samboct
Posts: 1817
Joined: 1/17/2007
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Hi Polite Sub 53
"Its nice to know you can work out the English viewpoint from a few posts on a web forum."
Here's how-
The language is a dead giveaway. (Sorry, bad pun.) Lady E's post are generally interesting and well written. The title of "disproportionate, much" I didn't find very informative. It wasn't until I looked at the article in the link that I gathered it had something to do with the Palestinians.
In contrast to Pirate, Lady E's posts and language are readily intelligable to readers on both sides of the pond. My assumption is that most people in England would not find the title of her post surprising and would readily fathom its topic and logic. To a US audience, the concept is foreign. The idea of keeping score between sides based on body count or that there should be some type of equality is very strange to the US. We're used to body counts that, if expressed, tilt heavily in favor of the US- witness the military action in the Iraq war and the lopsided casualty figures. That Lady E could readily use the language expressing the idea that there should be some type of equality led me to the assumption that this type of morality is accepted in England.
Howzzat?
Lady E
"There are big differences of course. The nazis sought nothing less than the extermination of European Jewry and on the way to that end made their victims slave labourers for as long as they could be useful, working on projects for which ethnic Germans and others were unavailable due to service in the armed forces."
Some agreement, but also some disagreement. Hitler had a goal of ridding Europe of its Jewish population and discussed this goal in his turgid "Mein Kampf" published in 1923. (That damn book gave him eating money.) Lucy Dawidowicz has the hypothesis that Hitler's primary goal in WWII was to eliminate the Jews, the land conquests were secondary. (I think this is a bit extreme.) But Jews were not readily utilized as slave labor except in the extermination camps. Most of the slave labor were foreign nationals, such as Poles, Czechs, French, Russians etc. For example, of the 7,000 people initially enslaved to build the V-2/A-4 rockets at Peenemunde and later Mittelwerke, I don't think any of them were Jews. Jews were brought in at the end when Auschwitz had been shut down. Its hard to argue that the Nazis treated the Jews worse than these other folks, in both cases they were essentially starved to death.
In terms of the comments by the British officers at Bergen Belsen. Tony Judt's extensive postwar census of the Jews shows that a desire to emigrate to Palestine was not high on the list of things to do. Most Jews wanted to go back home, but were stuck. The Nazis had passed laws forbidding Jews to own homes or businesses, and thus non-Jewish individuals had purchased these valuables for a song. (It's one of the reasons Hitler was so popular.) It was decided by the victors that these sales were legal since they had taken place under the law of the land at the time. Coupled with the Swiss banks refusal to honor the heirs request of access to the bank accounts of the Jews exterminated by the Nazis (no death certificate, no money, knowing full well that the Nazis didn't issue death certificates and that the Nazis had been excellent customers.) and the lack of housing available, emigration to Palestine began to look attractive.
Consider the options for a Jewish survivor-
1) Go home and rebuild. Problem- your home is either bombed out or occupied legally by another family.
2) Emigrate to the US. The US I think still had an emigration policy that you needed a sponsor. If you didn't know anybody-you were screwed.
3) Emigrate to the UK. The English had suffered far more catastrophically than the US and didn't have the resources to deal with a large number of refugees.
4) Emigrate to Canada. Lots of red tape- this proved to be impractical in most cases.
5) Go to Palestine. No civilization, agrarian, a challenging existence. Then the Arabs asked the English to enforce quota's for emigration to Palestine, which they obligingly did, but clearly- surrounded by a sea of increasingly hostile Arabs. There was money available for people to do this, I think largely funded by US donations.
6) Sit in a dp camp in Europe. Lots of Jews did this even through 1948.
7) Go to Russia. Remember that Jews had been the targets of pogroms up through the Bolshevik revolution, and that acceptance of Jews in this country was grudging at best.
Also note- you have no money. While this wasn't much of a sticking point for option 5 and 6, it was something of a sticking point for most of the others. (How are you going to afford passage anywhere?)
For exact numbers of who went where- I recommend Tony Judt's Postwar. But what was clear was that the majority didn't go to Palestine and weren't crazy about going.
However, I must admit, I find that Hamas has far more in common with Hitler than Israel. Hamas and Hitler share a similar goal- extermination of the Jews. Hamas and Hitler also both use "big lie" psychology. If you're going to tell a lie- tell a whopper, because people think that there must be a grain of truth in there somewhere. Neither Hitler nor Hamas seem to have much inclination to stick to facts.
As noted earlier in this topic, I pointed out that Israel is an apartheid country. Basically non-Jews are second class citizens.
Here's the problem from the Israeli point of view-
1) Israel was founded as a sanctuary for all Jews. While it hasn't done wonderfully at that, (Ethiopian Jews were excluded as citizens for a number of years.) its probably been better than nothing.
2) There are lots of Palestinians living there.
3) Palestinians are less educated than Jews and consequently, have a higher birth rate.
4) Israel is a limited democracy. Hey, so is/was the US. For over a century- women didn't have the right to vote in this country. What the Jews are looking at is that the Palestinians either are or will become a majority in short order (I may be out of date here.) If everyone gets the right to vote, and if the Palestinians vote in a block- what's to prevent the Israeli charter from being changed and Israel no longer being a safe haven for Jews?
What's the problem with a Palestinian state? Well, also as noted earlier, Jews grabbed the water and began irrigating. But Arab states have oil, and Jews had the misfortune of picking the only lousy piece of desert in the region that doesn't have oil. Oil translates to money. For many years, I assumed that the Palestinians were pawns, and to a certain extent they still are. But it turns out the other Arab states were actually pretty generous with the Palestinians and gave them lots of aid. (They could afford it from oil revenue.) So why are the Palestinians still living in poverty? Yasser Arafat. Basically he stole most of the money and stuck it in a Swiss bank account- it's billions. (His widow is a very rich lady.) So the attempt to alleviate the Palestinian standard of living which would go a long way towards easing tension in the region failed. But overall, this may be the most workable solution- and if the Palestinians could get a hold of the money and use to build infrastructure instead of rockets, there might be peace there.
Sam
< Message edited by samboct -- 12/31/2008 11:22:56 AM >
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RE: disproportionate, much? - 
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