In 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Albert Einstein the presidency of the new State of Israel. The 11 individuals just indicted by Cleveland prosecutors should take note.
Einstein rejected the offer, and we should recall his famous 1948 letter to the New York Times (NYT). Co-signed by about two dozen other prominent American Jews, the letter tied the creation of Ben-Gurion’s new nation to fascism.
Specifically, Einstein condemned future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his political party as “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Begin was leader of the notorious Irgun militia, which was responsible for perpetrating the Deir Yassin massacre where over 100 Palestinian villagers, who played no part in the resistance, were murdered. Deir Yassin was the primary example why the creation of the new Jewish state became known as the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic). Ultimately some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from Palestine.
Aharon Zisling is less well-known than Einstein. He was Ben-Gurion’s minister of agriculture and served in Israel’s Knesset. In 1948, observing Deir Yassin and other atrocities committed by Jewish militias, Zisling stated on the record, but not well publicized at the time, that he was shocked as “Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis.”
Today on the Case Western Reserve University campus, we can see that 1948 is but an eye-blink away in the vast millennia of history in the Holy Land. The Nakba and the creation of Israel provide a moral lens through which we must judge the shenanigans of the current CWRU administration, which supports Israel’s crimes and genocide in Gaza and enthusiastically endorses the prosecution of its own students.
As a footnote to this sordid history, we should never forget Hannah Arendt, one of the co-signers of Einstein’s 1948 NYT letter. Arendt went on to write “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in 1963 after attending the trial of this lieutenant to Adolf Hitler in Israel. She coined the now famous phrase “banality of evil” to characterize Adolf Eichmann’s moral aloofness from the death camps which he did so much to organize. Like so many other complicit Germans, Eichmann refused to take any responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust unfolding before their very eyes. After all, they did not actually participate, hands-on, in marching the Jewish victims into the ovens.
Hannah Arendt was onto something, a lesson we should never have forgotten now in the 21st century. It’s fair to say that there’s a lot of banality of evil on the CWRU campus. The 11 indicted individuals are certainly not on the wrong side of history, as it will be written!
Thomas Kim Hill ’73 MA Education