief of American exceptionalism, that the country exercises military force only for righteous ends. No public outcries were raised against exhibits at the Holocaust Museum that criticized the United States for failing to bomb Auschwitz or to rescue Jews. On the contrary, this failure became an item of received wisdom about the war, and public officials ritually admitted American culpability at Holocaust commemorations. Guilt for not bombing Auschwitz did not detract from the mythic narrative about American virtue; instead, it contributed to the idea that America has the power and the moral obligation to exercise force for humanitarian ends. The United States ought to behave as its better self—to act out its essential identity as liberator. Since the Holocaust was not only a catastrophe from the past, but an ever-threatening possibility in the future, this narrative implied that the United States could get it right this time—by supporting Israel and deploying its firepower to save innocents and prevent new Holocausts.

In American popular culture, the best-known savior of Jews from the Nazis is not an American GI but a German businessman, Oskar Schindler. Based on a historical novel about a real German entrepreneur and Nazi party member, Schindler’s List (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of Schindler’s change of heart and his successful effort to protect the Jewish workers at his factory in Krakow, Poland, from being taken to the death camps.⁶³ Two months after the Holocaust Museum opened its doors to the public, Spielberg’s film was released to reverential critical acclaim. The media treated the film, the first big-budget Hollywood film about the Holocaust, as more of an event than a movie, a document of witnessing, as Spielberg told Newsweek. Public officials, including President Clinton, personally attested to its impact and implored the public to see it. Free public screenings were offered to high school students all over the country, and it has remained a centerpiece of school curricula ever since. As James Young noted, There are a couple of gigantic institutions now, Spielberg being one and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum being another, which are defining a kind of public consciousness of the Holocaust.⁶⁴ Both institutions contributed to a view of the Holocaust as bonding the United States to Israel.

The film presents both sides of the American liberation narrative: pride for what was done, and guilt for what was not. The plot revolves around Schindler’s rescue of 1,100 Jews on his celebrated list. As the character that viewers most identity with, Schindler is recognizable as a Hollywood protagonist: a heroic individual, a lusty can-do capitalist with a mind of his own, who, upon witnessing the suffering of others, rises above political ideology to do the right thing. Viewers also witness his moral growth and awakening, as he painfully begins to realize the limits of his efforts to oppose the evil power of the Nazis. Although Schindler saves his Jews, he comes to recognize his failure to rescue more. In a moving scene at the war’s end, Schindler sinks to his knees under the weight of overpowering guilt, and he repeats the words expressing his terrible remorse: I could have saved more. I could have saved more.

The film’s narrative of liberation requires Israel as a haven for deliverance. Schindler’s List concludes in Jerusalem as the site of redemption for both Schindler and his Jews. Like the ending of the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Spielberg’s film culminates in the memory of Israel’s rebirth out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Yet it ends in a Jerusalem cemetery where the real Schindler is buried.

Israel may be a conventional destination for popular Holocaust narratives, but Spielberg arrives there by breaking from the documentary quality of the rest of the film to transport his characters to Jerusalem through a cinematic feat of magical realism. Unlike the end of the Holocaust miniseries, or the beginning of Exodus, no Mossad agent from Palestine leads the survivors to the Promised Land. Instead, as they sit listlessly along the railroad tracks, a Russian soldier on horseback tells them that they are not wanted in the East or the West, and he points over a hill where they can find food. The group then links arms and marches as a phalanx up the hill, with the Israeli song Jerusalem of Gold playing in the background, making a contrast with the plaintive violin theme played throughout the film. The camera focuses on the weathered yet hopeful faces until they reach the crest of the hill, and then everything changes in one frozen shot. The film switches from black and white to color, from past to present, from fiction to reality. The young actors are replaced by the actual, now elderly Jews whom Schindler saved, and at the same time, the landscape changes under their feet from the grass-covered hill of Poland to the dry stony ground of Jerusalem. The scene then shifts to Schindler’s gravesite in a Christian cemetery on a Jerusalem hillside, bathed in bright Mediterranean light. The aging survivors walk haltingly down an incline to place a stone on Schindler’s tombstone, which is engraved with a cross and Hebrew writing. They are accompanied by the actors who have played their younger selves.

Israeli previews of the film criticized Spielberg’s choice of Jerusalem of Gold, for its historical anachronism and political implications.⁶⁵ The song became hugely popular during the Six-Day War and has endured as a national anthem celebrating military conquest and messianic longing. The question of anachronism, however, is moot. The film’s ending posits an ahistorical timeless connection between the Holocaust and Israel, with Jerusalem as its mystical uncontested center. The history of 1948 disappears, and the victory song magically transports survivors from Poland to Jerusalem. Even though the individuals actually saved by Schindler dispersed to many countries, the film brings them all to Jerusalem to memorialize their liberator, as though it were their final destination. What links the Holocaust and Israel in the movie is the timeless obligation to honor the dead. The universal message of the film, about Schindler overcoming indifference to rescue the weak, merges with the nationalist message, epitomized by Jerusalem of Gold. The only part of Israel shown in the film is the graveyard visited by elderly survivors. No nation of refugees, pioneers, or fighters appears—only a memorial site that unites the liberator and the liberated in a ritual of commemoration. Spielberg’s cinematic magic projects a timeless bond between the liberator, the survivor, and the land of Israel.

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