The Holocaust is a Myth to Justify Israel

The claim collapses two questions that have to be kept separate: did the Holocaust happen, and what political consequences flowed from its having happened. The Holocaust happened, on the evidence dealt with elsewhere on this site (the construction documents of the gas chambers, the Operation Reinhard records, the Einsatzgruppen reports, the demographic records, the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, the surviving photographs and films). The political consequences for the Zionist movement and for the eventual foundation of Israel are a separate question, with their own scholarly literature. The denier move is to take the second question and use it to negate the first. The move requires the listener to believe that an operation documented in the surviving German archive, attested by the perpetrators in their own trials, recorded by Allied intelligence as it was happening, and tracked through the European Jewish demography of 1939 to 1945, was instead invented after the fact for political reasons. The chronology alone refutes this.

The chronology of the Zionist movement

The Zionist movement long predates the Holocaust. Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat was published in 1896. The First Zionist Congress was held in Basel in 1897. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed the British government to support a Jewish national home in Palestine; the British Mandate over Palestine ran from 1923 to 1948 with this commitment as part of its founding documents. The Zionist project of settlement in Palestine had built up the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) from approximately 50,000 in 1900 to approximately 400,000 by 1939, well before any Holocaust had occurred. The Haavara Agreement of 1933 to 1939, the Évian Conference of 1938, the Kindertransport of 1938 to 1939, and the wider pre-war debate over the absorption of European Jewish refugees were all conducted on the assumption that there was a substantial Zionist project already in operation. The state of Israel did not emerge from the Holocaust; it emerged from a Zionist project that had been in motion for fifty years before the Holocaust.

What changed with the Holocaust was the moral and political pressure on the Western governments to permit the founding of the state, and the demographic position of European Jewry, which had been reduced from approximately nine million to approximately three million in five years. The Holocaust accelerated and shaped the political outcome of 1948; it did not generate the Zionist project from scratch. Treating the Holocaust as a Zionist invention requires the listener to ignore the entire pre-war history of the movement.

The contemporaneous documentation

The Holocaust’s documentary record was produced as the killing was happening, before any post-war Zionist political use could have shaped it. The Höfle Telegram of 11 January 1943 was decoded at Bletchley Park in real time, classified, and held in British intelligence archives until its declassification in 2000. The Vrba-Wetzler Report of April 1944 was produced by two escapees from Birkenau and reached Allied governments by mid-1944, with its description of the gas chambers in operation. The Korherr Report of March 1943 was prepared by the SS chief statistician for Himmler. The Wannsee Protocol was distributed to thirty copies in January 1942, of which one survived in the German Foreign Ministry files captured at the war’s end. The Allied aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau were taken in 1944 and filed in US Army Air Forces archives. None of this material was produced by post-war Zionist actors; all of it was produced by the perpetrators or by Allied intelligence services, in real time. The documentary record exists independently of any post-war political use.

The earliest comprehensive accounting of the killing, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1946 and the Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1949, were not Zionist productions. The Nuremberg prosecutors were British, American, French and Soviet. The judgments were delivered by the International Military Tribunal whose composition included no Israeli representative (Israel did not yet exist). The findings on the killing were based on captured German documents and on the testimony of German defendants. The Nuremberg record is an Allied judicial product, not a Zionist political product.

The post-war Israeli use of Holocaust memory

It is true that Israeli political discourse has, since the founding of the state, made use of Holocaust memory in various ways. The Eichmann Trial of 1961 was a deliberate Israeli political-legal event that brought Holocaust testimony to public consciousness on a global scale. The teaching of the Holocaust in Israeli schools is part of the national curriculum. The Holocaust is invoked in Israeli political rhetoric on questions of national security and existential threat. The deniers’ implicit claim is that this Israeli use of memory has somehow generated the historical record of the Holocaust itself, which is the chronological reverse of what occurred. The Holocaust generated the conditions under which Israeli memory politics could later draw on it; the memory politics did not generate the historical record.

The argument also requires the listener to believe that the historical scholarship of the Holocaust is an Israeli or Zionist product, which is straightforwardly untrue. The standard works are by historians of multiple nationalities, faiths and political orientations: Raul Hilberg (American Jewish, anti-Zionist), Christopher Browning (American non-Jewish), Saul Friedländer (Israeli but writing within the Western academic tradition), Ian Kershaw (British non-Jewish), Yehuda Bauer (Israeli), Peter Longerich (German), Karin Orth (German), and many others. The historiographical consensus is the work of an international scholarly community over eight decades. It is not a Zionist artefact.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it converts the Holocaust from a documented historical event into a political accusation against the Jewish people. The accusation is that Jews fabricated their own genocide for political advantage; the implicit further accusation is that the Jewish dead are themselves a fiction in the service of an ongoing Jewish political project. This is the antisemitic libel in close to its purest form, presented as historical scepticism. To accept the libel one would have to dismiss the captured German documents, the Allied intelligence record, the demographic accounting, the testimony of the perpetrators, the surviving photographs and films, and the entire international scholarly tradition; and one would have to attribute all of this to a coordinated Zionist deception. This is not a historical argument. It is the deployment of a conspiracy theory in historical clothing.

What did the Zionist movement look like before 1939? When were the principal Holocaust documents produced? Whose hands produced them?

See also

• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
• Raul Hilberg
• The Nuremberg Trials
• The Haavara Agreement
• Allied Aerial Photographs of Auschwitz
• The Eichmann Trial 1961

---

Sources

• Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, Vienna, 1896
• Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, Schocken Books, 1972
• Anita Shapira, Israel: A History, Brandeis University Press, 2012
• Höfle Telegram, 11 January 1943, decoded by GCHQ Bletchley Park, file HW 16/23, The National Archives, Kew
• Vrba-Wetzler Report (Auschwitz Protocols), April 1944, in War Refugee Board, German Extermination Camps – Auschwitz and Birkenau, Washington, November 1944
• Wannsee Conference Protocol, 20 January 1942, House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, Berlin
• International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg, 1947 to 1949
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, Yale University Press, 2003
• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945, HarperCollins, 2007
• Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001
• Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mifflin, 1999, on the post-war reception of Holocaust memory
• Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993, on Israeli memory politics
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust” and “The History of the Holocaust”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org