Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 25
Israel doesn’t exist because of the Holocaust – the Holocaust occurred because Israel didn’t exist
President Barack Obama [1], addressing an Egyptian audience, said this in 2009:
“The aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and antisemitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.”
At first sight, that looks an uncontroversial statement. Yet Obama provoked widespread Jewish criticism because of its underlying implication (intended or not) that the world gifted Israel to the Jews as a guilt-offering for the Holocaust. Distinguished musician Daniel Barenboim went further, drawing a direct line between Nazism and the modern plight of the Palestinians: “Without the Holocaust there never would have been a partition of Palestine, there would have been no al-Nakba, 1967 war, and occupation.” [2] This echoes his friend, Edward Said, who asserted that the Palestinians were “the victims of the victims” [3] – a phrase that rolls nicely off the tongue but bears a tenuous link, at best, to reality.
Similar pronouncements have been made by many commentators and politicians including US Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. This line of thinking leads ultimately to the grotesque antisemitic conspiracy theory – most notoriously expressed by former London mayor Ken Livingstone – that the Zionist movement and the Nazis were (and remain) ideological bedfellows.
The allegedly causal connection between the European Jewish calamity and the creation of Israel is not merely false; in reality, according to Israeli scholar Eviatar Friesel [4], the Holocaust seriously damaged the prospects for Jewish statehood:
“There was a point of contact and influence between the Holocaust and the creation of the Jewish state. It was, however, exactly the reverse of what is commonly assumed: the destruction of European Jewry almost rendered the birth of Israel impossible…Zionism was essentially a product of European Jewry, especially East European Jewry. Ironically, that sector of the Jewish people was almost completely annihilated in the Holocaust.”
There was, of course, a relationship between the Holocaust and Israel’s rebirth but conflating chronology with causality is misleading. Some sympathy for the Jewish plight may have been generated in diplomatic circles by the haunting images that emerged from the death camps at their liberation in 1945. But the sequence of events linking the Holocaust to Israel was the inverse of the narrative apparently favoured by Obama, Barenboim and Said. To understand it, we have to rewind history to the early years of the 20th century.
The UN partition resolution of 1947 was the end-point of a torturous historical process initiated towards the end of the First World War when US President Wilson touted the principle of self-determination of all peoples, including the Jews. Every November, around the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised British support for a Jewish national home, antiZionists demand an apology from the UK government. That hasn’t been granted, and rightly so, but the highlighting of British culpability for an avoidable catastrophe is inadvertently appropriate since an apology is indeed merited – to the Jewish people. That Declaration, and its international endorsement, should have been the salvation of the Jews but wasn’t. As a result of Britain’s perfidy, trapped European Jewry had nowhere to find refuge from the Nazi predator. Countless innocent lives might have been saved had the doors of Mandatory Palestine remained open to Jewish immigration rather than slammed shut during those years of persecution and mass murder. (Unlike the Jews, to whom self-determination had been promised but not delivered, the Arabs were granted several sovereign states almost immediately following the Declaration starting with Churchill’s carving out of Transjordan from most of Mandatory Palestine).
This was the tragedy of the Palestine Mandate; its near-total repudiation, via a succession of British white papers in response to Arab violence, not only violated the expressed wishes of the League of Nations, but deprived millions of Jews of the opportunity to escape from the Third Reich’s killing fields. In The Revolt, Menachem Begin [5] asserted that Britain was complicit in the Holocaust by reneging on the Mandate:
“An entire nation – six million men, women and children, sank into an abyss, in a planned campaign of annihilation which lasted five whole years, because the Germans decided to destroy it, and the British – and others – decided not to rescue it.”
Former Israeli ambassador to the UK Mark Regev [6] supports Begin’s view:
“Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921, president of the Supreme Muslim Council from 1922 and president of the Arab Higher Committee from 1936, was the pivotal figure in the Palestinian national movement and his views were no secret…Husseini, along with fellow Arab Palestinian nationalists, conducted a successful campaign to pressure the British to keep the gates of Mandatory Palestine all but closed to European Jews fleeing the Nazis, and in so doing, sealed their fate… Husseini knew of the ‘Final Solution’ and supported the genocide.”
The trashing of the Mandate remains a troubling issue to this day. The acknowledgement of Zionism by the major powers after the Great War was, after all, a humanitarian response to antisemitism. But the failure to implement the Balfour Declaration, given its incorporation into international law via the San Remo conference and subsequent treaties, represents a profound moral failure on the part of the international community that inexplicably declined to enforce its own decisions or to call the recalcitrant Mandatory government to account.
The prime responsibility for the obscenity of the Final Solution lies with the German nation, who have sought to atone. Others too must shoulder a degree of blame but few have shown signs of doing so. No Arab leader has yet had the courage to admit the disastrous impact, on both Jews and Arabs, of Husseini’s collaboration with Hitler and his Nazification of Arab antiZionism.
As for the UK, what can one say? Even self-proclaimed “pro-Israel” British governments have remained silent on the UK’s shameful Mandate record and continue to support the institutionally antisemitic UNRWA as well as the Holocaust-denying, violence-inciting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. As if that were an insufficient rubbing of salt in Jewish wounds, the UK works with the EU in seeking to revive the near-moribund nuclear deal that was designed to appease Islamo-fascist Iran. Is it any wonder that British Jews remain sceptical of public UK denunciations of antisemitism while government ministers indulge in recurrent, ritualistic and hypocritical condemnation of Israel in the UN? Constant references to “occupation of Palestinian land” and “illegal settlements,” invariably delivered in insufferably sanctimonious tones, cut no ice when far more egregious examples of such policies are pursued by Russia, China, Turkey, India and Morocco. Only tiny, democratic Israel, that for decades has striven to achieve equitable peace treaties with her neighbours, including the Palestinians, is singled out for opprobrium. With friends like these…
Then there is the contemporary international community. The modern heirs of Hitler are aided and abetted by their apologists in the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, the UN, prominent NGOs, and an army of academics, journalists and politicians. All are determined to pursue their hate-filled war against the Jewish people, hiding behind a transparent facade of “criticism of Israel.” They would, if granted their wish, reduce Jews once more to a position of impotent vulnerability to the annihilationist aspirations of their enemies.
There can be no equivocation on this point and no room for post-modernist relativism – either you are opposed to genocide and in favour of peaceful coexistence or you are not. Which side are you on? That’s the question that today’s architects of “even-handed” policy-making in the UK Foreign Office, the US State Department, the EU and the UN must answer satisfactorily.
Anything less would be an act of global moral cowardice comparable to the Mandate-era betrayal of the Jewish people who suffered an agonising and avoidable fate as a result of the UK’s shredding of Arthur Balfour’s well-intentioned but ultimately empty promise.
1. Text of Barack Obama speech 2009
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html
2. Barenboim D. Germany Is Repaying Its post-Holocaust Debts to Israel - but not to the Palestinians. Haaretz 8 June 2017
3. Said, E. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims. Social Text no 1, Duke University Press, 1979
https://doi.org/10.2307/466405
4. Friesel E. The Holocaust: Factor in the Birth of Israel? Shoah Resource Centre, The International School for Holocaust Studies [undated].
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203575.pdf
5. Begin M. The revolt. New York, Tolmitch E-books (electronic copyright 2013), 1952
6. Regev M. Jerusalem Post, 11 November 2021. The Palestinians must acknowledge their role in the Holocaust.
