There are two kinds of evil-doers: those who kill, rape, beat, and brutalize others, and those who let this happen.
The story of American and British indifference to the fate of Jews during the Second World War still makes for disturbing reading. It’s worth revisiting the subject for three reasons:
1) The abandonment of the Jews — the title of David Wyman’s comprehensive study — is the ultimate rationale for the creation of the state of Israel. There will be no second Hitler in Europe — though he has many apprentices in the Middle East. But when the West turned its back on Hitler’s victims (with exceptions discussed below), many Jews who were not committed Zionists were persuaded that the survival of their people depended on its having a state of its own, and an army to defend it. “There are two sorts of countries in the world,” Chaim Weizmann had concluded in the late ‘30s, “those that want to expel the Jews and those that don’t want to admit them.”
2) America’s response to the Holocaust helps explain the seemingly perverse attachment of American Jews to open borders — a policy that permits an influx of immigrants who are considerably more antisemitic than European-Americans, apart from other consequences that negatively impact all Americans. (Even second-generation Hispanics are twice as likely as whites to have strong Judeophobic beliefs.) It helps explain also the seemingly irrational attachment of Jews to a party with a significantly less favorable attitude toward them and which is far less supportive of Israel than its rival. Fully 83% of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians; only 48% of Democrats do so.
3) The most important reason, though, has to do with the Iran nuclear agreement. A lot of things were taken off the table at Geneva: a renunciation of terrorism (responsible for 1,100 American combat deaths in Iraq), an effective means of verifying Tehran’s compliance, even the return of four American hostages — a token gesture on the mullahs’ part. Never on the table was regime’s determination to annihilate Israel, its chief objective in acquiring a nuclear arsenal. The fact that the administration’s new Middle Eastern ally is bent on genocide was irrelevant. The Obama administration’s abandonment of the Jewish state in 2015 was prefigured by the abandonment of European Jews in the ‘40s.