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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Holocaust, the Founding of Israel and the Arab-Israeli War in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press

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The fact that the gap between the founding of the state of Israel and the end of the Holocaust was only three years (almost to date), creates, at least in retrospect, a strong link between the two events. Articulating this view, Walter Harrelson has written that ‘[A] shamed world was certainly ready, after the Holocaust and the struggle of Jews from Europe to get to Israel, to support the Partition Plan that led to the establishment of the state.’1 Yehuda Bauer has argued that the birth of a nation ‘bridges the gap between an unconquered past tragedy and the hope for the resurrection of an almost mortally wounded people’.2 Peter Novick also agrees that the link exists, although in less certain terms: ‘[i]n countless ways, it was the survivors who were indispensable middle term in the equation linking the Holocaust and the birth of Israel’.3 In similar tones, Mark Wyman has added that ‘the Jewish DPs’ suffering in overcrowded camps must be counted as major factors in the rise of modern Israel’.4