The Holocaust and Israel

What are the connections between them?

In a year when a mini-Holocaust took place in Israel, and countless people around the world are calling for the genocide of Israel and even of the Jewish people as a whole, Yom HaShoah takes on particular significance. The relationship between the Holocaust and Israel is profound. But it’s not necessarily what people think.

The Holocaust certainly helped the formation of Israel receive international support. After the horrors of the destruction of European Jewry, many people realized that perhaps it was important for the Jews to have a homeland. Had Israel been created just a few years earlier, millions of lives could have been saved.

But while the Holocaust helped the creation of Israel get international political support, realpolitik had even more to do with it. And the original move to create Israel was not done with the Holocaust itself in mind. Nobody imagined that there could be destruction on such a scale.

What many Jews did know, for several decades before the Holocaust, is that Jews in Europe were never going to be reliably safe, that things were getting very bad, and that they were very likely going to get even worse.

Even more significantly, what some Jews realized is that the key problem was homelessness. There were so many Jews who wanted to flee, or who would eventually need a place to flee to, but simply had nowhere to go, especially after the US started drastically restricting immigration.

As Adam Rovner documents in his fascinating book In The Shadow of Zion, there were numerous options that were investigated as a potential refuge for the Jews of Europe. The so-called Uganda Plan (which was actually Kenya) is the most famous, but Surinam, Angola, Madagascar, Tasmania and other places were also explored.

This may come as a surprise, but the majority of religious Zionists, including Rav Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, as well as none other than Zev Jabotinsky, were in favor of exploring the Uganda Plan. And this is completely understandable. There was a pressing need to provide a safe haven for the Jews of Europe. For a certain period, East Africa seemed to be a much more viable prospect, both politically and economically, than Palestine.

Alas, none of these ideas ended up working out, for a variety of reasons. Even if they had temporarily worked, one can only imagine what situation they would be in after de-colonization started to happen and spread globally.

And meanwhile, things kept getting even worse for the Jews of Europe. They started to flee, but it was difficult to find somewhere to go. Some Jews escaped from Germany to Palestine, not because they were Zionists, but rather simply because it was a place where they could get in.

In 1938, the US convened the Évian Conference, attended by representatives of 32 countries, to attempt to find a refuge for the millions of Jews seeking to flee Hitler. It was a failure. The Dominican Republic offered to take 100,000 Jews (which ended up being 1000), and Costa Rica offered to take some, but that was it. Nobody wanted to help take in millions of Jews. And thus six million Jews were killed.

Incredible, even after the world learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, there was still nowhere for the surviving Jews to go! Some of them went back to their home towns in Poland and were killed in a pogrom. Others languished in Displaced Persons camps for years, some of which were actually former concentration camps. When Israel came into existence, one of the first acts of the provisional government was to cancel Britain’s immigration restrictions. Within weeks, Jews arrived in enormous numbers.

I’ve seen someone (I forget who) describe the current war, both in its Gaza physical manifestation and in its international political manifestation, as a war on the very concept of a Jewish home. (Unfortunately the word “homelessness” does not have a satisfactory antonym.) Much of the world doesn’t want the Jews to have a homeland in tiny Palestine, but they also don’t consider that Jews should have a home anywhere else. If you ask them what the Jews in Europe should have done to escape persecution in massacred, they will either ignore the question, shrug their shoulders, or even outright say that they should have just let themselves be killed rather than try to “colonize” any land.

The slogan “Never Again” can have many meanings. Some take it to mean that never again will there be a genocide against the Jews (which is a problematic assertion - how can we be sure that we can stop such a thing?). Some interpret it to mean that never again will Jews have no way to defend themselves, which is something that the existence of the IDF addresses. Some understand it to mean that never again will Jews passively allow themselves to be massacred (which the creation of Israel has changed, but which is a bit unfair to the Jews of Europe). But I think that at its most basic level, it ought to mean that never again should there be a situation in which a Holocaust can happen simply because the Jews being persecuted have nowhere to go.

Home is a place that you can always enter. While the Jewish state serves many purposes, one of its earliest and most basic goals is that there should be a country which will let Jews in and can be always be relied upon to do that. The Holocaust is a stark reminder of what can happen if Jews don’t have a homeland. The Hamas massacre is a price that we pay for having a Jewish State, but the Holocaust was a price that we paid for not having one. This is just one of the many reasons that we should be very, very grateful that we have Israel.