Lithuania’s Hunt for Jewish “War Criminals” Who Fought the Nazis

In 1998, Lithuania established a commission to investigate local collaboration with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, who successively occupied the country during World War II. But rather than searching out the numerous Lithuanians who aided the SS in murdering Jews, the commission turned against one of its own participants—the eminent Israeli Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad, who fought the Germans as part of a pro-Soviet partisan unit. Daniel Brook writes:

On April 22, 2006, Respublika, an openly anti-Semitic newspaper that is one of Lithuania’s highest-circulation dailies, published a story headlined, “The Expert with Blood on His Hands.” The article used passages of Arad’s memoir, The Partisan, published in English in 1979, to smear him. In the Respublika article, what Arad’s memoir terms a 1944 “mopping-up operation” against “armed Lithuanians” after the Nazi withdrawal becomes an “ethnic cleansing of Lithuanians” that was part of a larger “Soviet genocide.” Arad, who was a teenager during the Holocaust, is referred to as an “NKVD storm trooper.”

The anti-Communist convictions that are evident throughout Arad’s book—his recounting of how Stalin crushed the organized Jewish community of Lithuania during the annexation of 1940 [and] his description of his hometown’s market turned scraggly and abandoned in the fallout from disastrous Communist economic policies—go unmentioned. As for the defection of this supposedly rabid Communist from Soviet Lithuania, the article seems genuinely puzzled: “It is not evident why, but right after the war Y. Arad decided to run to the West.”

Read more at Slate

More about: Anti-Semitism, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Lithuania, Nazis, Resistance, Soviet Union

Expand Gaza into Sinai

Feb. 11 2025

Calling the proposal to depopulate Gaza completely (if temporarily) “unworkable,” Peter Berkowitz makes the case for a similar, but more feasible, plan:

The United States along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE should persuade Egypt by means of generous financial inducements to open the sparsely populated ten-to-fifteen miles of Sinai adjacent to Gaza to Palestinians seeking a fresh start and better life. Egypt would not absorb Gazans and make them citizens but rather move Gaza’s border . . . westward into Sinai. Fences would be erected along the new border. The Israel Defense Force would maintain border security on the Gaza-extension side, Egyptian forces on the other. Egypt might lease the land to the Palestinians for 75 years.

The Sinai option does not involve forced transfer of civilian populations, which the international laws of war bar. As the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other partners build temporary dwellings and then apartment buildings and towns, they would provide bus service to the Gaza-extension. Palestinian families that choose to make the short trip would receive a key to a new residence and, say, $10,000.

The Sinai option is flawed. . . . Then again, all conventional options for rehabilitating and governing Gaza are terrible.

Read more at RealClear Politics

More about: Donald Trump, Egypt, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula