Debunking the Real “Big Lie”

Debunking the Real “Big Lie”

By Gil Troy
Canadian Jewish News
January 4, 2007

At Tehran’s recent Holocaust deception convention, a rogue’s gallery of falsifiers peddled lies both big and small. The con men who deny the existence of one of recent history’s most documented events received the most attention. Other participants included a former Ku Klux Klan leader whose many plastic surgeries have made him the Michael Jackson of the racist world, and a Canadian academic who, when chided, claimed he had no idea Holocaust deniers would be attending the Holocaust denial conference. Hmmm. Last time I checked, professors were in the business of fighting ignorance, not pleading and spreading it.

In this den of deceit, the most dangerous lie was not that the Holocaust did not happen. The Nazi campaign of mass murder against Jews is so well-documented that anyone who embraces this falsehood implicitly resigns from the community of civilized truth-seekers. Far more insidious is the Big Lie that motivates Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the fiction that Israel was only created out of European Holocaust guilt. This claim has become a central tenet among those who seek to delegimitize Israel and Zionism, the movement of Jewish nationalism. It’s harder to disprove, because it’s a question of interpretation, not fact. Assessing the impact of the Nazi horror on Israel’s founding is more complex than the simple question of did the Nazis murder the Jews – and it’s the kind of issue that historians usually enjoy debating.

Moreover, let’s be honest. If you open up most world history books and turn to the 1940s, the two Jewish-related events mentioned are Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry, which ended in 1945, and Israel’s founding in 1948. Even people without a political agenda link the two. Many of us have long criticized various Zionist and Israeli narratives that emphasize “Meshoah le’tkuma,” “from Holocaust to the founding,” for creating a too-simplistic linkage and a false happy ending to the Holocaust horror.

The intermediary event linking the Holocaust to Israel’s establishment is the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan, which further subdivided the part of Palestine left for a Jewish state by the British partition in the 1920s. Clearly, the Nazi crime against the Jews haunted the world’s representatives as they debated the plan. However, the 1947 resolution did not mention the Holocaust. The UN resolution instead referred to “the present situation in Palestine” as “one which is likely to impair the general welfare and friendly relations among nations.”

The UN was responding to the growing clash between Jews and Arabs. To begin the story of that tension with the Holocaust is similar to starting the story of American and British relations with the Boston Tea Party and ignoring hundreds of preceding years of British settlement in North America.

The Holocaust did not give birth to Zionism or the State of Israel. The Zionist idea – of the Jewish people as a nation, not just a religion, and of Eretz Yisrael being that Jewish people’s homeland – is as old as Judaism itself. You can’t tell the story of the Jewish people without telling the story of the Land of Israel. Even when Jews were exiled, the idea of exile meant that they defined themselves in relation to the land. And even during the long years of exile, some Jewish settlement remained in Israel.

The modern story of Zionism begins in the 1800s. New waves of settlement reinvigorated Jewish life in Israel. Prior to the 1940s, Jews developed an ideology, an infrastructure, and a life in Israel. Prior to the 1940s, various international declarations, most notably the Balfour Declaration, acknowledged the Jewish people’s rights to establish a modern state in the Jews’ traditional homeland. These historical factors predated the Holocaust. To deny them is as absurd as denying the Holocaust itself.

It would have been immoral to bring Holocaust refugees to Israel if an incipient Jewish state had not already been in the making there. It would have been impossible to integrate the survivors if an infrastructure did not already exist. This history – our history – is under assault. If we don’t learn it, write about it, and proclaim its truth loudly, then shame on us.

The liars are speaking loudly and garnering lots of media attention. We must mobilize to stand up for ourselves, our rights and our ancestors.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.