Applauding Britain for Taking in Young Holocaust Survivors, the BBC Covers Up the Country’s Disdain for Their Wishes

Next month, the BBC plans to air a docudrama, titled The Children, about some of the roughly 700 young Holocaust survivors who came to Britain in the aftermath of World War II. Rosie Whitehouse writes that the complete story is rather different from the “redemptive, feel-good tale” being advertised:

After the war the British government offered a home to 1,000 Jewish orphans. But only 731 visas were issued: many of the youngsters point-blank refused to accept the offer from the country they had come to see as an enemy. The orphans wanted to travel to Palestine, but the British, in control of the Mandate territory, were blocking their route with Royal Navy patrols.

This did not deter the Jewish teenagers. They rejected the British visas to join thousands of others attempting to enter Palestine on illegal immigrant ships. A hundred youngsters tried to break through the British blockade on the Josiah Wedgwood, a former Canadian corvette. The survivors joined battle against the Royal Navy sailors who had boarded their illegal immigrant boat on the high seas off the Haifa coast, pelting them with potatoes and tinned food.

Meanwhile the Jewish Brigade, a British military unit recruited from Jews living in the Land of Israel, offered a different choice to a group of young survivors in Italy:

Just like “the Boys,” [as they were known], who came to Britain, the teenage survivors in Italy were taken to hostels to recuperate. Their new home was the stunning Villa Bencistà in Fiesole, above Florence. . . . The Jewish soldiers helped [them] rebuild their lives, filling their charges with a love of Palestine and a deep Zionist commitment, but also giving them a wider education.

None of this is likely to appear in The Children. The Villa Bencistà cannot be considered a British triumph. It was, however, a humanitarian one.

Read more at Standpoint

More about: Holocaust survivors, Mandate Palestine, United Kingdom, Zionism

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF