A Middle Eastern Apocalypse in the Offing?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Things have been going from bad to worse in the Middle East, as Israel and its neighbours feel ever more frustrated at their inability to craft a permanent peace – or even a tolerable level of co-existence – with each other.

Most worrisome, of course, is the growing power of Iran, a state that not only funds and arms groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, but is clearly working towards acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Iranian regime makes no bones about wanting to wipe Israel off the map, nor should we assume this is hyperbole. They mean what they say.

It is very likely that, should Israel determine that Iran has developed – and intends to use – such weapons against the Jewish state, Jerusalem will launch a pre-emptive strike against the Islamic Republic.

After all, even one or two nuclear missiles launched at Israel, a tiny country with most of its population centered in a narrow coastal strip around Tel Aviv, would destroy the state.

The one thing Israel’s leaders will do all they can to prevent, no matter what their politics, is the end of Jewish sovereignty in the land. They have all made this very clear in the country’s current election campaign.

However, even if Israel struck first, Iran might by then already have acquired second-strike capability, and still deliver a devastating blow.

It might mean the end of the Jewish state, but at that point, like the Biblical account of Samson bringing down the Philistines’ temple in Gaza, my guess is that Israel would launch what was left of its nuclear arsenal at all of the major capitals and holy sites in the region.

Such a massive conflagration might even extend eastwards, given the religious and cultural dimension, and bring in two other nuclear powers long as odds with each other, India and Pakistan.

This would truly be a modern Armageddon and we must do all we can to prevent such a cataclysm. But in the capitals of the world, people far wiser than I are perplexed and seem unable to stop this march towards catastrophe.

Where Do Israel, Jewish People Stand at This Moment? 

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

It’s always important to be realistic and not give in to wishful thinking when it comes to the security of Israel.

Though I don’t think of myself as an alarmist, I’m sorry to say that things do not look good right now.

We must take the long view and see trend lines in Israel’s strength vis-a-vis its foes.

Despite Israel’s military prowess, there has been a slow but steady shift in the balance of forces between Israel and its most implacable enemies. All we need to do is look at Gaza.

In 1956 and 1967, Israel swept through the small area with hardly any resistance, even though in both cases the Gaza battles were just part of much larger wars.

Even during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel suffered horrific initial losses, Gaza, as well as the border with Lebanon, remained quiet. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah had yet been created. Nor was Iran in the hands of a Shi’ite theocracy.

And between 1949 and 1991 – when Saddam Hussein lobbed Scud missiles at the country – Israel’s home front was safe from military attack.

Yet now, after three weeks of warfare in Gaza, Israel has been either unable to militarily vanquish Hamas, or else felt it simply couldn’t afford to do so, due to a combination of diplomatic pressure and effective Palestinian manipulation of world opinion. And this, even though Israel wasn’t involved in fighting anywhere else.

I don’t think that Israel gained much from this offensive, especially when judged against the condemnations of the operation, even by western countries. It’s little more than the status quo. I doubt that Egypt or even the US will be able to stop the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.

Something similar happened in the war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006. While Israel was unchallenged in the air, the ground war was inconclusive – and Hezbollah today has more rockets than it did back then.

It turns out the weapons suppliers – Iran and others – to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are doing a far more effective job, and providing more “bang for the buck,” than the old Communist bloc did when the Soviets were arming countries like Egypt and Syria.

Also, as one war follows another, there is another worrisome trend: more and more diaspora Jews, particularly younger people, in Canada and elsewhere, are signing anti-Israeli petitions and joining ‘anti-Zionist’ groups, with some even supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.

It’s easy for us to write them off as “self-hating Jews.” Some are. But for many others, it’s a version of the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, where people begin to identify with their tormentors – “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” – and hope to be spared.

Such Jews, usually fairly assimilated into the larger society and often with little schooling in Judaism or Jewish history, find intolerable the stress of iving and working amongst people who increasingly see Israel as an aggressor, rogue, or ‘apartheid’ state.

The relentless ideological attacks on the Jewish state – not to mention increasingly blatant antisemitic rhetoric – are taking their toll. No one wants to be ostracized by colleagues, fellow students, or co-workers.

To ease this psychological burden, such Jews are in effect ‘converting,’ to use religious terminology, from ‘Jewishness’ (except as a vestigial identity) to ‘cosmopolitan diaspora multiculturalism.’

None of this bodes well, either for Israel or for the rest of us.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact: Two Years of Infamy

Henry Srebrnik , [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Welcome to 2009. This is a year in which Jews will remember many days of sadness, since it will be the 70th anniversary of, among other events, Hitler’s occupation of the remains of Czechoslovakia, on March 15, 1939; the British “White Paper,” which effectively ended Jewish immigration into the Palestine Mandate, issued on May 17; and, of course, the German invasion of Poland, on Sept. 1.

We’ve all heard, on old newsreels, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, referring to Dec. 7, 1941 as “a day of infamy.” All of these 1939 dates were also “days of infamy.”

And that label might just as easily be applied to another date from 70 years ago: Aug. 23, 1939, the day the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin Pact, was signed. It created the conditions for the “perfect storm” that led, one week later, to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The pact destroyed Jewish faith in the pro-Soviet left, including the Communist Parties and their various front groups in North America. From Sept. 3, 1939, when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, until June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Communists directed much of their venom, not at Hitler’s Germany, but at Britain and France.

This caused special consternation among Jewish Communists. Those who supported the change in Moscow’s line were now forced to rationalize their defence of the treaty. Shloime Almazov, the head of the ICOR, a Communist front group, published Der Sovyetish-daytsher opmakh: vos meynt er? (The Soviet-German Pact: What Does it Mean?) immediately following the announcement of the pact.

The enemies of the USSR were displeased that the Soviet Union had thwarted a German attack against it, something its foes devoutly desired, he remarked. The Soviet-German pact was not a danger to the progressive movement, he concluded; rather, it was motivated by the Soviet desire to live in peace with its neighbours and to guard with all its strength the peace of the world.

The Soviets had already saved some two million Jews when they “liberated” eastern Poland in mid-September 1939, declared Almazov. (A secret protocol to the pact had allowed the two dictators to partition Poland.)

And the prospect for European Jews improved even more dramatically, according to the Communists, when in June, 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Romanian Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Added to the total within the pre-1939 Soviet borders, by 1941 perhaps as many as 6.5 million Jews lived under the protection of “Soviet power” – about two-thirds of European Jewry.

Moishe Katz, a writer for the New York Communist daily Morgn Frayhayt, was so certain that “a new and bright day” had dawned that in August 1940, he wrote an article entitled Der oyflebung fun dem mizrakh-europayishn yidntum (The Rejuvenation of East European Jewry).

Most Jews, however, were simply not buying the party line. And they were, unfortunately, proven correct. The Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, and the subsequent mass murder of the majority of east European and Soviet Jews, punctured the fantasy of a 6.5-million-strong Jewish community living safely and productively in a peaceful USSR, a country that had been spared the horrors of war thanks to Stalin’s wise decision to sign the pact with Hitler.

In the wake of the rationales to which they had been subjected between 1939 and 1941, even pro-Soviet Jews realized that they had been lulled into a false sense of security. Those who remained in the movement were never again as certain as they had been before 1941 that they could trust Russia to protect Jews.

The lesson most other Jews – including the many former Communists who abandoned the movement in 1939 – learned was that we needed a sovereign state of our own in the old homeland, Eretz Yisroel.