Keeping the Secrets

Since its inception, the State of Israel has harbored more secrets than any other democratic country. Over the last decade, the secrecy has been intensified as access to numerous documents was denied, particularly regarding the behavior of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust. Some of these documents are meant to remain locked up until at least 2042.

From "In Jewish Blood: The Zionist Alliance with Germany, 1933-1963"

Chapter: Opening the Archives. Page 570

The military and security services have played a leading role in concealing Israel’s past. The state archives, part of the Prime Minister’s Office, was instructed by the attorney general to stop declassifying records. Civil servants were warned that any infraction could mean dismissal if not criminal prosecution. The archives of the military and intelligence community were even stricter, making available no more than 0.4 percent of its files. For decades, the community was a law unto itself, maintaining unauthorized collections and refusing to send material to the state archives.

Israel has held two secrets that it is determined never to give up. The first relates to the Holocaust; the second to the 1948 war of independence. The methods used to obfuscate and revise have been common to both subjects. Files on the war that had been declassified were slammed shut to researchers. They included documents that told of the expulsion of Arabs by the new Israeli military.

Other material no longer made available concerned alleged killing and rape of civilians by Israeli soldiers. Foreign and even Israeli historians have used this to argue that the Arabs were expelled, which Israel has long feared could end up in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Given access, Arab descendants could use government files as part of massive compensation claims in Western courts. These documents were reclassified “top secret.” Soon after he became prime minister, Ben-Gurion went beyond concealment. He tried to rewrite the War of Independence. He was helped by the military censor, who for at least 20 years would bar civil servants from releasing any information, including the Palmach sinking of the Revisionist-sponsored ship Altalena. In 1961, after several years of discussion, the prime minister ordered a project to refute the accusations that Israel had expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs during its first two years. The official narrative was that the Arabs had left voluntarily, mostly at the urging of their leaders.

For Israel, the Holocaust was the bigger secret. Ben-Gurion could count on Zionists and their supporters to defend Israel regardless of what had taken place during the War of Independence. But who would protect the Mapai regime should it be found to have collaborated with the Germans during World War II? The blowback could include lawsuits by hundreds of thousands of Jews, expected to demand far more than meager German reparations. Ben-Gurion and his colleagues might even find themselves in the dock of some international tribunal. Israel would become a pariah in the Diaspora. Donations would dry up and the Israeli leadership boycotted. Foreign aid would disappear.

Tuvia Friling became a key executor of Israel’s policy to conceal the past. He obtained his Master’s and doctorate from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry. In 1991, he wrote his doctoral thesis “Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust in Europe 1939-1945” under the guidance of Bauer. Ben-Gurion was portrayed as deeply concerned over the fate of European Jews. Eight years later, his dissertation was turned into a book Shot in the Dark, which won a series of state-sponsored awards, including one by Yad Vashem. Friling was appointed to the board of directors at Yad Vashem’s research institute. His focus was Ben-Gurion, and from 1993 to 2001 the Romanian-born professor headed the Ben-Gurion Institute at Kibbutz Sde Boker. One course at the institute was titled “David Ben-Gurion: The greatest decision maker.” Like Bauer, Friling became a visiting scholar at numerous U.S. and British universities, including Oxford. He also served as vice chairman of the International Commission of the Holocaust in Romania, headed by Eli Wiesel.

From 2001 through 2004, Friling was the state archivist. He blocked access to documents linked to Kastner. His reason was not national security. Instead, he claimed that the Kastner material was unimportant and could be used only to smear politicians. He insisted that the protocols, correspondence, memorandums of the Jewish Agency or its rescue committees in Jerusalem and Istanbul did not reflect genuine activities. Ben-Gurion, Sharett and Kaplan, he said, made the decisions, but did their best to avoid a paper trail. What really took place had never been recorded. He advised researchers to forget about Israel and wait for the opening of the archives in Britain, Russia and the United States. Friling’s argument was disingenuous. If the Israeli archives contained nothing of value, then why keep them closed? His concern that researchers could exploit the material for political purposes ruled out any other authority but himself. But Friling might have been hinting at something else – that much or most of the material on the Holocaust had already been taken out of government hands. In 1963, Ben-Gurion left the premiership with a trove of official documents that should have been transferred to the archives. Some of the papers were regarded as so sensitive that a Mapai minister threatened to take the matter to the police.

Seven years after Friling, Yaakov Lozowick became the state archivist. Born in Germany in 1957, Lozowick’s career in Israel embarked on a fast track, from obtaining degrees at Hebrew University, through becoming a tour guide and a history teacher at an Orthodox Jewish high school in Jerusalem. In 1982, Lozowick, who had just earned his bachelor’s degree in history and Jewish philosophy, joined Yad Vashem as a research assistant. Like Bauer, Lozowick was politically active, described as a “noted Israeli peace activist” who eventually became “disabused” of his dream that Palestinian ruler Yasser Arafat sought peace with Israel.

In 1993, Lozowick was appointed director of Yad Vashem’s archives. Two years shy of completing his doctorate, he gained the post by default, following the retirement of his longtime predecessor. Although inexperienced, Lozowick, who had worked in the education department, had proven valuable to the Yad Vashem brass. He spoke fluent German and was usually assigned to guide high-ranking German officials. In 1995, he escorted Chancellor Kohl. Lozowick was also computer literate and determined to digitalize the millions of files in the archives.

Lozowick headed Yad Vashem’s archives for 14 years. His lectures presented contradictory accounts of Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust. Sometimes, he asserted that Eichmann had been merely an emissary of the SS and Gestapo, assigned to report on the Nazi extermination in Poland and the Soviet Union. At other times, Lozowick saw Eichmann as highly effective in Hitler’s Final Solution. Eichmann and his colleagues were “true innovators in the Silicon Valley sense of the word,” Lozowick said. “... They went to deal with it in revolutionary ways.”

Upon assuming his position as state archivist, Lozowick announced that he was prepared to release a huge amount of material. Instead, he presided over the shutdown of the institution. What was released amounted to little more than fan mail – a photograph of a teenage Yitzhak Rabin, or that of Yitzhak Shamir doing calisthenics. He released files of mental patients who had committed suicide. He withheld everything else, particularly Zionist policy toward the Reich. Like Friling, Lozowick could determine whether a requested document could harm the Zionist narrative. He acknowledged that he did not seek public input. “It didn’t occur to me that would bother anybody at all,” he said.

Lozowick worked under Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had fought to open the archives of war criminals – at the United Nations. It was a success that Netanyahu boasted to audiences. But he ignored the appeals by historians to do the same in Israel. From 2009 through 2017, a Cabinet committee authorized to declassify documents on national security and foreign relations failed to convene. But the government censors did. In 2017, authorities imposed additional restrictions that ensured that no objectionable material would be released. The measure required all documents — regardless of classification — to remain secret until approval by the agency that had deposited them in the state archives. Friling was proven right. There was nothing left for the historian to do in Israel.

“There is something tremendously embarrassing about Israel also hiding information about the Holocaust,” Israeli historian Tom Segev said. “It is intolerable to have even one document related to the Holocaust barred from research. As the prime minister in charge of the Shin Bet and the Mossad, Netanyahu can instruct the two organizations to open their archives on war criminals, both during the Holocaust and in its aftermath.”

In 1994, Israel raised the possible consequences of releasing its secrets. A ministerial committee decided that the state would withhold any information that could hurt relations with minorities or other groups and which “could serve as the apparent basis for claims against the state.” The Cabinet directive guaranteed that any such document — even that available for decades — would be reclassified and concealed. Since then, official archivists have told researchers that some secrets would be kept until at least 2042 for security and privacy reasons.