History, Zionism, 1938

Editorial

History is not bunk, as the anti-Semite Henry Ford famously dismissed it, unless its lessons are ignored. This issue of the Independent may seem heavy on history, because this week marks the 70th anniversary of a dark moment in our collective past.

This issue includes coverage of a remarkable lecture delivered Sunday night by Dr. Robert Krell (see cover story) and an essay about the parallels between Kristallnacht and an event a few weeks earlier, in 1938, the Evian Conference, which has been called "Hitler's green light for genocide" (see Opinion article this week).

The Evian Conference was, put simply, the tragic moment when the world's democracies came together at a lovely resort on the French-Swiss border and decided to do absolutely nothing to aid the endangered Jews of Europe.

The failure of the Evian Conference delegates to act on behalf of Europe's Jews holds lessons to contemporary affairs, one being present-day perspectives on Jewish self-determination.

The relationship between the Holocaust and the realization of the Zionist ambition is contentious territory. The simplest equation, employed commonly by Israel's enemies, is that the creation of the state of Israel by the United Nations was an act of global contrition and that Israel's existence is the embodiment of Arab people paying the price for European sins. This is one of several deeply flawed and inhuman interpretations that deserve debunking.

The state of Israel was formed in fire, not in the UN's General Assembly. The Jews of Palestine were given precisely nothing they did not have to fight for with every fibre of their being and many thousands of lives. From the moment of the Partition Resolution, the Jews of Palestine were utterly on their own. Almost everything Israel received from the world community in the dark days of 1947-'49 came from Diaspora Jews. Even what armaments they received via the black market from such states as Czechoslovakia were not shared with the Jews out of any sense of common cause or sense of justice, but out of sheer economic pragmatism.

Second, the Partition Resolution was less an opportunity for the world to take responsibility for their failure to protect the Jews of Europe than an opportunity to perpetuate that malignant neglect. Palestine was where the world thought they could pen up penniless, emotionally and physically devastated throngs who were given very little chance of individual or collective success. It is this incredible underestimation of human resilience that makes Israel's success that much more miraculous.

The attempt to portray Israel as the manifestation of European guilt and colonialism deflects from the Arab and Muslim world's complicity at Evian. From the moment that a Jewish state became a realistic proposition in Palestine – in the 1920s – Arab anti-Jewish violence in the Levant was intended to influence and, indeed, succeeded in formulating, the policy of the British colonial power on migration to Palestine. The British prewar position was influenced largely by the anti-Semitic mob violence that had riven the Levant in direct proportion to the inevitability of the creation of a Jewish state. Though absent from Evian, the Arab world was were there in spirit.

Additionally, while Zionism may well have been a European invention, the people for whom Israel would be a refuge in the second half of the 20th century were not the Jews of Europe, most of whom did not live to see the fruition of the Zionist dream. It was the Jewish victims of totalitarian African and Arab states in the second half of the 20th century for whom Israel would be a sanctuary.

The entire Arab and Muslim world, from the Maghreb to the Asian subcontinent, was totally or nearly totally erased of Jews in the years after 1948. While enthusiastically blaming Europe for the presence of Israel in their midst, Arab and Muslim leaders unwittingly supported – and continue to support – the Zionist case, if anyone cares, by demonstrating that a refuge for Jews is as necessary after the Holocaust as it was before.

The difference between the fate of Jews in the two halves of the 20th century is that, in the second half, when faced with no less genocidal a threat, Jews had a country that would accept them, in any number, without question. This is the imperative of the Law of Return, one of the pillars on which Zionism rests, and it is the most important lesson we can take from the events at Evian 70 years ago.

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