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Zionism Denial

(Daily Beast) Einat Wilf - Israel exists not because of the Holocaust but because the Jews willed it into existence. The modern state of Israel exists because the Jews who created it believed themselves to be descendants of the Israelites and Judeans who were sovereign there in ancient times and paid a high price for preserving their separate existence as a people. Israel exists because for centuries and millennia Jews kept yearning for Israel. It exists thanks to visionary Jewish thinkers and leaders who realized that changing times created an opportunity to turn the messianic hope to return to Israel into a political program, and who were able to mobilize sympathy and support at critical junctures. Were it not for Arab resistance and Britain's betrayal and submission to Arab pressures, the Holocaust as such might not have taken place. Jews would have been able to escape Europe to their ancient homeland in what was already a widely supported embryonic state. They would have had a destination country at a time when Hitler was still willing to let the Jewish people go. Israel came into being after World War II not thanks to the Holocaust, but thanks to Britain's imperial dissolution. Just as India and Pakistan required no Holocaust to attain their independence and come into being, so too Israel. The Jewish people would have achieved their state sooner or later as part of the wave of liberation of peoples around the world. To portray Israel as the outcome of the Holocaust is to engage in Zionism Denial, robbing the Jews of their historical connection to the Land of Israel. It erases all that was achieved by the Zionists before World War II. The writer, a senior fellow with the Jewish People Policy Institute, is a former Knesset member.
2017-04-24 00:00:00
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