Saturday, November 03, 2012

Churchill and the Jews

On Winston Churchill and the Jews:

...“His attitude towards the Jews was very complicated,” says Eli Shaltiel, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. “The Jewish state was a way of solving the Jewish problem… Once they had a state of their own, it would serve their very uniqueness. They would be normal like any other nation.”

The question of Auschwitz concentration camp, where thousands were killed daily, also remains a bone of contention. Critics say he put Allied lives before Jewish ones by failing to bomb it in 1944. Although historians concede Churchill did give the order for an attack, he did not make it a priority.

Edward Luttwak, a Washington-based scholar writing a book about Churchill, is even more uncomplimentary. Even as the full horrors of the extermination camp became more widely known, , he claims, Churchill willfully ignored the plight of Hungarian Jews.

He points to events in early 1944, when Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary all ceased to cooperate with Nazi Germany in deporting their Jewry, but Britain continued to enforce rigorously stiff immigration quotas to Palestine to appease the Arabs during a time of war. He claims they denied many European Jews safe passage by either declining or issuing out-of-date visa documents.

“The Romanians survived, the Bulgarians survived, the Hungarians did not. That’s on Churchill’s conscience,” says Mr Luttwak. “In 1944, Churchill, lifelong friend of the Jews, became Hitler’s remaining Holocaust ally.”

They left out is unwillingness to authorize, until 1944, a Jewish Brigade despite the service of the Jewish Legion in WW I.

...Weizmann sought to establish an identifiably Jewish fighting formation (under a Jewish flag) under the auspices of the British Army. His request for a separate formation was rejected,..After much hesitation, on July 3, 1944, the British government consented to the establishment of a Jewish Brigade...


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