For Israeli teenagers in high school, it’s a common rite of passage to go on a school-organized educational trip to one of the Holocaust death camps operated by the Nazis in Poland. One of the lessons of the trip, whether explicitly stated or just implied, is that if the Jewish State had existed a decade earlier, much of the Holocaust would not have happened. The Jews of Eastern Europe would have simply made aliyah and been saved or somehow the IDF would have come to the rescue.

‘Polish death camps’ and other distortions

Quite a lot of things are forgotten in this re-telling of recent world history and some unfortunate distortions enter the narrative along the way. For example, the rebranding of the Nazi-run death camps on Polish territory as “Polish death camps,” even though they were not run by Poles and many non-Jewish Poles died in them as well.

Moreover, not only was Poland far from being the only location where Jews suffered and were murdered during the Holocaust, it wasn’t the sole location of fascist death........

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