Israel Matzav

Why die for Danzig?

Sarah Honig gives some historical context for President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry's mendacious treatment of Israel.

*Even the definitive end of “the Czechoslovakian problem,” didn’t end Hitler’s provocations – as the appeasers had trusted it would. Hitler robbed Europeans of “a nice quiet sleep” with yet new demands. These involved the Free City of Danzig, a semi-autonomous entity created in 1920 as part of the Treaty of Versailles and placed under League of Nations protection.

Hot on the heels of the Munich Conference, Hitler began agitating for Danzig’s incorporation into the Third Reich. In April 1939 Poland warned that it would defy any German incursion. That presumably would subsequently oblige Warsaw’s allies to come to its aid.

And to forestall this, Déat wrote his commentary with the stirring headline that tauntingly asked Frenchmen whether they should really want to put their lives on the line for Danzig. Not only did Déat think that they shouldn’t, but he further portrayed the Poles as intransigent firebrands, whose irresponsible politicking was the source of all their tribulations. They bring calamity on themselves by opposing Germany’s territorial demands, he asserted.

This should sound ominously familiar to us Israelis all these decades after Déat’s powerful pro-appeasement piece. We have been told that we would bring calamity on ourselves if we continue to oppose Ramallah’s territorial demands. This reprimand was delivered by none other than America’s top diplomat – precisely when he and his boss also bent over backwards to appease the tyrants from Tehran.

Anyone who gets in the way of appeasers is sure to be castigated by them. In his address to the British people on September 27, 1938, a couple of fateful days before the signing of the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain made it seem that Czechoslovakia is the troublemaker, that it harasses Europe’s fellow-democracies with impertinent expectations:

“We cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her [Czechoslovakia’s] account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.”

And after putting Czechoslovakia in its place, as a diminutive no-account bother, Chamberlain proceeded to defend his duplicity as morality incarnate: “Since I first went to Berchtesgaden, more than 20,000 letters and telegrams have come to No.10, Downing Street. Of course, I have been able to look at a tiny fraction of them, but I have seen enough to know that the people who wrote did not feel that they had such a cause for which to fight, if they were asked to go to war in order that the Sudeten Germans might not join the Reich.”

This is exactly what Déat did to the Poles six month later – depict their ostensible obstructionism and obduracy as the only obstacles to world peace. This is what Kerry does to us Israelis when he warns that if the so-called peace talks fail, it will be our fault and we will reap the whirlwind. We will only have ourselves to blame for the misfortunes we bring on ourselves.

Read the whole thing.

By the way, anyone want to caption the picture at the top of this post?

Labels: 1930's, Czech Republic, history lesson, Palestinian Authority

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:03 AM