One of the most persistent claims in contemporary discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that the Palestinians are the “secondary victims” of the Holocaust.
The argument is straightforward. Europe attempted to exterminate its Jews. The survivors could no longer remain among the societies that had persecuted them. In response, the international community created a Jewish state in Palestine. Palestinians ultimately paid the price for Europe’s crimes and therefore became the Holocaust’s final victims.
It is an emotionally compelling narrative. It is not, however, an historically accurate one.
The claim rests upon a series of conceptual errors. It confuses historical consequence with historical responsibility, diplomatic developments with historical origins, and those affected by a later conflict with the victims of an earlier crime. Once those distinctions are restored, the thesis becomes difficult to sustain.
The Holocaust Has Identifiable Victims
The Holocaust was a specific historical event. It was the systematic attempt by Nazi Germany and its collaborators to annihilate the Jewish people. Its perpetrators are known. Its victims are known.¹
That matters because historical responsibility cannot simply be transferred across time.
The consequences of one event may shape another. That does not transform those affected by the later event into victims of the earlier one.
History is full of chains of causation. Victimhood is not one of them.
Zionism Did Not Begin at Auschwitz
The suggestion that Israel exists because of the Holocaust ignores decades of earlier history.
Modern political Zionism emerged in the nineteenth century. The First Zionist Congress met in Basel in 1897. Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine had already begun. The Balfour Declaration recognised support for a Jewish National Home in 1917. The League of Nations incorporated that objective into the Mandate for Palestine in 1922.² Before that, the longing of Jews to return to their indigenous lands has been enacted in daily liturgy and at festivals like Passover, which ends with the imperative “next year in Jerusalem”.
Long before Hitler came to power, the Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine had established towns, agricultural settlements, schools, hospitals, universities, representative institutions and an expanding economy.³
Israel was not conceived after Auschwitz. It was the culmination of a national movement that had already existed for generations and a longing to return to indigenous lands that were millennia old.
The Holocaust profoundly reinforced Zionism’s argument. It did not create it.
Palestine Was Not Chosen Because of the Holocaust
The suggestion that Europe selected Palestine after the Holocaust also misunderstands Zionism itself.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various territorial proposals were discussed as possible refuges for persecuted Jews. The best known was the British East Africa (“Uganda”) Scheme of 1903. Other proposals pointed to locations in East Africa, South America and elsewhere.⁴
A minority territorialist current, led most prominently by Israel Zangwill after 1905, continued to advocate alternative locations where Jews might establish a homeland. It reflected a genuine concern for Jewish safety as antisemitism intensified in Europe. Yet it remained a minority position.⁵
The decisive question for most zionists was not whether Jews needed safety, but where that safety should be established. After 1905, the overwhelming consensus was that the Jewish national home belonged in the historic Land of Israel, although precisely what political form that home would ultimately assume remained an open question for decades.
That is why the Seventh Zionist Congress rejected the Uganda proposal in 1905. The issue was not whether Jews needed refuge; it was whether that refuge could exist anywhere other than the historic Land of Israel. For the overwhelming majority of delegates, the answer was no.
That distinction is fundamental.
If Zionism had been merely a search for somewhere — anywhere — to shelter Europe’s Jews, territorial alternatives might well have prevailed.
Instead, they failed because the decisive question was not whether Jews required refuge, but where that refuge should be established. For the overwhelming majority of Zionists, the answer remained the historic Land of Israel.
The Holocaust did not redirect Zionism towards Palestine.
Zionism had already chosen Palestine decades before Hitler came to power.
The Holocaust Changed Diplomacy. It Did Not Create Jewish National Rights
A more sophisticated version of the “secondary victims” thesis deserves serious consideration.
Few historians would dispute that the Holocaust profoundly influenced international opinion. The existence of hundreds of thousands of Jewish displaced persons after the war created an urgency that did not previously exist. Sympathy for Jewish survivors almost certainly strengthened international support for the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan.⁶
Acknowledging that reality is not a concession. It is simply good history. But the conclusion often drawn from it does not follow.
The Holocaust did not suddenly create Jewish national rights in 1947. Those rights had already received international recognition through the League of Nations Mandate a quarter of a century earlier. Nor did the Holocaust determine the political choices that followed.
The United Nations recommended partition. The Jewish Agency accepted it despite profound reservations about the proposed borders. The Arab Higher Committee rejected it. Neighbouring Arab states invaded following Israel’s declaration of independence.⁷
Those decisions were made by political actors exercising agency after the Holocaust had ended.
The Holocaust influenced the diplomatic environment. It did not dictate those choices.
Historical events often alter the circumstances in which later decisions are made. They do not remove responsibility for the decisions themselves.
Europe Did Not “Dump” Jews in Palestine
The popular narrative also misrepresents British policy.
If Britain had intended to solve Europe’s “Jewish problem” by sending Jews to Palestine, its conduct during the Holocaust would have looked very different.
Instead, the 1939 White Paper imposed severe restrictions on Jewish immigration precisely when European Jews most desperately sought refuge. Refugee ships were intercepted. Many Holocaust survivors attempting to reach Palestine after the war were detained in camps on Cyprus rather than admitted.⁸
Far from facilitating Jewish migration, Britain repeatedly obstructed it. Ultimately, unable or unwilling to reconcile its conflicting commitments, Britain referred the Palestine question to the United Nations and withdrew from the Mandate altogether. It did not establish Israel; it relinquished responsibility for deciding Palestine’s future.
Nor did Jews suddenly appear in Palestine after the Holocaust. Jewish communities had maintained a continuous presence in the land for centuries, particularly in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. Modern Zionist immigration greatly expanded that population, but it did not create it. Nor were the newcomers strangers to the land in a civilisational sense. They understood themselves not as Europeans establishing a new society overseas, but as Jews returning to the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
The historical record is considerably more complex than the claim that Europe simply relocated its Jews to Palestine. Britain sought to restrict Jewish immigration, ultimately abandoned the Mandate, and did so in a land where Jewish presence had never entirely disappeared.
Israel Was Never Merely a European Project
The theory also struggles to explain who actually built Israel.
Within only a few years of independence, roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population consisted of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. They came from Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere. Many had lived continuously in those regions for centuries. They were not European refugees. They were not products of the Holocaust. Many themselves became refugees after longstanding Jewish communities throughout the Arab world collapsed in the years surrounding Israel’s establishment.⁹
Their history cannot be reduced to Europe’s attempt to resolve Europe’s crimes.
History Did Not Happen to Passive People
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the “secondary victims” narrative is that it strips everyone of agency.
Jews become passive refugees whom Europe relocated.
Palestinians become passive victims upon whom history descended.
Neither description reflects reality.
The Zionist movement built institutions, raised funds, revived Hebrew, purchased land, established representative bodies and pursued international recognition for decades before independence.
Palestinian Arab leaders also made consequential political choices. They rejected partition and chose war rather than accepting the creation of a neighbouring Jewish state.¹⁰
Those decisions do not erase Palestinian suffering.
They do, however, demonstrate that the conflict emerged through political choices made by numerous actors — not through the automatic unfolding of Europe’s wartime crimes.
Consequence Is Not Victimhood
None of this denies the suffering experienced by Palestinian Arabs.
The displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1947–49 war remains one of the defining tragedies of the modern Middle East. It deserves to be studied honestly and remembered seriously.
But tragedy alone does not determine historical category.
The Holocaust belongs to the history of Nazi Germany’s attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.
The Arab-Israeli conflict belongs to the history of competing national movements, decolonisation, partition, war and political decision-making.
The two histories intersect. They are not the same history.
The Holocaust undoubtedly influenced the world in which Israel came into being. It affected diplomacy, public opinion and the urgency with which governments viewed the Jewish refugee crisis.
None of that transformed Palestinians into victims of the Holocaust itself. To argue otherwise is to blur the distinction between consequence and victimhood. History deserves greater precision.
The Holocaust had identifiable perpetrators and identifiable victims.
Later political conflicts may have been shaped by its consequences, but those who suffered in those conflicts were not thereby transformed into victims of the Holocaust.
That distinction is not merely semantic. It is essential to understanding both histories honestly.
References
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols. (New York: HarperCollins, 1997–2007).
- League of Nations, Mandate for Palestine, approved 24 July 1922; Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 2003 [1972]).
- Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012); Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 3rd ed. (New York: Knopf, 2007).
- Laqueur, A History of Zionism; David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
- Gur Alroey, Zionism without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016); Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 2003 [1972]).
- Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001); Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989).
- United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), “Future Government of Palestine,” 29 November 1947; Morris, 1948.
- Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
- Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Sergio Della Pergola, “Jewish Demographic Policies: Population Trends and Options,” American Jewish Year Book 99 (1999): 3-77.
- Morris, 1948; Morris, Righteous Victims; Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Edward W. Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text 1 (1979): 7–58.
