The destruction of European Jewry was the culmination of a system of complementarity that had gathered political momentum in Europe over many centuries. I much prefer Lucy Dawidowicz’s exact term, the war against the Jews, to such religiously shaded words as hurban, sho’a and Holocaust, because it precisely designates the political aspect of what was a supremely political event. Though Hitler’s obsession with eradicating the Jews eventually interfered with his prosecution of the war, in its earliest stages his anti-Jewish policy gained him allies in consolidating German rule over Europe: Getting rid of their Jews was, in effect, the gift that Hitler offered to every country that he conquered, a political bonus for the indignity of subjugation. If the Jews had thought they could create a temporary alternative to self-government in the land of Israel through a strategy of peaceable accommodation abroad, they and everyone else now knew how the process worked itself out in history.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that my analysis casts no aspersion on the Jewish political experiment itself, which was vigorous, noble, even exalting. There is no shame in experimentation: The Jews invested tremendous faith not only in God, but in themselves and their fellow man when they perpetuated their demanding way of life among the nations. Nor are the Jews altogether singular in their role of targeted outsiders. Hostility toward other alien populations, like the Armenians, or like the Chinese in Malaysia or Indonesia, sometimes follows some of the same patterns I have outlined here. But in trying to sustain themselves for so long without a home territory or defensive powers, the Jews had unwittingly proven that no people can hope to flourish collectively, spiritually and materially, without securing its own forms of self-protection. The Jews had tried to make a virtue of adapting to foreign power in order to perpetuate their own way of life with the least interference. Instead, their deferment of power engendered unique conditions for genocide.

Much of what I am saying was understood by the Zionist movement, and by those who established the State of Israel. Zionism recognized that in a time of nascent nation-states and populist politicians, Jews could no longer afford to depend on others for their security. They had to reclaim their own territory and become subject to their own political authority, so that among other manifestations of national independence they could militarily protect themselves. The Zionist historian Ben-Zion Dinur described the process as follows:

The revolt against the Galut was like a huge river into which flowed all the smaller streams and tributaries of the Jewish struggle down the ages. It incorporated into itself… all the various methods of resistance ever adopted by the Jews against their oppressors and persecutors, together with the stubborn persistence displayed by them in their hard struggle for survival…. So powerful was the impetus of the revolt against the Galut that it forced the historical course of the nation back into its original channels and recreated the character of the modern Jew in the likeness of his ancient ancestors.³⁰

Dinur underscores the negative judgment on the diaspora that fueled the difficult task of reconstruction, yet he uses a language of natural evolution to suggest how organic, how inevitable, was the return when it occurred. To Dinur, Zionism was categorical proof of just how dynamic Jewish political strategy in the diaspora really was, since without an indigenous political tradition, no such movement of self-emancipation could have developed, matured and achieved its goal in so short a time.

The Zionist diagnosis might have saved the world much damage had it been implemented sooner than it was. (I say, saved “the world” rather than merely “the Jews,” because if my analysis is accurate, the violence that erupts as part of the politics of complementarity is destructive for the perpetrators as well as for their victims.) I think history will confirm that the establishment of Israel was the most extraordinary political feat of the twentieth century, providing a model of collective responsibility in the midst of unspeakable degradation and malice. Jews around the world responded to the murder of one-third of their people through an act of unprecedented national resolve, counteracting the uniqueness of the destruction of European Jewry by a unique determination to change their political fate. Through the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people hoped to move from a politics of complementarity to a politics of reciprocity, whereby the Jews would achieve unexceptional status in the family of nations, behaving and being treated according to international customs and laws.

That might have happened had the Arabs accepted the partition of Palestine as voted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 29, 1947. It might have happened had the Arabs accepted the outcome of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. But the Arab-Israel conflict did not turn out to be—as so many people still pretend it is—the struggle of two peoples over one land. Arab opposition to Israel was not a “normal” territorial dispute over how much land was owing to each, but an ideological assault on the legitimacy of an independent Jewish polity, encouraged by the image of the subject Jew of the diaspora. Ironically, the same war that had convinced the Jews they must take power for themselves had convinced the Arabs that the Jews were ultimately ripe for conquest. Bluntly stated, Hitler had demonstrated the utility of hostility to the Jews by making it the centerpiece of his internal and foreign policy. Although he was defeated in all his other aims, Hitler did succeed in eliminating most of Europe’s Jews. He was beaten, but not for having killed the Jews.

The Jews who built Israel, including the Revisionists, expected the Arabs to react to them “normally,” if not by immediately accepting them as neighbors, then by accepting the outcome of war. War is the final arbiter of international disputes, the way of settling otherwise intractable political conflicts. When the Americans won their War of Independence, the British soon thereafter recognized the freedom of the colonies. When Algeria won its War of Independence, the French accepted the terms of disengagement. Israelis were convinced that once they began to function as a sovereign nation, they would be treated as such by the rest of the world. But though the Jews also won their War of Independence, their victory was not credited by those whom they defeated. Given their vast demographic and political advantage, the Arabs were convinced they would reconquer Palestine in time. The efforts of the Hashemite king to strike a deal with David Ben-Gurion were thwarted by the followers of the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had openly joined Hitler during World War II. And even as the Israelis resettled hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, those same Arab countries refused to dismantle the refugee camps, so that the Arab refugees should remain the festering protest and the human weapon against the Jewish state.

No doubt the Arabs might have offered equal resistance to any other new sovereign entity in their region, but opposition to the Jews included special political opportunities. No other people could have provided the Jewish combination of visible achievement, magnified images of potency and a demonstrated ideological disinclination to aggress. The unwelcome presence of a Jewish state in an Arab region became the rallying cry for Pan-Arabism, uniting Arabs, as Arabs, against an ethnic and religious enemy. Just as anti-Semitism had once functioned on the European continent as the one unifying passion of otherwise vying Christian nations, so anti-Zionism became a feature of modern nationalisms in countries as different as Iraq and Iran. Indeed, the Palestinians are the first people whose nationalism consists primarily of opposition to the Jews, and the Palestinians have been aided by their fellow Arabs only to the extent that they are useful in opposing Israel. It is clear from the political behavior of the Arab countries that the desire to secure a Palestinian homeland has been merely the excuse, not the reason for anti-Zionism, a sentiment which grows arguably stronger as Israeli concessions reconfirm the image of the accommodating Jew.