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What was the gravest crisis of Israeli democracy?
It was not legislation to reform Judicial authority of over one year ago. Hint: it occurred 72 years ago.
By the 1950s, the economy of the State of Israel was so depleted that there weren’t even the funds to absorb immigrants, which was a paramount national priority. The government had instituted food rationing, and there was a dearth of the heavy machinery necessary for a country’s infrastructure. Desperate situations mandate desperate measures, but is there a limit?
According to many in the Jewish state, when negotiations with West Germany were announced for war reparations, Israel had crossed that line. Many Israelis did not wish to have anything to do with Germany, so to actually sit down and talk with them over a matter that could ease the German conscience was unthinkable.
Ben Gurion, ever the pragmatist, was not pleased about the potential source of income, but he had bills to pay. His best face-saving gesture was to inform West Germany that before he could request authority from the Knesset to negotiate, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had to solemnly acknowledge before the Bundestag Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust.
Adenauer, who was keenly aware of his country’s need to acquire atonement from the Jews, accepted these terms. On September 27, 1951, Adenauer addressed the Bundestag and declared that Bonn must make amends for Hitler for even if Nazi crimes were not committed by all Germans, they were committed in the name of all Germans. To achieve penance for this, his government would make material payment to Israel and Jews at large. The speech won the Bundestag’s near-unanimous approval.
Talented Nahum Goldman, president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Jewish Agency organized a Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany made up of twenty-two world Jewish organizations. How would Ben Gurion sell talks with Bonn to the Knesset? As Howard Sachar recounted, this would arguably be “the gravest crisis of Israeli democracy.”
Ben Gurion informed the Knesset that if the negotiations did not proceed, Israel would be forfeiting over a billion dollars of heirless Jewish property. The opposing voice was that of Ben Gurion’s critic and nemesis, and undeniably the greatest orator in Israel, Menachem Begin. Begin, whose mother, father, and brother had been murdered by the Nazis, minced no words in accusing Ben Gurion of abandoning the obligations of Jewish history and Jewish honor.
Among Begin’s accusations, as recorded by Daniel Gordis, “The government is on the verge of signing an accord with Germany and of saying that Germany is a nation, and not what it is: a pack of wolves whose fangs devoured and consumed our people.”
Begin was the spokesman, but the whole country was enraged. The Ma’ariv newspaper published a cartoon depicting a German handing an Israeli a blood-soaked bag of money. A headline in the newspaper of Begin’s party asked in bold letters, “How much will we get for a burnt child?”
The date of the Knesset vote on whether to accept German reparation was on January 7, 1952. Prior to the vote, there was a mass rally in Zion Square just a few blocks away from (where) the Knesset (was housed at the time). Begin addressed the rally referring to Ben Gurion as “the maniac who is now Prime Minister.”
At the conclusion of the rally just before the vote, the protesters marched up to the Knesset, which had been cordoned off by a large police detachment. In no time, the protestors broke through the first outer ring of the police and started slinging stones. The police on the roof deployed tear gas against the demonstrators, but the wind blew it back into the faces of the police and into the Knesset building whose windows were shattered from rocks.
The billowing clouds of tear gas, the shrieking of ambulance sirens, and the ring of pistol shots fired by the police above the heads of the demonstrators gave the impression of a war zone.
Menachem Begin who ordered his men not to return fire upon Haganah troops who shot and sunk the Altalena in June 1948, to avert a civil war, was saying nothing of the sort on the day of the Knesset vote. This time he avowed, “This will be a war of life and death. Today I will give the order: Blood!”
The shouting of the crowd outside, the bedlam in the streets, the hail of rocks, and Begin’s rhetoric did not faze Ben Gurion, and after a ten-hour debate, the principle of reparations was accepted. Because of the extreme hostility in the country over the issue, all negotiations with Germans were held in secret and not conducted in German (despite the fluency of the Israeli delegates in German).
Although many Israelis realized how important the reparations agreement was for the economy and safety of Israel, nonetheless, for survivors and non-survivors alike, the notion that money could somehow atone for the suffering and mass murder inflicted upon the Jewish people was utterly unconscionable.
Stormy debates in the Knesset were followed by stormy sessions in the Bundestag when the Arab League announced that if the reparation deal went through, no Arab state would grant import licenses to German firms. The Germans managed to placate the Arabs by offering them large grants for their economic development.
Even those who argued in favor of the reparations, most notably Ben Gurion, were skeptical if the deal would ever be fulfilled suffering a fate similar to the arrangements of the Versailles Treaty after World War I. Thanks to Adenauer, however, a devout Catholic who believed in atonement for sin, the arrangements were punctiliously observed.
The reparations were instrumental in improving housing, creating an Israeli shipping fleet and airline, building roads, telecommunication systems, and electricity networks. The reparations also played a role in the National water carrier system. The stain of accepting the most corrupt money in the world has never been expunged.