Justice on Trial

In a tiny, improvised cell in a secluded villa, War Criminal Adolf Eichmann, 54, last week volubly answered questions hour after hour. As though bent on slow-motion suicide, the man charged with responsibility for the murder of 6,000,000 Jews was eager to tell all, often asked for pencil and paper to enlarge his replies. With evident satisfaction, Israel's Chief Investigator Abraham Selinger reported that the thin, flop-eared ex-Gestapo leader--who had proclaimed that he would kill himself if he were ever captured--was the most "cooperative" suspect he had ever interrogated.

Selinger's satisfaction was not universally shared. Argentina--from whose soil Eichmann had been kidnaped by Israeli agents last month--seemed content to accept at face value Israel's pro forma denial that the kidnaping had ever happened. But in New York, Nahum Goldmann, prestigious president of the World Zionist Organization, was openly troubled by Israel's unilateral action and urged that Eichmann should stand trial for mass murder before an international court rather than an Israeli one.

The New York Post proposed that Eichmann be prosecuted "in Germany by the German republic"--a suggestion that found scant favor in Germany. The Washington Post complained that "everything connected with the proceedings against Eichmann is tainted with lawlessness. If, as reported, he was abducted from another country, international law was violated. The crimes with which he is to be charged were committed in Germany and Austria; Israel has no jurisdiction to try the case. In any event, Israel can try him only under ex post facto statutes."

Visibly angered by all this, Israel's Premier David Ben-Gurion lashed back at Nahum Goldmann with the sweeping statement that "historic justice and the honor of the Jewish people" required that the trial be held in Israel. As for "American journalists," shrugged the Premier, they could afford to be "objective" since they had never suffered Nazi atrocities. Despite the strong opposition of his own Justice Minister, Ben-Gurion was clearly determined to seize the occasion for a "show" trial. If he got his way, the trial would be used not only to condemn Eichmann but also to rehearse all the anti-Semitic crimes of the Nazi era and to remind the world of the continuing presence of ex-Nazis in advisory jobs in the governments of Israel's Arab neighbors, most notably the U.A.R.

In his justifiable determination to see Eichmann punished for his monstrous past. Ben-Gurion seemed to be unaware of the inverse racism implicit in his claim that Israel, as "the only sovereign authority in Jewry," had the right to seek out criminals guilty of offenses against the "Jewish people" anywhere it could find them. And he seemed equally unaware or indifferent to the fact that the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as one U.S. official pointed out, "is going to cause a serious loss of world confidence in the objectivity of the Israeli government."

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