It wasn't the Holocaust

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3063943,00.html

Holocaust was not determining factor behind Israel's establishment, Sever
Plocker writes



The inauguration of the new Holocaust Museum at "Yad Vashem" and the Zionist
statement that is evident from the museum's architecture begs, yet again, a
discussion as to whether or not Israel would have been established had the
Holocaust not taken place.


Historically speaking, Zionism, as revolutionary national liberation movement,
was established decades before the Holocaust. The first Zionist Congress was
held in 1897; Adolf Hitler was eight-years-old, and Nazism wasn't even in its
budding stage.



Great Britain, the most dominant colonial power at the time, officially
recognized the Jewish nation's right to a "national home" of its own in 1917,
25 years before the first European Jew was sent to a concentration camp.



It was the inquiry into the history of the Jewish nation as a stateless people
continuously rejected by its surroundings that pushed Jews into the arms of
Zionism, that is, a political solution in the form of a Jewish state.



Indeed, this was a cumulative, bitter historical lesson, rather than a
one-time revelation.



The demographic argument


The Holocaust only re-validated Zionism's basic assumptions, whereby the Jews
are a nation living in the Diaspora among other nations that despise them, to
some extent or another, and that seemingly "harmless" anti-Semitism can
escalate into murderous pogroms.


The Holocaust was such a pogrom; its scale makes it a unique, but not deviant,
event in the history of anti-Jewish hatred. Indeed, it was proceeded by
numerous "minor" and "moderate" Holocausts and violent anti-Semitic outbursts
across the globe.


However, the strongest argument for rejecting the claim the Holocaust produced
Israel has to do with demographics.


On the eve of World War II, some 9.5 million Jews lived in parts of Europe
that were later conquered by the Nazis.


What would have happened to European Jewry had the "final solution" not
materialized? How many would Jews would be here today if they hadn't been
systematically annihilated?



The relatively slow birth rate among Western European Jews before the war
allows us to assume the European Jewish population in 1945 would stand at
about 10 million, and would increase by 2 percent a year.


The result: The number of European Jews in 1975 would reach some 18 million,
and today the number would stand at about 33 million.



Is it at all fathomable that 18 to 20 million European Jews would not demand a
homeland? Can anyone imagine the assimilation of 20 or more million Jews into
Christian Europe?



'We pine for the Jews who were murdered'



Poland's Jewish community alone would number 6 million in 1980 had it not been
for the Holocaust. Can anyone imagine that the State

of Israel wouldn't have been established and recognized by the world as the
single solution to "Europe's Jewish problem," once this "problem's" scope
surpassed the 15-million mark?


Indeed, the Europeans would not have accepted the existence of such huge
Jewish minority amidst them, and the Jews, in turn, would not have agreed to
the status of a minority devoid of national-sovereign rights.


If the Holocaust had never occurred, the mass immigration of European Jews to
Palestine-Israel would have commenced in the 1950s, with the approval and
encouragement of European governments, including the Soviet Union.


No Arab protest could have prevented this from happening: A Jewish state
accepting millions of Jews from Europe would quickly become an acknowledged
fact.


The Holocaust did not beget Israel; rather, the Holocaust almost foiled the
country's establishment, by depleting the Jewish nation's resources,
threatening its very existence, and creating a huge gap in Jewish demography.


Without the Holocaust, today Israel would have been more heavily populated and
stronger.


We pine for the Jews who were murdered.



(03.27.05, 16:08)