The right wing's denial of the occupation is not enough, and eventually requires that the event be blurred altogether
The project of rewriting Israel’s history by the right wing took a fascinating turn during Hanukkah. A presentation in honor of the holiday sponsored by the Education Ministry that surveyed significant events over the past 70 left out a few main events. These included the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Yarden Zur, December 21).
As expected, the left wing quickly fought back. MK Ilan Gilon (Meretz) issued a harsh condemnation, his party colleague MK Tamar Zandberg submitted a query and asked for clarification, and MK Ksenia Svetlova (Zionist Union) issued her own sharply worded message. But none of them, not Gilon, Zandberg or even Svetlova, got upset that the ministry headed by the chairman of the settler party, devotees of annexation, deniers of the occupation and the Palestinian people, left the Six-Day War out of the summary of “the second decade of the State of Israel.”
Education Minister Naftali Bennett was quick to apologize, and Rabin’s murder was reinstated into history. “Rabin’s murder was a quite a dramatic event in the history of the state, I didn’t know it doesn’t appear,” Bennett explained. “There are malfunctions and always will be when you’re running such a large system as education,” he added. Malfunctions, Bennett? For such malfunctions, regular people pay a lot of money for a 50-minute session twice a week. There really is no boundary to the depths of the sub-conscious.
Do you want to know what happened between 1958 and 1968 in Israel? Well, here we go: In 1959, the Israeli car called the Sussita hit the road; in 1961 the trial of arch-Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann took place, and from that year until 1964, Operation Yachin was underway to bring the Jews of Morocco to Israel. In 1963, the iconic Hagashash Hahiver comedy troupe put on its first performance. In 1964, the National Water Carrier was built; in 1965 the film “Salah Shabbati” was nominated for an Oscar; and in 1966, Coca Cola began selling in Israel. Also in 1966, the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to S.Y. Agnon, and in 1968, Israeli Television was established. Oops, how time flies when you’re rewriting history; it’s already 1970 and there are 266,233 cars plying Israel’s roads.
Might you say that this was a survey mainly of popular culture events? But the War of Independence, the Yom Kippur War, Operation Yonatan, the first Lebanon war, the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq – they’re all mentioned. So it’s hard to decide what’s crazier: that the right wing left the Six-Day War out, or that the left wing accepted this offhandedly. What’s certain is that it is deeply significant. It seems that to the people who prepared this presentation for the Education Ministry, it was important to “get around” historical events that generate dispute. They wanted an activity for the whole family, to leave political arguments out. But how did it happen that the Six-Day War has become a subject of political dispute? Especially when the right wing is in power and with Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel?
When the Netanyahu era comes to an end, and Israeli society begins to liberate its consciousness from his lies and rehabilitate its self-image, there will be no choice but to go back to that same war, to that same victory, and find the political potion that will be able to lift the victors’ curse that has been plaguing it ever since.
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