Daily Briefing: Europe’s Schizophrenic Relationship With Jews (May 24, 2019)

On countless occasions, Israel has fed NATO allies life-saving intelligence. Just last year, Israel prevented a blood bath at a political rally in Paris plotted by diplomats of the Iranian regime. Israeli warnings also foiled an ISIS attack at a soccer match between NATO ally Albania and Israel in 2016. Last year Israel unearthed a treasure-trove of evidence on the nuclear ambitions of Tehran, the world’s foremost state-sponsor of terrorism. The list goes on.

Cyber warfare is increasingly viewed as the Achilles heel of advanced economies. Early on, Israel had to respond to such attacks on its critical infrastructure. Today Israel is a global leader in the field of cybersecurity, its ecosystem the envy of the world. Israel’s enemies have long known this. Its friends are now increasingly benefiting from it.

Last year, Israel’s elite cyber unit 8200 thwarted a potentially harrowing ISIS “air attack” on European soil. Earlier this month, Israel made history by responding in real-time to a Hamas cyber-attack with a conventional air strike. The IDF’s Twitter account quipped: “HamasCyberHQ.exe has been removed.” To be sure, leaders from Tehran to Pyongyang heard loud and clear the crucial cyber defence precedent Israel set for the West.

In a landmark decision in 2014, NATO’s top governing body declared cyberspace an official domain of operations on equal footing with land, sea, and air. Two years prior, NATO had expanded its collective defence clause, Article 5, to apply to cyber-attacks. Today, every exercise must include a cyber component. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
 

Recently, the Michalskis’ youngest son became the third generation of the family to learn that telling people he is Jewish could cause problems. The boy — whose parents asked that he be called by one of his middle names, Solomon, to protect his privacy — had attended a Jewish primary school in Berlin. But he didn’t want to stay in such a homogeneous school for good, so just before he turned 14, he transferred to a public school that was representative of Germany’s new diversity — a place, as Gemma described it, where he “could have friends with names like Hassan and Ahmed.”

The first few days there seemed to go well. Solomon, an affable kid with an easy smile, bonded with one classmate over their common affection for rap music. That classmate introduced him to a German-Turkish rapper who would rap about “Allah and stuff,” Solomon told me. In return, he introduced the classmate to American and British rap. Solomon had a feeling they would end up being best friends. On the fourth day, when Solomon was in ethics class, the teachers asked the students what houses of worship they had been to. One student mentioned a mosque. Another mentioned a church. Solomon raised his hand and said he’d been to a synagogue. There was a strange silence, Solomon later recalled. One teacher asked how he had encountered a synagogue.

“I’m Jewish,” Solomon said.

“Everyone was shocked, especially the teachers,” Solomon later told me about this moment. After class, a teacher told Solomon that he was “very brave.” Solomon was perplexed. As Gemma explained: “He didn’t know that you’re not meant to tell anyone.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
 

Even before Hungary actively rallied to the German war effort, most of Hungary’s young Jewish men had been dispatched to so-called labour battalions, serving unarmed near the front, where they were as likely to be killed by their commandants as by enemy fire. In 1941, the Hungarian army rounded up about 17,000 Jews who couldn’t prove they were citizens, and dumped them across the border into Ukraine, where they were systematically massacred by German death squads. By 1942, labour service had been extended to all Jewish men under the age of 45. All this happened while Horthy—an “exceptional statesman,” according to current Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—ran the country.

Meanwhile, Hungary’s participation in the invasion of the USSR led to the extermination of the flower of Hungarian youth. At the 1942 battle of Voronezh and subsequent operations, the underequipped Hungarian 2nd Army was practically wiped out as it launched itself against Russian defences in support of the ultimately disastrous German thrust toward Stalingrad. By late 1944, Russian troops got to the outskirts of Budapest, which suffered through a 50-day siege before Axis forces surrendered on February 13, 1945. Almost 40,000 civilians died during this period, and much of the city was destroyed.

By this time, most of the country’s Jews already had been deported to concentration camps. In all, an estimated 565,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Historical documents show that even some Germans were amazed by the speed and efficiency of the Hungarian government’s co-operation, and by the cruelty of its gendarmerie.

Horthy and Hitler, in 1938

Some of the few elderly Hungarian Jews who survived in the Budapest ghetto can still remember scenes of rats feasting on the unburied dead in Klauzal Square, and the trigger-happy young men guarding the gates. I have spoken to many survivors, including Max Eisen, a Canadian Holocaust educator, who was a young teenager when his family was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. He still remembers the terror of being crammed into a boxcar, standing room only, a hundred to a car, with no water, food or sunlight. To this day, Eisen has nightmares about his mother holding his nine-month-old sister during that three-day journey. Most of his family was murdered mere hours after arriving on the platform at Birkenau. His father’s last words to him were: “If you survive, you must tell the world what happened”—which is what Eisen did with his devastating 2016 book, By Chance Alone.

But Horthy, who survived the war and lived till 1957, had different memories to relate. In his Memoirs, he pompously declared of the mid-1930s that “though times had changed considerably since I had been aide-de-camp to His Majesty Emperor Francis Joseph, my concepts of honour, law and justice…had not altered.” Of meeting Hitler in 1936, he wrote: “It was not my task to stand in judgment upon the man who, since he had come to power, had shown nothing but goodwill towards Hungary, and who had sent me an extremely friendly telegram on the 15th anniversary of my entry into Budapest. I decided, therefore, to avail myself of an Austrian invitation to a chamois [goat-antelope] shoot in August 1936, to seize the opportunity of paying a personal visit to Herr Hitler. The Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg had offered me the choice between three hunting preserves; I chose Hinterriss, which is famous for its chamois and to which Bavaria affords the only access.… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]

In section one, paragraph two, line one, of the White Paper, the following line sums up British intentions: “His Majesty’s government believe the framers of the mandate in which the Balfour declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population of the country.”

The Jewish Agency swiftly responded with indignation: “The Jewish people regard this policy as a breach of faith and a surrender to Arab terrorism. … It is in the darkest hour of Jewish history that the British Government proposes to deprive the Jews of their last hope and to close the road back to their homeland.”

The following day, a general strike was called for Jews in Palestine, and 300,000 Palestinian Jews attended protests, in which 120 Jews were wounded during clashes with the British police. At one protest, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Yaakov Herzog, burned a copy of the White Paper. The protests continued over the following weeks.

Chaim Weizmann called it a “Death sentence for the Jewish people.” David Ben-Gurion famously stated that Zionists “would fight the war as if there was no White Paper and fight the White Paper as if there was no war.”
Emergency funds were sent to Palestine by the Jewish National Fund to purchase land while the opportunity still existed.

On May 21, protests in the United States began, where thousands of Jews protested in cities throughout the country. At the same time, 230 American Jewish leaders urged Secretary of State Cordell Hull to refuse recognition of the White Paper.

On May 22, the House of Commons held a debate on a motion that the White Paper was a violation of the terms of the Mandate. It was defeated by a vote of 268 to 179. Among those who voted for it was the soon-to-be prime minister, Winston Churchill. Another supporter of the motion, former prime minister Lloyd George, who had a significant role in the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration, called the White Paper an “act of perfidy.”

In the US, Senator William King of Utah called the White Paper a “betrayal of the Jews.” New York Congressman Hamilton Fish, from the House floor, called the British vote a “shocking repudiation of the Balfour pledges.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]