Effects of the Holocaust

For this week's assignment, I chose to write about a topic with which I'm very familiar, the Holocust. For years, I've conducted independent research on the topic and have published a fair amount of material. I think it's therefore safe to say that the Holocaust had extensive politics effects on Europe and the rest of the world. Although it is important to acknowledge that there were many innocent victims of the Nazis, not the least of whom were non-Jewish Polish citizens, Soviet POWs, and religious and political enemies, my focus here is on the largest victim group, i.e., the nearly six million European Jews killed during World War II.

Probably the most important political effect of the Holocaust was the creation within three years of the end of the war of the State of Israel. Although the Zionist movement had existed in its political form since the 1890s, it had had limited impact on the Jewish world at large. Because Orthodox Judaism rejected Zionism as heresy, while left-wing political organizations largely rejected it as bourgeois in its embrace of ethnic nationalism, Zionism in Europe was the province of eastern European, largely left-wing Jews, mainly in Poland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union. By the time the Holocaust happened, the political leadership of these Zionist groups was already in Palestine. The political effect of the Holocaust was a massive increase in support for Zionism, not only among the international community, which now agreed with the Zionism movement on the need for a Jewish state, but also among Jews themselves who had previously rejected Zionism but who now believed that continued Jewish survival in Europe was impossible. Although I believe that it is important to emphasize that the Holocaust did not "cause" Israel to exist -- the Zionist movement would ultimately have been successful in its goals; in fact, the Peel Commission under the U.K. Mandate for Palestine had voted for partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in 1937 -- it is undeniable, I believe, to state that the Holocaust expedited Israel's creation.

Obviously, given the long-term Arab-Israeli conflict that arose in connection to the creation of Israel, the Holocaust clearly had repercussions outside of Europe as well. Several important works on the topic have demonstrated an important role of Holocaust remembrance -- not to mention, unfortunately, some exploitation on one hand and denial on the other -- in post-World War II politics. In his book The Holocaust in American Life, the late historian Peter Novick argued that the Holocaust had a lasting impact on American culture and foreign policy over the course of the 20th century.[1] From the Israeli perspective, Tom Segev has argued quite convincingly that the Holocaust has been a frequent topic evoked by Israeli politicians, particularly when they find their own governments to be experiencing moments of crisis (e.g., a series of crises for David Ben-Gurion in the late 1950s culminated in Israel's capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann).[2] Finally, scholars of Holocaust denial have repeatedly noted a strong current of denial in the Arab world, particularly in the 21st century.[3]

Finally, recognition of the Holocaust, not to mention the Armenian Genocide of World War I, resulted in the U.N.'s adoption of its Convention on Genocide in 1948. Although the efficacy of this convention has been debated extensively, particularly given the failure of the United States to ratify it, it nevertheless was evoked when genocidal violence erupted in the former Yugoslavia beginning in the late 1980s, with the ultimate result being the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, which has tried and convicted several war criminals, not the least of whom was the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Arguably, had the Holocaust not happened, the ability of the U.N. to enact the Convention on Genocide -- and perhaps even its inspiration to do so -- might well have been absent.

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     [1] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Mariner Books, 2000).
     [2] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (London: Picador, 2000).
     [3] See, e.g., Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009).