Turning grief into cash
Survivors' yellow star protest is Holocaust pornography
One billion, seven hundred million shekels. According to Deputy Prime Minister Rafi Eitan, this is the annual sum granted by the Treasury to 50,000 senior citizens and Holocaust survivors who lived under Nazi occupation. Is this a small amount?
In the prevailing mood in Israel it appears that we have lost the ability to understand what is a lot and what is not, who is nurtured, and who is deprived.
There are no words to describe the sight of elderly citizens making their way to the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem in the scorching August sun. Not a single one of them is cynical and seeking to rob the State coffers; not a single one of them is an extortionist seeking to hold the State by the throat. They are too old for such games.
Each does his or her own reckoning, the amount that is lacking at the end of the month, the gifts they find difficult to buy their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, and as is common among the elderly, they take stock of their lives – their disappointment of themselves, of their families, and of the State.
They are not cynical, yet they are surrounded by many people who are. The politicians are the first: Benjamin Netanyahu, who is boasting his greatest achievement on posters on every bus – the grand cuts in the social budgets – on Sunday called on the government to comply with the demands made by Holocaust survivors; Shimon Peres, whose greatest achievement as prime minister was the large-scale cuts in the social budgets in the mid '80s, made similar pleas.
And then there is Ehud Olmert, who on Wednesday fiercely opposed any addition, only to fold under the pressure exerted by Rafi Eitan the next day. On Sunday evening, an inter-ministerial committee was set up to reexamine the stipends.
Next are the wheeler dealers, all of whom are well to do, veterans in Israel, who in their old age found their peace - the lawyers, the publicists, and all the professionals who organized this protest and will be the first to reap its benefits. Motti Morel and Ronen Zur's PR office, the aggressive office that campaigned for Moshe Katsav, was hired to market Sunday's demonstration.
Not a 2nd Holocaust
I asked Ronen Zur, the owner, why some of the protestors donned the striped outfit and yellow star worn at the camps. Isn't this a wild exaggeration? He replied that this was a private initiative by some of the demonstrators.
Perhaps this was true, but someone convinced them that they are in the midst of a second Holocaust. Someone revved them up and convinced them that the only way to force the government to open its coffers is to wave the worst symbols in its face. This is not just making the Holocaust banal; it is turning it into pornography.
Some 250,000 Israelis are currently defined as Holocaust survivors: This is a sweeping definition. It includes 150,000 Jews who escaped the Nazis to the USSR, lived there and came to Israel when the gates were opened. Rafi Eitan calls them "war refugees," to distinguish them from "Holocaust survivors."
And indeed, they are war refugees. And they do not differ in any way from the Jews who lived in Arab countries, and who until arriving in Israel endured harsh persecution and lost all their property.
Some 80,000 of the war refugees who came from the USSR are defined as needy. And they need to receive care: Not because of their retroactive refugee status, but rather, because of their current needs.
However, treating every elderly citizen who escaped to the USSR during the war as a "Holocaust survivor" looks like an attempt to curry favor with the Russian electorate.
On top of this, Knesset members barge in and pass more and more decisions that broaden the scope of survivors, and the High Court gets involved, another populist element that enforces further expansions of its own. Into this come TV broadcasters for whom every number tattooed onto an arm serves to increase viewer ratings.
As Sever Plocker wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth last Friday, elderly citizens in Israel should be treated according to their social condition, not according to the harships endured 60 years ago. This is the obligation of the State; it’s the State's responsibility. All the rest is a cynical attempt to turn the most sensitive grief into cash.
