Israel, the Holocaust and the the Hysteria over the Polish Law - by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen

The essence of Zionism as a national liberation movement is the Jewish People’s return to history as a sovereign actor – a nation among the nations. Insofar as the Holocaust is not the justification for its sovereign existence, Israel’s response to the Polish law forbidding Poles from being accused of involvement in Nazi crimes must take into account pragmatic considerations in the changing political arena.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 785..
03 April '18..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/polish-holocaust-law/

The intensity of the reactions in Israel to the “Polish death camps law,” which forbids accusing the Polish people of any sort of involvement in Nazi crimes, exposed a sensitive nerve in Israel’s collective identity. The memory of the Holocaust is, of course, common to the country’s Jewish citizens, but on this issue the reactions from the left side of the map were more vociferous. It was claimed inter alia that because the Holocaust constituted the justification for Israel’s existence, the Polish law requires a particularly harsh reaction.

This assertion, however, couldn’t be further from the truth. While the Holocaust was undoubtedly a traumatic and pivotal event in Jewish history, it was not, and cannot be, the justification for the existence of the state of Israel.

“What was the word Holocaust two years before the Holocaust?” asked the poet Meir Wieseltier. The longing for Zion, in contrast, existed long before the founding of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century. As Theodore Herzl stated in his closing address to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1903: “I want to state now in the language of our ancestors an ancient consolation that for me is also a commitment: If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.”

In practice, however, when it comes to state ceremonies for official foreign guests, the required visit to Yad Vashem creates the (wrong) impression that the state of Israel was born from the Holocaust. The IDF gives the Holocaust a similarly prominent emphasis, something I experienced firsthand while attending a dinner for a delegation of American generals a few years ago. The Israeli general who hosted the event told his guests that “tomorrow you will visit Yad Vashem and understand the story of the state of Israel.” I challenged his assertion, saying that if the Zionist story was only about finding a safe haven for persecuted Jews, then Brooklyn offered a no less adequate alternative than the Land of Israel. Indeed, absent the Jewish People’s millenarian attachment to its ancestral homeland – as Zionism’s founding fathers explained decades before the Holocaust, and as the League of Nations observed in its 1922 decision to give Britain the mandate to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine – there is no justification for the existence of the state of Israel.

Crazy like a fox by Caroline Glick

...No, the Holocaust was not Husseini’s idea. But he was a partner in perpetrating and promoting it. He also made it inevitable.

Caroline Glick..
Column One..
22 October '15..

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is crazy like a fox.

Netanyahu’s assertion on Tuesday before the World Zionist Congress that the founder of the Palestinian people, Haj Amin al-Husseini, convinced Adolf Hitler to eradicate rather than expel the Jews of Europe was an overstatement of Husseini’s role.

No, the Holocaust was not Husseini’s idea.

But he was a partner in perpetrating and promoting it. He also made it inevitable.

As I detailed in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, during the course of Husseini’s meeting with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, Hitler told the Arab leader of his plan to eradicate European Jewry.

Husseini told Hitler that he would support the Nazis, and rally the Arab world to their side, if Hitler agreed to two conditions: that Hitler support his bid to rule over a postwar Arab state comprised of present-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel; and that Hitler support the genocide of Middle Eastern Jewry.

As both the official Nazi record and Husseini’s summary of the meeting in his diary report, Hitler accepted Husseini’s demands.

And it makes sense that he did.

Husseini proved his loyalty to the Nazis long before he arrived in Berlin. His romance with them began with Hitler’s election victory in 1933. From then on, Husseini’s followers in Mandatory Palestine greeted one another with the Nazi salute. Swastikas festooned their towns. The Nazis began directly funding Husseini’s terror war against the Jews of Israel and British Mandatory officials in 1937.

In 1937, the British forced Husseini to flee the country. In 1941, he organized and incited a pro-Nazi military coup in Iraq. The British were forced to invade Iraq in response to the coup.

Husseini then fled to Rome where he met with Mussolini and went on the Berlin, where he remained for the duration of the war.

As the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini invented and shaped the Palestinian national ethos in a manner that aligned with his pathological hatred of the Jews. Rather than providing the Palestinian Arabs with a positive vision of a future state that would safeguard and cultivate them as a distinct Arab nation, he shaped Palestinian society as a wholly negative phenomenon. It was seeded in a hybrid hatred of Jews that fused Koranic hostility to Jews with racism-based annihilationist European anti-Semitism rooted in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Husseini translated and published in Arabic.

The goal of Husseini’s nationalist drive was not to form a Palestinian Arab state, but to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state and to annihilate all aspects of the Jewish national liberation movement through a campaign a terror and political warfare.

Husseini’s goal of leading an Arab state that encompassed Iraq and the entire Levant shows that the founding father of the Palestinian national project did not view “Palestine” as a distinct territorial entity.

After Hitler agreed to both of Husseini’s conditions, Husseini began his active collaboration in the Nazi war effort. He participated in the Holocaust directly. In 1943, he formed the SS Handschar Division comprised of Bosnian Muslims. His troops exterminated 90 percent of Bosnia’s 14,000-member Jewish community.

Husseini used his position as well to scuttle British attempts to trade German prisoners of war for Jews. In one such documented episode, in 1943 Husseini appealed to SS commander Heinrich Himmler to cancel a deal to exchange 4,500 Jewish children and 500 Jewish adults from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to cancel the deal and send the Jews to Auschwitz.

Himmler bowed to his appeal. The Jews were sent to the gas chambers.

Husseini contributed to the Holocaust indirectly.

Beginning shortly after his meeting with Hitler and extending through the end of the war, Husseini broadcast regular programs to the Arab world on Nazi short wave radio in Arabic. In those broadcasts he engendered support for the Nazis and the extermination of world Jewry. Using the mix of Islamic Jew-hatred and European annihilationist anti-Semitism he had developed in Jerusalem, Husseini cultivated a culture of support for the annihilation of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish (then nascent) state in the Land of Israel. That culture, bred through those broadcasts heard regularly by millions throughout the entire Arab world, still holds today.

Husseini was indicted as a war criminal in Nuremberg. Rather than try him, the allies allowed him to flee to Egypt in 1946. There he was greeted as a war hero by King Farouk.

It is true that Hitler didn’t need Husseini to convince him to annihilate European Jewry. By the time Husseini arrived in Germany, the Nazis had already murdered a million Jews.

But Netanyahu’s claim that Husseini made it impossible for Hitler to suffice with expelling the Jews from Europe is true. The only place that wanted the Jews of Europe was the nascent Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

Death trucks on European highways and the recalling of the “original truck people”

...Of course, one mustn’t confuse botched human trafficking with planned genocide. But part of what is so shocking about the Austrian truck tragedy is the earlier precedent of men, women, and children packed into trucks and asphyxiated to death in the heart of Europe. If the horror on the Austrian motorway should evoke anyone’s fate, it is that of six million exterminated Jews, not five million living Palestinians. To anyone who knows history, death trucks on European highways recall why the “original truck people,” the Jews, needed the refuge finally secured by the creation of Israel

Dr. Martin Kramer..
Commentary Magazine..
31 August '15..

Austrian authorities on Thursday discovered an abandoned truck on a highway near the Hungarian border, packed with the decomposed bodies of 71 dead migrants, including four children. While migrants have perished at sea in the multitudes, this tragedy has put Europe on notice: The horrors from which the migrants flee, and that regularly play themselves out in the middle of the Mediterranean, will soon become commonplace in the heart of the continent unless something changes.

Now how addled and obsessed must one be to use this event as a stick to beat Israel? About as addled and obsessed as Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan and popular blogger on the edge of the left. See as evidence this post: “Austrian Truck Tragedy echoes Palestinian Story, reminding us of 7 million still stateless [Palestinians].”

What is that Palestinian story? It is a 1962 novella by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani entitled Men in the Sun. The allegorical storyline is about three Palestinians who flee the misery of Lebanon’s refugee camps to Iraq, in the hope of reaching the Xanadu of Kuwait. They are smuggled across the desert from Basra in the empty barrel of a water tanker truck. But because of a delay at the Kuwaiti border, the three suffocate to death. (The novella was made into a film in 1972.)

I won’t make an issue of the “seven million still stateless” Palestinians. (The upper-end estimate is closer to five million.) And far be it from me to quibble with anyone’s free associations. But Cole tops off his with this statement, which purports to be historical: the Palestinians’ “home has been stolen from them by the Israelis and they were unceremoniously dumped on the neighbors or in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip. They are stateless. They are the original truck people.” (My emphasis.)

This concluding dramatic flourish, identifying the Palestinians as “the original truck people,” jolted me. The first people made stateless, dispossessed, stripped of their humanity, and packed into sealed trucks where they died horribly, all in the very heart of Europe, were many thousands of Jewish victims of the Nazi extermination machine.

As anyone who has read even one history of the Holocaust knows, before there were gas chambers there were mobile gas vans. These were airtight trucks that could be packed with as many as sixty persons, who would be killed by cycling the carbon monoxide exhaust back into the cargo area. Himmler ordered the invention of the method to spare the Germans in SS killing squads the damaging psychological effects of shooting thousands of victims, one at a time. The trucks were deployed primarily to kill Jews, who were loaded into them without separation by gender or age. I will spare readers the horrific testimonies of the operators of these trucks, and the documentary evidence of how technicians worked to perfect them. I’ll only quote this argument, made by a technician, for keeping the cargo area lit:

Victory Day - A Jewish Perspective

...Ultimately, the Second World War erupted because Western democracies did not have the will to confront Germany even as they had the power to do so. The Jewish people became one of the main victims of this unfolding tragedy. Winston Churchill had much sympathy and admiration for the Jews, and the war against Hitler would never have been won without him. But he lost the 1945 election at the height of his glory. The new Labor government of Clement Attlee did all it could to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, even as the horrors of the Holocaust were being revealed and as Jewish survivors were trying to reach the Promised Land. Today, Jews are no longer at the mercy of world powers, but Israel’s fate is influenced by international politics, as it always will be. There is still a price to be paid for the cowardice and blindness of others, but sovereignty and power make that price affordable.

Dr. Emmanuel Navon..
i24 News..
06 May '15..

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the capitulation of Nazi Germany. Such a historical date provides an opportunity to ponder the past and to contemplate the future. “Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!” proclaimed Winston Churchill, the ultimate hero of the war, on the 7th of May 1945. Back in January 1942, Churchill declared in front of the US Congress: “If we had kept together after the last war, if we had taken common measures for our safety, this renewal of the curse would never have fallen upon us. Do we not owe it to ourselves, to our children, to all of mankind, to make sure that these catastrophes do not engulf us for a third time?”

Seventy years later, can we confidently say that the renewal of the curse will never fall upon us? The victors of 1945 are nearly as divided today as they were after the surrender of their common foe. The leaders of America, Britain and France will pointedly be absent from Russia’s victory celebrations on May 9. Russia and the West are at odds over Ukraine and Iran, and Russia’s celebrations will turn into a show of might and defiance. Britain has become a marginal international player, France is struggling with economic paralysis, and America is wary of military confrontation.

Critics of the emerging agreement over Iran’s nuclear program often compare it to the 1938 Munich accords. The 1925 Locarno Treaties are probably more accurate an analogy. In those treaties, Britain and France agreed to “reintegrate” Germany into the international community in exchange for a German commitment to stop challenging the borders imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. In truth, however, Germany was only asked to recognize its western borders but not its eastern ones. As Polish diplomat Józef Beck declared at the time: “Germany was officially asked to attack the east, in return for peace in the west.”

(Video) Caroline Glick on the Holocaust: Competing Visions of 'Never Again'

CarolineGlick.com..
17 April '15..

(Caroline Glick Update)  I gave the speech below four years ago before Young Israel in Hillcrest, Queens. I posted it on my Facebook page this week ahead of Yom Hashaoah and a viewer reposted it with Hebrew subtitles yesterday. Amazingly, it went viral within moments and several hours later had received more than 50,000 views. Given the level of interest the speech generated in Israel, I have decided to post it here as well.



May we never be helpless again.

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPdqzFK6-KQ

CarolineGlick.com

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
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Abbas, Holocaust Commemoration and the embrace of those who shed Jewish blood in our own time

...But courtesies about the events of the 1940s do not outweigh efforts to deny legitimacy to Jewish rights let alone justify the embrace of those who shed Jewish blood in our own time. If Holocaust commemoration has evolved to a point where these factors are unimportant, then perhaps it is time for those of us who have worked so hard to make it part of the fabric of Western culture to rethink the impact of what we have accomplished.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
27 April '14..

Today Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas did as many peace process proponents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have been imploring him to do. He condemned the Holocaust in terms that are entirely appropriate, saying the Shoah was “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” and expressing sympathy for the victims. If, as we are informed by the New York Times, this statement is published in the Palestinian media in Arabic in the same phrasing as in the English version for Israelis and the international media, that is progress of a sort, especially coming as it does from the lips of a man who wrote a doctoral thesis centered on the theme that the Holocaust was a “Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed.”

The timing of the statement was meant to coincide with the beginning tonight of Yom HaShoah—the day set by the State of Israel and the international Jewish community for Holocaust remembrance. Yet coming as it did only days after Abbas signed a unity agreement with the Hamas terrorist movement that is committed in its charter to not only the destruction of Israel but to the slaughter of its Jewish population, it is hard to view this statement as purely an expression of the evolution of Abbas’s views about the Holocaust. The man who only one day earlier restated his pledge to “never” recognize Israel as a Jewish state—a pledge that would signal that the Palestinians were truly prepared to end their century long war on Zionism—it is easy to understand the less than enthusiastic reaction to Abbas’s words from Israel’s government. But far from being greeted with the cynicism that Abbas might have expected, it was instead Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who appears to have come out the loser in the exchange with pundits. Abbas’s apologists are lauding the Palestinian for his “outreach” campaign—the Holocaust statement was procured by celebrity interfaith proponent Rabbi Marc Schneir—and blasting Netanyahu for a petty rejection of the Palestinian gesture. Abbas’s words, welcome as they might be, were a clever tactical move and in the viewpoint of much of the international press seemed to outweigh any negative feedback about the Hamas deal.

But this contretemps illustrates something more significant than the success of the Palestinians in distracting the world from what was, in effect, their fourth rejection of an Israeli peace offer, including independence and statehood, in the last 15 years. If the world thinks Abbas’s nice words about the Holocaust are more important than his pact with Hamas or even his personal embrace of the terrorist murderers who shed Jewish blood, then perhaps it is time to start worrying about a trend that appears to elevate Holocaust commemoration over and above any concern for Jews currently alive.

Does Remembering the Holocaust Have Meaning?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
08 April '13..

In Jewish communities around the world as well as in city halls, state houses and in Washington, people will gather today to remember the Holocaust, as is the custom on Yom HaShoah. This Holocaust Remembrance Day will produce vast amounts of rhetoric urging us to not let the six million victims of the Nazis and their collaborators be forgotten. There will be calls, as there are every year, for vigilance against hatred and intolerance of all kinds seeking to extract a universal message from this specific tragedy. All of this will be well intentioned and much of it will be both heartfelt and appropriate. But the terrible question hanging over all these proceedings remains the same one that should nag at the hearts and the consciences of many of those assembled every year. It is whether the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance in the last generation has accomplished much other than reinforcing the anodyne conclusion that the Nazis were terrible and that the sufferings of their victims was awful.

To pose this query is not to question the magnitude of the achievement of a generation of survivors, scholars and activists who have worked hard for the past few decades to create museums, programs and a vast body of literature that ought to ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten. As a result of their efforts, there is little chance that the Shoah will become a mere footnote to World War II or that it will be submerged in the vacuous collective memory of the world as just one more instance of inhumanity. But we need to place that achievement in perspective. In the past two decades there have not only been numerous instances of other genocidal atrocities, be it in Bosnia, Rwanda or Darfur, but an alarming rise of anti-Semitism in the world. There is a need for us to ask just how much the world has learned from the Holocaust, or whether it has learned anything at all. Even more to the point, with threats of genocide being uttered by the leaders of Iran in just the last month against Israel and with a growth in the number of those willing to join or justify hateful campaigns aimed at destroying the Jewish state, understanding the lessons of history now requires a lot more than the lip service that will be paid to the Holocaust today.

It needs to be stated in as succinct a manner as possible that an ocean of tears cried today or any other day about what happened from 1933 to 1945 will not save a single soul from a similar fate if all we’re willing to do is to talk about the past. Historical remembrance is intrinsically worthwhile. But if we are to give any real meaning to our attempts to embed these events in the consciousness of the world, it cannot be done outside of the context of the ongoing campaign to continue a murderous assault on the Jewish people.

The only way to ensure that “Never Again” will mean never again.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
First published 02 May '11..


In the end, the Holocaust raged until the Allied powers won the war. It didn’t have to be that way. If the Jews had been permitted to leave Europe, the Holocaust could have been averted. But the only place that wanted us wasn’t allowed to take us. The nations of the world closed their gates. Only the Jews in the Land of Israel wanted the Jews of Europe. But the British barred their arrival.

Britain was required by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine to facilitate Jewish immigration to the Jewish national homeland in order to advance the cause of Jewish sovereignty. But legal obligations couldn’t compete with Britain’s belief that its national interests lay with the Arabs. So from 1939 on, the British closed the doors of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. In so doing, they effectively sealed the fate of six million Jews.

Both the US and Britain were aware of what the Nazis were up to almost from the beginning, but refused to take any effective action to save the Jews. They refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, or the crematoria at the death camp. They refused to bomb Auschwitz even though Allied pilots were sent on bombing missions five miles away. Likewise, they refused to bomb any of the scores of death camps dotting the landscape of Nazi-occupied Europe.

There were two main reasons that the Allies behaved as they did. First, they were none too fond of Jews. It is not that the Americans or British supported their annihilation, but they weren’t bothered by it sufficiently to do anything to stop it.

Anti-Semitism is not the main reason the Allies did nothing. The main reason was because, love us or hate us, the allies couldn’t figure out why they should care. Dead or alive, Jews weren’t a part of their war plans.

For Britain, the goal of the war was to survive.

For the Americans it was to defend the cause of freedom and pave the way for America’s emergence as leader of the free world. Jewish survival was not considered relevant to achieving these goals, so the Allies stood by as the ghettos were liquidated and the gas chambers began operating at full capacity.

AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.

These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Illustrating the Link

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
27 January '13..

The Commentator draws our attention today to the fact that Britain’s Sunday Times celebrated the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—the date that is observed outside of Israel and the United States as Holocaust Memorial Day—by publishing a cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a hook-nosed thug cementing helpless Arab victims into a wall whose bricks are lined with blood rather than mortar. This is an apt reminder of just how low Europe’s intellectual elites have sunk and how deep the taint of anti-Semitism is baked into the political culture of the West these days. As the Commentator’s Raheem Kassam points out, in Britain as in many other places, the Holocaust is not a historical lesson of the product of 2,000 years of anti-Semitism and Jewish powerlessness as it is an excuse to depict Israel as a Nazi-like entity.

The cartoon will be defended as fair comment about Israel’s security fence that the Palestinians and their foreign cheerleaders depict as a war crime. That this strictly defensive measure was made necessary by the Palestinians’ campaign of suicide bombings that cost the lives of a thousand Jews in the last decade goes unmentioned. The willingness of Israel-bashers to appropriate the Holocaust to promote a new generation of anti-Semitic imagery is rooted in a worldview in which the actions of the Palestinians, or their consistent refusal to make peace, are irrelevant. If even a fence to keep out suicide bombers can be seen as criminal then it is obvious that no terrorist outrage or act of hateful incitement (such as the Egyptian president’s belief that Israelis are the “descendants of apes and pigs”) is worthy of censure so long as Israelis are standing up for themselves and refusing to be slaughtered as the Jews of Europe were 70 years ago.

President Obama, Judaism, and the Holocaust

Elliott Abrams..
Pressure Points..
25 September '12..






In June 2009, President Obama addressed the Muslim world in a speech in Cairo. About Israel, he said this:

America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.

At the time, there were objections from Israelis and from many Jews in the United States that he appeared to believe Israel was the product of the Holocaust, period. The “tragic history” to which he referred appeared to be not two millennia of anti-Semitism but the Holocaust alone, and he seemed to ignore two millenia of Jewish longing for a return to Jerusalem.

Elder Responds: Zionism - The movement for self-determination of the Jewish people

LOTL..
10 July '12..






From the "Report of the Working Group on Israeli/Palestine Policy." (United Church of Canada):

4.1 Israel came into existence following recognition of the horrors of the Holocaust. There was wide support throughout the world for the creation of a Jewish homeland.

While many of the assumptions of this working group are problematic in and of themselves, Elder of Ziyon has taken the time to focus on this one particularly egregious supposition, with a short but powerful essay in response.

Elder of Ziyon: 

The implication is that Israel's history begins in 1947.

My response:

Zionism is the movement for self-determination of the Jewish people.

That Jews are a people is beyond dispute. Jews have been considered a nation by the Jewish people themselves as well as by all of the other nations, whether those nations were friendly or not, since before the days of King David. In 1 Chronicles 17 the Bible itself asks rhetorically of G-d, "Who is like Your people Israel, a unique nation in the world?"

Even before the term Zionism was coined, Jews have been returning to their ancestral lands in the Land of Israel for many centuries. Sometimes individually, often in groups, Jews have risked their lives to return to their Land. Many of them, particularly the communities of Jerusalem and Hebron, essentially never left.

This return to Zion accelerated in the mid-18th century as Jews became more organized in their nationalism. Many Christians supported this movement as well, decades before Theodor Herzl or the First Zionist Congress.

Fresnozionism - If I do not defend myself, who will defend me?

Fresnozionism.org..
02 June '12..

Even among events of some of the darkest days in recent history, this story stands out. Not so much because so many people stood by and did nothing — that’s happening today in Syria, and seems to happen every few months somewhere in the world — but because so many ‘enlightened’ nations actively cooperated in making it happen.

No one writes like Sarah Honig, and the following isn’t easy to read, even if you are familiar with the events described. But please read it to the end. Read the last sentence. Several times. (h/t: GR)

Lessons from the floating coffin
By Sarah Honig

February 24, 2012

Exactly 70 years ago – on February 24, 1942 – 19-year-old David Stoliar terrifyingly clung to bobbing debris in the Black Sea. At first he heard screams in the frigid waters but the voices died down. It eventually emerged that Stoliar was the sole survivor of the Struma, an un-seaworthy vessel chuck-full of frantic Jewish refugees.

World War II was already in fever pitch. Against the enormity of the then-unfolding Holocaust, the loss at sea of 768 Jewish lives (103 of them babies and children) was at most blithely overlooked as a marginal annotation.

Kuntzel - "Against those who want to destroy me, I must be strong."

What is the connection between Shoah-remembrance and Iran? An Interview with Holocaust survivor Fanny Englard

Matthias Küntzel..
05 April '12..


The likelihood that negotiations will persuade Iran to change its nuclear programme is slim and the probability of an Israeli military strike against Iran correspondingly high. What are the implications of this for Germany, which has both strong economic ties with Tehran and a special relationship with Israel?

As the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, referring explicitly to the Iranian nuclear programme, told the Israeli Parliament in March 2008, “Israel’s security is part of my country’s reason of state (…) Germany and Israel are and will remain, assuredly for ever, bound together in a particular way through the memory of the Shoah.”

But what does Shoah-remembrance have to do with the Iranian crisis? I discussed this question with my friend, Fanny Englard, who was born in Cologne in 1925 and, as a Holocaust survivor, belongs to the leadership of the Israeli organization, Perpetuation of Memory of the Holocaust.

On 6 December 1941, 16-year old Fanny Englard was deported from Hamburg to Riga and on 8 March 1945 liberated by the Red Army. Her father died in the Warsaw Ghetto, her mother and 10-year old brother, along with her grandmother, aunts and cousins, were gassed in Belzec and her brothers Leo and Isi, 15 and 13 respectively, were shot near Minsk.

“In 1947 I came to Israel and got married, in order to establish a new family as a replacement for the murdered one, which had fallen victim to Jew-hatred”, she told me in her apartment near Tel Aviv. “We did not survive and bring a new family into the world in order to sacrifice them once again to Jew-hatred. Jew-hatred compels us to engage in the struggle for a secure future for the new family.”

Q. In Germany, the attack on the Iranian nuclear installations advocated by some in the Israeli government would be considered an act of war.

It’s not a war, it’s a struggle for life. There’s a difference between waging a war and fighting to survive. What we are facing here is the Jew-hatred of Hitler’s Islamist heirs. Israeli actions against those who want to destroy us are not acts of war waged in order to kill others, but part of a struggle for life.

Q. Nonetheless, the Israeli military action in 2009 aimed at preventing the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel was strongly criticized.

Those who criticize our struggle for life are attacking us. When we are attacked and act in self-defence, we are not committing war crimes. We have sworn “never again” and Israel is responsible for our vow; it is shaped by our vow.

Medoff - Benzion Netanyahu’s eyewitness report on America’s response to the Holocaust.

Rafael Medoff..
Insights/JPost..
03 May '12..

Over the years, I had the opportunity to conduct a number of lengthy interviews with Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, who passed away early Monday, concerning his activities in the United States in the 1940s, when he was executive director of the American wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement.

The previously unpublished interview below took place in June 2009, as I was working on my book, Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel (coauthored with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling), which was published last month.

In your view, why were American Jewish leaders so cautious during the 1940s?

Part of the problem was how they saw themselves. In their contacts with president Roosevelt, Jewish leaders thought of themselves as weak or helpless. Take, for example, Rabbi Stephen Wise – leader of the American Zionist movement, the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress. He thought of himself as a servant of president Roosevelt.

He referred to Roosevelt as “chief,” and he really meant it that way – Roosevelt as was the chief, and Wise was the servant. Wise was happy to just follow along with whatever Roosevelt wanted. He was content as long as FDR just remembered his name or gave him a few minutes of his time every once in a while.

Sultan Knish - The Universalist Holocaust

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
22 April '12..

Everyone deals with trauma in different ways. Getting violently attacked on a street late at night. Watching a loved one murdered in front of your eyes. Feeling the fire on your skin as your home burns. It's not just the pain of the experience, it's realizing afterward how your world has changed and that your life will never be the same.

There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself. I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world.

The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories. Never Again and Teach Tolerance. And the two responses were segmented by population. Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora. There were many Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and many Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but for the most part the responses were structural. And yet the divide between Nationalists and Universalists also predated the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a transformative event, but only to a degree, the responses to it came out of earlier debates that had been going on for two generations. Before the Holocaust, the Czarist pogroms had led to the same fork in the road between a collective struggle for a better world and national self-defense. The current debates about Israel revisit an old argument that has been going on for well over a century.

Honig - The Struma: Lessons from the floating coffin

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
23 February '12..

Exactly 70 years ago – on February 24, 1942 – 19-year-old David Stoliar terrifyingly clung to bobbing debris in the Black Sea. At first he heard screams in the frigid waters but the voices died down. It eventually emerged that Stoliar was the sole survivor of the Struma, an un-seaworthy vessel chuck-full of frantic Jewish refugees.

World War II was already in fever pitch. Against the enormity of the then-unfolding Holocaust, the loss at sea of 768 Jewish lives (103 of them babies and children) was at most blithely overlooked as a marginal annotation.

Moreover, although these Jews fled the Nazis, in the pedantic literal sense they weren’t executed by Third Reich henchmen.

This atrocity was the coldblooded handiwork of Great Britain (committed while it combated the Germans but remarkably without compassion for their Jewish victims), supposedly neutral Turkey (whose so-called nonalignment didn’t extend to outcast Jewish refugees), by the Arabs (who were openly and unreservedly Nazism’s avid collaborators and who pressured London into denying endangered Jews asylum in the Jewish homeland) and, finally, by the Russians (who targeted the immobilized sardine can that carried Jews to whom nobody would allow a toehold on terra firma).

The entire world seemed united in signaling Jews how utterly unwanted they were anywhere.

Tobin - FDR Didn’t Try to Save Middle East Jews

Jonathan Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
12 October '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/10/12/fdr-middle-east-jews-holocaust/#more-770936


One of the staples of American Jewish history is the periodic surfacing of books or articles dedicated to reviving the tarnished reputation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The one-way love affair that characterized the relationship between FDR and Jews has never quite recovered from the publication of Arthur D. Morse’s seminal 1967 book, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, and it was pretty much destroyed by David S. Wyman’s more scholarly and equally important 1984 work ,The Abandonment of the Jews: American and the Holocaust 1941-1945. Both books and the subsequent scholarship they inspired constructed an ironclad case pointing to FDR’s indifference and the impact of his failure to act on the fate of European Jewry.

Yet that hasn’t stopped FDR’s defenders from sallying forth every now and then to restore a bit of the luster to his legacy with varying success. But as wrongheaded as some entries in this genre may be, you’d have to go far to find one as foolish and patently disingenuous as the piece that appeared in the most recent issue of the Forward by former Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau and New York University Law Professor Frank Tuerkheimer. They claim Roosevelt’s “Germany first” war policy saved the Jews of the Middle East. But the notion the fate of the Jews had even the tiniest impact on his decision is not only unproven; it is absurd.

It is true that had the United States decided to concentrate its forces for a counter-attack on Japan in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor that may well have prolonged the war in Europe. It is also conceivable though not likely such a decision would have led to a complete British collapse in North Africa. If that had happened, it might have led, as Morgenthau and Tuerkheimer assert, to the fulfillment of the dreams of Haj Amin Husseini, Germany’s Palestinian Arab ally, who wished to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Had Germany held North Africa longer, it might also have led to the complete destruction of the Jewish communities of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

Fresnozionism - The failure of the liberal Jewish establishment, then and now

400 mostly Orthodox rabbis
march to the White House on
 October 6, 1943. Roosevelt avoided
meeting with them.

Fresnozionism.org
07 August '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/08/the-failure-of-the-liberal-jewish-establishment-then-and-now/

It’s well-known that the Roosevelt Administration did little to help European Jews during the Holocaust. Unfortunately, part of the blame falls on American Jewry, which was sharply divided about how to respond — a fact which caused good men in the government to hesitate, while it gave antisemites an excuse to resist.

The NY Times has published a piece by Isabel Kershner that may bring more attention to the shameful stupidity of the Jewish establishment during that period:

The Bergson group formed in 1940 when about 10 young Jews from Palestine and Europe came to the United States to open a fund-raising and propaganda operation for the Irgun, the right-wing Zionist militia. The group was organized by Hillel Kook, a charismatic Irgun leader who adopted the pseudonym Peter H. Bergson. [Samuel] Merlin was his right-hand man.

The group began by raising money for illegal Jewish immigration to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and promoting the idea of an army composed of stateless and Palestinian Jews. But the mission abruptly changed in November 1942 after reports of the Nazi annihilation of two million European Jews emerged. Like earlier reports of the mass killing of Jews, the news barely made the inside pages of major American newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Bergsonites were appalled by what they saw as the indifference of the Roosevelt administration and the passivity of the Jewish establishment, which staunchly supported the administration and largely accepted its argument that the primary American military objective was to win the war, not to save European Jews. The group embarked on a provocative campaign to publicize the genocide and to lobby Congress to support the rescue of Jews, roaming the hallways of Capitol Hill and knocking on doors, displaying a degree of chutzpah that made the traditional, pro-Roosevelt Jewish establishment uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable?

The establishment, led by Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, fought Kook’s group tooth and nail. Writer Ben Hecht, recruited by Kook to stage a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden in March 1943 (“We will never die”) to raise awareness and embarrass the government into action, described one encounter:

Rennert: Washington Post Enlists Holocaust Against Israel

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
29 May '11

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/05/washington_post_enlists_holoca.html

In an earlier incarnation, Scott Wilson worked for several years as the Washington Post's Jerusalem correspondent. So you would think that he learned something about the ancient historical, political, national, and cultural ties of Jews to the Holy Land.

But you would be wrong.

In the Post's May 28 edition, Wilson, currently the paper's White House correspondent, writes as follows in the lead paragraph of his article about the arrival of President Obama in Poland:

WARSAW--Within hours of arriving Friday in this once-occupied capital, President Obama encountered the enduring emotion surrounding the state of Israel, founded as a sanctuary from the virulent anti-Semitism that wiped out much of Poland's Jewish population during World War II. ("Obama visits monument to Warsaw Ghetto uprising" page A10).

In one stroke of the pen, Wilson thus wipes out 4,000 years of Jewish national and territorial attachments to this land. According to Wilson, Israel is merely a recent sanctuary for Jews persecuted elsewhere. This is the same distortion of history that Obama promulgated in his 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world when he erroneously connected Israel's existence to 'the aspiration for a Jewish homeland rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied -- anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.

Of course, this also happens to be what Iranian President Ahmadinejad and countless other Israeli enemies preach -- that Israel is a latter-day colonial implant in the Holy Land because Jews suffered elsewhere and then were sent to Palestine to displace a more indigenous population -- the Palestinians. Why should Palestinians have to suffer for sins committed against Jews by Europeans?

So, let's examine exactly why Wilson offends real history when he writes that Israel was "founded as a sanctuary from virulent anti-Semitism" -- i.e. a protectorate against another Holocaust.

Jewish ties and claims to the land -- i.e. Zionism -- don't have their roots in the Holocaust but date back some four millennia when, according to the Bible in Genesis, Chapter 12," "the Lord said unto Abram: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation."

Here's the real genesis of Zionism through the ages. Israel's first claim to the "land" and to a "nation" in this land.

But if you're not religiously inclined, there are many other historical markers with ample secular evidence. More than 3,000 years ago, King David established Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish people and the Jewish nation. His son, King Solomon, built the first Jewish Temple atop Temple Mount. For more than a millennium, with only a 50-year hiatus of exile in Babylon -- Jewish monarchs reigned in the Holy Land. There were as many Jewish monarchs in that time span as there have been U.S. presidents.

Even after the Roman conquest and the dispersal of Jews to other places, there was a continuous Jewish presence in the land right up to and until modern times. By the thousands and tens of thousands Jews populated the land over the last 2,000 years and established dozens of vibrant Jewish communities. And while no other people established Jerusalem as their capital, Jews the world over continued to cling to it and to pray to it.

In modern times, Jewish claims to nationhood got a huge boost from the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with British Foreign Secretary James Balfour declaring that "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." A "national" home, mind you, not just a homeland without Jewish sovereignty.

The Balfour Declaration subsequently was embraced and endorsed by the Allied victors after World I at the San Remo conference, by the League of Nations when it granted Britain an interim mandate in Palestine, and by the U.S. Congress.

When some Holocaust survivors arrived in Palestine, they were greeted by a long-standing, fully organized Jewish community set to declare Jewish resumption of sovereign nationhood.

Jews happen to be the most indigenous people in this land, with political rights, claims, and actual sovereign rule than any other people. They are not the British in India or the French in Algeria.

If one attributes and ties Israel's founding to merely a post-Holocaust adjunct to provide sanctuary to persecuted Jews, any other place would have sufficed and, in fact, several geographic alternatives (Uganda among others) were floated in the last couple of centuries.

But Israel, of course, is not just a sanctuary born from the ashes of the Holocaust, as Wilson would have it. It has a 4,000-year-old pedigree -- with a deeper and longer history than anyone else in the Holy Land.

For a former Jerusalem correspondent to perpetuate this colossal canard is a blot on the Post's credibility.

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The Lesson of the Holocaust - A Strong Israel!

Avi Abelow
Israel Straight Talk
IST #54
01 May '11

Never again! Never again should any people be persecuted and massacred, Thankfully, the Jewish People today rule themselves in their own country, with their own army, so as not to ever let that happen. Regardless of one's position on Israel and the peace process, everyone must be honest with him/herself and understand that Israel lives in a hostile neighborhood with many neighbors who are fighting its legitimacy to exist. Therefore, Israel must be strong and Israel must be able to protect itself.



Israel is a beacon to the world and on the forefront of the world's war against radical Islam, even though many in the world don't appreciate it. Regardless, Israel will do what is necessary so "Never Again" is not just rhetoric. All questions and comments are welcome on http://www.facebook.com/israelstraighttalk

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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