Bibi, blueprints and Berlin

During his in-and-out trip to Germany, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a precious hour to collect a present from Bild Zeitung, a tabloid of the Axel Springer Group, which traditionally has been very friendly to Israel. The gift was a ghastly one - a set of architectural blueprints of Auschwitz, which will be deposited at Yad Vashem.

Historians will approve of this gift. But some questions begin to gnaw. What is the symbolism here? Why would an Israeli prime minister link himself and thus his country so demonstratively to Auschwitz? Netanyahu's answer was: "There are those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened." Hence, "let them come to Jerusalem to look at these designs for the death factory."

Okay, so this is one strike against the Holocaust-deniers. Still, it would have been wiser to let Yad Vashem's chairman take possession of the documents; collecting and preserving the evidence is, after all, the memorial's central task. Why even go there as Israeli PM?

Unwittingly, Netanyahu has played into the hands of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his comrades-in-hate. Their line is: No Holocaust, no Israel. Hence it is perfectly logical for them to deny the cause (the Shoah) to delegitimize the effect (Israel). But by accepting the Auschwitz blueprints as an almost sacred gift, and doing so as the head of government, Netanyahu has actually scored one for Israel's sworn enemies. He has walked into the Holocaust-equals-Israel trap, as if the state were indeed a posthumous gift of Adolf Hitler.

It is not, and the country's founding fathers would have recoiled from such a ceremony. What? they would have asked. Israel as consolation prize for the deadliest assault on the Jewish people in history? Haven't we dreamt about this state since the destruction of the Second Temple? We have drained the swamps and pushed back the desert. We have fought off five Arab armies and have shed our blood again and again. We have gathered the exiles from the four corners of the earth. So we have earned this land; it is not a gift of the gentiles. The Shoah was a horror of cosmic proportions, but it did not create the State of Israel, let alone make it what it is today.

This is how Ben-Gurion and Weizmann and Begin would have spoken. They strove relentlessly to build an Israeli identity rooted in the Hebrew language, the ethics of the Torah, the fruits of blood, sweat and tears - and the systematic transcendence of the past, as did the Israelites on Mount Sinai. The Shoah for them was a dreadful memory, not a nation-builder.

The blueprint episode seems like yet another instance of psychological regression. For many years, and especially on the right, the Holocaust identity has been expanding throughout the land, as if there were nothing else to instill a sense of "we." This new ideology (one hates to call it the "New Zionism") makes light of Israel's Herculean achievements in the last 60 years. It turns Israel's gaze from the future to the past. Worst of all, it defines Israel as a nation of victims, and these, as we know, expect further victimization instead of taking fate into their own hands. At best, victims earn pity; at worst, contempt.

Nor does "victimology" make for creative policy, be it toward Israel's friends, like Germany or America, or its foes, Palestinians, Arabs or Iranians. Celebrating history's "First War of National Liberation," the Haggadah has it right: Once we were slaves, now we are free men - and have been since 1948. Passover is about the Promised Land, not about Pharaoh. The PM should have asked Bild Zeitung to Fedex the blueprints to Jerusalem. The head of Yad Vashem then should have sent back an enthusiastic letter of appreciation - on his own stationery, not on the prime minister's.

The writer is publisher-editor of Die Zeit and a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.