No, Daniel Barenboim, the Holocaust Didn’t Create Israel https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2017/06/no-daniel-barenboim-the-holocaust-didnt-create-israel/

June 21, 2017 | Yehuda Bauer
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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 on Haaretz: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.796464