The Shoah-Israel connection

In commemoration of Yom HaShoah today, I’d like to address a commonly held myth:

Many people (including Iran’s Ahmedinejad y”s, if you can call him a “person”) have made the claim that it was guilt resulting from the Shoah that forced the otherwise rational members of the United Nations to vote in favor of the 1947 Partition Plan, which led to the foundation of the State of Israel.

These people are wrong, and on every count.

At the time of the Partition vote, the Shoah was only the most recent in a long history of oppression of Jews.  If Europeans wanted something to feel guilty about, they had countless oppressive measures, pogroms, and expulsions from their own history to choose from; they didn’t need the Shoah.

In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British promised “a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object,” then did everything within their power to thwart that aim, including severely restricting Jewish immigration (including Jews desperately trying to flee the ovens of Europe), giving away land they’d promised to the Jews to the Arabs instead (modern-day Jordan was to become part of Jewish Palestine), and preventing the Jews from defending themselves against Arab aggression and violence.  The Jews had been well on their way to creating a state before the Shoah began.

The dastardly deeds of the Germans are well-documented, and their toadies, the Vichy government in France, outdid themselves to cooperate with their occupiers.  For its part, the United States government remained unconcerned about the plight of the Jews, concentrating their efforts on winning the war (a productive aim) but also refusing to admit Jewish refugees starting in the 1920s and continuing until after the war (a much more sinister policy, and one directly responsible for countless Jewish lives lost).

What Ahmedinejad and his ilk really mean to say is that had the West taken the attitude that the Arab world did–that the Jews were a people to rid themselves of to make way for a Middle East dominated by Arabs–they would never have allowed their guilt to get the best of them, and would have stood back and allowed the Arab masses and their armies to finish Hitler’s work of making the world Judenrein (as, indeed the West did, and the Arabs somehow did not).

The Shoah did drag world anti-Semitism out into the daylight for all to see.  The actions of the British, the Germans, the French Vichy government, and the United States, with their active or passive participation in the Shoah, demonstrated as clearly as could be the reason why the Jews needed their own state.  And yet even then, the Jewish State was not a shoo-in; Jews had to lobby hard for the necessary number of U.N. votes to make a fraction of their dream (and Britain’s broken promise) come true.  Doesn’t sound like the world’s guilt was all that overwhelming to me.  They stood by while 600,000 Jews (one-tenth of the number slaughtered by the Nazis) cobbled together a defense force to salvage their lives and their dream.  They stood by while over 900,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab nations in the 1950s and 1960s.  They stood by while Jewish civilians were shot and blown to bits in the intifadas of the last twenty years, only pausing long enough to write the PLO checks and let their hearts bleed for the poor, oppressed Palestinians.  And they are standing by now while Iran arms itself with nuclear weapons, which Ahmedinejad y”s says he hopes he will get the chance to use to wipe Israel off the map.  They will always stand by; of that you can be sure.

Even if the guilt purportedly felt by the U.N. members did inform their choice to vote for the Partition, it certainly didn’t create the State of Israel.  The Jewish State was created by those who fought against the eight Arab armies that tried to take away the few scraps of land the U.N. had tossed to the Jews.  The fact that the rest of the world had stood by while their families were deported and murdered in Europe only toughened the Jews’ resolve to establish a country of their own.

Place yourself in the shoes of one of the U.N. ambassadors on the eve of the vote.  If you voted “no,” you’d be part of the bloc of normative nations (i.e. Jew-haters) who were poised to deny the Balfour Declaration, which was formalized by the League of Nations in 1922.  If you voted “yes,” you’d be part of a lunatic fringe which planned to affirm the Zionist dream.  Regardless of which side you found yourself on, if you knew your job, you knew that there was no way a tiny population of Jews surrounded by hostile Arabs was going to get its wish.  Even a “yes” vote was sure to be overruled by events which, in fact, took place, rendering your vote moot.  You would have known that the Arabs would not accept such a victory for the Jews, and would saddle up as soon as they could get organized.  Imagine the surprise that must have greeted those who had voted “yes” when the Jews actually emerged alive and with enough contiguous land to call a state!  For the record, no country has ever been founded by a U.N. vote.

I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory explanation for why the rest of the world dislikes Jews so much.  But the fact that their behavior shows this to be true makes it impossible for me to believe that any feelings of guilt (real or faked) have influenced their conduct with respect to Israel.

On this Yom HaShoah, let’s put that myth to rest once and for all.

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