There is a venomous campaign against the appointment of Effi Eitam to the chairmanship of Yad Vashem being waged in the media, one that combines slander and half truths. Opposition to Eitam being appointed to head Israel's national Holocaust memorial is more than a simple political fight; it's a struggle for the character of the memory and history of the Jewish people and its place in Israel.
Effi Eitam is a brave warrior for the security of the state, who was awarded a medal for his outstanding courage for his part in battles to repel the enemy on the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He commanded a Golani reconnaissance unit in Operation Yonatan, and a Givati battalion, as well as the Galilee Division, and reached the rank of brigadier general in the IDF. In his political life, he served as an MK, a government minister, and head of the National Religious Party. Today, he is a businessman who wants to start fracking in Israel. A campaign is underway to delegitimize Eitam, whose mother – Esther Fein – fought bravely against the Nazis. He is being cast as the embodiment of Israeli fascism, and the lie has taken hold.
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One of the notable opponents of the appointment is Professor Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a historian who has published harsh criticism of the French parliament and the German Bundestag for their decisions to define opposing Israel as a Jewish state as a form of anti-Semitism. Blatman has been accused by Professor Dan Miron of pulling the wool over people's eyes and keeping information from his readers. In Miron's opinion, Blatman is lending support to the common position of western universities that see Zionism and Israel as "a cancer in the body of the international public," a colonial crime, and therefore something to be eradicated.
When we look into Blatman's claims, as they were published in Haaretz, we find that most of them are against outgoing Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev. What bothers Blatman? He accuses Shalev of the sin of rendering the Yad Vashem Law ineffective.
Shalev is accused of focusing on Jewish targets only, as opposed to adopting the stance of German historian Ernst Nolte. Nolte wanted to obscure the uniqueness of the Holocaust by comparing it to other genocides and even cast it as a "response" to communism in order to remove the burden of guilt from Germany. His approach seeks to move the focus of research to other groups, besides the Jews, and even the suffering of the German people themselves.
Avnet Shalev led Yad Vashem in research and the cultivation of a museum focused on the destruction of the Jews and their communities, just like the founders of the national memorial envisioned. Under his leadership, Yad Vashem rejected the idea of making the Holocaust into just another world genocide.
Blatman, like Nolte, wants to make the Holocaust into a political took. First, to decide that Yad Vashem will deal with the issue of genocide in the world, of which the Holocaust is supposedly just one example. From there, it's a short path to deciding that Israeli society is similar to German society in the first half of the 20th century and fabricating research to show that Israel is sliding into a proto-fascist and racist regime.
Avner Shalev withstood Blatman's slander and criticism, but now that he is stepping down, Blatman and his friends are trying to foist their path on the national institute and lead it down an ideological track that was rejected by the founder of Yad Vashem and its head for decades. This is nothing more than a fraud against the public and the law, a manipulative takeover of a national institute for the commemoration of the Holocaust and changing its purpose, which is set down in law.
The criticism being voiced against Effi Eitam is shocking. How can such things be said of a warrior and an officer who has devoted his life to defending the Jewish people? The very word "heroism" is part of the official name for Yad Vashem, and partly refers to the attempts to prevent another genocide against the Jewish people. Eitam did everything he could as a Jew and a Zionist to defend his country. That is not a fascist worldview, except in certain pockets of the radical Left. We need to do everything possible to stop these sectors from taking over Yad Vashem.
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