Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, friends of Masuah, Avner Shalev,
It is, I suppose, a task - one of the main tasks - of a historian to debunk myths.
And what I would like to do is to address a myth that is common among all Israelis,
from ministers of the government to the ordinary people in the street,
common to friends of Israel all over the world, friends of the Jewish people,
enemies of the Jewish people, enemies of Israel.
They share the myth that Israel is the result of the Holocaust.
It is absolutely false. It's a myth. It never happened.
Prior to World War II, there were some 4-4.5 million Jews in what was called Eastern Europe
outside of the Soviet Union.
These people couldn't stay where they were.
They lived among hostile peoples, people who didn't like them,
Peoples who hated them. Many of them. most of them.
There was an economic crisis of tremendous proportions.
Of 3.3 million Jews in 1939 in Poland, one-third were on or below the poverty level.
Jewish children couldn't go to school because they didn't have shoes in the winter to go to school with.
There was a constant decline in the 1930s, and there was nowhere to go.
America was closed. Britain was closed.
Western Europe had closed by then. South America was closed.
Palestine was closed by the British from 1936 on.
In 1938-39, this closure was tightened. And it became ever tighter as time went on.
But it was a hope.
Now, had there been a possibility for Jews to leave Eastern Europe, to go to Palestine,
the estimate is that at least a third of these 4.5 million
would immediately have taken the opportunity to come.
It would have been extremely difficult. There were only 500,000 Jews in Palestine at the moment.
But they would have come (not all at once).
You know, all that was stopped by the Holocaust.
There was nothing left afterward. Out of 3.3 million Jews, 3 million were killed.
The Holocaust almost prevented the rise of the State of Israel.
More Holocaust = less Israel. That's the equation.
World War II ended in 1945.
Between 1945-1947, about 300,000-350,000 Jews -
not only survivors, but, to a large extent, also Jews who had escaped into the interior of the Soviet Union
and came back after the war -
these 300,000-350,000 Jews came to Central Europe, largely to the American zones of Germany and Austria,
after the victory.
And they formed a small population there, with whom the Allies didn't know what to do.
The Americans didn't want them. The British certainly didn't want them.
Nobody else wanted them.
And most of them, rightly or wrongly, decided that the place for them
was a place where they would determine their own destiny.
And the large majority of them wanted to go to Palestine.
And they were not persuaded to do that by Palestinian Jewish emissaries.
In fact, they criticized those emissaries for not being energetic enough
to move the world to let them go where they wanted to go.
Between 1945-1948, 69,000 European and North African Jews wanted and did
go on illegal ships to come to this country.
From 1946, they were prevented from doing so. They were shipped to Cyprus by the British.
But there were thousands, tens of thousands, who were willing to do that,
who were willing to spend time in detention camps on Cyprus
on their way (hopefully) to this place.
If the war had lasted for more than it lasted,
if it had stopped in 1947 instead of 1945,
there would have been not a single survivor.
there would have been nobody to press, there would have been nobody to come.
There would have been no political issue.
There would have been no Israel.
The idea that the world gave Israel to the Jews
as a result of what they had suffered during World War II is total and absolute nonsense.
Look at what the historians can tell you today about the internal diplomatic correspondence
of the various states that voted at the United Nations for or against the partition of Palestine.
There was no mention of the Holocaust - of what we today call "the Holocaust", the genocide of the Jews.
No mention of that anywhere.
Not even those who advocated for the partition of Palestine and the State of Israel -
people like Granados from Guatemala, for instance, a friend of the Jews.
What motivated him were the pioneering efforts of the Jews in Palestine,
the right of the Jewish people for independence , and that sort of thing.
The Holocaust? The genocide of the Jews? Not a word.
Truman didn't want the state of Israel. He opposed it to the last moment.
There was no mention of this anywhere in American diplomatic correspondence.
No mention of that in French diplomatic correspondence.
This is a total invention, a total myth.
The considerations for and against the establishment of the State of Israel
were of a diplomatic, political, global kind.
There as only one exception.
Andrei Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, made a speech on May 14, 1947,
in which he mentioned the destruction of the Jewish people in Europe during the Second World War.
How genuine was that?
The Soviet Union opposed any mention of the Holocaust.
The Soviet Union opposed any memory of the Holocaust by the Jews who had survived in the Soviet Union.
They could not have cared less.
What they wanted was to get the British out of the Middle East, and the Jews were a good tool to do that.
And so, for purely propagandist purposes, he mentioned that in his speech.
It was a lie. It was propaganda. And he was the only one. Nobody else.
It is very important to debunk that myth. Very important.
Because the State of Israel almost didn't come into existence. It hung by a thread.
Yes. Those survivors who had managed to get to Central Europe were a major element,
but they were the survivors.
Despite the Holocaust. Despite it, not because of it!
And it was they who created the political conditions,
the cul-de-sac where the Americans didn't know what to do with them. They didn't want them in America.
The British wanted them out. Europe didn't want them. Germany didn't want them, and they wanted to go.
And that created the discussion at the United Nations
that resulted not in the establishment of the State of Israel, but in the possibility of fighting for it.