From my experience, the history of Israel as discussed in the media usually begins in 1948. A standard phrase is "The state was founded and immediately declared war at".

Sometimes discussion goes back a bit further about how the area was a "League of Nations Mandatory Area" before, that was for some reason was administered by the British.

That's usually it.

An interesting detail is that the legitimacy of Israel here is usually explained with the UN (the Partition Plan resolutions and the accepted membership) - not with any kind of divine right. I think that's quite different from how (right wing) Israelis see the source of legitimacy themselves.

That's a whole other fork of the story.

I was basically getting at how does Europe see its role in the fact that a big part of what made Israel possible was the more or less complete displacement of European jewry during the war, and the complete lack of will to create a place in post-war europe for their own Jewish community.

This perspective comes from my own family history where a few relatives managed to survive the war in Nazi custody, but then spent longer in Western European refugee camps postwar than they spent in the concentration and death camps during the war. The entire family ended up outside of Europe (USA and Israel) since it was the most viable path out of the camps.

Basically the success of Zionism is due in no small part to the active support from Europe in the years after the war, and my question is, do Europeans see that in as self-interested terms as it can look. More succinctly, does the Western European community realize that creating Israel was a solution to the post-war "Jewish Problem" that conveniently did not require those nations to create a hospitable place for jewish communities within their own borders.

That's a very good question, and thank you for sharing the experience of your family.

I can't really say.

From what I see here, there is not a lot of discussion in that area. (That was the first time I heard about those refugee camps, but that may just be me)

From what I understand, the discussion for a long time was more about whether Jews would even want to come back to.Germany, after all the other Germans did to them.

German reflection on the Nazi period also happened in multiple stages. From what I know, the initial phase, right after the war, was quite inadequate. Yes, there were the Nuremberg Trials, but both Allies and Germans were interested in quickly getting back to some kind of "normal" and rebuilding the country - the US and the Soviets in particular in preparation for the imminent conflict between them. So a lot of Nazi personnel stayed in office.

I believe, support of Israel in that time was seen as a sort of reparation that conveniently made it unnecessary to engage with the Nazi past on a deeper level. (I did wonder when learning more about the conflict recently, why the Allies didn't designate some are inside former Germany as a Jewish state - let's say the Rhineland. That would have been entirely justified IMO. But of course the question of Israel was already settled at that time.)

There was a sort of "second stage" a generation later, during the Civil Rights movement, where students forced a revisit of the Nazi past. I believe, a lot of the currently known details of the Holocaust are coming from that phase. But I think they didn't say a lot about Israel and just saw it as an emancipatory, left-wing project.

Today, people here are enormously proud that Jewish communities exist again in Germany, though it's understood that it's still a lot less than before the war.

It would be an interesting question how the sentiment of German leadership towards Jews was in the 50s and 60s.

In case you are interested in the bigger picture, the camps were called Displaced Person camps in English. Most had closed by 1952, with the last one in Germany closing in 1957.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_pos...

“Desperate and traumatised Jewish survivors refused to return to neighbours who had denounced or deported them; when some were returned to Poland anyway and met with pogroms and hatred, all prospect of Jewish repatriation evaporated. Following sharp criticism from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was caring for Jewish survivors, in December 1945 Truman opened up visas in excess of the usual quotas for some 23,000 DPs in the American zone, two-thirds of them Jewish, and from January 1946 UNRRA too recognised Jews as a national group, to be housed apart from other refugees. In this case (and no other), the Soviets and Americans were on the same page, agreeing that refuge outside Europe must be found, ideally in Palestine. The British, having learned how strongly Palestine’s Arab population would resist this project, objected until, in 1948, they surrendered their mandate, leaving – as one departing official put it – the key under the mat. Of some 230,000 registered Jewish DPs, just over 130,000 would settle in the new state of Israel and about 65,000 in the United States.”

From a recent review in the LRB of a book (Lost Souls) about those camps and their inhabitants. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n10/susan-pedersen/owner...

Europeans were eager to see Jews gone, one way or another. “Pogroms and hatred” sounds pretty violent.

I think that part of history is largely forgotten. I don't think a lot of Europeans have much self-interest in mind when picking a side in this conflict today.

Well it's in their self interest to deny any culpability. That way older generations could say "Jews get out of Poland! Go back to Palestine!" And younger generations can say "Jews get out of Palestine! Go back to Poland!" Without acknowledging that taken together, these statements show they just don't want Jews to exist anywhere.

What if the Arab states stole property multiple times the size of Israel from Mizrahi Jews? Which they did.

The Arab states clearly owe Israelis more reparations than the other way around.

If a genocide survivor showed up on my doorstep with nowhere else to go, I hope that my reaction would be: Welcome fellow man. You must be desperate. How can I help.

Nope. It's basically forgotten. At least, I haven't heard anyone talking about it, either in my circles or in the media.