Eastern European Jews were fucking decimated in the Holocaust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Europe#/media/File:Holocaustdeathtoll%.pn
You might note that there’s a fair share of countries that have zero or extremely low death toll… please note that amongst them only the UK and Switzerland had a significant Jewish community (0.5% or more of the total population).
Anyways, you are right that European Jews that actually lived through or fled the actual Holocaust never represented the majority of Jewish Israeli citizens. However they have still made up a significant part of Israeli population.
Israel had 700k Jewish citizens in 1948. Maybe a third of those had fled Germany and Poland in the thirties and forties. 300k Jews from countries affected by the Holocaust immigrated between 1948 and 1951… more or less the same number of Jews that emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East in that same period.
And there has been a lot of mingling between the different Jewish people inside Israel. I don’t think it’s the case but I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority, if small, of Jews inside Israel today have some ancestors or relatives who died in the Holocaust. Two thirds of European prewar Jewish population were murdered in the Holocaust.
It should be noted that Zionism indeed predates the Holocaust. Early adopters of Zionist ideology had largely emigrated to British Palestine before the Holocaust or its onset. They and their descendants have and continue to constitute a large part of the Israeli establishment (ie Netanyahu). Like you say, a lot of them would still have faced intense persecution in Europe before they emigrated, and a lot of them might also have some family or friends that stayed behind and died in the Holocaust. Let’s also note that, at the time, Zionist leaders have shown extreme cynicism if not disdain towards the ongoing Holocaust and the surviving Jewish population (see Tom Segev’s “the Seventh Million”)
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