Perhaps it would be better to say “one of the other holocausts” instead of “the other holocaust.” There have, after all, been many. However, the one that Jews of eastern and central Europe suffered during and immediately after World War I was probably more costly in terms of lives and suffering than any other save the Nazi inferno. Accounts of it may be found in numerous sources. The following are taken from the memoirs of Maurice Paleologue, French ambassador to Russia during the war (my translation from the German version). The first is from the entry of March 1, 1915:
The Jews of Poland and Lithuania have suffered terrible persecution since the beginning of the war. During the month of August (1914) they were forced to leave the zone near the border as quickly as possible. After a short time, these mandatory expulsions, carried out with excessive haste an cruelty, were applied further east with each passing day. Eventually, the entire Israelite population from Grodno, Lomza, Plozk, Kutno, Lodz, Pietrokov, Kielce, Radom, and Lublin was forced into the interior of the country in the direction of Podolia and Volhynia. Everywhere the expulsions were accompanied by acts of violence and plunder, carried out under the approving gaze of the authorities. One could see hundreds of thousands of unfortunates, driven aimlessly through the snow, driven on like cattle by bands of cossacks, in extreme want, abandoned in train stations, open fields, and the outskirts of cities, dying of hunger, exhaustion, and cold. And to improve their morale, everywhere they went these miserable people encountered the same feelings of hatred and rejection, the same accusations of expionage and treason. Never in all its painful history has Israel suffered a more tragic expulsion. And yet, there are 200,000 Jewish soldiers fighting bravely in the ranks of the Russian army!
and, from the entry of August 5, 1915,
With every retreat of the Russian army, the police continue the expulsion of Jews. Wherever it occurs, the expulsions are carried out with the usual excessive haste, as mindless as they are cruel. Those affected are informed at the last minute; they have neither time nor opportunity to take anything along. They are hurriedly packed into train cars; they are forced onto the road like herds of cattle; they are informed of their destination, which is then changed 20 times along the way. And wherever the order is given for them to leave a city, the orthodox population descends on the ghetto and plunders it. Forced back in the direction of Podolia, Volhynia, Bessarabia, and the Ukraine, they are given over to terrible suffering. The total number of the expelled has reached 800,000.
These expulsions were accompanied by bloody pogroms, lasting through the Civil War years, in which tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in cold blood. Descriptions of those carried out in the Odessa area may be found, for example, in Ivan Bunin’s Cursed Days.
In the years immediately following World War II, as hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews continued to wander about Europe, it seemed obvious to President Truman and many other leaders on this side of the iron curtain that the best solution to the problem was the creation of a Jewish State. There they would have at least a fighting chance of defending themselves against the holocausts of the future. It is interesting to consider, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the founding of the state of Israel really was a good idea after all. However, while the existence of human moral emotions certainly cannot be ignored in answering that question, they should certainly not be consulted to arrive at that answer.
Consider, for example, the contortions of the “progressive” ideologues as they chased the chimera of “the Good” as applied to the state of Israel. In the beginning, the Jews were the “good guys,” as seen, for example, in films like “Exodus.” Now, after demonstrating on several occasions that they are quite capable of defending themselves, they have become the “bad guys,” a much more familiar role for the Jews, who have always had the misfortune of being a “natural” outgroup wherever the diaspora has taken them. They are accused of favoring “apartheid,” in spite of Israel’s large Arab population, and the decimation of Jewish minorities in many of the states of north Africa and the Middle East. They are the ones guilty of “ethnic cleansing,” even as genuine ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is accepted without a murmur. They are accused of atrocities against civilians, even as their enemies deliberately fire thousands of rockets at civilian population centers, and so on, and so on.
All this demonstrates once again, as have a virtually infinite number of similar experiments throughout human history, that decisions of this sort should not be based on morality. The reason for this seems abundantly obvious. The moral emotions from which all moral systems are ultimately derived evolved at a time when entities such as the state of Israel, or anything else resembling a modern state, for that matter, simply did not exist. On what, then, should they be based, if we exclude the wonderfully satisfying but grossly destructive and unreliable moral emotions? Why, the human ability to reason, by default. It is, admittedly, a very weak reed to lean on, but it’s the only one we really have.