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.
Yup, but an understandable choice under the circumstances.
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?
