When I was a child, in the early 1960s, the left tended to sympathize with Israel. The “nakba”, the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and lands during the 1948-1949 war, the conflict that established the existence of Israel, but the thing did not have much impact on international public opinion. As it did not have it either, until then, the Holocaust or Shoah suffered by Jews during World War II. Both issues were one horror among many others of war or one horror among many others of decolonization.
The Shoah It began to be fully perceived (we are always talking about the general public) in 1960 with the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina by an Israeli commando, his transfer to Jerusalem, his trial and his execution in 1962. The story of the Nazi war criminal, one of the main executors of the genocide, went around the world. Images of the extermination camps became integrated into popular culture. The “Eichmann case” coincided with the publication of the novel ‘Exodus’, by Leon Uris, a heroic story about the founding of Israel. ‘Exodus’ achieved overwhelming international success and was soon made into a film, with Paul Newman as the protagonist.
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