The relationship between the Holocaust and the modern Middle East is one of the most contested subjects in contemporary public argument. The state of Israel was declared three years and two days after the liberation of Auschwitz; its founding generation was substantially the survivors of the Nazi murder of European Jewry; the political case for its establishment ran through the displaced persons camps of post-war Germany; and its early defenders made the connection openly. So have its later critics, sometimes in good faith and sometimes not. The Holocaust has been used to justify Israeli policy and to attack it; to argue that the modern Middle East is the price of European antisemitism and to argue that European antisemitism has been imported to the Middle East and is now its currency. The pages below address the substantive history. This page sets out the framing.
What the historical record shows
Three things are well established. The Zionist movement was founded in late nineteenth-century Europe and pre-dates the Holocaust by half a century. Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Chaim Weizmann and others built the political case for a Jewish state as the necessary response to European antisemitism, well before any of the events that would later be called the Holocaust occurred. The 1917 Balfour Declaration committed Britain to a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Mass Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s was already substantial before 1939. The Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine, was around 450,000 strong by 1939.
The Holocaust then transformed the political environment. The murder of approximately one third of the world’s Jews, the destruction of the diaspora communities of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Hungary, Greece, the Netherlands and elsewhere, and the displaced-persons crisis of 1945 to 1948 produced a sustained international moral pressure for partition that the British government and the surrounding Arab states could not contain. The United Nations General Assembly vote of 29 November 1947 in favour of partition cannot be read in isolation from the immediate post-Holocaust moment. Israel’s declaration on 14 May 1948 took place against that background, and against the simultaneous unresolved fate of the European Jewish survivors who could not return to their pre-war homes.
The Arab world’s relationship with the Nazi regime during the war is the second documented strand. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met Hitler in Berlin in November 1941 and worked with the regime through the war on Arab and Bosnian Muslim recruitment to the SS, on broadcasting to the Arab world from Berlin, and on opposition to Jewish migration to Palestine. He has his own page in this section. Most Arab governments and most Arab populations were not aligned with the regime; some collaborated, some resisted, most operated in the difficult space between Vichy and the British. The detailed national histories are documented elsewhere.
The third documented strand is the population transfer that followed the 1948 war. Roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced from the territory that became Israel. Roughly 850,000 Jews were expelled or driven out of the Arab states between 1948 and the early 1970s, the great majority resettling in Israel. The two displacements are not equivalent in scale, in mechanism, or in subsequent treatment, but they belong to the same period and to the same conflict, and any honest account of the modern Middle East has to reckon with both.
The argument and its uses
The Holocaust has been used in the Israeli-Palestinian argument in three distinct ways.
The first is foundational. The case for Israel as the necessary refuge from European antisemitism, made by Israel’s founders and by its diaspora supporters, treats the Holocaust as the event that established beyond reasonable doubt why a sovereign Jewish state was needed. This case is real and the political weight it has carried is documented. It is not the same as a claim that Israel was caused by the Holocaust; the Zionist movement existed for fifty years before the Holocaust occurred. It is the claim that the Holocaust transformed the case for the state from one argument among several to the argument that carried, in a way the Zionists’ own pre-war work had not been able to do.
The second is comparative. Critics of Israeli policy have at various points compared specific Israeli actions to Nazi actions. Some of these comparisons have been made by Israeli writers and by Holocaust survivors themselves; some have been made in good faith by those who regard certain policies as profoundly wrong; some have been made in bad faith as a rhetorical move to delegitimise the state. The historians who have written most carefully on the comparison, including Yehuda Bauer and Deborah Lipstadt, have been clear that the comparison fails on the relevant dimensions of scale, intent, mechanism and duration, and that its rhetorical power lies in the very implausibility that makes it inaccurate. The argument is treated in detail on the Holocaust Inversion sub-section under Denial Claims and Rebuttals.
The third is denialist. The argument that the Holocaust was invented or inflated to justify the founding of Israel, prominent in some Arab and Iranian state propaganda from the 1960s onwards, and in the writings of Roger Garaudy in the 1990s and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2000s, takes the foundational case and inverts it. If the Holocaust was the case for Israel, the argument runs, then disproving the Holocaust would dissolve the case. The argument has been answered on the Numbers and Motivation and Fabrication pages and is not made here.
The pages below
The Holocaust and the Founding of Israel is the substantive historical page. It treats the displaced-persons crisis, the British Mandate’s collapse, the United Nations partition vote, and the 1948 war.
Arab Responses to Jewish Immigration Before and After the War treats the Arab political and intellectual responses to Jewish migration to Mandate Palestine, the role of the Mufti and other figures, and the position of the surrounding Arab states through the 1930s and 1940s.
How the Holocaust is Used and Misused in the Israeli-Palestinian Debate treats the contemporary argument: how Holocaust memory is invoked by both sides, what the historians say about specific comparisons, and where the line falls between legitimate political criticism and the use of Holocaust imagery as a rhetorical weapon.
Sources
- Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry, Pergamon, 1989
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993
- Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881 to 1948, Oxford University Press, 1992
- Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2005
- Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Yale University Press, 2008
- Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, Hurst, 2009
- Klaus Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years, Vallentine Mitchell, 2011
- Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Yale University Press, 2009
- Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972
- Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, Knopf, 1976 (revised editions through 2007)