And Who Will Atone for Our Deeds

Will our descendants, too, one day plead for forgiveness?

The following words come from a chilling interview with Dr. Assaf David, co-founder and academic director of the Forum for Regional Thinking and head of the Israel Department at the Van Leer Institute:

“One day, the State of Israel will awaken, drenched in tears and rot. It will look into the mirror, collapse and cry out in anguish: What in God’s name have I done? One day it will understand how Netanyahu inflicted upon it the decisive blow – one that fused together personal corruption, political tyranny, religion, nationalism, and unbridled violence… On that day we will be there – Jews and Palestinians, citizens and non-citizens alike – to gather the fragments and rebuild this state anew.”

I stumbled upon that interview on a flight home from an unforgettable journey, traveling with a small group of the Exodus 1947 survivors. Remarkable figures from Ein HaMifratz and Tivon in the north, from Beit Nir in the south, and even as far away as Palo Alto in the American West. Elderly in years but youthful in body and spirit, joined by second and third-generation descendants of survivors, most of whom are no longer with us.

The entire journey was masterfully led by Yaankele Weiman and Itzik Rozman, two “youthful seniors” who, together with others, have devoted themselves to the sacred mission of preserving the memory of their parents. Parents who had been part of one of the defining sagas of Israel’s ethos: between the Shoah and the rule of the British Mandate (which, with cruelty and persistence, blocked Holocaust survivors from entering the Land of Israel, even after World War II had ended), and between destruction and national rebirth.

As in earlier journeys of this special project, we walked the very ground where the Exodus refugees had been held. Those who had already glimpsed Haifa before their eyes, only to be deported by three British cargo ships to Port-de-Boucs on the southern coast of France. When the refugees refused to disembark there, the British forcibly sailed them to Hamburg, in their zone of occupied Germany. There, they were driven onto the piers and transferred into camps, where they remained until their eventual immigration to Israel.

We stood on Pier 3 of Hamburg’s vast harbor, where a memorial now honors the Exodus deportees. We visited the deserted train station at Pöppendorf, where thousands of refugees had been unloaded from railway cars. We entered the forest that had “swallowed” the camp of Pöppendorf, where my wife’s father, Haim Finkelstein, had been imprisoned with more than two thousand fellow refugees. Not a single barrack remains. We joined in the unveiling of a memorial plaque at Emden, near the ruins where another camp had been built for one-third of the deportees, once again turned into displaced persons, this time on German soil.

Farther south, we walked through an old Jewish cemetery in Emden, where we set memorial stones for two young Exodus passengers who had died of illness. We visited a house in Blankenese donated for the recovery of Jewish orphans, and a hospital where in the maternity ward one of our group members, Benjamin Halpern, had been born—a moment so moving that it brought tears to all. We also stood in Bergen-Belsen, where nothing remains today but the mass graves of tens of thousands. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the new national memorial in Amsterdam framed the journey with solemnity.

But this is not what I wish to dwell on. Not even the vivid memories of Dov Kaplan, who was ten years old at the time, or Ariel Plat, who had stumbled through Emden at age three, or even Yona Yahav, who left Haifa for a week to accompany his wife Rivka and her brother Yaron Burstein, whose parents had been passengers on that same ship.

What I do wish to reflect on is atonement—the expressions of regret, of apology, often tearful, that we heard everywhere from our German hosts. People like Heinrich in Hamburg or Kai in Emden, who went out of their way to welcome us, to enrich our time, to make us feel the depth of their remorse.

And yes—one cannot overlook the German high-school students, fourth-generation descendants, who joined us on a full day of remembrance. They, too, in their quiet presence, became part of the chain of shame, regret, and plea for forgiveness.

I also wish to recall two British Christian women, Rosie and Verity, who came to express the repentance of the nation that had forcibly prevented the Exodus passengers from reaching Haifa. Rosie, Irish-born, moved with her husband to Israel, raised a large family in Ashdod, and devoted her life to helping new immigrants. Verity, fluent in Hebrew and from distant Portsmouth, shared how her conscience had been awakened when she discovered that her uncle had served aboard the destroyer HMS Checkers, which opened fire on the Exodus. Her uncle had never spoken of it, but Verity has lived ever since with a profound sense of guilt and a plea for forgiveness that she carries in their name.

Throughout the journey, I could not escape the parallels to our own time. The past cannot and must not be forgotten—but my thoughts turned to what lies ahead. The heavy burden of what we are now inflicting upon ourselves and upon the Palestinians will not only fall on our children, but on our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, and beyond.

I do not speak here of the enormous financial debts we are leaving them. I speak of the moral debt—the injuries to thousands of innocents, the humanitarian disaster already unfolding, and the ruin of Israel’s standing in the eyes of our neighbors and the nations of the world.

We are acting with reckless disregard for generations not yet born. And they—most of whom will never have heard of the Exodus, though its torn threads still ripple today—they will likely be forced, like second-, third- and fourth-generation Germans, to seek forgiveness for wrongs that may never be forgiven.

Israel’s response to October 7th was certainly justified, but it has long since passed the point of necessity. Its continuation, now with the launch of “Gideon’s Chariots 2” (a direct sequel to “Iron Ruins”—and the distortion of the name is deliberate), demonstrates that the prophecy of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz has already come true. We must remove the beam from our own eye and do everything—absolutely everything—to limit the damage, both within ourselves and toward the Palestinian people, who will one day hold us to account.