Zionism and the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe

The Holocaust was by far the worst genocide in human history and has understandably attracted much scholarly interest. However, the Holocaust did not happen in isolation. As the term ‘final solution’ indicates, it was intended as the culmination of a broad effort to ethnically cleanse 1 Europe of its Jews – an effort that preceded the Holocaust and continued even after it ended. This paper argues that in a curious ideological relationship, Zionists 2 and their supporters embraced much of the ideological framework of European anti-Semitism, and, except for its most intense manifestation in the form of genocide, implicitly endorsed the effort to ethnically cleanse Jews from Europe and make Europe judenrein (free of Jews).