WW2 justifies the State of Israel
More or less
In a previous article, I (correctly) argued that the Holocaust does not vindicate Zionism for some simple reasons:
Zionism did not prevent the Holocaust
Zionism was predicated explicitly, according to its adherents, on a Holocaust-type event among East European Jewry being unlikely
Those who did predict such an event, or even something an order of magnitude less, separated from the Zionist movement precisely for this reason
Zionism drained time, energy and resources from other enterprises that could have relocated a much larger number of European Jews elsewhere at a fraction of the cost, and the Zionists knew this.
So, when I argue here that the State of Israel is justified by World War Two, I am not basing that on 5-6 million Jews having been murdered during that war by rightoids with a victimhood complex and sophistical rationales for why it was only fair for them to revert to barbarism. Rather, the justification is essentially the opposite: not that the Holocaust happened, but that it wasn’t complete.
At the end of World War 2 there were roughly 250,000 Jews living in Displaced Persons camps in Eastern Europe. Since they could not just evaporate into the ether, they had to go live somewhere. For very good reasons, most of them did not want to return to their towns and villages, but even if they had, the countries concerned were in no condition to deal with additional refugees, and did not want to take them anyway. There was precisely one stable political institution with de facto control of a territory, that showed any enthusiasm at all about absorbing this population, namely the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine.
To this number we can add about 175,000 Jews who had fled Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia between 1933 and 1939 and ended up in Palestine, some legally, some otherwise. These joined a further roughly 75,000 immigrants who came for economic or ideological reasons, and another 300,000 Jews who were already there. In total, therefore, there were about 850,000 Jews, most already in Palestine and some still in Europe, who had nowhere else to go.
World War 2 was an absolute nadir of post-antique human history. Here is a simple visual representation of just how much of a nadir it was:
Some nutcases cite this nightmare period as a justification for why it would be good to have more ethnic cleansing today, but any reasonable person understands that the overriding priority is making sure that nothing like that ever happens again. Nevertheless, it wasn’t all bad. Prior to 1939, Eastern European countries were plagued by diversity. You can get into the weeds and argue about which ethno-linguistic-religious groups acted worst, but it’s probably a depressing waste of time because pretty much all of them disgraced themselves. The sheer volume of killing, displacement and devastation between 1939 and 1945 allowed for a resolution of these chronic problems by creating discrete states with overwhelming ethnic supermajorities that stilled ethnic conflict by giving the majority confidence and the minorities no grounds for hope. Even after WW2, there was still a certain amount of unpleasant mopping up to do in order to achieve patchwork homogeneity, but it was within reach.
It is obvious that, even had they wanted to go back, returning the survivors of Central and Eastern European Jewry to their homes or the general environs thereof wasn’t part of the programme, unless the idea was to create a Yiddish-speaking ethnostate somewhere in the mix. There was no infrastructure for that, largely because the Jewish nation builders had mostly gone to live in the Palestinian coastal plain, and it would have been pointless and quixotic to suggest bringing them back. Meanwhile, thanks to the patient and diligent labours of the Yishuv leadership, and their mostly successful marginalization of rightoid doughnutheads, there was a quasi state already in place with health insurance, police, courts, and education system, banks, and most of the rest needed to slot in hundreds of thousands of people into a system, when none other was on offer.
On the other hand, there were Arabs in Palestine, too, and they didn’t want to be part of this political system, so the vast majority of national governments agreed that the least bad option was partition.
Both sides have their complaints about partition, but both sides are frontin’. It was, under the circumstances, about as fair a deal as could be done, while necessitating the displacement of the smallest number of people possible in order to get two solid ethnic majorities in place. The Jews got more land, but the Arabs got more of the good land, and a lot of what the Jews got the Arabs really had no claim to (most of Palestine was not in fact basically empty in 1880, but the coastal plain kind of was). It’s probable that the northern part of the Arab section would have been absorbed into Lebanon, and the western part absorbed into Jordan (or Syria had things shaken out differently), but so what? If we leave aside ethnic and religious chauvinism, the only real objection you can have from the Arab side to this arrangement is some kind of mystical nationalist connection of people to soil, but that’s gay so drop it.
That’s one half of the story, here’s the second. Once the Arab leadership started the civil war in 1947 in rejection of the partition plan, and Jews gradually moved from defence to offence in 1948, a lot of Arabs started getting kicked out of their homes. Many people today struggle to see how the international community (the Muslim world aside) greeted this with an attitude of equanimity, attributing this to some kind of Holocaust ‘you get to do a bad thing too as a consolation prize’ pass the Jews were given, or to some sinister machinations. The reality though is actually quite simple: in the view of most observers in Allied nations, the Palestinian Arabs, viewed as a political entity, had been enthusiastic allies of the Axis powers, they had, therefore, been lucky to get a deal as good as they got, and if they saw fit to reject that then they could go fly a kite in a refugee camp.
Was this completely true? No. Was it true enough? Enough. The Nashashibi clan didn’t support the Axis in WW2, but then they didn’t support going to war over the partition plan either. The faction that was calling the shots in 1947 had indeed been enthusiastic allies of the Nazis, as in really enthusiastic.
You can be moralistic about this if you want and, for the record, I am willing to die on the hill of Nazism being bad, but that is not quite the point here. World War 2 was a titanic struggle for global supremacy fought with the full consciousness of all that that entailed. Choosing which side to throw your lot in with was no joke; it was a gamble with centuries of ramifications on the line. Some countries, like Turkey, were able to slither out of a bum choice early enough with sufficient plausible deniability intact to negotiate a good deal in the new order, but others weren’t, and they had to pay a price. From any adult perspective, the price the Palestinian Arabs paid in 1947 was pretty mild, and they would have been well-advised to take it and move on.
Zionism in 1933 was a failed movement. Indeed, it was a multiply failed movement. It failed in the 1890s as settlement projects fizzled out in disappointment; it failed again in the 1900s as years of Herzlian shuttle diplomacy turned up precisely nothing. It was resurrected by the combination of the Balfour Declaration and, far more importantly, Calvin Coolidge’s immigration quotas, and then it failed again. The White Paper of 1939 was the end of the road for political Zionism. Of course, the Palestinian Arab leadership still rejected it because they were completely sick in the head, but regardless, absent WW2, there is no way a Jewish state would have been established. But WW2 happened, and you have to lump it. A lot of messed up s**t happened in WW2, and a lot of messed up s**t cleaning up the mess after WW2 too. What happened in Palestine wasn’t even somewhere in the middle of that; it was way down near the bottom. The Arabs should have got over it in 1947, and they should really have got over it in 1949, and every year since. For our sake, sure, but mostly for theirs. Compensation for refugees, territorial swaps, return of peaceable refugees: all these only start to be conceivable once they get over this completely insane idea that a piece of territory 200 miles from where your ancestor lived somehow belongs to you eternally because the people who used to live there were related to your ancestors, maybe. Irredentist nationalism is bad, not just for white people, but for brown people too. Ceteris paribus it’s probably worse for brown people. For people who are not even Arabs, though, to still be trying to engineer a do-over is genuinely sick, messed up stuff. If you know someone who does that, tell them to cut it out. Better, tell them they should subscribe to this blog, and pay for it too as a token of penance.
“Jews gradually moved from offence to defence. “ Don’t you mean defense to offense?
Zionism did not predict the Holocaust, nor was it predicated on preventing the Holocaust. It precedes the Holocaust by decades, as you well know, but choose to ignore.
Zionism did successfully provide a refuge for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis before the Holocaust and fleeing other pogroms before then, and all of that before the state even. I exist because my grandmother escaped as a teen from Germany through Switzerland to British Mandate Palestine. Her family that stayed was destroyed. Similarly, Israel successfully prevented satelessness for the IDP Jews stuck in concentration camps by the Allies after the war, and the nearly million MENA Jews scapegoated by Arab societies during their ‘decolonization’, like the barbaric Algerians revoking the citizenship of Algerian Jews.
Zionism was justified before and after WW2 for the same exact reasons, and non-Zionists and antizionists have no answers for the questions Zionism addresses.