War and Memory - Berghahn Journals

War and Memory The Israeli Communist Commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1986 Amir Locker-Biletzki

Abstract: The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 aroused strong responses in the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. The support for the Spanish Republic— prevalent in the Zionist left as well as among the Communists—resulted in young Jews and Arabs volunteering to fight in Spain. These volunteers, primarily Jewish Communists, became part of a cult created around the war by the Communist Party. This article will examine the content of this cult while relating it to parallel groups in the West and in East Germany. Through this analysis, the ideological elements, heroes, modes of memory, and dissemination of the memory of the war will be explored. Keywords: civil war, communism, cult, East Germany, fascism, memory, Spain, Zionism

The Spanish Civil War, which began on 19 July 1936, quickly became the rallying point for leftists around the globe, who flocked to defend the Spanish Republic. During those same years, the rise of extreme rightwing ideologies in Central and Eastern Europe, accompanied by rabid anti-Semitism, affected the lives of Jews in various ways. Some, who held leftist and anti-Fascist views, went to Spain. Among them were volunteers from Palestine, most of whom fought in the ranks of the International Brigades (IB). The aim of this article is to explore how the Spanish Civil War and the (mostly Jewish) Palestinian volunteers in the IB were commemorated by the Palestine Communist Party (PKP), the Israeli Communist Party (Maki), and the Israeli Young Communist League (Banki).1 The Communist cult regarding these volunteers will be analyzed in light of two parallel phenomena: the cult of the Spanish volunteers that developed Israel Studies Review, Volume 31, Issue 2, Winter 2016: 61–79 © Association for Israel Studies doi: 10.3167/isr.2016.310205 • ISSN 2159-0370 (Print) • ISSN 2159-0389 (Online)

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in the West, as described by George Mosse (1990), and the East German state cult of the Spanish Civil War. The article will argue that while the Israeli cult shared some elements with similar cults in East Germany and the West, it developed a distinct local character. Furthermore, the Israeli cult assimilated elements prevailing in the wider Zionist-Israeli, as well as Jewish, traditional cults of war, memory, and mourning. The research presented here mainly focuses on the 1950s to the 1960s, that is, the principal years in which the cult was celebrated by the Israeli Communists. The years after the 1965 split within Maki will be covered by literary materials produced by those who stayed in the Arab-Jewish Rakah (New Communist List). While the Jewish Maki faction dissolved into the Zionist left, Rakah became the standard bearer of Communist values in Israel, including those linked to Spain. Admittedly, more nuanced research into the way Rakah commemorated the Spanish War—one that is based on the party’s publications such as Zu Ha’Derech and Arachim—is precluded in this article due to constraints of space and availability of primary sources. The work presented here is based on sources derived from the Communist daily Kol Ha’am (The Peoples Voice),2 primarily issues from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. In the years following 1936, the commemoration of the Spanish Civil War was gradually accepted by the Israeli mainstream (Rein 2012: 65–88). However, although extensive research has been conducted and much has been written about the volunteers, the ways in which the PKP and Maki commemorated and mythologized the war have never been examined, despite the fact that it was an enduring element of the Communist ethos in Palestine/Israel. The role that the Spanish Civil War played in local Communist culture and how it compared to the Western and East German commemorations of the war is the subject of the following pages.

The Western Cult of the Spanish Volunteers Mosse (1990) traces the early origins of the cult of the volunteer—as it developed mainly in North America and Western Europe—to the new relationship between the citizen-soldier and the republic that was created during the French Revolution. The German wars of liberation against Napoleon marked the second phase of the development of the cult. Together, these two events forged the image of the volunteer soldier as a young, educated, middle-class man in search of adventure—and at times the exotic—in the service of the nation (ibid.: 17). However, what propelled the cult from its early origins to full-blown maturity was the collective trauma of World War I, mainly the 1914 Battle of Langemarck where,

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reportedly, youthful students charged at the enemy singing the German national anthem (ibid.: 70). Since it represented the first time that modern Europeans encountered organized mass death and slaughter at this level, the war marked a turning point in European commemoration culture. In its aftermath, the cult of the volunteer became widespread, partly reconstituting elements already seen on earlier occasions. In the troubled years after the Great War ended, the cult became entrenched in the German ultra-nationalist right, mainly the Freikorps, later to be appropriated by the Nazis and eventually wither away after World War II. As the nationalist cult of the volunteer was taking shape in the early nineteenth century and intensifying in the aftermath of War World I, another heroic cult of volunteers was developing, one that was predicated on a “war in which enthusiasm for one’s own nation was displaced upon a different nation in the name of a universal ideal” (Mosse 1990: 29). The Greek War of Independence from the Ottomans (1821–1831) sparked a European-wide volunteer movement. It was motivated by a mixture of philhellenism, the idealization of nineteenth-century Greeks as the heirs of Classical Greece, and a search for the exotic. These volunteers, like those of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, sought to give expression to qualities of manliness and to find cultural and personal regeneration in the war. However, they pursued their quest in the context of fighting for the freedom of another nation. Promoted by Romantic poets like Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the war was glorified, eventually becoming a model for the Spanish Civil War volunteer cult. Like its Greek predecessor, the Spanish Civil War fired the European imagination and sparked a global volunteer movement. The volunteers, most of whom came from North America and Europe, mainly fought in the IB, while the Spanish war myth was carried forward, like its Greek forerunner, by intellectuals. Even though 80 percent of the volunteers were workers, “there were many writers and artists among them” (Mosse 1990: 190) who were able to shape the myth of the war. Through prose by notable writers such as André Malraux, songs written and performed in the “tradition of political folk songs” (ibid.: 191) by the likes of Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, and Pete Seeger, to name just a few, the war myth was propagated in the West. These idioms perpetuated the memory of the war as a cosmic struggle between opposites, a fight of good versus evil, tyranny versus liberty, and democracy versus fascism. Besides the dichotomous nature of the struggle in Spain, the myth of the IB highlighted the volunteers’ internationalist spirit and ideological commitment: “In their way they differed from earlier volunteers, as their cosmopolitan ideologies—socialism, communism, and anarchism—differed from the earlier nationalist fervor.


They found their spirit of camaraderie among Germans, French, and Englishmen and those of other nations who fought side by side for freedom and justice” (ibid.: 190). While the war was commemorated in the Western democracies by intellectuals, many of them veterans of the IB, in East Germany the war and its heroes became the focal point of a powerful state cult.

The East German Spanish Myth Arising from the ruins of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ), the German Democratic Republic (GDR) sought to legitimize its rule over a reluctant populace. The new East German elites were hardpressed to find a founding myth for their new state, and the Spanish Civil War “was perfect” (Krammer 2004: 532) for that purpose. The war became the foundation on which the GDR legitimized itself and accentuated its uniqueness, distinguishing it from West Germany. The myth of the volunteers was largely carried by the veterans. Many of them—with their numbers running into the hundreds—became prominent members of the East German elite (ibid.: 537). Although some of them ran afoul of the Communist authorities during the Slánský trial (McLellan 2004: 57–63), by the beginning of de-Stalinization, from 1956 onward, they had become a privileged elite group that actively participated in the memorialization of the war. The myth of the Spanish war and the IB volunteers was promulgated by state-backed anti-Fascist organizations staffed by the veterans themselves. First, the East German Communists took over the Association of Those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime (VVN). Purging it of non-Communist resisters and Holocaust victims, by 1953 they had transformed the organization into the exclusively Communist Spanish Veterans Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters (KdAW). The myth thus was fashioned along rigid Marxist-Leninist ideological lines. Nazi Germany, so the narrative went, had intervened in Spain in search of raw materials. Colluding with local Spanish elites, the forces of global imperialism and capitalism had fought in Spain against the forces of progress personified in the IB. The fact that the IB had grasped this Leninist understanding of reality made them anti-Fascist resisters. The GDR, by inheriting the traditions of struggle against imperialism embedded in the IB, became “the heir to the soul of the Brigades” (Krammer 2004: 543). This ideological core of the myth changed with the onset of deStalinization, as the role played by the USSR became more openly discussed (although the darker side of Soviet involvement in Spain remained out of bounds, of course) and by 1960 had become an integral part of the myth.

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The war myth was kept alive and disseminated to the population through a plethora of rituals and hero cults. The Spanish Civil War commemorations imbued a symbolic and ritual language with a military and ideological emphasis and gave rise to the country’s own hero cult. The East German rituals honoring the IB concentrated mainly on the young and were molded in conformance with the traditional practices of the Free German Youth Movement, including campfire songs and talks with veterans, along with cross-country marches—all saturated with military indoctrination. Another facet of the commemoration of the International Brigades was the heroism cult celebrating individual German volunteers. The bestknown volunteer, and the most celebrated on a national scale, was Hans Beimler, who was born to a Bavarian working-class family in 1895 and killed in Madrid in 1936. Beimler’s legendary status began with his mass funeral in Spain and was intensified by publications in the IB’s newspapers, which attributed to him the roles of commissar of the German battalions of the Eleventh Brigade and member of the Communist Party of Germany’s Central Committee. Another powerful tool in the memorialization of Beimler was Ernst Busch’s song, “Hans Beimler, Comrade.” Beimler was portrayed as an impeccably heroic soldier, a role model to be emulated by the East German youth. His memory was ritually kept up by an annual paramilitary competition and the award of a medal named after him. The Spanish Civil War myth found its ritualistic geographic center in the memorial statue to the IB in Friedrichshain People’s Park. There, “[i]n the early years of the GDR the Thälmannpioniere … carried out annual field exercises under the motto ‘We defend Madrid!’. The children sang International Brigades songs, read books and memoirs, carried out exercises in the field … and listened to veterans’ tales … around the campfire” (McLellan 2004: 88). The IB myth was meant to inculcate in East German youth the proper values of socialist self-sacrifice, and it developed into a mass state cult. In the following pages, the ways in which the Communists in Palestine/Israel mythologized and disseminated the cult of Spain will be explored. Afterward, questions regarding who, among the Communists, established and formulated the myth of the war and its volunteers—and in what organizational framework—will be analyzed.

Palestine’s Volunteers to Spain: Historical Realities The Spanish Civil War echoed loudly within the Jewish Yishuv of 1930s Palestine. The Zionist-Socialist left supported the Spanish Republic, while parts of the liberal center advocated non-intervention, and the Revisionist right supported the Nationalists.3 The conflict in Spain mobilized the left


to actively help Spain, mainly in the form of fundraising. However, the Zionist-Socialist establishment was apprehensive about the recruitment of volunteers to the IB (Rein 2012: 65). This position was also mirrored by the PKP: it supported the Republic, but it did not encourage its members to go to Spain, in contrast to its practice in later years. Afraid of losing valuable cadres and diminishing the numbers of a small party that was being repressed by both the British and the Zionists, the Communists initially tried to prevent party members from going to Spain. However, when the PKP found out that the Comintern supported recruitment to the IB and that it could not stop the British from deporting Communists to Spain—in an effort to prevent subversive elements from organizing potential resistance to their rule in Palestine—the policy changed (ibid.: 67). Thus, despite the reluctance of Zionists and Communists alike, volunteers from Palestine did go to Spain. Of the tens of thousands worldwide who volunteered to join the IB, a disproportionately large number were Jewish. By “most assessments, the number of Jews that volunteered ranged between 4,000 and 8,000” (Rein 2012: 66) out of a total of about 40,000. The large number of Jews in the ranks of the IB was recognized by the founding of an exclusively Jewish company named after Naftali Botwin, a Jewish Communist martyred in Poland in 1925.4 Of the Jews who went to Spain, around 150 to 200 came from Palestine (ibid.: 67). The Palestinian contingent was of mixed ethnic and political backgrounds, including Jews, Arabs, and Armenians, and comprised both Zionists and Communists. However, the predominant component was Jewish members of the PKP. They were either deported by the British to Spain or volunteered in order to escape continued Zionist persecution. An additional motivation for the Communists was the increasing tensions between Arab and Jewish party members, which had been heightened by the support that the PKP lent to the Arab Rebellion of 1936–1939 (Arielli 2012).

War and Memory in the PKP and Maki There were a few main channels through which the Communists in Palestine/Israel could shape their myth of the Spanish Civil War. Principal among them was the party’s newspaper, Kol Ha’am. Another means of disseminating the memory of the war was aimed at the party’s youth and took the form of instructors’ brochures about the war. Yet another medium used by the PKP to propagate its myth was memoirs written by veterans. The foundation upon which the myth was built was the narrative of the war as the Communists in Palestine/Israel constructed it. This

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meta-narrative depicted the war as having been motivated by the alliance of capital and fascism looking for material gain. The December 1937 issue of Kol Ha’am argued that the rebellion was motivated by the “English reaction, finance capital … that strengthens Franco in his war against the Republic, and the hands of Mussolini in helping Franco” (Algazy 2000: 302). The same Marxist-Leninist theme continued to reverberate years later. In an event organized by the veterans of the IB commemorating the tenth anniversary of the war, Communist leader Ester Vilenska blamed the Western powers’ non-intervention policy on “the desire to keep the mercury and lead mines … and the factories in Oviedo and Bilbao” (Kol Ha’Kidma, 25 July 1946). All these economic interests were owned by British and American capitalists. On the basis of these ideological fundamentals, the meta-narrative of the Spanish Civil War unfolded. An extension of this argument showed that the war had been, in essence, a prelude to World War II: “It was the first stage in Hitler’s war for world domination” (Kol Ha’am, 19 July 1945). The Spanish Republic “defended itself successfully for three years against Hitler’s and Mussolini’s aggression” (Kol Ha’am, 14 July 1950). The war had been lost due to the treacherous non-intervention policy of France and Britain and the “despicable behavior of the leaders of the Second International” (Kol Ha’am, 18 July 1958). This narrative did not take into account the Republic’s own mismanagement of the war or the conservative military thinking of the Soviet advisers, which was partly the result of Stalin’s purges of the Red Army officer corps in the 1930s (Beevor 2006). While the meta-narrative of the war provided the linear story of the war myth, one mythological element kept reappearing, echoing how the war was portrayed in the West. The Communists in Palestine/Israel depicted the war as an absolute struggle between democracy and fascism. At the tenth anniversary event organized by the IB veterans, Vilenska made this point clear as well. The war in Spain was the beginning “of the founding of the great unified democratic citadel that would break the wall of Fascism” (Kol Ha’Kidma, 25 July 1946). In 1950, Berl Balti, himself a veteran of the IB, described the war as “the first formation of armed resistance of the democratic forces to Fascist expansion” (Kol Ha’am, 14 July 1950). In 1956, Israel Centner, another IB veteran, described the war as a struggle between “the forces of war and fascism and the forces of peace and democracy” (Kol Ha’am, 20 July 1956). The battle between democracy and fascism was not just a clash of political ideologies: it attained mythological proportions. The war was portrayed in charged language. For instance, Mordechai AviShaul (1945: 5) describes Fascism as a “monster bursting from its lair,” a “Satan” that had murdered millions. Elsewhere, he depicts the conflict in


Spain as a Manichaean war between “light and darkness, between tyranny and freedom fighters” (Kol Ha’am, 15 July 1962). There is no denying that Spain was an ideological battleground for the struggle between notions of freedom and grassroots political mobilization, on the one hand, and Fascist and conservative ideas of authoritarian hierarchy, on the other. However, the way in which the Communists in Palestine/ Israel depicted the war completely disregarded its Spanish aspects. The fact that the Nationalist side was driven by fear of the anti-clerical Republic just as much as the left was motivated by fear of a Fascist takeover is not mentioned. The lumping together of all the Spanish Nationalists as Fascist disregarded the more nuanced reality, where the Spanish Falange5 was but one component in Franco’s coalition and government, alongside more traditional conservative forces (Ben-Ami 1990). The emphasis on democracy as the main characteristic of the anti-Franco forces failed to recognize the considerable flaws of Spanish democracy at the time, with the Republic having fallen under growing Communist and Soviet influence and the war used as a pretext to repress Trotskyists and Anarchists.6 If the mythical notion of a struggle between moral opposites framed the Communist myth of the war, its core value was international solidarity. In this it resembled the Western myth of the war as portrayed by Mosse: the volunteers from Palestine had fought not for national glory, but for international camaraderie. The writers for Kol Ha’am emphasized time and again that the plight of the Republic had been answered by “volunteers from 54 countries” (Kol Ha’am, 20 July 1956). Those who had rushed to the defense of the freedom of the Spanish people were “the whirling wave of proletarian internationalism” (Kol Ha’am, 25 July 1955). Indeed, the war in Spain had been “the defensive struggle of the whole globe against the rise of Fascism” (ibid.). International solidarity could overcome old hatreds, as the story of one Polish miner attests. He at first was apprehensive of his Jewish comrades in arms, but over the course of the war he learned to appreciate their bravery and value their friendship (Kol Ha’am, 18 December 1957). This international proletarian solidarity was interwoven with the solidarity between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Raanan Rein (2012: 69) maintains that “there is something artificial, not to say false, in the way the Communist Party tried to portray the volunteers as the embodiment of Jewish-Arab solidarity.” Nonetheless, the references to the camaraderie of Palestinian Arabs and Jews were intimately connected to international solidarity in the face of Fascism. The words of the ultimate Jewish Palestinian Communist hero of the war, Mark Milman, clearly illustrate this point. In a letter to his mother, Milman wrote: “In my battalion there are soldiers who talk to me in Spanish, French, English, German, Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. But all these languages are one,

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an expression of one will: to annihilate tyranny” (cited in Avi-Shaul 1945: 50). In the very same letter, Milman also called for Arab-Jewish solidarity in the context of the escalating Arab Rebellion of 1936–1939. International solidarity did not, however, obscure the Jewish aspect of the myth of the war. After 1945, the Communists reiterated the link between the war in Spain and the Jewish Holocaust, or, as Ester Vilenska phrased it, “from the battlefields of Madrid and Barcelona through the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto” (Kol Ha’Kidma, 25 July 1946). The Fascism against which the volunteers struggled in Spain was directly associated with the Nazism of War World II. This is eloquently demonstrated by Avi-Shaul (1945: 5), who asserts that “the Fascist Satan that rampaged in Treblinka and Majdanek” had first attacked Abyssinia and Spain. The Jewish collective memory of Spain was also used to enhance the war myth. Shmuel Eisenstadt, a prominent intellectual and sympathizer of the Communist Party, evoked the Golden Era of Spain’s Jews when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived side by side until “Catholic Christianity used racial persecution and hatred as a means of economic attack” (Kol Ha’Kidma, 25 July 1946). The invocation of Spain’s Jewish as well as Arab past was most clearly expressed by Michael Harsegor. In a 1955 article in the literary supplement of Kol Ha’am, Harsegor, one of the editors of the section, states: For us, Eretz-Israeli Jews and Arabs alike, this country is not a faraway and strange realm at the ends of the great sea. Parts of our past and the tears of our hearts have been left in her. The poets of Israel, and the greatest among them, were born and flourished in her cities; the artists of Arabia, fine and delicate, dressed her in a mantle of art … The enemies of the Spanish people are our foes also; on the same pyres burnt Jews loyal to their tradition, Arabs who refused to surrender to a religion foisted on them, and Spaniards who believed more in their common sense than in dark fanaticism. Jewish and Arab blood still runs in the veins of Spain, and our blood was spilt again in the civil war. (Kol Ha’am, 15 July 1955)

Placing the Spanish Civil War within the larger narratives of Jewish history and collective memory differentiated this myth from its Western and East German versions. Those renditions were more concerned with establishing a myth that, respectively, would conform to Western democratic and working-class traditions or would be applicable as a founding myth for East Germany. For both Western intellectuals and East German state officials, Spain lacked the historical meaning that it evoked for Jews and Arabs alike. The Communists invoked not just the distant past, but also the deeds of Palestine’s Jewish and Arab volunteers. This commemoration cult


revolved around the Naftali Botwin Company. The Botwin Company was lauded in a series of articles in Kol Ha’am from the mid-1940s onward. In a July 1945 issue, parts of a letter of the company’s political commissar were published. In the introduction of the letter, the bravery of the unit is commended and its exploits are linked to the Holocaust. It had been “the first Jewish military unit to fight Fascism,” and its men fought “to prevent the disaster that later befell the Jewish people” (Kol Ha’am, 19 July 1945). For example, the Jewish volunteers are described as creating a progressive Jewish alliance that transcended ideological and other differences: “How multifaceted were its members! Communists, Bundists, Zionists from the kibbutzim in Palestine. Textile workers and metalworkers from Zagłe˛bie, needleworkers from Paris, and construction and port workers from Palestine” (Kol Ha’am, 19 July 1946).

From Palestine to Spain The commemoration of fallen volunteers from Palestine started early on in the pages of Kol Ha’am. A 1937 issue of the then-underground paper laid down the basic elements of the memorial cult. The names of the fallen are framed in black, appearing alongside letters by a certain comrade Mosh from Haifa, who describes the heroic death of Isaak Yoffe, and by the brother of the slain volunteer, who vows to take his brother’s place. Then the letters of Yoffe in Yiddish were reprinted. These formalistic devices would become prevalent in the commemorative culture of the war promoted by the Communist Party. Borrowing some characteristics from the developing memorial culture, a 1947 commemorative issue of the newspaper resonates with Zionist elements. The black-framed names of the dead volunteers are captioned with the Hebrew word Yizkor (remembrance), harking back to traditional Jewish remembrance that was reworked into the commemorative cult of Zionism. However, the content of these memorial customs remained true to the internationalist, Jewish-Arab, and alternative Jewish national motifs seen earlier. The introduction to the list of the deceased states that among the volunteers there had been “Jews and Arabs, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, those from the city and from the kibbutz, Communists and members of other parties” (Kol Ha’am, 18 July 1947). The text goes on to emphasize the role played by the volunteers from Palestine in the international anti-Nazi struggle during World War II. The commemoration of the volunteers from Palestine as it unfolded on the pages of Kol Ha’am did not resemble the East German version. Rather, by emphasizing the written word, it reflected the Zionist and Jewish cultural

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and political environments in which the Palestinian Communists operated: in linking the commemoration to one of the Jewish people’s historical themes, the written text became a repository of memory and identity. This Jewish motif was not present in the East German memorial culture, which relied on monuments and mass rites in order to communicate the content of the war myth. It did bear some resemblance to how the volunteers’ myth was transmitted in the West, to the extent that in both cases the written word was used. However, except for the notable case of Alexander Penn, the stature of the intellectuals who drove this effort was considerably less than that of those who conveyed the war in Spain to Western audiences. In addition, the emphasis on the national and international dimension of the Jewish volunteers from Palestine was not the same as the international cosmic battle between good and evil that was seen as essential to Western anti-Fascists. While the Communist cult of the volunteers presented them as a collective, the party and Banki did not shy away from sanctifying the life of one individual volunteer. Starting in the mid-1940s, the memory of the war increasingly revolved around the figure of Mark Milman, who became the personification of Palestine’s volunteers.

Mark Milman: A Jewish Palestinian Hero of the Spanish Civil War Mark Milman was born in 1909 in Ukraine near the town of Uman. His father, an independent printer, was murdered by the soldiers of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura. In 1922, the family, made destitute by the murder of their father, immigrated to Palestine, where life consisted of hard work. Milman’s mother worked in a cigarette factory, and Mark himself was no stranger to manual labor, working as “a porter, a night guard, in the orange groves, in a carpentry shop … and finally as a clerk” (Avi-Shaul 1945: 31). As humble as his circumstances were, by 1935 Milman had managed to save enough to go to France, where he earned a degree in agronomy. As for his political leanings, it appears that Milman was active in the Communist youth movement and harbored leftist inclinations. A 1932 photograph of him standing in front of the Soviet pavilion in the Levant Fair indicates rather clearly where his sympathies lay (Donner and Bonfil 2012: 40). The Communist press, for its part, emphasized his Communist affiliation. As early as 1947, beside his name in the list of the fallen, the caption “Party member” appears (Kol Ha’am, 18 July 1947). However, given the fact that none of his biographies describes him as being repeatedly arrested by the British (the experience of many Communist activists), it is possible to say that Milman was active only at the periphery of the party. It is also reasonable to assume that he was further


radicalized in Spain, where he became a card-carrying Communist, since he would not have been entrusted with the role of a commissar if he were not politically reliable. In any case, by the end of 1936, Milman had joined the IB, fighting in some of the major battles of the war. He rose through the ranks to the position of a political commissar, serving as a captain in the 24th Battalion of the 15th Brigade, made up mostly of English speakers. He was killed in action by a sniper near the Ebro River on 5 September 1938. The figure of Milman was first significantly sanctified in Avi-Shaul’s (1945) Mark Milman: A Jewish Captain in Fighting Spain. The book is composed of two main sections: opening chapters that provide a general background to the war, followed by a short biographic narrative of Milman’s life. The first part exhibits many of the elements of the myth of the war, such as the cosmological dichotomy between democracy and fascism. The second part of the book depicts the figure of the fallen hero in a distinctive manner, different from how Hans Beimler was commemorated as a military hero and used to promote Communist self-sacrifice and martial valor in a skeptical society. While Milman’s military leadership was celebrated (ibid.: 45–49), he was also described by Avi-Shaul as a sensitive lad, a loyal friend, and at the same time observant and critical (ibid.: 31). His deep feelings toward his mother and brother were repeatedly stressed (ibid.). This motif was not confined to the book, but appeared widely in the PKP newspaper (Kol Ha’am, 15 July 1949; Kol Ha’am, 15 July 1955). It was also conveyed to Banki members. One ex-member attests that Milman was portrayed as a “sensitive, unconfident boy, searching for his way” (Shafran 1983: 89) and deeply devoted to his mother. The emphasis on this non-martial portrayal of Milman fits well with the developing Zionist-Israeli commemorative culture. In many ways, A Jewish Captain in Fighting Spain is a forerunner of some of the elements seen in the iconic Friends Tell about Jimmy (Anonymous 1999). Both books use the written word in order to create a prototype of a hero, be it a ZionistSocialist sabra or a Palestinian-Jewish Communist. Milman’s character, as portrayed in letters sent to his mother by his comrades-in-arms (AviShaul 1945: 55–56), is that of an internationalist hero. At the same time, his sensitivity, expressed in his close relationship with his family, is celebrated. In the later text dedicated to Aron Shemi (aka ‘Jimmy’), the same literary device is employed. Jimmy is depicted as a plainspoken tough warrior, a sabra concealing a sensitive, poetic, and artistic self. This similarity between the two texts demonstrates again that the Palestinian/Israeli Communists used Zionist-Israeli cultural elements, as well as left-wing and European motifs, in shaping their memorial cult. In addition, just as the left in the West celebrated the internationalist facet of the war, the Milman cult did so as well. An oft-quoted sentence

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from one of Milman’s letters clearly demonstrates this element: “Dear Mother: I am here with the finest sons of the world proletariat. I am proud to be one of them” (Avi-Shaul 1945: 44). At the same time, Milman’s international solidarity was compounded by the Communists in Palestine with Arab-Jewish solidarity. Reflecting the immanent link between the issues in the minds of Communists, Milman is quoted as having said: “I hear bad news from Eretz-Israel … Haven’t the Jewish and Arab workers understood they mustn’t fight one another? Don’t they know they both have a mutual interest and future … and today a common enemy?!” (ibid.: 50). The Jewish aspect of the war, as perceived by the Jewish Communists, was also echoed in Milman’s memory. Motivated by the murder of his father, Milman viewed the Spanish war as a way to avenge his death. This is plainly evident in the following statement: “Every front against the Fascists is a Jewish one. The sons of Eretz-Israel are coming to the aid of Spain, fighting for its freedom. Only solidarity with the anti-Fascist forces worldwide can save the Jewish people. In the place where the pioneers of liberty from all nations fight, we will be the emissaries of Judaism” (Avi-Shaul 1945: 39). This statement interweaves Jewish nationalism and Palestinian-Jewish localism together with internationalism, adding another feature to the alternative Jewish nationalism seen in other manifestations of the war myth. The memorialization of Milman by the literary intellectual Mordechai Avi-Shaul—a poet and translator of some note—speaks to the role played in the commemoration cult by men of letters. Much as the Spanish war myth was disseminated in the West, local Communists in Palestine/Israel also used poems as a way to convey aspects of the war.

The Poets of the War Myth The Spanish Civil War penetrated into the lives of Communists in Palestine/Israel largely through the work of two poets: Federico García Lorca and Alexander Penn. Lorca’s poems and his martyr’s death lay at the core of an extensive cult that appeared on the pages of Kol Ha’am and in Banki’s instructors’ brochures. The special issue of Kol Ha’am on the twentieth anniversary of his murder articulates well how Lorca was perceived by the Communists. In a long article, the poet’s life and work are analyzed and his political stance evaluated. While not a Communist, he is described as a “progressive and anti-Fascist poet” (Kol Ha’am, 3 August 1956). This political characterization was oblivious to his homosexuality and, by portraying his art as deeply rooted in “Spanish folklore” (ibid.), made Lorca respectable and, indeed, central to the memory of the war. In that context, it is not surprising that at the center of Lorca’s memorialization stood his


Gypsy Ballads of 1928. Lorca’s poems framed the war differently than did other expressions of the war myth. In addition to the internationalist, Jewish national, and even Zionist elements seen thus far, Lorca’s poems gave a distinctly Spanish coloring to the Communists’ myth. For them, the poet became the epitome of Spain, beyond the standard Marxist portrayals of the country (Avi-Shaul 1945: 8–20; Centner 1966: 15–20). The Communists could imagine an exotic Spain, one far removed from the realities of a small and marginalized Communist Party. This highlighting of the faraway and exotic, while obviously rooted in Spanish culture, obscured a more nuanced view. It disregarded the fact that Spanish culture—and Lorca as part of it, although influenced by the country’s artistic and religious past—had produced an avant-garde, modernized art. In the Communist view, artists such as Salvador Dalí and Antoni Gaudí were non-existent. Thus, the dogmatic portrayal of Spanish society and politics—disregarding its dark sides and the complexities of the war—extended to Spanish culture. As important as Lorca’s work was to the Israeli Communists, their memory of the Spanish Civil War truly reverberated with the poems of Alexander Penn. Penn was the most important cultural figure in the Israeli Communist subculture in the 1950s and 1960s. He joined the Communist Party in 1947 and quickly became “the Party’s great poet, its high priest” (Shafran 1983: 103). Performing at the party’s public events and editing its newspaper’s cultural section, the poet became an important cultural figure in Communist circles. His left-wing poetry of the 1930s, epitomized by the famous “Against,” was widely read in Banki and other Zionist-Socialist youth movements, and when it came to Spain, his evocative poem “Spain on the Pyre” was prominent. Penn himself was active in the commemoration of the war. As early as 1946, when participating in an IB veterans’ tenth anniversary event, he read this famous poem (Kol Ha’Kidma, 25 July 1946). In 1949, Penn addressed a Paris rally in honor of the Republican commander General Walter as the representative of the IB veterans’ organization in Israel (Kol Ha’am, 15 July 1949). “Spain on the Pyre” also appeared regularly on the pages of the party’s newspaper (Kol Ha’am, 20 July 1951; Kol Ha’am, 15 July 1955). Far removed from the reality of Palestine, Penn’s poem is one in a succession of 1930s political poems that herald his turn to the Marxist left, which culminated in his joining Maki (Halperin 2007: 100–130). The poem contrasts an abstract man, a collective personification of humanity, with the forces of militarism and capitalism. In that context, it reinforces the Marxist and internationalist facets of the war myth. At the same time, the fact that it was written in Hebrew by one of the great wielders of the rejuvenated language gave the poem a local context.

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The distinct elements of the Spanish Civil War myth did not exist separately from each other and were not only expressed on the pages of Kol Ha’am. For Banki, Spain was a potent mobilizing myth. Not unlike in the GDR, the Communist Party made some effort to adapt the Spanish myth to its youth. The part that Spain played in the lives of young Communists is described by Nessia Shafran (1983: 89) as standing above other revolutionary myths, such as the Paris Commune or the Vienna Uprising of 1934. The Banki club in Jaffa was named after Mark Milman (Kol Ha’am, 8 July 1950). The clearest expression of how the myth of the war was transmitted to young Communists is revealed in the Banki instructors’ brochures. The thirtieth anniversary of the war and Lorca’s martyrdom occasioned the composition of several pamphlets. One, simply captioned An Evening for Spain, starts with a long poem by Lorca that reinforces the exotic, folkloristic element of the myth. As the text states: “Spain, Spain of the Flamenco and the guitar, Spain of the burning sun, Spain of the brownskinned women and brave men, the legendary Spain of Don Quixote, the magical Spain of Lorca.”7 Following this sincere, if somewhat clichéd, depiction, the text goes on to recount the proclamation of the Spanish Republic, only to make a foray into a long verse from Penn’s “Spain on the Pyre.” After a narration in chorus style of the atrocities of the Nationalists, the text denounces Western non-intervention and contrasts it to the internationalist camaraderie of the IB: “But to this Spain, miraculously, fighters of all nations came in camaraderie, workers from Germany, doctors from England, Soviet teachers, American students. The sons of all nations came to block the Fascist beast with their own bodies.”8 From the international camaraderie of the IB, the brochure moves on to the volunteers from Palestine. After briefly mentioning Mark Milman, it goes into a Yizkor for the fallen: “Let the people remember in reverence the m”b (42) fighters from Eretz-Israel, the humble and clear-eyed lovers of humanity, who gave their lives for the freedom of the Spanish people while guarding our people’s honor. Their memory lives with us.”9 This brief but revealing text, which places the Jewish Yizkor remembrance prayer within the framework of an international Communist cause, expresses the cultural mix that gave the Jewish Communist myth its local Jewish-Israeli uniqueness. At the same time, the text both adheres to and departs from the prevailing Zionist interpretation of Jewish nationalism, martial valor, and sacrifice by reinterpreting the national into the international. The text ends with Franco’s victory and vows to continue the struggle. If An Evening for Spain only briefly remembers Mark Milman, a lengthier exposition on the fallen captain can be found in an undated text titled simply Spain.10 Adapted for a younger age group, it starts with a heroic


story that takes place during the war years. The text continues with a simplified explanation of the causes and events of the war and then provides a hagiography of Milman. Through excerpts from his letters and his memorial book, Milman’s life is portrayed in such a way as to mobilize the younger groups in Banki. Milman’s widely noted motivation for going to Spain—the opportunity to avenge his father’s murder—is here supplanted by a desire “to protect the children of Spain so they won’t be orphaned like him.”11 In another passage, the fallen hero, à la Edmondo De Amicis,12 saves his little brother from drowning. Other than the effort to adapt Milman’s life story to a younger group, the same elements of his myth recur here. The text presents him as athletic and loyal to his friends, as well as possessing deep feelings for his family, especially his mother. His and his family’s working-class background is stressed, as are the elements of alternative Jewish nationalism and Arab-Jewish internationalism, backed by the customary quotations from his letters. The narrative ends with Milman’s death by a sniper bullet, the description bathed in secular saintliness. The text states that after Milman was hit, “his comrades raised him. His pulse was still beating, his laughing eyes were wide open, and he looked on with clearness and generosity, the gaze of a comrade.”13

Conclusion The Communist cult of the Spanish Civil War exhibited numerous similarities to the East German and Western myths of the war. At the same time, it had its own local Israeli and Jewish elements. A few questions remain open: Who was responsible for perpetuating the cult? How was it disseminated? What values did it promote? Within the Communist Party, no particular organizational section kept the cult going. In contrast to the official party- and state-backed organization behind the East German cult, in the case of the Israeli Communists the cult was furthered by individual IB veterans, mainly Berl Balti and Israel Centner. Both Communist Party members, they were largely responsible for the historical and theoretical portrayals of the war on the pages of Kol Ha’am. Appointed by the party to record the deeds of the Spanish volunteers from Palestine, Centner (1966) brought his task to fruition with the volume From Madrid to Berlin. In no way a dispassionate report on the war, the book exemplifies many of the elements of the war myth, from the Marxist ideological understanding of the war (ibid.: 15–20), through the coupling of the international solidarity in Spain with Arab-Jewish fraternity in Palestine (ibid.: 12), to the condemnation of the complacency of the Western democracies (ibid.: 35–36).

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The book—an amalgamation of Centner’s personal narrative with an account of the exploits of the volunteers from Palestine—notably does not feature the letters of individual volunteers. Centner (1966: 31) does allocate considerable space to Mark Milman and notes, albeit briefly, the martyrdom of Lorca, as well as Penn’s iconic poem. The more poetic and individualistic aspects of the war myth were the domain of the intellectuals who shaped the myth. The most prominent figure in that endeavor after War World II was Mordechai Avi-Shaul. His effort to shape the memory of the war was reasserted by the work of Ruth Levin, a Communist Party intellectual. Levin’s (1987) book, The Righteous Were with Spain, is a collage of poetry, literature, and letters about Spain and the volunteers from Palestine. It relies heavily on the words of the volunteers themselves, including the iconic Mark Milman (ibid.: 121–125). The text is permeated with an attempt to reassert the Communist cult in the face of growing challenges. “What kind of war was it?” Levin asks. “Was it a ‘civil war’, as ‘objective’ historians and journalists claim, or a Fascist rebellion and a foreign attack on the elected Republic?” (ibid.: 7). However, Levin does not mention the greatest challenge of all to the Communist cult of the war— the absorption of IB volunteers into the Israeli mainstream. This process, as Rananan Rein (2012: 84) demonstrates, “had its political and ideological price.” It blurred the internationalist and Jewish alternative aspects of the story of the volunteers, favoring a Zionist narrative that linked them to Jewish anti-Nazism and to Israel’s wars.

Acknowledgments In memory of the young men and women who came from Palestine to fight fascism in Spain.

Amir Locker-Biletzki is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His dissertation dealt with the cultural practices of the Jewish Communists in Palestine/ Israel. His current research examines the cultural history of Communism in Palestine/Israel, including how Israeli Communists conceptualized the presence of Western, that is, British and American, powers in the country, and the concurrent changes in the theory and practice of Zionism.


Notes 1. The history of the Palestinian/Israeli Communist Party has been debated among Zionist, Palestinian, and post-Zionist historians. For some of the main works of these three schools, see Dothan (1991), Budeiri (1979), and Beinin (1990). 2. Some issues were called Kol Ha’Kidma (The Voice of Progress). The change of name was made in order to bypass British censors, who shut the paper down on occasion. This enabled the continued publication of what was in essence Kol Ha’am under a different name. 3. For attitudes toward the war as they were reflected in the Hebrew press of the time, see Algazy (2000) and Rein (2008). 4. For information on the Jews fighting in the IB and the Naftali Botwin Company, see Zaagsma (2003) and Shindler (1986). 5. The Falange was the Italian-style Fascist movement led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of Spain’s former dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. 6. For the persecution of non-Stalinists and Anarchists, see Orwell (1980). 7. An Evening for Spain, June 1966, File 22, Yad Tabenkin Archives, Ramat Ef’al. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Spain, File 3, Yad Tabenkin Archives, Ramat Ef’al. 11. Ibid. 12. Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908) was an Italian writer whose most famous book, The Heart (Cuore, in Italian), is composed of a series of short stories written as part of a diary of a nine-year-old boy. The stories, aimed at children and young adults, promote values of Italian patriotism, obedience to family and state, and bravery. One of them tells about a young boy who saves his friend from drowning in a river. The Heart was immensely popular in Israel. 13. Spain, File 3, Yad Tabenkin Archives, Ramat Ef’al.

References Algazy, Joseph. 2000. “The Spanish Civil War as Reflected in the Hebrew Press in Eretz-Israel/Palestine.” [In Hebrew.] Pp. 272–305 in They Shall Not Pass: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, ed. Raanan Rein. Tel Aviv: Zmora-Bitan Publishers. Anonymous. 1999. Friends Tell about Jimmy. [In Hebrew.] Jerusalem: Ariel Publishers. Arielli, Nir. 2012. “Induced to Volunteer? The Predicament of Jewish Communists in Palestine and the Spanish Civil War.” [In Hebrew.] Pp. 41–57 in Donner and Bonfil 2012. Avi-Shaul, Mordechai. 1945. Mark Milman: A Jewish Captain in Fighting Spain. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Author. Beevor, Antony. 2006. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. New York: Penguin Books.

War and Memory | 79 Beinin, Joel. 1990. Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948–1965. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ben-Ami, Shlomo. 1990. Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy 1936–1977. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Budeiri, Musa. 1979. The Palestine Communist Party 1919–1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism. London: Ithaca Press. Centner, Israel. 1966. From Madrid to Berlin. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Author. Donner, Batia, and Rachel Bonfil, eds. 2012. From Here to Madrid: Volunteers from Palestine in the International Brigades in Spain 1936–1938. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum. Dothan, Shmuel. 1991. Reds: The Communist Party in Eretz Israel. [In Hebrew.] Kfar Sava: Shvana Hasofer Publishing. Halperin, Hagit. 2007. The Color of Life: The Life and Works of Alexander Penn. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me’ukhad Press. Krammer, Arnold. 2004. “The Cult of the Spanish Civil War in East Germany.” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 4: 531–560. Levin, Ruth. 1987. The Righteous Were with Spain, 1936–1939. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Ofakim Publishers. McLellan, Josie. 2004. Antifascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the International Brigades 1945–1989. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mosse, George L. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press. Orwell, George. 1980. Homage to Catalonia. London: Harcourt. Rein, Raanan. 2008. “Echoes of the Spanish Civil War in Palestine: Zionist, Communists and the Contemporary Press.” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 1: 9–23. Rein, Raanan. 2012. “A Belated Inclusion: Jewish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and their Place in the Israeli National Narrative.” [In Hebrew.] Pp. 65–90 in Donner and Bonfil 2012. Shafran, Nessia. 1983. Farewell Communism. [In Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me’ukhad Press. Shindler, Colin. 1986. “No Pasaran: The Jews Who Fought in Spain.” Jewish Quarterly 33, no. 3: 34–41. Zaagsma, Gerben. 2008. “‘Red Devils’: The Botwin Company in the Spanish Civil War.” East European Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1: 83–99.