Quoting Zehavit Gross’s Holocaust education in Jewish schools in Israel: Goals, dilemmas, challenges:

The brave sabra (a Hebrew nickname for the Israeli‐born) who had just established a sovereign state, who served in the army and was willing to sacrifice his life for the state, was unwilling to relate to survivors of the Holocaust who came to [the Middle East] from the displaced persons camps in Europe. The passive victims of the Holocaust were viewed as having gone to the gas chambers like “lambs to the slaughter” (e.g., Shapira 1997, p. 97).

This was considered shameful and contrary to the zeitgeist of the period, a climate enhanced by Ben‐Gurion’s vision of the new Jew who is secular and takes his fate into his own hands; as a result, Holocaust survivors were ignored. Only the partisans and those active in the Warsaw ghetto uprising were considered heroes. On the other hand, those who survived the camps were unable to talk about their trauma, so they remained invisible and anonymous. In this period, commemoration ceremonies were private and held only by those who were directly connected to the Holocaust.

Don‐Yehiya (1993) claims that Ben‐Gurion’s attempt to construct the new Jew stemmed from his conception of mamlachtiyut (statism), which incorporated Holocaust denial and negated the reality of exile. According to this conception, the Holocaust was proof that [a neocolony] was the only place where Jews could make their national aspirations concrete.

Unlike the passive exilic Jew and the Holocaust Jew who went like a lamb to the slaughter, the new Jew took his fate into his own hands and resisted his enemies. Hence, for instance, Ben‐Gurion never mentioned the Holocaust in his public addresses.

[…]

In the public sphere, the attitude of the government was similar. Don‐Yehiya (2000) reports that Prime Minister David Ben‐Gurion opposed the establishment of a Holocaust memorial day and referred to the survivors as the “dust of human beings”. […] Stauber (2007) found that during the 1950s, Ben‐Gurion never participated in the commemoration events organized by Yad Vashem and never sent messages to the commemoration ceremonies.

Feminists shall immediately recognize the machismo in these sentiments; the early neocolonists held onto a kind of ‘social Darwinist’ philosophy, where the frail and elderly Jews would have to die so that there would be plenty of room and other resources left to go around for the strong and youthful Jews. (The exceptions were those Jews who had proven their worth as authorities, such as David Ben‐Gurion.) Quoting Tragic Irony:

In the Zionist Congress which took place in London in 1937, Dr. Weizmann established the line of policy with his words:

“The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, ‘Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?’ I replied, ‘No’…From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people…The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world…Only the branch of the young shall survive…They have to accept it.”

(Holocaust Victims Accuse, p. 25)

“Palestine cannot absorb the Jews of Europe. We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fait awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low‐grade ghetto.” (Quoted in The Jewish Press, October 18, 2002)

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Concerning the demand for certificates Ben Gurion wrote: “Today, EretzYisroel is in need of settlers, not immigrants… Zionism is not a charitable corporation. We are in need of the superior type of Jews who will develop the national home.”

(Emphasis added in all cases. Coincidentally, general contempt for the elderly and borderline fetishization of youth were normal phenomena in the Fascist empires. See, for example, the songs Es zittern die morschen Knochen and Giovinezza.)

Today, approximately one third of Shoah survivors live in poverty.