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Chapter 13 Is There a Theological Connection between the Holocaust and the Reestablishment of the State of Israel? David Novak Historical and Political Sequences To see a connection between the Holocaust and the reestablishment of the state of Israel is inevitable when one looks at the historical facts. There is a virtual juxtaposition between January 1933, when Hitler and the Nazi regime came to power in Germany, and May 1948, when the independence of the state of Israel was declared. In the incredibly brief historical period of just fifteen and a half years, the Jewish people suffered its greatest tragedy ever and one of its greatest victories. Nevertheless, we must avoid the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which assumes that mere temporal juxtaposition automatically signifies some necessary causal connection between an earlier event and a later one. Instead, the burden of proof is on those who assert that there is a deeper nexus within this temporal proximity, one that essentially links these two epoch-making events in the history of the Jews and, perhaps, in the history of Western civilization and the history of humankind. In the secular and secularized world in which most contemporary Jews live and speak, the method most readily at hand for making an essential connection between historical events is political. In the case of the Holocaust and the reestablishment of the state of Israel, the connection is usually made by correlating political experience and political action. Many see the connection as a transition from passive Jewish impotence to active Jewish power. The Holocaust is the experience of Jewish impotence; the reestablishment of the state of Israel is the activation of Jewish power. 248 In terms of the experience of the Holocaust and the question of Jewish passivity, some quite recent scholarship has done much to dispel the impression that the six million Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder “went to the slaughter like lambs.” Many Jews did not simply cooperate in their own destruction but bravely resisted as best they could despite the nearly impossible odds against them. Indeed, we need to learn much more about this resistance in order to properly honor the memory of those who can no longer speak of themselves or for themselves. Nevertheless, in terms of “suffering,” both in the modern sense of enduring pain and in the earlier sense of being acted upon, for the Jewish people the Holocaust was far more what happened to us than what we were able to do. That is why attempts to fix any responsibility for the Holocaust on the Jews, whether by religious or secular thinkers, are regarded by most Jews (and by most fair-minded persons in general) as downright obscene. It is not that everything done by every Jew at that time was right, but to fix any attention on what Jews may have done to cooperate with their own destruction, either before or during the Holocaust, deflects full moral judgment away from the Nazi murderers themselves by, in effect,“blaming the victim.” (Aside from proven Jewish collaborators and informers who can and should be brought to human justice, whatever other sins were committed by Jewish victims either before or during the Holocaust are beyond the range of our judging and are best left to the Judge of the whole world and everything in it.) Thus the psychological fact that most Jews during the Holocaust did not accept what was being done to them does not dispel the political fact of our overwhelming weakness in relation to the power of the Nazis and their cohorts. Thank God the Allies defeated the Nazi regime on the battlefield. If not, all of us here today would likely be dead or never have been born. Nevertheless, as far as the Jews are concerned , those of us who survived did not defeat the Nazis; we just managed somehow or other to escape them. There is an enormous difference between being a refugee and being a victor. Later, we shall explore this point theologically. Of course, at least two generations before the rise of Nazi genocide the Zionists, who rightly deserve credit for being the most direct cause of the existence of the state of Israel, advocated the idea of a Jewish state in the land of Israel as the solution to the so-called Jewish question (especially what came to be known as “die Judenfrage in Europa”). National sovereignty was intended to transform the Jewish people from a...

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