You keep putting it aside all the time, and I have to put it back again and again. Why do you want the Holocaust to explain a string of terror attacks that started before the Holocaust? And by the way, why do you want to make all Holocaust-surviving Jews complicit in Irgun's philosophy? (For your information, not all Holocaust survivors were even Zionists, while revisionists were a minority among them.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Why do you want the Holocaust to explain a string of terror attacks that started before the Holocaust?
and of course not all Holocaust survivors were Zionists,,,,,they were people trying to recover, and find someway to live their lives. What would you have had them do?
There was massive displacement of Poles, Czechs and others during WWII, and their contribution to slave labour and concentration camp statistics is far from negligible.
And yet - none of them used this as an excuse for terrorism after the war. For the most part they integrated successfully into communities in the UK, Canada and the US.
Don't forget too that there have been many examples of tribes or nations reinventing themselves after a move to new territory.
Why is the Middle Eastern types (and it doesn't seem to be exclusively a Jewish problem) who believe that that godforsaken stretch of near desert on the edge of the Mediterranean is the most?
What you don't understand is that there are always choices and options. The creation of Israel was a choice, not a necessity, and certainly not an inevitable outcome of the Holocaust.
Levelling Beirut and using banned phosphorus weapons on civilians is also a choice. Or do you think the Holocaust explains that as well?
Slavs? Ummm... no. Extreme brutality, gratuitous slaughter, mass slavery - but not extermination. He might have gotten around to it eventually but it never actually happened. And Czechs are a really poor example - as Nazi occupations go that one was pretty mild - comparable to France rather than the stuff that occurred in occupied Poland and USSR.
The Roma got the same treatment as the Jews but he wasn't equally into the idea. One was a centerpiece of Nazi ideology the other a throw in. Not that it made any difference to the Roma.
I haven't heard of any terrorism by Jews in US or Canada or the UK either, like the local Slav communities they lobbied and integrated. But at home it was a different story. The Poles and their neighbours indulged in plenty of atrocities against each other while the Germans who had the bad luck to find themselves within what became the Communist Bloc were brutally ethnically cleansed and the Red Army killed, looted and raped everyone in their path, but particularly Germans.
Yup, but an understandable choice under the circumstances.
(A Polish commenter at my blog pointed out that "according to polish Institute of National Memory (IPN) there is no evidence that Solomon Morel - or any close memmber of his family - was in KL Auschwitz. there are strong (i think) suggestions that he was in Stalin's soviet Russia in 1943-45.") The world's northernmost desert wind.
The only difference was that Poles around - say - Oswiecim were considered useful as labour while Jews were fast-tracked for extermination.
From a humanitarian viewpoint, the distinction is subtle - being a slave was not a healthy long-lived occupation - and 400,000 slave labourers passed through Oswiecim alone. The total number in Nazi territories was well into millions.
Once the war was over the plan was always to ethnically cleanse Poland and settle it with Germans. This would have required the extermination of the original inhabitants.
Certainly if Poland had been looking for a justification for violence, it could easily have found one.
I haven't heard of any terrorism by Jews in US or Canada or the UK either, like the local Slav communities they lobbied and integrated.
How is this relevant? The point is the Poles could easily have created a terrorist organisation after Yalta to try to liberate Eastern Europe. It's true the Soviets were tough bastards, but so were the Nazis, and the Polish resistance wasn't shy about taking them on.
One reason this didn't happen is because after Yalta the US and UK saw it as strategically inappropriate.
Aside from all the nonsense about homelands, this is as much about geopolitical strategy as anything else.
No more understandable than some of the alternatives, surely?
The point is you can't - at all - use the Holocaust to justify the creation of Israel. As a talking point it carries no weight when alternatives were available that would have guaranteed peace and very possibly prosperity elsewhere.
Just from a common sense point of view, the idea that a tribe has a claim on land that it came from two millennia ago is irrational at best and unique in history. I can't think of any other culture that uses events from Roman and pre-Roman times to justify political strategy today. It makes as much sense as the UK demanding reparations from Scandinavia for the Viking landings, or from Italy for the Roman conquest.
To be fair the UK has to take some of the blame here, because its diplomatic ineptness before and after WWII helped create today's Middle East.
But the Israeli narrative of a brave homeland surrounded by enemies is straight out the Old Testament, and should really have been put out to grass by now. Using it to justify atrocities isn't going to convince anyone who isn't convinced already.
Militarily it's naive. And diplomatically, the best way to deal with enemies is to avoid creating more of them in the first place.
Throw in the religion stuff, and the claim is comparable to Greece claiming the Turkish Mediterranean coast on the basis of The Illiad. The world's northernmost desert wind.
There were three resistance organizations operating in Poland during WWII - the Communist AL, the fascist NSZ, and the AK which covered the spectrum from semi-fascist right wingers to very left wing socialists, constituted the vast majority of the resistance, and was the official resistance legitimized by the government in exile. For obvious reasons the AL was not into fighting the new order. The AK decided armed struggle had absolutely no chance of success with the West having accepted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and that therefore it would be wrong to add more death to all that had happened. The NSZ decided to fight on with a mix of guerilla and terrorist tactics. They were joined by some AK veterans, particularly after it became clear that the Communists were imprisoning and killing AK leaders anyways. However, even though most Poles hated their new rulers, they agreed with the AK leadership's decision.
Just from a common sense point of view, the idea that a tribe has a claim on land that it came from two millennia ago is irrational at best and unique in history.
You clearly aren't too familiar with modern Polish history, unless you think that referring to the 1400's rather than the 100's makes all the difference.
Like what? Neither Britain nor the US nor the USSR had been particularly interested in the fate of the Jews before and during WWII. The non-Jewish populations of German occupied Europe had been mostly indifferent to what was going on. The alternatives weren't particularly good from the perspective of the immediate post WWII period - create a state where you can rely on yourself for self-defense but be surrounded by enemies, or rely on people who hadn't defended you but were promising that next time they would. The Holocaust may not justify the creation of Israel, but the rise of antisemitism and what that ideology culminated in certainly explains a lot.
Who said anything about justifying atrocities?
So what are you defending? Have you completely forgotten what ignited your initial comment?
find someway to live their lives. What would you have had them do?
So you think the way to live their lives is to go to another country and join a group there who killed the locals since before the Holocaust?
Don't you think that, say, getting land from Germany would have been more just pay for the Holocaust? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
