"Zion arose as a resurrection of the dead at the
concentration camps," said French Christian writer Francois
Mauriac after the War. This view became rooted in Europe
through the Church — which could offer no other
explanation for the return of the Jewish people to Eretz
Yisroel, a historical development that lies in conflict with
Christian thought — and through the Arabs and Jew
haters.
In his new book, Zionism and the Destruction of the
Jews, French historian George Ben Shushan has refuted
this widespread claim, now being propagated by Iran. He
argues that the only connection between the Holocaust and the
State of Israel is demographic, as a result of the wave of
immigration by survivors. "In 1948 Israel did not appear as a
European compensation to the Jews as Holocaust victims or as
a Jewish reaction to the murderous Nazi antisemitism in
Europe," he writes. The West felt no culpability for the
Holocaust. France, which aided Israel in 1947, acted on its
own interests of restricting British control in the Middle
East.
Ben Shushan also recalls Zionist leaders' deprecating
attitude towards Holocaust victims both during and after the
war. Only in 1942 did the Zionist leadership officially
recognize that the Nazis were carrying out genocide rather
than killing Jews intermittently, as they had claimed
previously. "Why didn't you revolt?" the General Prosecutor
asked one witness at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in
1961.
Ben Shushan demonstrates that the survivors were received
coolly in Israel. "Among the concentration camp survivors few
would have survived had they not been wicked, ruthless and
egotistical," said Ben Gurion in 1949.
"The denigrating attitude toward survivors placed them in an
impossible position: whoever died was to blame for his death
and whoever lived was suspect," writes Ben Shushan.
But because of Arab propaganda, more and more Europeans
associate the Holocaust with Israel, turning the Palestinians
into indirect Holocaust victims. Ben Shushan reminds readers
that the Zionist leadership accused European Jewry of
passivity, saying they went "like sheep to the slaughter,"
which led pioneer settlers to develop a sense of disgust
toward the victims.
In fact the memory of the Holocaust has only been encouraged
in Israel in recent years. At first Israelis were embarrassed
by the Holocaust. Only after the Six-Day War, when fear
seized the Jewish world, did they latch onto the
Holocaust.
According to Ben Shushan, through their distortions new
Israeli historians fostered the view that Israel rose up from
the ashes of the Holocaust in order to point out the
injustice supposedly done to the Palestinians and to stir
guilt pangs in Europe. The result: today Europe provides the
Palestinians 800 million euro per year as pseudo-reparations
payments.
