If the State of Israel had come into existence ten or fifteen years earlier, would this have helped [rescue people from the Holocaust] in a central way? Self-evidently, a very significant number of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe would have fled there prior to Hitler’s invasions of their countries; if Palestine/Israel had survived the war unscathed, presumably those Jews, too, would have survived the war. Yet, as we have seen previously, it is easy to overestimate the political clientele for Zionism among eastern European Jewry prior to the Holocaust; at the time, even when Nazi Germany existied, most Jews were adherents of other ideologies – Bund Socialism, Strict Orthodoxy, Marxism – which were explicitly anti-Zionist, and showed no interest in migrating to the Hebrew-speaking Yishuv, economically primitive and under constant Arab threat. Some historians have also argued that had Israel existed during the war, it might have saved Europe’s Jews in other ways. For instance, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, seldom a proponent of overly sanguine ‘might-have-beens’ of Holocaust rescue, nevertheless states without qualification that:
"Without political power Jews had no chance for survival. Had a Jewish state existed in 1939, even one as small as Israel today, but militarily competent, the terrible story of six million dead might have had another outcome. As a member of the Allied nations, contributing its manpower and military resources to the conduct of the war, a Jewish state could have exercised some leverage with the great powers in the alliance. Even though it would not have diverted Hitler from his determination to murder the Jews, a Jewish state might have been able to wield sufficient military and political clout to have inhibited Slovakia, Rumania, and Croatia from collaborating with the Germans in that murder. A Jewish state could have persuaded neutral countries to give Jewish refugees safe passage. A Jewish state would have ensured a safe havem. A Jewish state would have made the difference."
It is genuinely surprising to read-alas-such a naïve and improbable statement in the writings of an author as astute and intelligence as Lucy S. Dawidowicz. Unfortunately, even if Israel had existed and attempted to use its ‘military and political clout’ to change the anti-semitic policies of ‘Slovakia, Rumania and Croatia’, it was Hitler and Hitler alone who had the final say about the fate of the Jews in these countries, just as he did in Hungary.
Indeed had an independent Jewish state existed in Palestine during the war, the fate of the Jews may have been very different, but not in the way imagine here: Hitler might well have made its conquest and destruction a much higher priority than it was actually given. Rommel had only ten divisions in North Africa; with the destruction of Israel and the extermination of perhaps 1 million Jews there as his goal, Hitler might have agreed to give him twenty, thirty or whatever number of Axis divisions was necessary for a successful drive through Egypt (incidentally seizing the Suez Canal) to Palestine, doubtless fanning Arab anti-British and anti-Jewish nationalism every inch of the way. Given what we know about Hitler, which possibility was more likely?