Argentina, Israel, and the Jews

Four actors are present on the stage of the drama which unfolds before us in this well-researched and captivatingly written work, and two more are hidden behind the scenery but are most influential: the governments of Argentina and of Israel, the Jews of Argentina and Argentine general society, and American Jewry and the U. S. government. The author leads us very skillfully from the first act—Argentina’s 1947 vote on Resolution 181 of the UN General Assembly, known as the “Plan of Partition with an Economic Union” of Palestine, which enabled the establishment of the State of Israel—through Juan Domingo Peron’s relations with Israel and with Argentine Jewry, to the last act, namely the capture in Argentina of the top organizer of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, and his trial in Jerusalem (1960-62). One of the author’s basic arguments is that all the five presidents who occupied the Casa Rosada during these 15 years tuned their attitudes toward Israel and their own Jewish citizens based on their belief in the omnipotent ability of American Jews to influence their government’s policies regarding Argentina. Rein manages to present dramatically the whole complex of political and economic interests, as well as the hopes and fears, of the three components of the Argentina-Israel-Argentine Jewry triangle. He thus accomplishes his aim of filling in an important lacuna in the already abundant historiography on Argentine Jews.Nevertheless, the roles of some of the six actors are presented much more extensively than some of the others. Perón and his regime are presented quite fully—no wonder, as this volume has been preceded by Rein’s The Franco-Perón Alliance: Relations between Spain and Argentina, 1946-1955 (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1993) and Peronismo, populismo y política: Argentina, 1943-1955 (Ed. de la Univ. de Belgrano, 1998). For this part of the book, as well for the presidencies of Arturo Frondizi and of the “juntas” that deposed him and Perón, the author employs almost all the primary and secondary resources available, giving a good understanding of the sequence of political and economic factors that formed the context of the adopted policies. Israel is presented in a rather shallower form. Rein’s analysis of its dialogue with Argentina is based mainly on Foreign Ministry papers and in some cases also on the Israeli press. But the reader is not informed from the outset that Israel was, at that time, only a nation-in-the-making, and the text gives the impression of a kind of equality and common ground between the two countries. It is only on page 92, in the context of the first economic accord between Israel and Argentina, that Rein describes the realities of Israel: a country that doubled its population in three years, with most of its new citizens still housed in temporary camps, while food was scarce and rationed. On the other hand, Israel’s decision to set out to capture Eichmann is carefully presented, as well as the efforts of both governments to end this incident as quickly as possible.The Jewish community of Argentina faced two main challenges during Perón’s presidency: to keep its umbrella organization and political representation—the DAIA—free of the regime’s patronage and, as a very Zionist community, to help and show solidarity toward the nascent Jewish state. During the Frondizi presidency, Argentina’s Jews had to face two even more dramatic challenges. First was the unique need to support Israel’s kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, an infringement on Argentine sovereignty. The second was to face the growing wave of anti-Semitic violence, partly aggravated by the Eichmann affair. The author describes how Argentine Jews withstood all these challenges. His analysis is based mainly on DAIA publications and Israeli and American Jewish archives. He relies only partly on the Argentine Jewish press and rarely on documents in Yiddish, the language of Jewish public life.This work presents Argentine general society mainly through the discussion of anti-Semitism, with little mention of other very important sectors. This is felt particularly during the Eichmann affair and thereafter. Rein merely mentions publications with favorable attitudes toward Jews, while he describes anti-Jewish papers and violent leaders in detail. This phenomenon is not unique to this particular study, but it draws our attention in this otherwise noteworthy piece. The author made thorough use of the National Archives in Washington and the papers of the American Jewish Committee for his analysis of the role of American Jews and the U.S. government.In the introduction and the epilogue, the author tries to apply the findings of this study to much later periods—a poorly convincing extrapolation of a well-defined and limited study that represents an important contribution to the historiography on Argentinean and Israeli foreign relations and partly also on Argentine Jewry

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