If it's Possible to Create the If-Statement from Simpler Primitives
Contrary to what you (and many people) may think, in the field of programming languages, the most primitive control-flow operation is actually pattern matching!

With a simple type system (say the simply-typed lambda calculus) plus unit types and sum types, you can encode the boolean type easily. Let $\mathbf{1}$ be the unit type. The boolean type is simply $\mathbf{1} + \mathbf{1}$, i.e. the sum of two unit types (because each variation has exactly one inhabitant, respectively "true" and "false").

Now, when we get a sum type, we can destruct it by pattern matching. That is, for each branch of the sum type, we return a different expression. This is the most basic control-flow operation! The expression if b then et else ef is simply sugar for:

match b with
| left -&gt; et
| right -&gt; ef


Interesting, isn't it?

Of course, this is not how machines work, but from a lambda-calculus/type theory standpoint, pattern matching is the father of all conditional execution!