An August 16 Associated Press article by Vanessa Gera titled, Poland keeps ambassador at home amid dispute with Israel, describes the diplomatic dustup caused by Warsaw’s new law that effectively prevents Holocaust survivors and their descendants from reclaiming property seized by the Nazis.
The piece notes:
The dispute is the latest to erupt over history between Poland, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community before World War II, and Israel, which was founded as a safe haven for Jews driven from Europe by German dictator Adolf Hitler and his helpers.”
The above quote is a subtle example of a common misconception; namely, that the Jewish state was created in response to the Holocaust, a canard pervasive even in the West that was previously disseminated by former US president Barack Obama and, more recently, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.
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Fact Check: Israel is not the result of European guilt over the Holocaust
Stating definitively that Israel’s founding was the result of the Holocaust is a fallacy even though the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during WWII did, in fact, cause many people to sympathize with the millennia-long plight of the Jewish people. However, the notion that this was the primary catalyst for the international community’s step-wise process toward establishing a Jewish state confuses correlation with causation.
First of all, the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel dates back at least 3,000 years. This is not Biblical conjecture but rather confirmed by a myriad of archeological findings.
Fast forward to the late 19th century, when the first organized wave of Jewish migration to what is present-day Israel began. By the 1880s, Jews were already laying the foundations of a future sovereign state. During World War I, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, which had for 400 years ruled much of the Middle East — including the territory encompassing modern-day Israel — the Zionist cause was embraced by the British government.
Related Reading: Roots of Zionism
Around the same time that Adolf Hitler served as a lance corporal in the Bavarian Army, then-British Prime Minister David Lloyd George expressed public support for Zionism. On November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration, produced by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, formalized London’s policy and explicitly called for the creation of a Jewish homeland.
There were a multitude of geopolitical considerations that influenced this historic decision, including the British government’s hope that such a declaration would help gain Jewish support for the Allies in neutral countries during World War I. Additionally, the region that just years later would constitute British-ruled Mandatory Palestine was coveted by 10 Downing Street as it would act as a land bridge between the British-governed territories of India and Egypt.
Nevertheless, the belief in the righteousness of the Zionist cause held by Lloyd George and many other leaders was genuine.
Related Reading: ‘Historic Palestine’ – A Misleading Anachronism
This was reflected in the passage of the so-called San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, which officially created Mandatory Palestine. The resolution specifically directed the “Mandatory,” in this case the British, to establish a national home for the Jewish people in the newly formed entity; this was largely based on the Balfour Declaration.
Moreover, as part of the groundwork laid for building a broad coalition of support for a Jewish national home, the text of the Declaration was incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate.
As these momentous events were taking place during the early 1920s, the Nazi Party was little more than an unpopular, fringe group.
Using the Holocaust to demonize Israel
The promotion of the mistaken theory that the Jewish state is but a byproduct of the WWII genocide has had a surreal boomerang effect, essentially opening the door to those with anti-Zionist agendas, as well as antisemites, to hijack Holocaust-related language and symbols in order to libel Israel by comparing its treatment of the Palestinians to that of the Jews by the Nazis.
For his part, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly likened the Jewish state’s Gaza policy to the Nazi treatment of Jews. Erdogan has said that “we view the Holocaust in the same way we view those besieging Gaza and carrying out massacres in it.”
Related Reading: Was The War of Independence The Sin of Israel’s Creation?
Perhaps most well-known was when former Iranian president and vile antisemite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007 accused Israel of using the Holocaust as a pretext for “genocide” against Palestinians.
Then there’s ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone. In 2018, The British Labour Party extended his suspension over a 2016 assertion that Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism in the 1930s. Livingston claimed he was merely “stating a historical fact.”
Meanwhile, the ‘Never Again For Anyone’ initiative is an especially egregious example as it demonizes Israel by advocating for the ‘Never Again’ mantra – created specifically in reference to the systematic murder of 6 million Jews – to be applied to the Palestinian people.
The big problem with cum hoc ergo propter hoc
The confluence of the Jewish people’s ancient connection to the Land of Israel, the Zionist movement’s monumental efforts to re-establish a Jewish state and a complex array of geopolitical factors are responsible for Israel’s creation. And this was likely to happen had the Holocaust never been perpetrated.
By failing to explain this reality, Associated Press, whose work is republished by more than 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters across the globe, has, inadvertently or not, framed the near-miraculous actualization through perseverance and hard work of the Jewish people’s 2000-years-longing into a sort of “consolation prize”- gifted by a world that turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Help fight for media accuracy. Contact @VanessaGera (Twitter) and ask that her article be revised. Or, email Associated Press directly.
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Featured Image: Declaration of State of Israel via Wikipedia Commons
