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The Eichmann Trial: Changing Perspectives

On the eve of the Jewish New Year 1960, a conversation took place, which was already an annual journalistic tradition, between the editors of the daily Ma’ariv and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The interviewers ranged widely, exploring many diverse issues and areas. At a certain point they pointedly asked Ben-Gurion: what do you think was the most important event of the past year, internationally, in Israel and the Jewish world? When it came to the world at large, Ben-Gurion was quick to respond: decolonization would transform the face of the globe. But an outstanding single most important event of the year for Israel and Judaism? Ben-Gurion hesitated, undecided. Like a backstage prompter, Shalom Rosenfeld suggested to him: “Eichmann? . . .” And Ben-Gurion answered, almost in a declamation: “Yes, that operation vouchsafes the rule of historical justice in the life of our people, thanks to the existence of the State of Israel.” Four months had passed since the electrifying announcement in the Knesset of Eichmann’s capture in Argentina by the Mossad and abduction to Israel for trial. But Ben-Gurion had not yet grasped just how significant all this was. The Eichmann trial was officially opened on 12 April 1961; five days later Gideon Hausner, Israeli Attorney General, read the indictment. It was one of those days when time seemed to stand still. The poet Haim Gouri wrote about an “ambience of a grand moment,” a day he would remember all his life. A few days later, during his Independence Day broadcast to the nation, Ben-Gurion commented on two significant events of the past year: the discovery of the remains of Bar Kokhba fighters in the Judaean desert and the Eichmann trial. Both, Ben-Gurion stressed, were the product of the independence of the Jewish people in its own sovereign land. In that speech, two founding myths of the State of Israel symbolically met: the myth of the heroism of the Jewish people in its ancestral land, and the myth of the Holocaust. One underscores the historical bond between the people and the land, forging a vital link with the age-old landscape and the nation’s pristine youth. The other inscribes the Jewish people’s unique fate, the bloody reckoning between Jews and non-Jews, the commitment to the people, and the state that was established as a lesson from the past and pledge for the future. One draws its sustenance from antiquity, the experience of a free people in its ancient land, its struggle for