Children of the State
Yitzhak Laor
- Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood by Idith Zertal
Cambridge, 236 pp, £19.99, October 2005, ISBN 0 521 85096 7
In 1950 the Israeli parliament passed the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, the first constitutional expression of Israel’s belief that it must act as the heir of the Jews murdered in Europe. This status won international recognition only gradually, thanks by and large to West Germany’s decision not only to pay compensation to the victims of Nazism but also to pay ‘reparations’ to the state of Israel. In her excellent book, Idith Zertal reviews some of the trials of Jewish collaborators who had immigrated to Israel after the war and were indicted under this law. These survivors were victims too, but the law required that their victimhood be suspended. Nevertheless, they were all given light sentences, as if the judges themselves had some reservations about the law.
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Vol. 28 No. 2 · 26 January 2006 » Yitzhak Laor » Children of the State (print version)
pages 9-10 | 2983 words