Had Israel Existed 10 Years Earlier, There Might Have Been No Holocaust

What if the State of Israel had existed ten years earlier? Jacob Sivak argues that had that been a Jewish state before World War II, there might not have been a Holocaust. More of his argument can be found here, stated a couple of months ago but enduringly relevant: “Holocaust scholars were wrong: A Jewish state would have prevented the Holocaust – opinion,” by Jacob Sivak, Jerusalem Post, May 16, 2024:

A few weeks after the horrifying October 7 attack by Hamas on men, women, and children in southern Israel, a letter appeared in the New York Review (November 20, 2023) signed by 16 Holocaust scholars (including Christopher Browning, who wrote Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland) criticizing the misuse of Holocaust memory. The writers were concerned about inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust made by Israeli and American public figures in relation to the (still ongoing) war between Israel and Hamas.

There were no illegitimate comparisons made between the Holocaust and the attacks by Hamas. The Holocaust was mentioned in this manner: “More Jews were killed in one day, on October 7, than on any day since the Holocaust.” No one suggested that those atrocities were equivalent to the Holocaust; such a claim would have been absurd.

Their intention was to protect the memory and uniqueness of the Holocaust. However, they have to be naive and or misinformed when they describe the Holocaust, in a narrow sense: “The Nazi genocide involved a state – and its willing civil society – attacking a tiny minority, which then escalated to a continent-wide genocide.” Do they really believe that the Holocaust began with the Nazis?

I [Jacob Sivak] grew up in Canada in the 1950s and ’60s and first heard about the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as a young boy. I also learned about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

That a mere decade separated the Holocaust from the establishment of a Jewish state was starkly evident to me then, as it is now. Had a Jewish state existed just 10 years earlier, the Holocaust might not have occurred.

What I cannot understand is how the connection between the absence of a Jewish state and the circumstances that led to the Holocaust is not obvious to everyone; including, apparently, the 16 scholars who signed the letter.

The genocide we now know as the Holocaust was not an aberration. Its beginnings go back to a period well before the Nazis took power. Not coincidentally, the lead-up to the Holocaust coincided with the development of modern Zionism….

All the early Zionist leaders, including Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, and David Ben-Gurion, understood that millions of European Jews, especially those in Eastern Europe, were in imminent physical danger….

An even bloodier wave of pogroms took place during 1903-1906. Herzl raised the British offer of a temporary refuge for Jews in Uganda at the 1903 Zionist Congress. (It was actually a tract in the highlands of Kenya.) He was thinking of the devastating Kishinev (today Chisinau, Moldava) pogrom that took place a few months earlier.

In the end, opposition by many among the Zionists to settling anywhere but Zion, as well as opposition from existing British settlers [in Kenya and Uganda], led to a withdrawal of the offer….

Just 17 years later, in 1936, Weizmann’s statement to the Peel Commission (see The Siege, by Conor Cruise O’Brien, 1986), established by the British in response to Arab-instigated violence in Palestine, noted there were six million people for whom the world was divided into places where they cannot live and places into which they cannot ente r[he was referring to the British making it nearly impossible for Jews to go to Mandatory Palestine]. He asks, “Have we the right to live?”…

The Jewish people paid a heavy price for not having a state when needed most. The 16 Holocaust scholars mentioned earlier are wrong. The genocide perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, as well as genocidal slogans such as “from the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary” now emanating today from universities across North America, are comparable to the hatred experienced by Jews before and during the Holocaust.

Had Israel existed in 1938, several million Jews in Europe might have been saved from the Nazis, by being able to settle in the Jewish state, without British hindrance or that infamous White Paper of 1939 that drastically curtailed Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine. Instead of the 1948 population of 630,000 Jews in Israel, in 1938 there could have been as many as three or four million Jews from Europe, who had found refuge from Hitlerism, with more flooding unstoppably into the new state through World War II. When the Arab states attacked the Jewish state, an Israeli army three or four times as large as the one that was fielded in 1948 would not only have repelled the Arab armies, but, unlike in 1948, would have defeated Jordan’s Arab Legion and held onto Judea and Samaria. Israel would then have existed “from the river to the sea.” And the Middle East, with that Jewish state from its inception in 1938 being many times more populous and powerful than the Israel that came into existence on May 14, 1948, after the Nazis had murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust, would have been a very different place.