Here is a photo that all Palestinians and their supporters should see and remember,
The caption is worthwhile, too.
Sudeten Germans make their way to the railway station in Liberec, in former Czechoslovakia, to be transferred to Germany in this July, 1946 photo. After the end of the war, millions of German nationals and ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from both territory Germany had annexed, and formerly German lands that were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union. The estimated numbers of Germans involved ranges from 12 to 14 million, with a further estimate of between 500,000 and 2 million dying during the expulsion.
It is a mystery to me (not really) why the Palestinians and their supporters do not make the connection between the Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and the Germans who were forced out at the end of the war. How many terrorist Sudetan Germans have you heard of ?
I have to admit that my knowledge of recent (1948) events in what was to become Israel is incomplete.
But weren’t the “Palestinians” offered a chance to stay and only those who left were expecting Israel to be wiped out by the opposing Arab Armies (as they seem to be waiting today!)
Hardly mentioned by the world’s press is that Israel has over a million Arab citizens.
The answer is simple. The relocation of ethnic Germans from all parts of Eastern Europe, including not just the Sudetenland, but large parts of what is now Poland, was ordered by Comrade Stalin on behalf of the Soviet Union, and remained Soviet policy until its dissolution. By the same token, the PLO was summoned into existence to continue a proxy war against the US by attacking its ally Israel.
At the end of WWII, Stalin order the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe. Millions of German speaking people from the Baltic littoral and from areas east of the Oder river were removed from places where they had lived for hundreds, even thousands of years. Poles were moved from the eastern part of their homeland and resettled in the western areas that Stalin had decreed to be part of Poland, and that is the way that it is. It is now fairly clear that those borders will stick for the time being. Of course, leftist discourse was not allowed to gainsay this arrangement in the name of anybody’s human rights.
The so called war of national liberation was a key method of attempting to expand Soviet power in the Cold War era. Vietnam was not an isolated incident, but was part of a calculated campaign. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was just another one of these Soviet tools. Sadly, the demise of the Soviet Union did not stop them, because the local tinpots, like Assad, Saddam, and the Sa’uds, found them to be useful and have stood them up and kept them in business, not only that but Soviets and the Arab League, managed to attach the PLO to a money tit coming out of the UN, and later the EU.
As much as pundits like to blame the imperial Ambitions of Britain and France for the problems of the Middle East, the the Soviet Union did just as much damage if not more. Further, the policies of Imperial Britain and France ceased to matter a long time ago and no-one is trying to implement them. OTOH, the Soviet Union’s policies continue to attract support from all of the useful idiots who championed them before the blessed day it collapsed.
Robert – I remember reading a book on the Prussian front in WW2 – with the Soviets closing in. It was a dry read (describing battles and fronts) but the one thing that stayed with me was – as one of the fleeing Prussians said – We are witnessing 600 years of history disappearing”.
And on the Russians treatment of the civilians – I was ambivalent given the Nazis treatment of the Russians (what an opportunity lost getting rid of Stalin) – but there is no doubt to me that this was a deliberate policy of Stalin’s – entire villages fleeing for the Baltic Coast hoping for a ride.
It was during this period that the Wilhelm Gustaf was sunk by a Russian submarine – people were crowded to the point they were all over the decks – an estimate 9,000 drowned –
http://www.wilhelmgustloff.com/
The Sudeten Germans were Czech citizens who, like the Palestinians, agitated to join the mother country, which then lost the war. The parallel with the PLO is exact.
If I may add something, there’s always too much silence on the fact that the very same UN resolution who gave birth to the State of Israel, also gave it to the State of Palestine. Lebanon, Syria, Jordania and Egypt moved their armies against this never-born country as well. Not to mention the treatment that Lebanon gave and still gives to the Palestinian refugees: enclosed in camps with no right to Lebanese naturalization, or even work outside of the camps themselves.
Still, I think that any rational argument wouldn’t add a single thing in Hamas/PLO minds.
Off topic but human nature: as constant readers may know, my husband is obsessive (and I do mean obsessive) about encouraging the study of Czech. An untenured prof he argued at meeting after meeting with the head of the Mod Lang here in the late seventies to encourage these language classes; she’d open them in July and close them in August, under scrutiny and amidst arguments, open them a bit in September. Not surprisingly, they seldom made. And they haven’t been offered, now, for decades. (In my opinion, they weren’t all that likely to, anyway. And Czechs are obsessive everywhere – my daughter’s tuition is paid at Lincoln for her second year Czech class, which last fall had 3 and now has 4 students.) But it was also not surprising, perhaps, that the chair was a Sudentland German. Those old European wounds often open here in surprising ways.
Every country with a significant ethnic German population was on Hitler’s hit list for partial or total annexation. What’s a little thing like borders to keep Das Volks/La Raza from being united?
It’s understandable why said countries might be a little miffed and err on the side of caution in the future.
Any metaphor using Germans and pre- or post-WW2 is out of its author’s control, and will be understood in unexpected ways the author will not intend.
The Sudeten Germans might have turned into terrorists had Germany not immediately accepted them as co-equal citizens and (with US aid in the FRG and Austria) spent considerable sums on housing, feeding and integrating them into the communities they had fled to.
The Arab regimes of the time, for various reasons, lacked the political will and the means to do something like that.
“The Sudeten Germans might have turned into terrorists had Germany not immediately accepted them as co-equal citizens”…possible true, but such terrorism would have been ruthlessly suppressed by the Western Allies and, to the extent it affected their territories, the Soviet bloc.
In the case of the Palestinians, otoh, their terrorism has been excused and romanticized by significant parts of academia, the media, and the “celebrity” industry,
we get more of what we incentivize and praise – until, maybe, we learn better. (Murray would argue until some of us learn better, I’m afraid.)
“possible true, but such terrorism would have been ruthlessly suppressed by the Western Allies and, to the extent it affected their territories, the Soviet bloc.”
…because Germany, unlike Palestine, was an area of major geopolitical importance. So, they’re not really the same at all.