…it may not be what you think.
By Vic Rosenthal
The sight of David Duke, Robert Faurisson, Fredrick Toben, and the Neturei Karta lunatics paying homage to the would-be Hitler of the 21st century unsurprisingly makes Jews livid. But what tactical purpose does it serve?
The answer is that it’s not the argument, it’s the assumptions. As Yigal Carmon and Caroline Glick point out, once the Holocaust is understood to be a premise for the legitimacy of the State of Israel, then it doesn’t matter what the outcome of the ‘scholarly inquiry’ is. If the Holocaust didn’t happen, then the creation of Israel was not justified; and if it did, then why should the Palestinians pay the price for the crimes of Europeans?
Of course, the hidden — and entirely false — premise is that Israel’s legitimacy somehow depends on the Holocaust. I deny this; in fact, I would argue that a Jewish state in Palestine is more legitimate than most of the world’s nations, when we consider the historical relationship of the people to the land, how the land was acquired, how it was developed, and how and why it has been defended.
And the price being paid by the Palestinians (which I do not minimize), is the price of Arab rejectionism, not Zionism.
Technorati Tags: Iran, Holocaust denial, Israel, Zionism
I think that you make a major point here one which contradicts the opinion of many people. I would even go beyond it in a way. The ‘Shoah’ took from the Jewish people most of European Jewry. These people were the greatest potential population for building the land of Israel.
At the time the Shoah happened the Yishuv and its institutions in Israel were already formed. There was already infrastructure for a State. Had the Jews of Europe, or some good share of them been able to come the State would conceivably have been a stronger one than the one we have today.