The Kindertransport’s True Legacy

March 24 2022

In discussions regarding Britain’s obligations to Ukrainian refugees, notes Jonathan Freedland, many commentators have invoked the Kindertransport, in which specially chartered trains brought thousands of Jews below the age of seventeen to England in the months prior to World War II. Freeland argues that appealing to the Kindertransport as a “noble tradition of looking after refugees,” as the conservative pundit Simon Heffer put it, is both self-serving and inaccurate:

It is quite true that between March 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, some 9,000 Jews below the age of seventeen came to Britain on the specially chartered trains that would become known as the Kindertransport. But here’s the question asked by too few of those who like to invoke that episode as proof of British generosity: why exactly was it children who were admitted, given that it was Jews of all ages who faced the threat of lethal Nazi persecution in Europe?

The answer is not flattering. Special provision was made for those children because Britain refused to let in their parents—or indeed any adults. Consult The Final Solution, the magisterial history of the Holocaust by the late David Cesarani—and how we miss his calm, reasoned scholarship—and you soon learn that then-Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare waved aside demands that Britain extend a hand to Jews fleeing Nazism, telling the House of Commons that there was an “underlying current of suspicion and anxiety, rightly or wrongly, about alien immigration on any big scale. It is a fact that below the surface there is the making of a definite anti-Jewish movement.”

In other words, His Majesty’s government could not help Jews escape anti-Semitism in Germany because that might cause anti-Semitism in Britain. Jewish refugees would become the objects of hatred, not least from those who imagined refugees coming here and stealing their jobs. Best, then, to keep the Jews out.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Kindertransport, United Kingdom

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