Narrator: In 1961, during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust, a witness named Yehiel De-Nur took the stand. Known by his pen name Ka-Tzetnik, a term for a concentration camp inmate, De-Nur was a survivor of Auschwitz. As he began to testify, he described the camp not as a place on Earth, but as another planet, a place with its own laws of time and existence, where inhabitants had no names, only numbers. The weight of these memories became too much to bear. Before the stunned courtroom and a nation listening on the radio, De-Nur collapsed in a faint. This single, dramatic moment captured the profound, often unspeakable trauma that lay at the heart of the new Israeli state. It is this complex, painful, and deeply politicized relationship between a nation and a catastrophe that is explored in Tom Segev's groundbreaking work, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. The book examines how the memory of the six million Jews who perished has shaped the identity, politics, and soul of the "seventh million"—the Israelis who lived in the shadow of the genocide.

Narrator: In the 1930s, as Nazi Germany began its persecution of Jews, the Jewish community in Palestine, known as the Yishuv, faced an agonizing dilemma. The core of this conflict was crystallized in the Haavara Agreement of 1933, a controversial deal struck between Zionist leaders and the Nazi regime. The agreement allowed German Jews to emigrate to Palestine and transfer a portion of their assets, not in cash, but in German goods. For pragmatists like David Ben-Gurion, this was a grim necessity. It offered a chance to save Jewish lives while simultaneously strengthening the Yishuv's fragile economy. As one activist reported back from Germany, "The streets are paved with more money than we have ever dreamed of." However, this pragmatism was seen by others as a moral betrayal. The agreement broke a worldwide Jewish boycott of Germany and was viewed as a form of collaboration with the persecutors. This division erupted into violence with the 1933 assassination of Haim Arlosoroff, a key negotiator of the agreement, on a Tel Aviv beach—a crime that poisoned relations between the Zionist left and right for decades and underscored the impossible choices of the era.

Narrator: As the full scale of the Holocaust became known during World War II, the Yishuv's response was marked by a sense of powerlessness, internal division, and a troubling psychological distance. While there were public demonstrations and days of mourning, the leadership was often preoccupied with its own political battles and the long-term project of state-building. A telling example is the story of the "Tehran Children," a group of young Polish-Jewish orphans who had escaped to the Soviet Union and ended up in a refugee camp in Iran. When they were finally brought to Palestine in 1943, they became the center of a bitter political struggle. Religious and secular factions fought fiercely over the children's souls, interrogating them about their parents' piety to determine whether they would receive a religious or secular education. This ideological battle, waged over traumatized children, revealed a leadership more focused on shaping the future of the state than on tending to the immediate wounds of the survivors.

Narrator: When the war ended, the Yishuv's encounter with the Holocaust survivors was fraught with misunderstanding and judgment. The sabra, the native-born Israeli, had been cultivated as a "new Jew"—strong, proud, and self-reliant. In contrast, the survivors were often seen as a broken, passive remnant of the Diaspora, a symbol of the very weakness Zionism sought to overcome. Envoys sent to the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Europe sent back critical reports, describing the survivors as morally degenerate and lacking self-respect. One envoy shockingly wrote, "At first I thought they were animals." This condescending attitude created a deep chasm between the established community and the newcomers. Survivors were often met not with empathy, but with a sense of shame and an implicit question: "Why didn't you fight back?" This clash of experiences would leave a lasting scar on Israeli society, creating a hierarchy of suffering and delaying a true national reckoning with the trauma.

Narrator: In the early 1950s, the debate over accepting reparations from West Germany tore Israel apart. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion argued that the money was a moral and practical necessity. Israel was struggling to absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and the funds—which he framed not as forgiveness but as the return of stolen property—were essential for national survival. He famously declared, "Let not the murderers of our nation also be its heirs." However, for many, especially Holocaust survivors and the political right led by Menahem Begin, the idea of negotiating with Germany was an unforgivable dishonor. Begin framed the reparations as "blood money." The conflict reached a violent climax in January 1952, when Begin led a massive protest outside the Knesset. He incited the crowd with fiery rhetoric, and demonstrators stormed the building, throwing stones and clashing with police. The riot was a visceral expression of the raw, unresolved pain of the Holocaust, showing that for many, no amount of money could ever atone for the genocide.

Narrator: The capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem was a watershed moment, deliberately orchestrated by Ben-Gurion to reshape Israel's relationship with the Holocaust. The trial was conceived as a grand educational spectacle, not just for the world, but for a new generation of Israelis who had grown up disconnected from the events in Europe. For the first time, the story of the Holocaust was told not through distant reports, but through the direct, harrowing testimony of survivors. The prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, opened his case with the iconic words, "As I stand before you, judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers." The trial transformed the Holocaust from a source of shame into a central pillar of Israeli national identity. It legitimized the survivors' stories and cemented the idea that the State of Israel was the ultimate answer to Jewish vulnerability.

Narrator: In the decades following the Eichmann trial, the memory of the Holocaust became an ever-present and highly politicized force in Israeli life. It was invoked to justify political and military decisions, shaping the nation's perception of its security and its place in the world. During the tense "waiting period" before the 1967 Six-Day War, fears of a second Holocaust were widespread, fueling public support for a preemptive strike. Menahem Begin later used the phrase "Auschwitz lines" to argue against returning to the pre-1967 borders. The memory was even present during the 1976 Entebbe hijacking, when the separation of Jewish and non-Jewish hostages by the terrorists evoked the 'selection' process in the death camps, strengthening the resolve for a daring rescue mission. This instrumental use of the past demonstrates how the Holocaust evolved from a private trauma into a public symbol, a powerful tool used to define national identity, justify policy, and mobilize the Israeli people.

Narrator: Tom Segev's The Seventh Million argues that the Holocaust is not a static historical event for Israel, but a dynamic, often contradictory force that has been continuously reinterpreted to meet the needs of the present. The book's most crucial takeaway is that there is no single, monolithic "lesson" of the Holocaust. Instead, its memory has been a battleground for the soul of the nation—used to justify pragmatism and moral compromise, to fuel nationalism and military strength, and to inspire both vengeance and a profound commitment to human rights.

The book challenges its readers to consider the immense burden of this legacy. How does a nation built in the shadow of an unparalleled catastrophe navigate the moral complexities of its own power? The Seventh Million leaves us with the unsettling realization that the struggle to define the past is, in fact, a struggle to define the future.