Israel’s “Declaration of Independence” – issued 76 years ago this week – invokes the Holocaust in an effort to confer legitimacy on a settler-colonial enterprise.
The industrial slaughter carried out by Germany’s Nazi regime illustrated that there was an urgent need to solve the problem of Jewish “homelessness” by “re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish state,” the document claimed.
The juxtaposition of a recent and extremely painful history with a reference to something from a few millennia earlier was perverse.
Leading figures in the Zionist movement were contending that both the Holocaust and the Bible gave them the right to set up a Jewish state in Palestine, which they were now calling “Eretz-Israel” or “Greater Israel.” ….more