Middle East: Lessons from Sudetenland

Koinona House in their February issues of khouse news, published a three-part series with the above title, extracted from the book A Place Among The Nations, published in 1993 by current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s really amazing how the current developments and dilemma in the Middle East parallel events leading to World War II. Netanyahu describes in clear terms the strategic barrier that Czechoslovakia constituted to Hitler’s plan to overrun Europe in his dream of starting the 1000 years rule of the Third Reich.: With the Sudeten mountains bordering Germany and Czechoslovakia being virtually militarily unassailable by Hitler, the only option left for him to move forward was political. Hitler therefore clamoured that the Germans in Sudetenland who were minorities in Czechoslovakia were not getting their rights (a string of deliberately provocative, never-ending demands) and he was set to defend them. The whole world, desperate to have, in the word of Britain’s Chamberlain “peace in our time” mounted obscene, shameless but irresistible pressure on Czechoslovakia to withdraw his troops from his own country. Hitler wasted no time, in less than six months –on March 15, 1939, in rolling his tanks into the remaining part of Czechoslovakia, and WWII was on in full swing. Today, the whole world is mounting identical pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Banks, land that historically had been Jewish for thousands of years and which are critical to her defenses. Read the entire article as first published by k-house in 1997 at http://www.khouse.org/articles/1997/11/

'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.
If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel ."
Benjamin Netanyahu (see http://www.ipi-usa.org/faq.htm)