From victimhood to statehood: The Holocaust's legacy and Israel's power - opinion

Last Monday, the Jewish community observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. This coming Tuesday, we mark Independence Day. Memories of the two seminal events of modern Jewish history surround Jews this season.

Historians may long debate a causal relationship between the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews and the founding of the state that might have saved them. Thirty years before the 1947 UN Partition Plan, the Balfour Declaration had already called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Nor does the State of Israel require the Holocaust as a raison d’etre; Israel is the Jewish people’s ancestral land.

Nonetheless, the Holocaust and the birth of the modern State of Israel remain linked in Jewish consciousness. In three short years, world Jewry passed from the valley of the shadow of the death of more than one-third of our people into the bright light of the restoration of a Jewish home.

As Abba Eban wrote in 1952: “Jewish history in our lifetime will forever be dominated by this most fantastic transition from the depths of paralyzing despair to unexpected pinnacles of sovereignty, pride, and achievement.”

Sadly, events of the last seven decades – and the last seven months – have brought us back down to earth. What was true at Israel’s founding still is: antisemitism remains an existential threat to the Jewish people, necessitating a Jewish state – not just a haven where Jews can be Jews without fear, but a nation with enough political, diplomatic, and military power to protect Jews wherever we live. 

According to the FBI, investigations into antisemitic hate crimes have more than tripled since October 7. Europe may be accustomed to violent antisemitism from the Left. But in America, until recently, only the far Right made us fear for our physical safety, while the Left operated through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, and other insidious channels.

Theirs was the antisemitism of university academics. But today, some of their acolytes are teaching the next generation, and the youngest are protesting on campus quads targeting their Jewish peers, their rhetoric often weaponizing the Holocaust against the Jewish community by characterizing Jews and supporters of Israel as “Nazis” and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as a “holocaust.” 

CONSIDER THE misappropriation of the term “genocide,” coined by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in the shadow of the Final Solution. According to Article II of the Genocide Convention, genocide involves “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” 

However one may feel about Israel’s war in Gaza – I believe the devastation there represents not just Hamas’s wanton disregard for human life, but also Israel’s own strategic and moral failures – Israel’s “intent” was never to destroy the Palestinian people, but rather to eradicate Hamas, a terrorist regime with genocide in its charter. 

The sharp spike of Holocaust inversion and antisemitism 

Such Holocaust inversion is antisemitism at its most grotesque. One taunt heard at Columbia University rang out with particular animus: “Go back to Poland.” Its message was clear: Jews should return to the ghettos, to the death camps, to being victims again.

Jews and Israel are welcome on the world stage only when vulnerable and weak. The moment Israel exercises its power to defend itself, no more or less imperfectly than any other country, it is demonized with comparisons to the most heinous regime in modern history. 

And the demonization is not irrational; it is intentional. As The Times of Israel’s David Horovitz explains, the aim is “to render Israel indefensible – in both senses of the word”: morally indefensible and unworthy of support; and physically indefensible by pressuring American institutions to restrict the financial investment and military aid Israel requires to defend itself against Hamas, Hezbollah, and their patron Iran.

Israel should get no free pass for its failures. But the calls for an “intifada revolution,” the glorification of Hamas, claims that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” – these are not protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or its policies, or even against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. They are protests against Israel’s existence. 

And protests against Israel’s existence are protests against Jewish existence. Half of world Jewry today lives in Israel. Had Israel become a state just ten years earlier, a third of world Jewry then might have been saved from annihilation. 

The State of Israel was not born because of the Holocaust, but its birth restored hope to the Jewish people then, and it guarantees us a lifeline now – power over our survival and our destiny. The world has a right to expect that power will be used morally. But the world should expect it to be used.

The writer holds the Peter and Mary Kalikow Senior Rabbinic Chair at Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York.