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Mark Steyn gets it.
Mark Steyn: Israel and Ukraine, each fighting against the forces of terror and chaos | National Post
This weekend will mark the 70th anniversary of the day the Soviets re-took the city of Lviv (or Lvov, or Lemberg, according to taste) in western Ukraine, and ended a three-year German occupation. Before the Germans arrived, there were well over 100,000 Jews in the city and just shy of 50 synagogues. On July 26th 1944, when the Soviets returned, there were a couple of hundred Jews left.
Lviv had been, variously, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Habsburg, Soviet — but always, across the centuries, Jewish. All gone.
Same with any number of Ukrainian cities. Chernivtsi, or Czernowitz, was once known as “Jerusalem on the Prut.” There were 50,000 Jews out of a population of approximately 100,000, and they dominated the city’s commercial life. “There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows,” wrote Sir Sacheverell Sitwell in 1937, when it was part of the Kingdom of Roumania. “The entire commerce of the place is in the hands of the Jews. Yiddish is spoken here more than German.” Not anymore. Today, the city’s population is over a quarter of a million, but only 2,000 are Jews.
There are cities like Lviv or Chernivtsi all over the world, where within living memory the streets were full of Jews — people went to school with Jews, lived next door to Jews, accompanied their mothers as they shopped from Jews. And now there are no Jews. In his what-if? novel Fatherland, Robert Harris captures very well the silence that settles in such communities: no one ever asks, “Do you remember the such-and-such family across the street?” — or what happened to them. Just as, a few years hence, everyone in Sarcelles, France will agree not to ask whatever happened to a Jewish-owned pharmacy, set ablaze during a “pro-Palestinian” protest last weekend.
Which brings us to the tiny Jewish state built in a sliver of a minority of the total land of the British Mandate of Palestine. Israel is dedicated to the proposition that there should be one place on Earth where what happened to the Jews in Lviv and Chernivtsi and Baghdad (once the second largest Jewish city in the world) and Tripoli (which was once 40% Jewish) and all over the map will not happen here.
Hamas, by contrast, is committed to the proposition that what happened to the Jews of Lviv should happen here, too.
+++++
As for Ukraine and the links between that conflict and Israel:
The purpose of this “separatist” movement [in Ukraine] is not to build a country but to use the territory they hold to harass and terrorize and weaken the Ukrainian state.
Now who does that sound like? The “Palestinian Authority” is not a fully sovereign nation but it holds roughly the powers the Irish Free State had in 1922. Many aspects of that settlement were obnoxious to southern Ireland’s “separatists” — the oath of allegiance to the King, the viceroy, their status as British subjects, the Royal Navy ports — but they nevertheless got on with building an Irish nation. Which is to say, boring stuff like fiscal policy and the education ministry and the department of public works.
Nobody in the “government” of Gaza wants to do that.
+++++
And this is a perfect distillation of the real issues on the Israeli side and on the Palestinian side of this conflict.
Mark Steyn: Israel and Ukraine, each fighting against the forces of terror and chaos | National Post
This weekend will mark the 70th anniversary of the day the Soviets re-took the city of Lviv (or Lvov, or Lemberg, according to taste) in western Ukraine, and ended a three-year German occupation. Before the Germans arrived, there were well over 100,000 Jews in the city and just shy of 50 synagogues. On July 26th 1944, when the Soviets returned, there were a couple of hundred Jews left.
Lviv had been, variously, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Habsburg, Soviet — but always, across the centuries, Jewish. All gone.
Same with any number of Ukrainian cities. Chernivtsi, or Czernowitz, was once known as “Jerusalem on the Prut.” There were 50,000 Jews out of a population of approximately 100,000, and they dominated the city’s commercial life. “There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows,” wrote Sir Sacheverell Sitwell in 1937, when it was part of the Kingdom of Roumania. “The entire commerce of the place is in the hands of the Jews. Yiddish is spoken here more than German.” Not anymore. Today, the city’s population is over a quarter of a million, but only 2,000 are Jews.
There are cities like Lviv or Chernivtsi all over the world, where within living memory the streets were full of Jews — people went to school with Jews, lived next door to Jews, accompanied their mothers as they shopped from Jews. And now there are no Jews. In his what-if? novel Fatherland, Robert Harris captures very well the silence that settles in such communities: no one ever asks, “Do you remember the such-and-such family across the street?” — or what happened to them. Just as, a few years hence, everyone in Sarcelles, France will agree not to ask whatever happened to a Jewish-owned pharmacy, set ablaze during a “pro-Palestinian” protest last weekend.
Which brings us to the tiny Jewish state built in a sliver of a minority of the total land of the British Mandate of Palestine. Israel is dedicated to the proposition that there should be one place on Earth where what happened to the Jews in Lviv and Chernivtsi and Baghdad (once the second largest Jewish city in the world) and Tripoli (which was once 40% Jewish) and all over the map will not happen here.
Hamas, by contrast, is committed to the proposition that what happened to the Jews of Lviv should happen here, too.
+++++
As for Ukraine and the links between that conflict and Israel:
The purpose of this “separatist” movement [in Ukraine] is not to build a country but to use the territory they hold to harass and terrorize and weaken the Ukrainian state.
Now who does that sound like? The “Palestinian Authority” is not a fully sovereign nation but it holds roughly the powers the Irish Free State had in 1922. Many aspects of that settlement were obnoxious to southern Ireland’s “separatists” — the oath of allegiance to the King, the viceroy, their status as British subjects, the Royal Navy ports — but they nevertheless got on with building an Irish nation. Which is to say, boring stuff like fiscal policy and the education ministry and the department of public works.
Nobody in the “government” of Gaza wants to do that.
+++++
And this is a perfect distillation of the real issues on the Israeli side and on the Palestinian side of this conflict.
