Monday, March 12, 2018
From Ian:
How the Dutch Red Cross Abetted the Nazis during World War II
Elliott Abrams: At Long Last, "The Crown" Will Visit Israel
How the Dutch Red Cross Abetted the Nazis during World War II
Last month, the president of the Netherlands’ Red Cross visited Israel to apologize formally for the organization’s conduct during the German occupation of the country. He was moved to do so by a recent book on the subject written by Regina Grüter, which assembles much evidence to prove what Dutch Jews themselves have long believed, as Ofer Aderet writes. (Free registration may be required.)
At the beginning of 1941, when the order came to stop accepting blood donations from Jews, the Dutch Red Cross accepted the decree . . . and didn’t send a protest letter. In February of that year, when 427 Jews were arrested in Amsterdam and sent to Buchenwald, the Dutch Red Cross sent a letter to the German occupying authorities wondering whether the organization was allowed to send packages to these Jews. The answer was as one would expect: it was forbidden to help Jews. The Red Cross simply accepted the order and sent aid packages only to non-Jewish Dutch political prisoners.
When in late 1941 the Germans ordered that all Jewish volunteers be dropped from the Red Cross, the group [again] followed these orders without a word. And the archives contain not one mention of any attempt to oppose these orders, or any underground attempts by the group to help Jews.
The research also didn’t uncover any evidence of discussions among the group’s leaders about the fate of the Dutch Jews. Grüter’s book leaves the impression that the Red Cross people acted as mere bureaucrats who carried out the Nazi occupiers’ orders to the letter and never tried to make things hard for the Germans—in clear violation of their role as aid workers. . . . “They weren’t anti-Semites, they were simply neutral,” Grüter says.
Elliott Abrams: At Long Last, "The Crown" Will Visit Israel
Seventy years after Israel's founding, at long last a member of the British royal family will visit there. The summer visit of the Duke of Cambridge, HRH Prince William, has been announced.Prince William’s visit may not be too late
This visit is remarkable for only one reason: that there has been no such visit before. Prince Charles attended the funerals of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, and Prince Philip made an equally brief visit one time to see his mother's grave site. Neither was an "official visit," because such a horrible event was simply not acceptable to the Foreign Office. The change is important. As the great historian Andrew Roberts wrote,
Royal visits have always been a central plank of Britain’s diplomacy over the centuries, and this one is a statement that Israel is no longer going to be treated like the pariah nation it so long has been by the Foreign Office. It is no therefore coincidence that although Her Majesty the Queen has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member of the British royal family has ever yet been to Israel on an official visit.
Why now? There are various theories. One is that Prince Charles was the wrong royal to send (see this Spectator story for one of the theories as to why) and time had to pass until someone in the next generation could do it. Another theory is that the Foreign Office simply could no longer maintain the claim that a visit would sour relations with the Arab states when those states are improving their own relations with Israel. Finally it has been argued that the Foreign Office and royal refusal (and it is not clear whether the "no" was over the years really from the bureaucrats or the royals, or both) was based on Zionist violence against British colonial administrators in the pre-1948 years of the Palestinian mandate. That obstacle would seem very odd when the Queen in 2012 was willing to shake the hand of Martin McGuinness, who had been a very senior IRA commander leader in 1979 when the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten, to whom she was close and who was Prince Philip's uncle.
Andrew Roberts is right: this visit is praiseworthy because it treats Israel as a normal nation. In that sense it is very much in line with President Trump's move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, acknowledging that it has the right every other nation has to choose its capital city, and the American effort at the United Nations system to stop the unfair and unequal treatment of Israel. Seventy years is a long time to wait for normal treatment, and of course Israel is far from achieving it even now. But these steps are symbolic of real progress.
The British Foreign Office has its own reasons for sending Prince William to visit Israel. The prince himself is only an excuse. The visit is not intended to boost the young man himself or the Royal Family as a whole, nor to showcase Israel on its 70th anniversary. The real aim is to get Britain back in the engine room of Middle East and world politics. Not necessarily a bad idea in itself, but an exercise in cynicism and humbug. I hope it is not too late.
Britain seems to be feeling increasingly fragile on the world scene. If the British government had been smart it could have claimed a special status in the Middle East by virtue of its (sometimes tortuous) role in 19th and 20th century Zionism, and one might have thought its vaunted friendship with Israel could have been given expression before this. There may be reason to fear that Britain has abdicated to the US the role of special friend.
Many Israelis still need convincing that Britain really is a friend. Those with long memories cannot forget the Mandate period. When my late parents-in-law made aliya in 1965 and said they were from London they saw Israelis physically flinch. Possibly most Israelis today think this is just history and prefer to accentuate the more positive attitudes of Arthur James Balfour and Winston Churchill, but this still does not justify the lack of official visits by British royals. The British way of showing friendship is to send the royals on a visit. They have had sixty-odd years to do this during the queen’s incumbency but the Foreign Office kept dithering – or worse, sneering and using bad language about the Jews.
Over the years there could have been some official fence-mending, but now it will be harder. The queen might have been able to charm Israel but she is no longer so young and energetic after more than 65 years on the throne, making her the longest-serving British monarch. She will presumably keep going until the day she dies. Few people share her concern for dogs and horses, nor is she a warm everyone’s-grandmother type. But she is part of the marketing, like Big Ben and the Thames. She is part of the ethos that makes Britain interesting.
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