Journalists should be honest: Israel’s roots lie in ancient Jewish history and the Zionist movement long before the Holocaust, which only underscored the urgency of a sovereign homeland.
I wish Ezra Klein was a zionist, but he seems to have replaced any connection to Judaism with the new leftist over intellectualized limousine liberal cult that has the NYTs as it's sacred text.
Klein is no longer a Zionist if he ever was. He is parroting the Arab narrative that Israel was born of European Holocaust guilt which is how they negate the Jewish connection to the land. It is a gross lie and you know who the first American Democrat I heard say it publicly was? Barak Obama. That is when I knew he was going to be a serious enemy of Israel and the Jewish people. Obama's leftist trumpeting of the Palestinian's lie is now Democratic dogma.
The Shoah was the causal event that allowed otherwise indifferent nations to vote in favor of the creation of the partition of The Mandate of Palestine. The vote took place in the UN in November of 1947. The vote was 33 to 13. Oddly, The USSR and the US voted for it with the UK abstaining.
Israel then declared its Independence in 1948.
The Holocaust was so horrible that many nations could not vote against the partition. Only Muslim nations, Cuba and Greece did.
The Muslim world's take on this was that there was little or no Jewish presence in modern day Israel, but rather surviving Jews invaded Muslim lands to create a state of Israel after WWII.
Of course they are lying, but given Kitman and Taqqiya, they are experienced liars or as Muslims like to like to say, "Hiding the truth."
Of course, Jews have been in Israel for millennia. Anything else is a lie.
It is also false to say Jews immigrated after WWII. In fact the modern Zionist movement began in 1904 and Jews were already returning before that in the late 19th century. It should be noted that Great Britain shamefully abstained from the vote even though the entire West followed the lead of the United States. Stalin voted for bit because he did not yet fully understand how the Cold War would work. He thought Britain still mattered and a vote for partition would stick it to them. He also thought the Labor Zionists being socialists would alight with the Soviet Union. He was dead wrong. From day one Ben Gurion aligned with the West.
Totally correct, The Muslims lied about post WWII immigration which was being prevented by the Brits going all the way back to the 1920's and later with their quotas laid out in their 1938 White Paper.
If you read "A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel" by Ron Radosh there is segment in there where the Brits in 1945 -1947 under their new Labour government told the surviving Jews in the death camps and concentration camps essentially, "You Jews should just go back to your countries of origin. Palestine is not for you."
They meant go back to Austria, Germany and so forth. Now that is so evil.
At the same time, I believe it remains important to emphasize in “Holocaust Education” that one of the chief lessons of the Holocaust is the need for a sovereign, Jewish-majority democratic State. The two lessons are not incompatible.
Thank you so much for your brilliant/informative essay. It's really frustrating that a Jewish journalist didn't bother to do some research about the rebirth of our beloved Israel (but doesn't surprise me, since he is working with .New York Times )
Klein is so good on domestic policy, Abundance is phenomenal. He just has this massive blind spot on foreign policy. Abundance honestly reminds me a lot of what made Israel so successful.
He did an episode talking about the divides in the Jewish community and how young Jews don't understand their parents, and you could tell he felt smug about showing both sides but he just had such a blind spot and even as much as he tried it was clearly a biased framing. Its a shame, but doesn't change his other accomplishments. I'd say we have bigger fish to fry though
Great article. So true. Such a reductionist sin on Klein’s part, to equate a chronology with a history, is now a cliche of uninformed people.
Chronologically, the birth of the State of Israel followed the Holocaust. And that’s that. But what triggered the urgency of resolving Palestine’s status as the British, exhausted from WWII, returned the Mandate to the United Nations and announced their departure, was the racist, Islamist, murderous hostility of Arabs, attacking Jews since the beginning of the century, and allied with Hitler in his genocidal plans. The decision to partition the land in 1947, made by the body who owned the land at that point, particularly the winners , was made because of the Arabs’ constant aggression and terror. Moreover, once Israel accepted their allocated portion, the Arabs attacked to eliminate the state and genocide the Jews. None of this had a direct connection to the Holocaust.
A small comment: Herzl’s book “ Der Judenstaat” is translated as “ the State of the Jews”, not “ the Jewish State”, though even Ben-Gurion used “ a Jewish State” in the Declaration of Independence.
The difference is important: Herzl’s aim was political, not religious. He was extremely secular and knew little of Judaism. His concern was, literally, a state of the Jews, where Jews could freely decide how Jewish they wanted to be. Fact is that Israel today is vastly secular, though Jewishness is expressed at too many levels to count, not least in the revival of the Hebrew language. It is today both a State of the Jews and a Jewish State.
Understand the thrust of this historical article but the modern state of Israel was made possible by Western guilt over the Holocaust because the results of the "Final Solution" were discovered by the Allies and could not be denied or finagled. Plus, voluminous records were kept by the Nazis and the tattoos were a way to keep track. Remember, many of the anti-semites still claim it never happened. As I've said before on this forum, General Eisenhower had film and photos taken because he said there would come a day when people would say the Holocaust/Shoah was, in essence, a fiction.
Once I started reading it, I remembered this excellent and important article by Alan. His Substack is criminally underrated! Ezra Klein is a smart guy who sometimes has some insightful things to say, but he is shockingly ignorant when it comes to his own people’s history. He also knows diddly squat about Israel. Israel wasn’t born out of Holocaust guilt on the part of the West. It was born in the days of the Old Testament. The Jewish people have maintained a constant presence in the holy land for 3,000 years. Before the modern state of Israel, there were the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea. Is Ezra not aware of who Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Joseph with his coat of many colors, Moses, Joshua, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, St. Paul, King Solomon, King David, and Jesus of Nazareth were? Is Ezra Klein familiar with the names Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Golda Meir were? Does the Balfour Declaration or the San Remo Conference of 1920 mean anything to him? No, Israel was most certainly NOT born of the Holocaust.
Rather, the Holocaust happened because Israel didn’t exist. This is what Ezra fails to understand. The Holocaust didn’t give the Jewish people Israel. It belonged to them for three thousand years. They fought the British and the Arabs to reclaim it. What Ezra has a hard time grasping is that the Jews aren’t the colonizers in the Middle East. The Arabs are in fact the colonizers. Don’t believe head over to the Guerre and Shalom Substack page and read my good friend Daniel Serret-Clark’s book Pax Arabica. The Arabs are the ones who conquered and Arabized the indigenous peoples of the Middle East. They resent that the Jews were able to defeat them and liberate the holy land from Arab imperial control. By the way, Ezra, Arab antisemitism existed LONG before Zionism came around. The Koran contains numerous passages that say derogatory things about the Jewish people. Jews were dhimmis or second-class citizens, in the Arab and Islamic World.
The Arabs also conquered, murdered, enslaved, and genocided Sub-Saharan Africans, Kurds, Bedouins, Assyrians, Mandeans, Persians, Samaritans, Talysh, and Yazidis. The Arab colonial project is clear for anyone to see. Egyptians for example, are Arabized Africans, they are NOT Arabs. Before Arab Muslims came and conquered Egypt, the Egyptian people spoke the language, worshipped the Gods and practiced the culture of Ancient Egypt. Iranians were Zoroastrians NOT Muslims before the Arabs came and conquered them. Ezra clearly never bothered to read up on any of this stuff! He needs an education on Middle Eastern history! He would do well to invite Daniel Gordis, Einat Wilf, Michael Oren, Ronen Bergman, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, or Adi Schwartz on his podcast.
I wish Ezra Klein was a zionist, but he seems to have replaced any connection to Judaism with the new leftist over intellectualized limousine liberal cult that has the NYTs as it's sacred text.
Klein is no longer a Zionist if he ever was. He is parroting the Arab narrative that Israel was born of European Holocaust guilt which is how they negate the Jewish connection to the land. It is a gross lie and you know who the first American Democrat I heard say it publicly was? Barak Obama. That is when I knew he was going to be a serious enemy of Israel and the Jewish people. Obama's leftist trumpeting of the Palestinian's lie is now Democratic dogma.
The Shoah was the causal event that allowed otherwise indifferent nations to vote in favor of the creation of the partition of The Mandate of Palestine. The vote took place in the UN in November of 1947. The vote was 33 to 13. Oddly, The USSR and the US voted for it with the UK abstaining.
Israel then declared its Independence in 1948.
The Holocaust was so horrible that many nations could not vote against the partition. Only Muslim nations, Cuba and Greece did.
The Muslim world's take on this was that there was little or no Jewish presence in modern day Israel, but rather surviving Jews invaded Muslim lands to create a state of Israel after WWII.
Of course they are lying, but given Kitman and Taqqiya, they are experienced liars or as Muslims like to like to say, "Hiding the truth."
Of course, Jews have been in Israel for millennia. Anything else is a lie.
It is also false to say Jews immigrated after WWII. In fact the modern Zionist movement began in 1904 and Jews were already returning before that in the late 19th century. It should be noted that Great Britain shamefully abstained from the vote even though the entire West followed the lead of the United States. Stalin voted for bit because he did not yet fully understand how the Cold War would work. He thought Britain still mattered and a vote for partition would stick it to them. He also thought the Labor Zionists being socialists would alight with the Soviet Union. He was dead wrong. From day one Ben Gurion aligned with the West.
Totally correct, The Muslims lied about post WWII immigration which was being prevented by the Brits going all the way back to the 1920's and later with their quotas laid out in their 1938 White Paper.
If you read "A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel" by Ron Radosh there is segment in there where the Brits in 1945 -1947 under their new Labour government told the surviving Jews in the death camps and concentration camps essentially, "You Jews should just go back to your countries of origin. Palestine is not for you."
They meant go back to Austria, Germany and so forth. Now that is so evil.
I believe I read it. And yes they were evil. Churchill on the other hand was a Zionist and Judeophile.
Yup, totally correct!!
Bravo!
At the same time, I believe it remains important to emphasize in “Holocaust Education” that one of the chief lessons of the Holocaust is the need for a sovereign, Jewish-majority democratic State. The two lessons are not incompatible.
www.sixmillioncrucifixions.com
major cause for modern Israel , recall Dreyfus
Thank you so much for your brilliant/informative essay. It's really frustrating that a Jewish journalist didn't bother to do some research about the rebirth of our beloved Israel (but doesn't surprise me, since he is working with .New York Times )
Klein follows and advocates the woke narrative He probably knows less about the relationship of the
Jewish People to the Land
of Israel than our grandchildren
Klein is so good on domestic policy, Abundance is phenomenal. He just has this massive blind spot on foreign policy. Abundance honestly reminds me a lot of what made Israel so successful.
He did an episode talking about the divides in the Jewish community and how young Jews don't understand their parents, and you could tell he felt smug about showing both sides but he just had such a blind spot and even as much as he tried it was clearly a biased framing. Its a shame, but doesn't change his other accomplishments. I'd say we have bigger fish to fry though
Great article. So true. Such a reductionist sin on Klein’s part, to equate a chronology with a history, is now a cliche of uninformed people.
Chronologically, the birth of the State of Israel followed the Holocaust. And that’s that. But what triggered the urgency of resolving Palestine’s status as the British, exhausted from WWII, returned the Mandate to the United Nations and announced their departure, was the racist, Islamist, murderous hostility of Arabs, attacking Jews since the beginning of the century, and allied with Hitler in his genocidal plans. The decision to partition the land in 1947, made by the body who owned the land at that point, particularly the winners , was made because of the Arabs’ constant aggression and terror. Moreover, once Israel accepted their allocated portion, the Arabs attacked to eliminate the state and genocide the Jews. None of this had a direct connection to the Holocaust.
A small comment: Herzl’s book “ Der Judenstaat” is translated as “ the State of the Jews”, not “ the Jewish State”, though even Ben-Gurion used “ a Jewish State” in the Declaration of Independence.
The difference is important: Herzl’s aim was political, not religious. He was extremely secular and knew little of Judaism. His concern was, literally, a state of the Jews, where Jews could freely decide how Jewish they wanted to be. Fact is that Israel today is vastly secular, though Jewishness is expressed at too many levels to count, not least in the revival of the Hebrew language. It is today both a State of the Jews and a Jewish State.
Understand the thrust of this historical article but the modern state of Israel was made possible by Western guilt over the Holocaust because the results of the "Final Solution" were discovered by the Allies and could not be denied or finagled. Plus, voluminous records were kept by the Nazis and the tattoos were a way to keep track. Remember, many of the anti-semites still claim it never happened. As I've said before on this forum, General Eisenhower had film and photos taken because he said there would come a day when people would say the Holocaust/Shoah was, in essence, a fiction.
Once I started reading it, I remembered this excellent and important article by Alan. His Substack is criminally underrated! Ezra Klein is a smart guy who sometimes has some insightful things to say, but he is shockingly ignorant when it comes to his own people’s history. He also knows diddly squat about Israel. Israel wasn’t born out of Holocaust guilt on the part of the West. It was born in the days of the Old Testament. The Jewish people have maintained a constant presence in the holy land for 3,000 years. Before the modern state of Israel, there were the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea. Is Ezra not aware of who Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Joseph with his coat of many colors, Moses, Joshua, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, St. Paul, King Solomon, King David, and Jesus of Nazareth were? Is Ezra Klein familiar with the names Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Golda Meir were? Does the Balfour Declaration or the San Remo Conference of 1920 mean anything to him? No, Israel was most certainly NOT born of the Holocaust.
Rather, the Holocaust happened because Israel didn’t exist. This is what Ezra fails to understand. The Holocaust didn’t give the Jewish people Israel. It belonged to them for three thousand years. They fought the British and the Arabs to reclaim it. What Ezra has a hard time grasping is that the Jews aren’t the colonizers in the Middle East. The Arabs are in fact the colonizers. Don’t believe head over to the Guerre and Shalom Substack page and read my good friend Daniel Serret-Clark’s book Pax Arabica. The Arabs are the ones who conquered and Arabized the indigenous peoples of the Middle East. They resent that the Jews were able to defeat them and liberate the holy land from Arab imperial control. By the way, Ezra, Arab antisemitism existed LONG before Zionism came around. The Koran contains numerous passages that say derogatory things about the Jewish people. Jews were dhimmis or second-class citizens, in the Arab and Islamic World.
The Arabs also conquered, murdered, enslaved, and genocided Sub-Saharan Africans, Kurds, Bedouins, Assyrians, Mandeans, Persians, Samaritans, Talysh, and Yazidis. The Arab colonial project is clear for anyone to see. Egyptians for example, are Arabized Africans, they are NOT Arabs. Before Arab Muslims came and conquered Egypt, the Egyptian people spoke the language, worshipped the Gods and practiced the culture of Ancient Egypt. Iranians were Zoroastrians NOT Muslims before the Arabs came and conquered them. Ezra clearly never bothered to read up on any of this stuff! He needs an education on Middle Eastern history! He would do well to invite Daniel Gordis, Einat Wilf, Michael Oren, Ronen Bergman, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, or Adi Schwartz on his podcast.
Another catalyst: www.thereligionofpeace.com
Schmucks!