Paul Boyer 🇺🇸

In 1938, five years into Nazi rule, 32 countries met at Evian, France to decide what to do with the Jews of Germany. They talked for nine days. They ate, drank, laughed, and agreed the Jews faced mortal danger. Then they kept their doors closed. By 1945, about 1.5 million Jewish children in Europe had been murdered. That’s 94% of those alive at the start of the war in 1939. There was no army, no reliable passport, and no Allied rescue that arrived in time. Survivors came out of the camps to find neighbors living in their homes and uninterested in their return. In several places, that disinterest turned into violent pogroms. Jews survived Hitler’s madness only to be killed when they tried to return home. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors had no homes and were placed back behind wire as “displaced persons.” Their ancestral homeland, recognized by the League of Nations in 1922 as the site of a Jewish national home, remained under a British blockade that kept Jewish immigration to a trickle. In 1947, the UN offered a truncated Jewish state next to an Arab state. The Jews accepted it, but the Arab Higher Committee refused. On the eve of the 1948 invasion, Azzam Pasha of the Arab League declared it would be “a war of extermination and momentous massacre.” The war killed about 1% of the Jewish population. The rest stayed and built a country that is now a technological leader, a regional power, and home to half the world’s Jews. No conference of self-congratulating leaders gets to decide anymore whether Jews must stay and be slaughtered or leave and hope to be saved. Now, there is a Jewish state. Now, every Jew has a home.