No, Daniel Barenboim, the Holocaust Didn’t Create Israel

The Argentine-Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim—who currently resides in Germany and has a record of anti-Israel pronouncements—recently contributed an op-ed to Haaretz repeating the oft-heard assertion that guilt over the Holocaust led “the world” to permit the creation of the Jewish state. In an open letter to Barenboim, Yehuda Bauer, an eminent historian of the Shoah, sets him straight. (Free registration may be required.)

In the decades before 1948, the Zionist movement laid the ground for a Jewish political entity in the land of Israel. It sought to settle large numbers of Jews there—mainly from Eastern Europe, where they faced persecution and were barred from immigrating elsewhere.

A large number of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews sought to go to Palestine. The Holocaust destroyed the potential pool of immigrants on which Zionism was based and, it seemed, the possibility of establishing that Jewish political entity. It is the fact of that entity’s establishment, despite the odds, that must be explained. . . .

You also presumably rely on the claim that Israel was established because of the “world’s” guilt over the Holocaust. The belief that world leaders felt remorse over what happened [during the war] is a Jewish myth. The archives from 1945-48 are open. Britain opposed a Jewish state. So did the U.S. State Department, which in March 1948, after the partition plan was approved in November 1947, proposed the establishment of an Anglo-American protectorate that would continue the [pre-war British policy of restricting immigration]. Its main provision was to hand the country, after ten years, to the Arab population. The Holocaust and the Jews’ fate in the war were irrelevant.

Read more at Haaretz

More about: History & Ideas, Holocaust, Israel & Zionism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society