Israel and the Holocaust

Palestine: A future to rebuild Esprit 6/2026 Palestinian historiography as struggle against erasure; a film about narrative and loss; Standing Together; debate as the first step to a renewed political imagination. From resistance heroization and victim denigration to justification for military action, perceptions of what the Holocaust means in Israel have shifted over the decades. Avinoam Patt talks to Eurozine about his research on Holocaust memorialization and Israeli national identity, discussing historical turning points and cultural influences. Sarah Waring: In your book, Israel and the Holocaust,1 you begin by debunking the common misconception that the Holocaust led to the foundation of the State of Israel. While the timing would appear sequential, could you briefly describe what separates the two? You also suggest that a case could even be made for the state having been founded in spite of the Holocaust. Could you explain what you mean by this? Avinoam Patt: As only three years separate the end of the Second World War in May 1945 – at least in Europe – and the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948, there is a common misconception that there must be some sort of causal relationship between the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel – that Israel exists because of the Holocaust. But we should make a distinction between historical causation and historical relationships that exist due to the proximity of events. First, Zionism and the political Zionist movement – the project of returning the Jewish people to the land of Israel and establishing sovereignty – long predates the Second World War and the Holocaust. If we look at the Zionist movement’s efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, much had been accomplished under the British mandate, especially after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, to create Jewish agency and the instruments of a state facilitating the migration of large numbers of Jews to Palestine before 1939. And yet, over the course of the 1930s, the Arab population in Palestine had been increasingly protesting British rule and Jewish migration. After the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, the British produced the 1939 White Paper, rejecting the partition of Palestine and restricting Jewish immigrants to 15,000 a year over the next five years – at the very time when the Second World War had broken out and the Jewish refugee crisis reached extreme dimensions. This was the worst possible timing for those fleeing Europe. The Second World War made it seem less likely that the state of Israel could overcome its demographic challenge: in 1939, the Jewish population was half that of the Arab population in Palestine. David Ben-Gurion, the driving force behind the creation of the State of Israel and Israel’s first prime minister, had been focused largely on European immigration to form a Jewish majority national home. So, when the Holocaust led to the destruction of European Jewry, it’s reasonable to say that in 1945 it seemed much less likely that the state would come into existence. The demographic challenge existed. The British blockade on migration continued to exist. So, then we have to ask, what happened. How is it that over the course of three years, from 1945 to 1948, the State of Israel came into existence? I would argue that coming up with a solution to the problem of Jewish statelessness and Jewish displacement in the aftermath of the Second World War played an underappreciated role in decision-making. Instrumental were the policies of Americans, especially from the American zone of occupation in post-war Germany, and the increasing pressure on the international community to come up with a solution to Jewish statelessness. In November 1947, the United Nations’ Resolution 181 (II) supported the partition of Palestine, specifically citing the need to create a Jewish state in a part of Palestine. But this wasn’t the United Nations saying, ‘we feel terrible about what Germans did to the Jews’. It was a very practical solution to the problem of post-war Jewish statelessness. After the creation of the state, there was also sizable migration from North Africa and the Middle East. And, going back – this is the historical complexity – we have to remember the determination of the Zionist movement, all the efforts that had gone into creating that Jewish state before the Second World War. We have to take all of these factors into account. Sarah Waring: So, there was a drive to include the survivors of the Holocaust in the establishment of the State of Israel. And yet, while Holocaust survivors made up a significant part of those who quickly doubled the newly formed state’s population in the space of just a few years, their traumatic experiences were not consistent with the aspirations of the newly founded nation. It could even be said that the principles of Zionism view diaspora as exile, a harmful existence for Jews that should be negated. What was the State of Israel’s initial response to practices of Holocaust memorialization, of familial commemoration? Avinoam Patt: We’ve just looked at the proximity of the end of the Second World War to the creation of the state. This means that Israel and its history exist in the aftermath of the Holocaust and had to negotiate its existence within this relationship. But in the early years of the state, its founders were very reluctant to connect the two. They were concerned by the perception that the state could only have come into existence because of the Holocaust. If Zionism, as an ideology, is predicated on the notion, on the one hand, of the Jewish ancestral connection to the land of Israel, and, on the other, that the Jewish nation is a nation like all others, deserving of a state – just as any other nation is deserving of a state – then you could see how the argument that the only reason the state exists is because of the Holocaust would undermine those two fundamental components of classical Zionist thought. Even before the state was created, part of the effort of Zionism was to create a new sense of national identity grounded in the idea that Jewish life in the diaspora had been harmful to a sense of Jewish national identity. A proud, independent Jewish nation, it was said, needed to be connected to the land of Israel in order to be a people of action, in order to be a people who took control of their own history and of their own destiny. And that Jewish life in the diaspora had weakened that sense of Jewish national identity and had turned the Jewish people into a passive people, who were the objects of history rather than fashioning their own existence. They were the subjects and victims of more powerful groups that determined their fate. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in the early years of the creation of the state, Holocaust survivors who ended up in Israel represented a challenge to this nationalist ethos. They were a reminder of what, from a Zionist perspective, could happen to a Jewish diaspora, of the danger of Jewish powerlessness. Therefore, the State of Israel elevated heroic narratives of Jewish resistance in its early years of Holocaust commemoration. The heroes were the ghetto fighters, the partisans, the people who had engaged in armed resistance. And everyone else was essentially looked upon as passive victims of Nazi persecution. They were seen as reminders of the harmful effects of Jewish life in the diaspora. This approach to shaping Holocaust commemoration served as a lesson: ‘this is why we need a Jewish state’. There was not only ambivalence to incorporating the memory of the Holocaust into the national narrative but also the state denigrated survivors who had not participated in heroic resistance. Many Holocaust survivors who ended up in Israel in the early years of state-building talk about being looked down upon, not encouraged to share their experiences. At the same time, the state was attempting to construct a top-down, state-sponsored history shaping the memory of what had happened during the Second World War from a Zionist perspective. Survivors themselves were meanwhile engaged in what I call a grassroots level of commemoration: talking about their experiences with one another, with other survivors, people from the same hometowns, forming Landsmanschaft and hometown associations. People who had similar experiences, either from specific ghettos or specific camps, engaged in commemorative experiences together, memorialization projects that took the form of memorial books like Yizkor books (that commemorate the memory of a specific town where survivors had come from), or cemeteries with monuments and memorials constructed to commemorate specific towns, or the destruction of certain places, or a community. There was tension, especially during the 1950s, between the state crafting top-down memory that emphasized heroic resistance and a bottom-up, grassroots movement of survivors crafting their own commemoration projects. Sarah Waring: It is commonly suggested that the state’s top-down position silenced Holocaust survivors. At what point did this change? What key events or policies cemented Holocaust moralization in the Israeli collective consciousness? Avinoam Patt: In my opinion, we can call this so-called ‘silence’ a silence that never was. Silence depends on who is or is not listening. Survivors and their communities, especially refugees from different parts of Europe, were listening. I don’t think we can say that there was a silence. From the 1950s, there are different commemorative activities and writing about it. There’s literature. There’s poetry. There’s an active press. But that doesn’t mean to say that on the part of the native-born sabras there wasn’t either this deep ambivalence, looking down upon the survivors, or a desire not to listen, not to talk to them. This idea of a silence might also have transpired from the perception of survivors. I should point out here that, by 1960, Holocaust survivors constituted about a quarter of the Israeli population: about 500,000 survivors out of 2 million Israeli citizens is a quarter of the population.2 Part of my broader argument, therefore, suggests why it would make sense over time that there was increasing awareness and identification with wartime experiences on the part of the descendants of survivors, who constituted a sizable proportion of the population. We can see how political leadership at the time used the tools at their disposal – ratifying laws, creating national institutions or memorial days – to craft and shape a specific type of memory. For example, in 1951 a national date of Holocaust commemoration was set in law: Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. Throughout the 1950s, from 1951 to 1953 and then 1959, different iterations of the law were developed, which ultimately prescribed specific types of behaviour, given the concerns that some weren’t observing Holocaust Memorial Day with the proper solemnity. A two-minute silence was introduced, as was playing sombre music on the radio. National commemorations were to take place. The law that formalized the commemoration, when concluded in 1959, enshrined Holocaust Memorial Day within the Israeli national calendar and the Jewish calendar. There was debate about when exactly that day should be. As there are plenty of other dates in the Jewish calendar that could have been used in service of the commemoration, it was questioned whether a new date was needed. Other dates of mourning like Tisha B’Av that commemorates the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem, for example. Or the 10th of Tevet, or the 17th of Tammuz. The decision to say, ‘no, we have to create a separate date that will be Holocaust Memorial Day’ is significant. In the The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw,3 I’ve written about why the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became central to Holocaust memorialization. For the creators of the State of Israel, it made sense that the uprising would be the prism through which they would want Israeli citizens to remember the Holocaust, focusing on the Zionist heroes that led the resistance in 1943. The only problem was that no one wanted to use a secular date and the uprising, which had started on 19 April, coincided with the first night of Passover in the Jewish calendar. This was a non-starter: Holocaust Memorial Day shouldn’t take over Passover celebrations. As the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was still unfolding two weeks after it started, a decision was made to designate the 27th of Nisan as Holocaust Memorial Day, one week before the 5th of Iyar, which is Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s day of independence. This created an annual cycle that very much fit the state’s efforts to craft a specific Zionist narrative of Holocaust memory: from the depths of destruction of the Jewish diaspora right into independence one week later. This is one of the main tools that state makers have: creating significant national holidays. The National Holocaust Memorial site, Yad Vashem, was designated as a state-sponsored site of Holocaust memory in 1953. But it is not the only Holocaust memorial site in Israel. Other museums and memorial sites had already been created: The Ghetto Fighters House was the first Holocaust museum in Israel, established on 19 April 1949; in Jerusalem, Martef HaShoah, or the Chamber of the Holocaust, also opened in 1949. The top-down, bottom-up tension continued. The 1950s was a fascinating period for the dynamic interplay between how the state crafted a specific memory of the Holocaust versus how survivors themselves memorialized their experiences. I’m dwelling on the 1950s, because there’s a tendency, which isn’t mistaken, to see the 1961 Eichmann trial as the major turning point in Israeli collective consciousness of the Holocaust. It did shift the Israeli public’s view of the complexity of Jewish behaviour during the war. It became a major pedagogic tool, developing deeper understanding of what happened to European Jewry during the war. What had been a simplistic notion of ghetto fighters as heroes versus passive ‘sheep to the slaughter’, this paradigm of resistance and passivity that had been the focus of how Israel talked about the Holocaust, became more complex. The dynamic nature of the Eichmann trial might be part of the reason why there’s a tendency to say that no one knew anything about the Holocaust or talked about it beforehand. But what my book and a lot of other research shows is that Holocaust memorialization was a constant presence over the course of the 1950s. There was literature, commemorations, it was in the press. There was the Kastner affair in 1955 – the Hungarian Labor Zionist activist accused of ‘selling his soul to the devil’ in negotiating the release of 1,684 Jews, including family and friends – which absolutely captured the attention of the broader public. So, it’s impossible to say that no one knew or spoke about the Holocaust. The discourse was just constructed through a very specific prism, which began to shift over time. Shifting perceptions of what the Holocaust means can be a way of understanding more broadly how Israeli national identity changes over time. Sarah Waring: You mentioned the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a fitting ideological focus for the Zionist memorialization of the Holocaust, emphasizing heroic resistance. Later in your book, you describe state-sponsored programmes that have sent thousands of teenagers (100,000 from the 1980s to 2002) to the sites of Poland concentration camps and death camps since 1988.4 You quote Jackie Feldman, who wrote: ‘The students’ path, like the monument’s iconography,’ meaning the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters’ Memorial, ‘moves from martyrdom and destruction to revolt. Immediately after the rising chants of the national anthem, students will board the plane for the flight home.’5 The March of the Living turns memorialization into a personified experience. Anybody that goes to a site such as Auschwitz can’t help but be moved, and rightly so, by what they experience. And, in this case, Holocaust memorialization is also directly connected to national identity; as you say, Yom HaShoah segues into Yom Ha’atzmaut; an emotional journey for young people. How would you describe this development in Holocaust memorialization? Avinoam Patt: Over the decades, we can trace shifting perceptions of Israel’s national identity in relation to the Holocaust. After the Eichmann trial, we see increasing research generated by Israeli scholars, who want to engage more broadly in Jewish experiences from the Second World War. And there’s a greater appetite on the part of the Jewish public to find out more. Zionism is meant to represent Jewish sovereignty, Jewish control over the Jewish faith and Jewish destiny, provide an army that is supposed to protect the citizens of Israel. From the Six-Day War in 1967, you start to see increasing references to national security through the lens of Holocaust memory. In the lead up to June 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s threats to wipe the State of Israel off the map induce anxiety. After the Six-Day War, Der Spiegel interviewed Abba Eban, then Israeli foreign minister, who said: ‘For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. …This is a situation which will never be repeated in history.’6 This statement sets the tone for no longer accepting indefensible boundaries – and this invocation of the Holocaust to explain national security issues coming from someone who was very much associated with the classical, Labor Zionist viewpoint. Then, the sense of invincibility that might have existed after the triumph of the Six-Day War was punctured by the Yom Kippur War in 1973. There was a sense that Israel had been defeated, even though it had not been; Israelis realized how tenuous their national security was. I’m emphasizing this period because there’s a tendency to see the election of right-wing Menachem Begin in 1977 as the turning point. But I think we already begin to see a perception of Israel’s history and political events through the lens of Holocaust memory beforehand. When Likud is in power for the first time and Begin augments his references to the Holocaust, the Israeli public is already used to its emotional invocation. In 1979, legislation is also passed that mandates Holocaust education, the first Holocaust history textbooks in the Israeli educational system. This sets us up for a period in the 1980s when it’s much more common to make references to the Holocaust. I don’t think that it was just politicians who from a top-down approach instilled Holocaust remembrance for political purposes. There was also an organic process that had been taking place over the decades. And it’s not just in Israel during the 1980s that there was a deepening association with Holocaust memory. A parallel process happened amongst the Jewish diaspora in the US and elsewhere at the exact same time. We begin to see documentation projects collecting testimonies. Holocaust, the mini-series on NBC in 1978 was incredibly influential. The United States Holocaust Memorial Council was established in 1980, leading to the creation of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Survivors start talking and giving their testimonies over the course of this period. Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah released in 1985 is a ground-breaking example. Holocaust memorialization had become a global phenomenon when these trips for teenagers to Poland began in 1988; not only Israeli but also American, British and other diaspora youth participate in the March of the Living. And yet, as your question points out, these experiences are very much framed within a Zionist perspective: from Me-Shoah (the destruction of the Holocaust) to le-Tkuma (rebirth) and the establishment of the state. And this itinerary of memory, if we think of it in that way, very much parallels the path that I spoke about on the Jewish calendar, of going from Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th of Nisan to the National Independence Day of Israel on the 5th of Iyar one week later. The itinerary of most of these trips also parallels that path, a journey both in chronological and physical space: from the epicentre of the annihilation of European Jewry in Auschwitz – the march from Auschwitz to Birkenau – to ending up in the Jewish state. The march justifies the State of Israel, the sentiment being ‘at least we now have the state to keep us safe’. That’s why you see the phenomenon of young people draping themselves in the Israeli flag as they participate in the march, as if it were a shield that will protect them, just as the Star of David is also a shield. Perhaps it functions on a psychological level during what is a difficult, troubling, even devastating experience to participate in the march. Perhaps the layered path of the march gives them a sense of meaning afterwards. I don’t know. I don’t want to psychologize all the people who participate, but I think their itineraries are very much structured in that way. One thing we shouldn’t forget is that the first march happened close to the fall of communism in 1989. When Eastern Europe’s borders opened, travelling to these sites became possible. Israelis began going back not just on state-sponsored trips but also independently. Families could return to sites that they may not have been able to visit so easily decades before. The trips of second-generation Israelis to find out where their families had come from and what had happened to victims also deepened associations with the Holocaust. Sarah Waring: I would like to move on now to thinking more about the evocation of the Holocaust for political gain. You have mentioned this in relation to the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps we can look at more recent forms of manipulation. ‘Never again’ was the defiant statement used as immediate memorialization by Buchenwald concentration camp survivors, but it is being used as justification for divisive right-wing Israeli government political ends. What, in your opinion, would be a more appropriate use of references to the Holocaust and its memorialization? Avinoam Patt: The use of ‘never again’ for political purposes is interesting. In 1981, in relation to bombing the Iraqi nuclear reactor, Begin said: ‘There won’t be another Holocaust in history. Never again, never again. We shall defend our people with all the means at our disposal. We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against us.’7 It’s a perfect example of the use of ‘never again’, the use of the memory of the Holocaust, to justify political decisions. Begin’s use of ‘never again’ was constructed through a very particularist viewpoint. His lesson is never again will the Jewish people be defenceless. Never again will they be powerless against their enemies. It is used to justify military action. I think we have to distinguish between memorialization that is done to remember specific historical events and the invocation of that history for political purposes. It’s a question of what direction we are asking the memory to flow? Are we saying that in order to justify an action in the present day, we will use the memory of the Holocaust to justify that action? Or are we taking a pause from our perspective of the present and remembering and commemorating the event itself, and rehumanizing the victims themselves – remembering that this happened in a specific historical moment in time. We live in a time where we see repeated invocation and use of Holocaust analogies. And I think we should always ask what is the purpose of the analogy that’s being made. Is it being made to use the emotional power of the Holocaust as an example of ultimate human evil? Is the symbol of the Holocaust being used to make a political point in the present? I draw the line at instrumentalization that trivializes the memory of the Holocaust, when it’s using the Holocaust to make a political point. An analogy could however also help us better understand the event itself in a way that people living 80 years after the event might have trouble understanding. Analogies that help us better understand the event can be appropriate in a specific context. One of the other challenges of ‘never again’ is distinguishing the ‘particular’ from the ‘universal’. The Begin formulation after the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor is very particular. It suggests that we have to bomb the reactor to defend Israel and the Jewish people. Whereas the universal interpretation of ‘never again’ means never again will humans do this to fellow humans. There are moral and ethical teachings that have universal implications, which is, frankly, why we teach the Holocaust. If we teach the Holocaust only in a Jewish context, then it would mean never again specifically for Jewish people. But if we teach the Holocaust in a broader universal context, that means that an event happened in human history that should help us understand the potential of humans to inflict evil, the dangers of conformity and groupthink, and the need for empathy – these are universal lessons. Sarah Waring: I’m glad you mentioned universality. You have previously described perceptions of October 7 and the Gaza War from inside and outside of Israel as representative of an ‘intense disconnect’.8 How could the principles of universal humanism be brought to bear in relation to Israel’s position on Palestinians in Gaza? Can Holocaust memorialization help understand responses to October 7? Or should we avoid such comparisons? Avinoam Patt: I recently spoke at length with author and former Professor of Holocaust and East European Studies (at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Dalia Ofer about Holocaust memory. In her interview we discussed the need for universal humanism in relation to the Gaza War. Dalia recalled speaking to a student who had taken part in a demonstration on the 600th day of the war in favor of bringing the hostages home: ‘Alongside the protesters, who were clutching photos of the hostages, a circle of students sat there with photos of starving children in Gaza in hand. This student told me: “I can’t think about both of these things together.” What she said gave me a sense that something had been profoundly squandered, had failed badly, in the teaching of the Holocaust. I take a critical view of Holocaust curricula and of centering the emotional aspect on being the victim, namely, the fate-based narrative, instead of focusing on the realization that murderous and racist ideologies can lead society – any society – to very dark places.’9 A large part of the Israeli public is still very much living in the moment of October 7 and the trauma of that devastating day. Whereas in the world outside of Israel, certainly in Gaza, in Europe, the US and the rest of the world, it feels like October 8 – it’s the day after. Israelis are reliving and still grappling with the trauma of that date. And, in the world at large, events are experienced, reported and perceived very differently. I think Israelis can’t understand why others don’t appreciate their intense suffering and why the focus has shifted onto the war in Gaza. There were many devastating aspects of Oct 7, but the State of Israel’s failure to protect its people was marked. If the state was predicated on the idea that never again should the Jewish people be vulnerable and powerless, then one of the traumatic aspects of that day was that communities in the South were overrun by Hamas fighters without any protection. Many people asked ‘Where was the army? Where were the police?’ Israelis were left with the feeling that they had to fend for themselves, bringing this vulnerability to the surface again. October 7 undermined the whole raison d’etre of the state. For leaders who wanted to prove to Israeli citizens that ‘never again’ meant ‘never again should Israelis feel powerless or defenseless’, their response would have to demonstrate to Gazans and to Hamas that they should never again try to perpetrate these types of atrocities, intending to restore some trust and belief in the power of the state to protect its citizens. I think there is a correlation between reinstating the state as protector and the intensity of the Israeli response to annihilating Hamas and destroying the whole terrorist infrastructure, which resulted in flattening entire sections of Gaza, leading to extreme losses of life – the death of civilians alongside fighters. It is telling that there hasn’t been a state-sponsored commission of inquiry to investigate the failings of the military and the state on October 7. What was the intelligence failure? What was the military failure? Part of this lies with the government. Netanyahu and his right-wing government don’t want to acknowledge their failings. The continuation of the war – the fact that it’s not really over – I think is also part of the avoidance of a commission of inquiry. In comparison, the Yom Kippur War, which incidentally – but perhaps not coincidentally – started 50 years before October 7, 2023, was investigated six months afterwards. There was a state commission of inquiry, a comparatively rapid political response to the war. It’s almost three years after Oct 7 now and this government has avoided taking any accountability for what happened. Since October 7 and then the war in Gaza, I’m constantly thinking about how Holocaust memory, which is deeply ingrained in the national psyche and collective memory, will influence the way Israelis perceive these events. Many Israelis have already made associations with the Holocaust. I’m beginning to research how the frameworks of Holocaust memory in Israeli society are embedded in the commemoration of traumatic event. Within Israeli society, Holocaust memorialization is the manual, the playbook, the guide for how to do it. Actually, I think it’s already shaping the ways in which Oct 7 is being perceived and will be commemorated. Edut 710 is a grassroots project that has so far collected almost 2,000 testimonies of October 7 survivors, which uses Holocaust testimony methodology. If one tours around memorial sites in the southern part of Israel, grassroots commemorations have sprung up. There you can also see echoes of how Holocaust memorial sites have been commemorated with memorial plaques that record the names of every single victim. But there are also debates about how sites of memory should be preserved. What do you rebuild on sites of devastation and destruction? How this trauma will be commemorated nationally will be interesting. It’s certainly already politicized. Sarah Waring: In your experience of good memorialization practice, do you consider the use of approaches to Holocaust memorialization appropriate for October 7? Avinoam Patt: That one merges into the other? Well, we know that everything always takes place in a political context. It’s hard to separate out what happens immediately as organic, authentic practice from political practice. But if we go back to preserving the dignity and the identity of the victims, to rehumanizing them, to sitting with the difficult memory, to not putting some simplistic political lesson onto it, but just sitting with the history that is there, I think that appropriate memorial practice can be realized. This interview was conducted on 21 August 2026. A. Patt, Israel and the Holocaust, Bloomsbury, 2024. See: G. Druker Bar-Am, ‘May the “Makom” Comfort You: Place Holocaust remembrance and the creation of national identity in the Israeli Yiddish Press, 1948-1961’, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2014; H. Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, Palgrave Macmillian, 1999, p.9. A. Patt, The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The afterlife of the revolt, Wayne State University Press, 2021. A. Patt, Israel and the Holocaust, p. 114. J. Feldman, 'Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective through the Poland "experience"', Israeli Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 84-114. Interview with Abba Eban, ‘Die Sackgasse ist arabisch’, Der Spiegel, 26 January 1969, p. 86. M. Begin, press conference, Tel Aviv, Israel, 9 June 1981. This description arose during a pre-interview discussion. D. Ofer & A. Patt, ‘Israelis in the Shadow of Holocaust Memory and Antisemitism: The role of the State of Israel prior to October 7, 2023’, interview in Jerusalem on 5 June 2025, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2025. Published 7 September 2026 Original in English First published by Eurozine © Eurozine PDF/PRINTSubscribe to know what’s worth thinking about. Palestinian historiography as struggle against erasure; a film about narrative and loss; Standing Together; debate as the first step to a renewed political imagination. The guarded approach of this year’s Berlin Biennale towards expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity left artists and art public alike with the sense that what is currently permissible in Germany’s cultural sector is not enough. (Lithuanian version added)