The Holocaust isn’t the primary justification for the existence of Israel. If it were then arguably only Holocaust survivors would be entitled to live there. American and British Jews would have no claim to Israeli citizenship and many Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses would.
Zionism existed before the Holocaust and the claims to Israel had already been made before World War II (or World War I for that matter). The justification for these claims was that Israel was the historical homeland of the Jewish people from which they had been forcibly exiled and they wanted to return to it.
It’s the contrary. Large parts of what is now France were part of the HRE during the middle-ages.
I think you might have in mind the early Carolingian era, since large chunks of what it now western Germany were part of the empire. But there was no “France” by this time, and both France and the HRE were created by the division of the Carolingian empire.
And there were also persecutions of Jews in Northern France and England during the crusades. I searched for examples : during the third crusade, it happened in England in York, Stamford, King’s Lynn, Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, London and Winchester. And even though the first crusade is famous for it, I’ve no reason to assume that things would have been any different had the crusade, for some reason, crossed France instead of Germany.
In any case, my point wasn’t that nothing bad happened to the Jews in Germany during the middle-ages, but that the claim that Jews were expelled from Germany during the middle-ages while other European countries were much more tolerant is utterly false and that it has been essentially the other way around.
Ha, funny you should mention that, I’ve asked this very question on another (mostly rightwing) board a few years ago, only I posited Kansas as the Jewish state :).
Oddly enough, that ended up an ugly mess and me being accused of rabid antisemitism :dubious:.
