Sorry, Rashida Tlaib: Israel was not a consolation prize for Jews

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23870

Recent assertions made by Rep. Rashida Tlaib regarding the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel have no foundation in the historical record.

In this imagined version of history, after the Holocaust, the Jews were awarded a consolation prize — the establishment of Israel — at the expense of those already living there.

Asserting that Israel’s creation was a direct response to the Holocaust overlooks the ancient and ceaseless connection of the Jewish people to Israel, as well as the modern Zionist enterprise that returned an exiled and oppressed people to their ancestral home. It also ignores the existence of a vibrant pre-World War II Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, whose population was severely circumscribed because of the virulent opposition by local Arabs to the very idea of Jews returning to the Land of Israel.

Throughout Europe following the Nazi rise to power, a great many Zionists were deeply frustrated by the quotas set for aliyah by the British, and they later became victims of the Holocaust, having never had the opportunity to realize their dreams of reaching the Land of Israel. It is impossible to even begin to divine what their contribution could have been to Israel, the Jewish people and to the world.