When Adolf Hitler started to turn Europe into his German empire, he faced military vulnerability. The newly minted country of Czechoslovakia thrust into the southeast of Germany. Its border with Germany was mountainous and, heavily fortified, posed a formidable obstacle to a German invasion. The Czech army was significant in size and in training, and its Skoda arms factory was the second largest in the world. Military historians estimate it could have held out for months against Germany in the years before the war. One cannot fight and win in urban warfare under such rules as the progressives insist upon.
But it wasn’t going to be standing alone. France pledged by treaty to intervene if the Czechs were attacked. Czechoslovakia acted faithfully with its treaty partner, always supporting French interests in international affairs and trusting France’s good faith as it of all countries had good reason to see any future German aggression checked. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Bidenpolitik: A Foreign Policy Without Coherence)
In 1938, Hitler felt ready to threaten war to get the Czechs to cede its border fortresses and its arms works to Germany. The Czechs thought they were secure with France treaty-bound to come to their aid. If Germany were to attack them, France would attack Germany from the west, making an unwinnable two-front war for Germany.
But France had lost the will to make a stand. Rather than commit to fight, it chose instead to seek any way it could to escape its treaty obligations. Britain, morally bound to stand against Germany’s aggression and with its ally in the previous war, was also ready to make any deal to avoid war. The resulting Munich Pact afforded Hitler an unearned victory, immensely increasing his prestige and his own sense of invincibility. Less than half a year later, he would gobble up the rest of Czechoslovakia, setting the stage for his next conquest, Poland, and the outbreak of the shooting war that would last until May 1945 in Europe.
Writing after the war’s end, Winston Churchill reflected on those days and on the capitulation in Munich, which he had called back then in the House of Commons “a total and unmitigated defeat.” In addition to the severe criticism of the British and French leaders of those days, he also had some words for the choices of the Czechs, which surely bear on any other country similarly confronted by aggression and saddled with a half-hearted ally. He wrote:
[Czech president Benes] should have defended his fortress line. Once fighting had begun, in my opinion at that time, France would have moved to his aid in a surge of national passion, and Britain would have rallied to France almost immediately.
Churchill, in fairness, gave his readers the French argument in their own defense:
If Czechoslovakia had refused to submit and war had resulted, France would have fulfilled her obligations; but if the Czechs chose to give in under whatever pressures were administered, French honour was saved.
Of this defense, Churchill wrote:
We must leave this to the judgment of history.
Eighty-five years later, Israel is being pressured by its defense partner. Biden’s administration gives out a double message: On the one hand, Americans support the destruction of the Hamas empire of terror. It’s a fairly simple call, much as it was in Europe in the 1930s, contested only by simpletons, of which there were plenty both then and now. Hamas shows itself the enemy of civilization by its endorsement of war by atrocity for the purpose of extermination. (READ MORE: The Totalitarianism of Cultural Fog)
On the other hand, the Administration has made itself dependent on the far-left woke ideologues, whom they have indiscriminately welcomed into their blue coalition. These folks, now nested throughout the deep-state bureaucracy, share Hamas aims and, in their fundamentalist fury, care as little as Hamas does about even the most rudimentary obligations of civilized life. They worship power and power only and are thus apt bedfellows, though they ought to be careful: Hamas gets its kicks just as much out of throwing certain folks off of rooftops as the more conventionally unconventional pleasurable preferences of the wokesters.
Between the one hand and the other, there is no coherence at all, only contradiction. And so the Biden folks attempt to square the circle, and demand that that impossible be realized immediately by Israel. They demand that somehow Israel avoid any civilian casualties fighting an ununiformed enemy who uses women and children as human shields and who hides in schools, mosques, churches, and private homes. And then they say that Israel can defend itself and who are we to interfere, And then they repeat the cycle.
One cannot fight and win in urban warfare under such rules as the progressives insist upon — rules that Hamas never commits to observe themselves and doesn’t even pretend to. And the cost of Israel not winning is deadly. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, former Israel Defense Force General Giora Eiland, former chairman of Israel’s National Security Council, said, “If we end the war right now, it will be a terrible Israeli defeat.”
Consider it in terms of the most appropriate parallel. Imagine that in 1945 we turned away from the ground war in Germany and allowed the Nazis to remain in control, as Hamas remains in control of southern Gaza. At the very least, we would not have the friendly Germany we have today: a constitutional society with advanced political freedom. Instead, we would be just waiting for those motivated by hate to find their next opportunity to break out and tumble the world into unimaginable chaos once again.
The connection between Israel and the West was understood well by Churchill. Speaking to an Israeli representative, Eliyahu Eilath, who was visiting him in London in 1950, he said (as Eilath reported to Martin Gilbert) that for her own sake and that of the democracies, Israel must lose no time in developing her potential; she must hasten to become a strong political and military factor.
Churchill’s insights on the grave issues at hand stand the test of time. When hate-driven tyrannies try to outbluff their democratic enemies, his doctrines remain sound. They are certainly better than anything Obama, Rhodes, Sullivan, Blinken, or Austin have to offer. (READ MORE: Hamas Plot to Attack Jews in Europe Foiled. World’s Response?)
May Israel’s coalition government listen politely to the Bidenauts, but do what they must. If they quietly stay the course, it may just be enough to shame the sorry Biden crew into allowing them to fight on to victory and the possibility of real peace.
In his latest article in Tablet, Lee Smith lays out clearly the profound cultural battle that is playing out in world affairs. (Yes, the culture war affects the entirety of our civilization.) Ruled by the woke culture of nihilism, whose cardinal idea is that human powers are so unchecked that they can completely redefine reality, the Biden folks believe that they really can square the circle. Any negative consequence, they can simply define away. So instead of allowing Hamas to suffer for unleashing a war of torture and extermination, Biden’s minions are intervening to save Hamas’ skin, because they can magically make them what their actions show they are not — a partner in peaceful civilization. Trapped by their Faustian egos, they seek to revive and rehabilitate Hamas’ culture of death — which is just a new, more comprehensive version of the Nazi vision — Gotterdammerung without the SS death’s head and with that extra frisson so essential in the West — new modes of protected sexual expression — mass rape and necrophilia. A match made in hell.
Pray that Israel stands strong and that America’s spirit resolves to rid itself at last of this woke insanity gone full-bore Nazi. Our culture is equal to the task.
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