We confess a certain weakness for blog posts that “do the legwork” of articulating or dismantling arguments (detailed research into false claims of Israeli atrocities, calm answers to the facile hysteria of anti-Israel activists, etc). Lynn at InContext has written a very pointed response to anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers who link the birth of Israel to Hitler’s attempted extermination of European Jewry:
Realizing that they’ve hit a nerve, though, the Holocaust deniers and anti-Zionists go a step further and assert that various Jewish and Zionist organizations actively encouraged, assisted or were somehow complicit in Hitler’s extermination campaign in order to assure that the State of Israel would come into being. This is, simply put, a vicious and ludicrous slander, based largely upon two fallacies: 20/20 hindsight and a misrepresentation of cause and effect.
It’s 20/20 hindsight because there was no reason to think, prior to the end of World War II, that most of the world gave a damn what happened to the Jews. Certainly few nations betrayed the slightest concern or prick of conscience over the fate of those whom Hitler had condemned to death. Who knew that after the fact there would be a change of heart and a flood of guilt? Few Jews at the time held out such hopes after watching for years the averted eyes, the rejected boatloads of refugees and the white papers. If there were some who dared anticipate that things would change in the aftermath of the war, they were a quiet minority.
She makes several good points, and you should read the rest of it. The only minor thing we would add is that some kind of Jewish state would in all likelihood have occurred without the Holocaust not because of global sympathy for self-determination, but because it was already happening. Jews were doing just fine moving to British mandate Palestine on their own before the Holocaust – to say that the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust uniquely caused Jewish immigration to Israel is as historically stupid as it is offensive. Lynn elaborates at length on the number of ways in which it’s stupid.
Ultimately, the vicious Holocaust denial – led by the lunatic running Iran, who is the second anti-Semite in 60 years that the world will allow to acquire genocidal capabilities – is logically incoherent by virtue of its own existence. If Zionists helped trigger the Holocaust in order to create international support for a Jewish state, they didn’t do a very good job of securing that support – as is proven by the very anti-Israel outbursts that claim that the Holocaust was designed to put an end to anti-Israel outbursts. But vicious anti-Semitism isn’t supposed to make sense – it exists only to provide enough of a push to set in motion massive violence, and it seems to be working.
