Even more common than the insidious suggestion that Jews make too much of the Holocaust or cynically use it to their advantage is the related notion that they were given the state of Israel as compensation for their suffering at the hands of Nazis. Labeling this claim “Zionism denial” because it ignores the persistent efforts to create a Jewish state long before World War II, Einat Wilf addresses the corollary insinuation that Palestinians have been allowed to suffer at the hands of Jews because of European guilt over the Shoah:

The deceptively seductive canard that “the Palestinians are the secondary victims of Europe’s crimes” is one of the worst lies [about Israel’s founding], since to the untrained ear it sounds logical. In this tale, after World War II, when it became clear that the Final Solution was not final and that the Jewish survivors could not be expected or welcomed to stay in Europe, the Europeans decided to “dump” the surviving Jews on unsuspecting Arabs who were living in an area that colonial Europe controlled. . . .

[But] Israel exists not because the Europeans dumped the surviving Jews in a colony in the Middle East. Israel exists because the Jews willed it into existence. The modern state of Israel exists because the Jews who created it believed themselves to be descendants of the Israelites and Judeans who were sovereign there in ancient times and paid a high price for preserving their separate existence as a people. The modern state of Israel exists because for centuries and millennia Jews kept yearning for Israel, ending the Passover seder with the words, “next year in Jerusalem.”

In fact, if it were not for Arab resistance and Britain’s betrayal [of its duties as the Mandate power] and submission to Arab pressures, the Holocaust as such might not have taken place. Jews would have been able to escape Europe to their ancient homeland in what was already a widely supported embryonic state. They would have had a . . . country to which to immigrate freely at a time when Hitler was still willing to let the Jewish people go. Israel came into being after World War II not “thanks” to the Holocaust, but thanks to Britain’s imperial dissolution.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].