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.
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.
A very big mistake. Guilt didn't create Israel; it simply forced the UN to vote (and only after political gamesmanship) to divide Palestine (already divided) into two states.
And the UN vote didn't create the state of Israel, because the UN lacks the authority or the means to create a state. It simply recognized that Palestine would be divided into two states (a highly controversial and unfair decision).
The Jews' only hope was that UN recognition of Israel would help the newly created state avoid wars. But that didn't happen either. Even recognition of Israel didn't stop the aggression of Arab states, which acted in defiance of the UN and encountered no obstacles from it. In other words, the UN, guilt toward Jews, and the Holocaust weren't the reasons for Israel's creation.
Israel was created by the Jewish people, who for centuries have striven to return to this land, or if not, to live as close as possible, in the hope of returning. Overcoming numerous obstacles and circumstances that made this impossible and even disastrous. Only in the early 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire relaxed the conditions for non-Muslims to remain in this land, acquire land, and operate, when Jews began to employ more advanced agricultural technologies, and when Jews began to develop the economy and infrastructure, did the possibility of properly settling this land, which had been inhabited by temporary forced settlers, constantly wandering in search of water, suitable land for farming, and fleeing epidemics and diseases, arise.
And this was before Theodor Herzl, Lord Balfour, and the Holocaust.
Already in the first half of the 19th century, Jews were building cities (the Arabs had never built a single city on this land). By the end of the 19th century, there was a community with a functioning, independent economy, infrastructure, and self-government. And by 1947, it was already a fully formed, viable state that only needed to be proclaimed. This would have happened immediately after the end of the British Mandate and the British authority, regardless of UN recognition. In the 1940s, there was no "guilt for the Holocaust." Jews were returning from concentration camps and evacuations to an equally anti-Semitic Europe. Their homes were occupied by others, and they were persecuted in Poland and western Ukraine. The Soviet Union hushed up the Holocaust and spread rumors about Jewish flight and reluctance to fight. Europe was ashamed of its own wickedness, but anti-Semitism did not disappear.
Jews attempting to leave anti-Semitic Europe for Palestine were herded into concentration camps, persecuted, and restricted in their freedom of movement.
Out of what sense of guilt did the UN partition Palestine so that small, defenseless Jewish enclaves found themselves surrounded by Arabs who threatened to exterminate them? What did the UN do when Arab states openly declared that they would exterminate the Jews if they declared their own state? What were the British authorities and the UN thinking when they withdrew their troops and left unarmed Jews a minority surrounded by numerous and armed enemies? Guilt? No, they simply washed their hands of the matter, like Pontius Pilate, and waited for the extermination of the Jews to solve the problem.
The feeling of guilt arose much later, and almost immediately the myth "Israel was created because of the Holocaust" arose.
When I was an undergrad at University of Texas 1974 - 1977 I befriended a couple who were grad students (both born and bred in the U.S.). He was getting a Masters in Iranian history. I'll never forget the evening he explained that telling the truth to foreigners was not required for them.
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.
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 at all? 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 me? 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.
Thank you for the kind words, Noah, and for your response, which fills in many gaps. I'd only add this...
You write: Ezra is "shockingly ignorant when it comes to his own people’s history" -- I bet he knows all this history. Nothing I wrote would be news to him. But he, like the rest of us, cherry picks the events from history he wants to prioritize and those he wants to ignore. Liberals (like Ezra) generally believe that the world was born again over the past 400 years, when we emerged from the darkness of medieval superstition into the light of the... Enlightenment. Given that worldview, who cares what "the sages" said 1500 years ago? Who cares what Isaiah prophesied? ... Most of these discussions come down to when you want to begin narrating the history. Tell me when you begin your Story, and I can usually tell you what Story you want to tell.
I would bet he knows much of the history, but, as I learned during his convo with Yoram Havony, Ezra’s mother is not Jewish. His mother is from South America & Christian.
Without knowing more, I can’t be sure, but I think that’s why he’s not invested in Israel or Judaism enough to want to correct the record on the contemporary or traditional disinformation.
Klein is an official member of our progressive aristocracy and thus his first loyalty is to the tribe that actually provides him with meaning and purpose, not to mention a gilded career and exalted social status. Progressives excise all religion and culture from Judaism and replace it with vague humanitarian values aka tikkun olam, mostly because our aristocracy is deeply secular and uncomfortable with religion and Jewish strivers always seem to feel the need to broadcast their loyalty to universalism over particularism (particularism makes you suspicious and is also bad for business). Also, standing up for Israel now requires courage and comes with risks to his social and professional life, so it's much easier to hem and haw and hope the angry mob passes on. He's devoted his whole life to school, tests, studying, striving and achieving, climbing the ladder—why risk it?
He is much like the Jewish owners and editors of the NYT a century ago, who refused to lift a finger to help the Jews being murdered by Hitler, because they were terrified of being accused of "dual loyalty". As Adolph Ochs, the anti-Zionist German-Jewish publisher said, “the Jews are not a nation, they share only a religion." This was obviously a euphemism for: I'm not risking my neck or my status to help some strangers on the other side of the world.
"New York Jewish intellectuals seemed all but oblivious to events unfolding in their own lifetimes that were to have such a massive impact on Jewish life. European antisemitism, culminating in the Nazi crimes, seems barely to have registered on their thinking at all." —Edward Alexander
Times change, but the New York Times doesn't. They are well-off Western liberals first, Jews second.
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.
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.
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 )
I loved this piece the first time I read it and loved it even more on a second reading. Sent it to Mr. Klein at his NYT address and hope he learned some history when he read it. I think all your readers should send the link to him.
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.
The Holocaust was certainly a catalyst. But when Ezra uses language like "born of," he makes it sound like the delivery of baby Israel in 1948 was the sole result of its conception during World War II. >> As I wrote to someone else: Liberals (like Ezra) generally believe that the world was born again over the past 400 years, when we emerged from the darkness of medieval superstition into the light of the... Enlightenment. Given that worldview, who cares what "the sages" said 1500 years ago? Who cares what Isaiah prophesied? ... Most of these discussions come down to when you want to begin narrating the history. Tell me when you begin your Story, and I can usually tell you what Story you want to tell. ... Ezra wants to begin telling the Story just a few decades before he was born. But the world -- and the Jews -- have been here a lot longer.
Agree. My comment was not about all the history of the Jews but how modern Israel was created and, yes, I know that there is a looong history before 1948. What General Eisenhower was doing with his order to record the sights in the concentration and death camps was to make sure the world didn't forget this recent horrendous pogrom.
I'd forgotten about Eisenhower's order. Thanks for the reminder. ... What's bracing is that despite the footage and all the evidence, the world is forgetting anyway, and not just the Holocaust. We seem to be losing our ability to remember anything. ... Years ago, I read an essay arguing that Alzheimer's Disease is a quintessentially modern affliction. If the world begins in, say, 1945, then why remember 1917 or 1776 or 30 CE? The problem becomes even more pronounced when there's a device in your pocket that can "remember" everything. So why should we waste our time thinking about it? Alzheimer's isn't a disease, I'm afraid; it's the future.
Without a shadow of a doubt Jews in Israel are in their native homeland. Science/Archeology & History clearly dispute the anti Zionists claim that Jewish connections to Israel never existed or are irrelevant.
The 21st century Journalists are Goebbels on steroids. Israelites were given and accepted the Torah when a nation of people was taken out of bandage in Egypt. The eternal meaning of this is that from this point on all humanity is bound by those laws. The law of Moses went on to become the bedrock of western ethics, legal codes, political theories, western civilization is built on this.
Not many know about the Blackstone Memorial, a petition presented to President Harrison in 1891. Signed by over 400 Christian Americans, including the Washington Post and New York Times to return the Jewish people to their historic homeland. 10 years before Theodor Herzl and the modern Zionist movement came to exist.
In his 2011 book, Perspectives of Psychological Operations in Contemporary Conflicts, Dr. Ron Schleifer, an Israeli researcher into psychological warfare, concluded that Jews always took an apologetic, defensive approach to their enemies. Jews want above all to convince people not to hate them. Why Israel has never called out the Islamic world or the Palestinians for their barbaric attitudes and behavior towards the Jews. The preoccupation has been and is with the need to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
I think he knows about that relationship. He just doesn't want to focus on it for too long because it's potentially destabilizing. He has a worldview, and he's sticking to it.
Alan, your sharp rebuttal to Ezra Klein's oversimplification is a must-read—Israel's roots run millennia deep, from Herzl's 1896 vision and the 1917 Balfour Declaration to ancient biblical covenants, not just post-Holocaust pity that some exploit to delegitimize Jewish claims today. This myth fuels the very narratives pushing premature statehood rewards for Oct. 7. My post breaks it down: “Recognizing Palestinian statehood now, with hostages still trapped, fuels terror and blocks justice.” Check it: https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/why-recognizing-palestinian-statehood . How do we counter these ahistorical takes in the public square? If you liked this, hit subscribe!
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!!
F*ckin' Brits. Sometimes . . .
A very big mistake. Guilt didn't create Israel; it simply forced the UN to vote (and only after political gamesmanship) to divide Palestine (already divided) into two states.
And the UN vote didn't create the state of Israel, because the UN lacks the authority or the means to create a state. It simply recognized that Palestine would be divided into two states (a highly controversial and unfair decision).
The Jews' only hope was that UN recognition of Israel would help the newly created state avoid wars. But that didn't happen either. Even recognition of Israel didn't stop the aggression of Arab states, which acted in defiance of the UN and encountered no obstacles from it. In other words, the UN, guilt toward Jews, and the Holocaust weren't the reasons for Israel's creation.
Israel was created by the Jewish people, who for centuries have striven to return to this land, or if not, to live as close as possible, in the hope of returning. Overcoming numerous obstacles and circumstances that made this impossible and even disastrous. Only in the early 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire relaxed the conditions for non-Muslims to remain in this land, acquire land, and operate, when Jews began to employ more advanced agricultural technologies, and when Jews began to develop the economy and infrastructure, did the possibility of properly settling this land, which had been inhabited by temporary forced settlers, constantly wandering in search of water, suitable land for farming, and fleeing epidemics and diseases, arise.
And this was before Theodor Herzl, Lord Balfour, and the Holocaust.
Already in the first half of the 19th century, Jews were building cities (the Arabs had never built a single city on this land). By the end of the 19th century, there was a community with a functioning, independent economy, infrastructure, and self-government. And by 1947, it was already a fully formed, viable state that only needed to be proclaimed. This would have happened immediately after the end of the British Mandate and the British authority, regardless of UN recognition. In the 1940s, there was no "guilt for the Holocaust." Jews were returning from concentration camps and evacuations to an equally anti-Semitic Europe. Their homes were occupied by others, and they were persecuted in Poland and western Ukraine. The Soviet Union hushed up the Holocaust and spread rumors about Jewish flight and reluctance to fight. Europe was ashamed of its own wickedness, but anti-Semitism did not disappear.
Jews attempting to leave anti-Semitic Europe for Palestine were herded into concentration camps, persecuted, and restricted in their freedom of movement.
Out of what sense of guilt did the UN partition Palestine so that small, defenseless Jewish enclaves found themselves surrounded by Arabs who threatened to exterminate them? What did the UN do when Arab states openly declared that they would exterminate the Jews if they declared their own state? What were the British authorities and the UN thinking when they withdrew their troops and left unarmed Jews a minority surrounded by numerous and armed enemies? Guilt? No, they simply washed their hands of the matter, like Pontius Pilate, and waited for the extermination of the Jews to solve the problem.
The feeling of guilt arose much later, and almost immediately the myth "Israel was created because of the Holocaust" arose.
The original League of Nations vote on a homeland for the Jews was in 1922
When I was an undergrad at University of Texas 1974 - 1977 I befriended a couple who were grad students (both born and bred in the U.S.). He was getting a Masters in Iranian history. I'll never forget the evening he explained that telling the truth to foreigners was not required for them.
Your attempt to explain events needs rewriting.
You are correct about Obama. Just awful.
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.
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 at all? 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 me? 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.
Thank you for the kind words, Noah, and for your response, which fills in many gaps. I'd only add this...
You write: Ezra is "shockingly ignorant when it comes to his own people’s history" -- I bet he knows all this history. Nothing I wrote would be news to him. But he, like the rest of us, cherry picks the events from history he wants to prioritize and those he wants to ignore. Liberals (like Ezra) generally believe that the world was born again over the past 400 years, when we emerged from the darkness of medieval superstition into the light of the... Enlightenment. Given that worldview, who cares what "the sages" said 1500 years ago? Who cares what Isaiah prophesied? ... Most of these discussions come down to when you want to begin narrating the history. Tell me when you begin your Story, and I can usually tell you what Story you want to tell.
I would bet he knows much of the history, but, as I learned during his convo with Yoram Havony, Ezra’s mother is not Jewish. His mother is from South America & Christian.
Without knowing more, I can’t be sure, but I think that’s why he’s not invested in Israel or Judaism enough to want to correct the record on the contemporary or traditional disinformation.
Klein is an official member of our progressive aristocracy and thus his first loyalty is to the tribe that actually provides him with meaning and purpose, not to mention a gilded career and exalted social status. Progressives excise all religion and culture from Judaism and replace it with vague humanitarian values aka tikkun olam, mostly because our aristocracy is deeply secular and uncomfortable with religion and Jewish strivers always seem to feel the need to broadcast their loyalty to universalism over particularism (particularism makes you suspicious and is also bad for business). Also, standing up for Israel now requires courage and comes with risks to his social and professional life, so it's much easier to hem and haw and hope the angry mob passes on. He's devoted his whole life to school, tests, studying, striving and achieving, climbing the ladder—why risk it?
He is much like the Jewish owners and editors of the NYT a century ago, who refused to lift a finger to help the Jews being murdered by Hitler, because they were terrified of being accused of "dual loyalty". As Adolph Ochs, the anti-Zionist German-Jewish publisher said, “the Jews are not a nation, they share only a religion." This was obviously a euphemism for: I'm not risking my neck or my status to help some strangers on the other side of the world.
"New York Jewish intellectuals seemed all but oblivious to events unfolding in their own lifetimes that were to have such a massive impact on Jewish life. European antisemitism, culminating in the Nazi crimes, seems barely to have registered on their thinking at all." —Edward Alexander
Times change, but the New York Times doesn't. They are well-off Western liberals first, Jews second.
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.
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.
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 )
Thank you for your extremely generous review, Beatrice! :-)
I loved this piece the first time I read it and loved it even more on a second reading. Sent it to Mr. Klein at his NYT address and hope he learned some history when he read it. I think all your readers should send the link to him.
mailto:ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com
Okay, EE. I think you've now become my literary agent... and I use the word "literary" very loosely. I await your monthly invoice. :-)
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.
The Holocaust was certainly a catalyst. But when Ezra uses language like "born of," he makes it sound like the delivery of baby Israel in 1948 was the sole result of its conception during World War II. >> As I wrote to someone else: Liberals (like Ezra) generally believe that the world was born again over the past 400 years, when we emerged from the darkness of medieval superstition into the light of the... Enlightenment. Given that worldview, who cares what "the sages" said 1500 years ago? Who cares what Isaiah prophesied? ... Most of these discussions come down to when you want to begin narrating the history. Tell me when you begin your Story, and I can usually tell you what Story you want to tell. ... Ezra wants to begin telling the Story just a few decades before he was born. But the world -- and the Jews -- have been here a lot longer.
Agree. My comment was not about all the history of the Jews but how modern Israel was created and, yes, I know that there is a looong history before 1948. What General Eisenhower was doing with his order to record the sights in the concentration and death camps was to make sure the world didn't forget this recent horrendous pogrom.
I'd forgotten about Eisenhower's order. Thanks for the reminder. ... What's bracing is that despite the footage and all the evidence, the world is forgetting anyway, and not just the Holocaust. We seem to be losing our ability to remember anything. ... Years ago, I read an essay arguing that Alzheimer's Disease is a quintessentially modern affliction. If the world begins in, say, 1945, then why remember 1917 or 1776 or 30 CE? The problem becomes even more pronounced when there's a device in your pocket that can "remember" everything. So why should we waste our time thinking about it? Alzheimer's isn't a disease, I'm afraid; it's the future.
Without a shadow of a doubt Jews in Israel are in their native homeland. Science/Archeology & History clearly dispute the anti Zionists claim that Jewish connections to Israel never existed or are irrelevant.
The 21st century Journalists are Goebbels on steroids. Israelites were given and accepted the Torah when a nation of people was taken out of bandage in Egypt. The eternal meaning of this is that from this point on all humanity is bound by those laws. The law of Moses went on to become the bedrock of western ethics, legal codes, political theories, western civilization is built on this.
Not many know about the Blackstone Memorial, a petition presented to President Harrison in 1891. Signed by over 400 Christian Americans, including the Washington Post and New York Times to return the Jewish people to their historic homeland. 10 years before Theodor Herzl and the modern Zionist movement came to exist.
In his 2011 book, Perspectives of Psychological Operations in Contemporary Conflicts, Dr. Ron Schleifer, an Israeli researcher into psychological warfare, concluded that Jews always took an apologetic, defensive approach to their enemies. Jews want above all to convince people not to hate them. Why Israel has never called out the Islamic world or the Palestinians for their barbaric attitudes and behavior towards the Jews. The preoccupation has been and is with the need to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
Fantastic post!
Excellent response to Klein and his ilk... and a wonderful historical journey for the rest of us...
Thank you and may it be a better year than last and may Am Yisrael continue to endure until the rest of the world wakes up to the truth...
Thanks, Debra. Shana tovah.
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
I think he knows about that relationship. He just doesn't want to focus on it for too long because it's potentially destabilizing. He has a worldview, and he's sticking to it.
Outstanding article. Thank you for the history lesson.
Alan, your sharp rebuttal to Ezra Klein's oversimplification is a must-read—Israel's roots run millennia deep, from Herzl's 1896 vision and the 1917 Balfour Declaration to ancient biblical covenants, not just post-Holocaust pity that some exploit to delegitimize Jewish claims today. This myth fuels the very narratives pushing premature statehood rewards for Oct. 7. My post breaks it down: “Recognizing Palestinian statehood now, with hostages still trapped, fuels terror and blocks justice.” Check it: https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/why-recognizing-palestinian-statehood . How do we counter these ahistorical takes in the public square? If you liked this, hit subscribe!
Some Jews require re-education about their own history. His parents neglected him. What a pity.