The Seventh Million summary

Before World War II, Europe was home to some nine million Jews. By the end of the war, that number was just three million. Of those Jews, just a few thousand owed their survival to the Zionist movement.

In fact, when news of the systematic extermination of European Jews first broke, the Jews in Palestine didn’t give it the attention it deserved. In 1942, Ha’aretz published a story about atrocities being committed against Jews in Kharkov, Ukraine, but the story appeared on page two under a single-column headline.

When the war came to a close and the extent of the horrors of the Holocaust came into sharper focus, the Jewish people living in Palestine were overcome by a collective sense of guilt because they hadn’t done everything they had been capable of doing to save the European Jews.

It was during this period of shock that some Jews called for revenge on the German people. For instance, a few months after the war ended, Abba Kovner, a young Holocaust survivor, arrived in Palestine armed with a plan for vengeance.

In the first few months following the declaration of the Israeli state in 1948, many Israelis called for a boycott of Germany. But such a boycott would have been difficult to achieve and, frankly, counterproductive.

Why?

In the 1950s, Israel became involved in a number of military conflicts with the neighboring Arab countries. And Israel received some of the military equipment it needed from Germany.

As with the reparation payments, the military connections between the two countries was a highly contentious subject among the Israeli people. In 1959, the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Israel was not just buying arms from Germany, but selling them to the country as well.

On the night of May 11, 1960, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mossad agents kidnapped a man whose neighbors knew him as Ricardo Clement. These Israeli secret agents drugged the man, dressed him as an airline steward and put him on a special plane waiting for them at the international airport.

The real name of the man they had kidnapped was Adolf Eichmann and he had been one of the highest-ranking figures in the Nazi party, playing a central role in organizing the transportation of Jews to death camps.

Science was always an essential part of the vision for the State of Israel, and the country built a nuclear power plant before many other nations. But their atomic pursuits weren’t made for solely civilian purposes and, in the late 1960s, Time magazine reported that Israel was constructing a nuclear weapon.

Why?

Since the early days of the Jewish state, the people of Israel have debated how to memorialize the Holocaust. How could the country preserve the collective memory of this event? What was OK and what was off limits?

A consensus was reached in 1951, when the Knesset decided that the twenty-seventh day of Nissan, the first month in the Jewish calendar, would be Holocaust and Ghetto Rebellion Memorial Day. Ever since this decision, the country has all but shut down for one day of remembrance, contemplation and unity each year.