Sympathy with the people of the Bible was to lead, not many years later, to the extension of British protection to the Jewish community in Palestine in the time of Lord Palmerston,⁵ and eventually to the British alliance with the Zionist Organization that would lay the foundations for the State of Israel. But the possibility Burke foresaw—that the humane nations could take upon themselves the protection of the Jews—proved to be no more than a romantic hope. By the time Herzl wrote of the same problem a century later, he saw clearly that the circumstances of statelessness had brought the Jews to the brink of horrors believed to have been left behind in medieval times. “It was erroneous… to believe that men can be made equal by publishing an edict in the Imperial Gazette,” Herzl wrote in 1895.⁶ Any gains the Jews had made in Europe would eventually be called into question, and when this time came, whatever the Jews did not have the political power to protect would be destroyed: “What form this [destruction] will take, I cannot surmise. Will it be a revolutionary expropriation from below or a reactionary confiscation from above? Will they drive us out? Will they kill us? … [In] France there will come a social revolution whose first victims will be the big bankers and the Jews…. In Russia there will simply be a confiscation from above. In Germany they will make emergency laws…. In Austria people will let themselves be intimidated by the Viennese rabble…. There, you see, the mob can achieve anything.”⁷

In Herzl’s day, most of the leading Jewish figures could not be induced to see matters in this fashion. Only with the passage of another generation did the darkness Herzl saw on the horizon begin to fill the noonday sky so that none could miss it. In 1942, the movement for the creation of an independent Jewish state had gained a significant foothold in Palestine, but the Viennese rabble had long since seized power not only in Austria, but in Germany and much of the rest of Europe as well. There, a people that had, in Burke’s words, “no such power and no such friend” was incinerated like so much unwanted refuse. The Jews, without independent state power and an army to throw into the alliance against Germany, were once again excluded from the councils of nations and left to plead for mercy, in a war in which mercy had run out long ago. When reliable information concerning the destruction of European Jewry finally reached Palestine, Ben-Gurion, speaking for nearly all of Jewry, once more asserted the need for a Jewish national state before the Jewish National Assembly in Palestine:

We do not know exactly what goes on in the Nazi valley of death, or how many Jews have been slaughtered.… We do not know whether the victory of democracy and freedom and justice will not find Europe a vast Jewish cemetery in which the bones of our people are scattered.… We are the only people in the world whose blood, as a nation, is allowed to be shed…. Only our children, our women… and our aged are set apart for special treatment, to be buried alive in graves dug by them, to be cremated in crematoriums, to be strangled and to be murdered by machine guns… for but one sin: … Because the Jews have no political standing, no Jewish army, no Jewish independence, and no homeland.… What has happened to us in Poland, what may, God forbid, happen to us in the future, all our innocent victims, all the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions… are the sacrifices of a people without a homeland…. We demand a homeland and independence.⁸

It has often been said that the destruction of European Jewry might have been greatly reduced in scale, and perhaps even prevented, had Israel come into existence in 1937, when Britain first proposed a partition of Palestine that would give the Jews an independent state. And it is surely right that even a relatively weak Jewish state—had it possessed the power to legislate in matters of immigration in a part of Palestine, and an armed force and diplomatic corps capable of being taken into account by the nations—might have done much to alter the fate of the Jews during the war.

But this historical hypothesis, which so easily evokes assent among us, carries within it an implication too rarely discussed. We are all aware of the failure of the United States and Britain to respond with even token efforts to relieve the plight of the Jews during the war, and yet most Jews are careful not to speak of this fact in too straightforward a fashion. The reason for this is certainly the universal esteem in which these two nations have been held by Jews, both during the war and since. Yet these nations, which we justifiably hold in such high regard, stood by in near perfect inaction as the “crimes against humanity” they excoriated after the fact were committed. Nor is this only a matter of the failure of the Allied armed forces to take action against the machinery of extermination—action which would have required the diversion of a minuscule quantity of men and arms in a direction that might not have contributed optimally to the prosecution of the war. For in Palestine, British forces that could have been engaged in the war against Germany were instead assigned to preventing European Jews from reaching safety—and this, despite the fact that few British statesmen were more inclined to consider favorably the cause of the Jews than was Churchill, then the British prime minister.

It is difficult not to conclude from these events that Burke’s supposition of a humanity capable of offering protection to the Jews was hopelessly misguided. For the truth is that those states we most admire for their humanity are those whose thoughts were elsewhere during the long years in which Jewry was being hunted down in every corner of Europe. Now the precise combination of causes which brought about this result may never be known for certain. But the more general cause is, I think, evident: Every state has its purpose, and the purposes of states have a profound effect on the manner in which national priorities are determined, whether in peacetime or in war. Thus while the Germans had seemingly excellent reasons not to divert their resources, in the midst of total war, to scouring Europe in search of Jewish children, these reasons were of secondary significance to a state whose purpose was to unite humanity under a regime of racial enslavement and purification. This overarching purpose rendered the destruction of the Jews a significant war aim for Germany, and it was pursued with consistency and determination over a period of years, even at the expense of other aims.

Had the United States and Britain regarded saving those Jews who might still be saved as one of the major aims of their war effort, just as the Germans saw murdering those Jews who might still be murdered as one of the aims of their own war effort, then the outcome of the war would certainly have been different. But the simple truth is that the Germans were prepared to make very real sacrifices to achieve the extinction of the Jews, while the Allies were not prepared to make even remotely comparable sacrifices to save them. And the reason for this is that the purpose of the English state, like that of her daughter America, is in fact what Montesquieu claimed it to be: The creation of the conditions of political liberty. This is without question one of the most noble purposes any national state has ever taken up, and in championing it, these states have immeasurably improved the condition of mankind. Moreover, it was for the sake of this cause that so many Americans and Britons gave their lives during the war against Germany. Yet there is no avoiding the fact that this purpose is exceedingly remote from a commitment to seek the salvation of endangered Jews come what may. To say this is not to deny that the British and the Americans have, on the whole, been better to the Jews than any other powers in history. Nonetheless, a state whose overriding purpose is the pursuit of political liberty cannot be counted upon to act like a state whose purpose is to pursue, with constancy and vigor, the well-being and interest of the Jewish people. For this, one must have a state whose purpose is to be the guardian of the Jews. For this, one must have a Jewish state.

Some well-educated Jews are ill at ease with this conclusion, preferring to believe that the idea of the guardian of the Jews is an anachronism, and that humanity has learned its lesson from the experience of Nazi Germany. Is it not absurd, they ask, to speak of the enemies of the Jews and of the need to defend the Jewish interest in an era in which a concern for human rights is becoming universal; in which the United Nations and the leading Western powers act on behalf of oppressed peoples everywhere; and in which Europe’s national states are dissolving themselves due to a widespread sense that such states are no longer needed in an era of international fraternity? Does this not augur a new age in which the Jews will no longer face enmity and danger?