What the Führer and the grand mufti decided on that autumn day does not loom large in the popular imagination, but it should, for the story of what might have been had Hitler’s armies reached the Holy Land is a lesson to posterity that history is, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a “close-run thing.” Last week marked the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Midway; in May we commemorated the 59th anniversary of the state of Israel, and every year we set aside a day to remember the victims of the Holocaust. There is a line that intimately connects these events.

After Pearl Harbor, Germany and its allies declared war against the United States. But there was no immediate military engagement between Germany and America. Nevertheless, President Franklin Roosevelt, who believed an industrial Europe under German control was a far greater threat than Japan, saw Germany as the enemy that had to be defeated first.

It was not a popular decision. The public initially believed that FDR was focusing on the wrong foe. But the Battle of Midway, June 3 to 5, 1942, gave Roosevelt some breathing room. The victory there gave him new confidence—a confidence without which he might have been more reluctant to react the way he did in a meeting with Winston Churchill a few weeks after the battle.

The session unfolded this way: one morning in the White House, FDR was given a note that he read and then handed to Churchill. Its grim message: the British had just surrendered to Gen. Erwin Rommel of the German Afrika Corps at Tobruk. Twenty-five thousand men were taken prisoner along with many tanks and artillery.

If Rommel were to follow up on this victory and continue the sweep eastward across North Africa, nothing would stop him from reaching the Suez Canal and then turning north to the British and French mandates that comprised Iraq, Syria and Palestine. “What can we do to help?” Roosevelt asked Churchill. Give us as many Sherman tanks as you can spare, Churchill replied, and ship them to the British forces in North Africa.

In an unpublished manuscript, Robert P. Patterson, under secretary of War for procurement, noted that with Rommel’s having driven the remnant British force to just 75 miles from Alexandria, it was “now a battle of supply, with the Axis enjoying far shorter lines from Italy.” At FDR’s direction, 300 Sherman tanks were taken from the production line and redesigned for desert warfare. These, along with 100 self-propelled guns, were then sent to Suez.

The 300 Sherman tanks and artillery hurriedly sent by the United States proved critical to the British victory over Rommel at El Alamein in November 1942. It was a victory with epic ramifications. Had Rommel not been defeated, he would have encountered little opposition between El Alamein and the mandated areas of western Asia. Once occupied by the German military, Iraq, Syria and Palestine would have been fertile ground for the implementation of the Berlin agreement reached by Hitler and the grand mufti in November 1941. A documentary recently broadcast by the respected German television station ZDF reveals that in July 1942, just after Tobruk, an SS killing squad, headed by the notorious Walter Rauff, designer of the mobile gas van used to kill countless thousands of Jews, was created to operate just behind Rommel’s front line—similar to the murderous Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe—for the express purpose of killing Jews in occupied territory. While the Allies, with their vastly superior industrial power, would most likely have defeated Germany in the end, it would have taken longer and postwar Europe would have looked very different.

But not just Europe. The historian Gerhard Weinberg has pointed out that it would have been impossible to establish a state of Israel in a place where there were no Jews. Who would have fought the 1948 war if there were no local Jewish population?

The anniversary of Midway passed with little notice. But we believe that without the victory at Midway and Roosevelt’s politically courageous decision to reinforce the British shortly thereafter, we would be living in a radically different world. Close run, indeed.