Strep Vote posted:

Israeli LinkedIn says the broken arm kid was actually beaten by his parents for snitching and/or pally wood. i now completely understand why deprogramming/reeducation has to be a thing.

ScootsMcSkirt posted:

wb ff

im not reading all of that tho

Frosted Flake posted:

Ringo Roadagain posted:

pro israeli retards are posting a video of him where he is moving like someone with two untreated broken arms while being released as proof that he left detainment perfectly fine.

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

I see people reacting "why is Germany doing this?" vis a vis loyalty oaths to Israel and so on.

If you want a top line explanation before the sources: Germany has accepted, to varying levels of openness, both the completion of the Holocaust, (which is to say, their government's actions towards living Jews in Israel has to be understood as reflecting a domestic belief that there are only dead Jews in Germany), and, for lack of a better word, its legitimacy. Which is not to say any German official alive today will say the Holocaust was good. Instead, they take as a baseline fact, that there is no longer such a thing as a German Jew, and that while there was a historical Jewish community in Germany, the "proper" place for Jews now is in Israel.

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

You might also compare this to Canada, where land acknowledgements and professions of regret about the treatment of First Nations scale with how many First Nations communities live in a particular area. The most anguished statements of regret and radical calls for reparations, land back, decolonialism etc. are the ones that happen where there is no chance of a native community actually making good on it. America is the same way of course.

So, it is with Germany and the Jews. Jews (of German origin) in Israel, are an artifact of history. Jews living in Germany might actually want the German government to return their property, (more on that in a moment).

So, how can Germany can act in a way that would make Dual Loyalty an irrefutable truth? I mean, imagine demanding that people within your country owe absolute allegiance, on threat of expulsion, to another nation. It's because, if you take the long view, they have accepted the premise of the Nuremberg Laws. This is directly linked to the Holocaust. Not just because the Nuremberg Laws allowed the Holocaust to happen, by effectively making German Jews nationless, but also because you can accept the premise of the Nuremberg Laws, and not feel particularly bad about it () if the Holocaust has already happened. You don't have to worry about Dual Loyalty if you don't believe that group exists within (Holocaust), or belongs within (Nuremberg Laws), your country in the first place.

It would be completely anathema for the German state to loudly support German Jews swearing allegiance to a foreign power, if they believe there were German Jews. They barely acknowledge that there are Jews today, alive, in Germany. When they do, it's clear, that they are not Germans, and clearer still that in the German government's opinion, they belong in Israel. IMO, The reasons why Germany has been acting the way they have towards Israel have almost nothing to do with guilt and more with this -

Without doing the napkin math or trying to post all of the statistics on my phone, the Third Reich profited, at minimum, $215B in today's money, from the Holocaust - in seized property, immigration tax, literal gold teeth in Swiss bank accounts. That's not including the sale of assets, for example art, or the profits made from seized companies. So, that's a low-ball estimate, and one that relies on the Nazi appraisal (and reporting) of seized assets, which is another way to say they severely undercounted according to every expert. Add to that corruption, Swiss banks, people trying to cook the books once the war was lost etc. and you are looking at huge amounts of assets, in Germany, today that originated in the Holocaust, often either directly owned by the German government or privatized by them at some point, with the proceeds going to the state treasury.

Germany has paid to date, $87B in reparations. Again, even by the roughest estimate, that leaves $128B of assets originally owned by German Jews still in German hands. With that in mind, let's examine Germany paying reparations to the state of Israel, and not Jewish community themselves, encouraging German Jews to emigrate to Israel not just immediately after the war in West Germany, but in a massive state-funded campaign after unification in 1991 as well.

It raises a lot of questions about that relationship. It would seem as if some people in the German state believe it is preferable, and again, most charitably "less expensive" to pay Israel for all of the Jews to go (and stay) there, than to have a German Jewish community, which might require them to divest some of this portfolio.

There are German laws on the books regarding German citizens who were charged the emigration taxes during the Third Reich. German legal codes are a bit obtuse to me, but so far as I know, for them to be compensated they need to show that their emigration was unjust. You know, that they were German, wished to remain in Germany, and so were unfairly forced to emigrate and give up that 80-90% of their assets. It's connected to right of return, you need to make good on it for the courts to award it to you. Now, if instead people remain in Israel, Canada, whatever, they've forfeited it. This is what I mean about the Nuremberg Laws and the consequences of the Holocaust having a status almost like fait accompli to the German state.

Their logic seems to be that they don't have to return all, or even most, of the money taken from German Jews who were kicked out, if none of them return to Germany.

In fact this was explicitly West German policy (overseen by many civil servants who had served the Third Reich) and is laid out in a recent book, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945. You see, West Germany did not actually take the Nuremberg Laws off the books, so effectively recognized the German Jews who survived the Holocaust as Displaced Persons, and Jews, but implicitly or explicitly, not as Germans. They therefore tirelessly worked to get rid of them alongside the other Displaced Persons. Survivor accounts are pretty unanimous in being told to go “back to Poland”, and “back East” - which is even more troubling since those were well known euphemisms in Nazi Germany for the programme of ghettoization and extermination in Poland. So, the German public, and German government, effectively acted as if the Nuremberg Laws stood, there was no such thing as a German Jew, and Jews were charitably Poland’s problems, if you don’t read that as “go to Hell”.

The publisher is very generous, the full book is far more frank:

“After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish sworking to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.”

At the risk of repeating myself, according to Ian Kershaw’s research, Germany made a tidy profit from the Holocaust. It was not just art and jewels that were seized by people murdered at the camps, property and businesses were seized too. These were not returned to surviving German Jews after the war, because they had been seized “legally", and so survivors would have to go to court, for example to evict the German family that had been living in their apartment since they were deported to Dachau. The occupation authorities preferred not to deal with this, and the German court system, on top of the wartime sympathies and histories of the vast majority of people involved (because Jews had been kicked out of the legal professions and civil service, remember, and reinstatement similarly dragged post 45) also had huge backlogs. All of which to say, the German government had huge amounts of property it would prefer the owners not reclaim. Either because the state literally used melted down gold teeth in Swiss banks, a huge part of the budget of Nazi Germany and West Germany also, but that there were fears that it was “disruptive” to displace good Germany families “just” because the Jews who (“formerly”) owned their homes and businesses turned up alive.

(Remember that Jews trying to flee Germany after 1936 had to surrender their immovable property, and also pay gigantic fees.) Post-war West Germany fully intended to keep this property, and budgets until at least the 1950’s were at least partially made possible with expropriated Jewish wealth.

You’ll never guess how this has been framed in liberal scholarship - all the communists' fault . Take Geller’s Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 :

“Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Jay Howard Geller analyzes the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders. Whereas the West German community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting, the small Jewish community in Eastern Germany was forced to struggle against communist opposition.”



Finally, Germany was not the only country this happened in. The first waves of “communist oppression” in Poland were, well, see for yourself:

“In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.”



Those awful heavy handed communists in Poland and East Germany made people give their poo poo back and reinstated citizenship for Jews and it caused literal riots. West Germany went another route, they moved heaven and earth to deport German Jews: to Israel, to the DDR, and to Poland. They worked to make staying in West Germany intolerable, to the maximal extent that they could.

For instance, they tried to keep the Jews who survived Belsen from moving into the village - they had to remain on the grounds of the concentration camp, even after liberation. Not just the local people of Belsen, but German officials referred to the Survivors as "the camp's prisoners", using a German word referring to convicts. When Survivors tried to start a Yiddish newspaper, the Germans suggested they go to Israel, and claimed that no printing blocks in that language survived in Germany or would be imported. They complained to the American occupation authorities about a passionate Yiddish culture emerging in the DP camps. They insisted that it was communist, and that the Jewish community remaining in Germany was dangerous, both because the Jews themselves were subversive, and because Good Germans would riot if a “criminal element” disturbed German society.

Finally, until the 2000’s, (West) Germans when discussing Holocaust Survivors amongst themselves in academic literature, which is to say decoupled from global Holocaust Studies (in English), referred to Survivors as “Former Prisoners”. This is one of those German compound word things, but basically referring to them as “Ex-Cons” upheld the justice of their imprisonment, aberrant nature etc.

All of this to say, I recommend anyone reading up on West Germany if they want to know about the intentions behind support for Israel.

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

I see people reacting "why is Germany doing this?" vis a vis loyalty oaths to Israel and so on.

If you want a top line explanation before the sources: Germany has accepted, to varying levels of openness, both the completion of the Holocaust, (which is to say, their government's actions towards living Jews in Israel has to be understood as reflecting a domestic belief that there are only dead Jews in Germany), and, for lack of a better word, its legitimacy. Which is not to say any German official alive today will say the Holocaust was good. Instead, they take as a baseline fact, that there is no longer such a thing as a German Jew, and that while there was a historical Jewish community in Germany, the "proper" place for Jews now is in Israel.

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

You might also compare this to Canada, where land acknowledgements and professions of regret about the treatment of First Nations scale with how many First Nations communities live in a particular area. The most anguished statements of regret and radical calls for reparations, land back, decolonialism etc. are the ones that happen where there is no chance of a native community actually making good on it. America is the same way of course.

So, it is with Germany and the Jews. Jews (of German origin) are in Israel, Jews remain only an artifact of history in Germany. Jews living in Germany might actually want the German government to return their property, (more on that in a moment).

So, how can Germany can act in a way that would make Dual Loyalty an irrefutable truth? I mean, imagine demanding that people within your country owe absolute allegiance, on threat of expulsion, to another nation. It's because, if you take the long view, they have accepted the premise of the Nuremberg Laws. This is directly linked to the Holocaust. Not just because the Nuremberg Laws allowed the Holocaust to happen, by effectively making German Jews nationless, but also because you can accept the premise of the Nuremberg Laws, and not feel particularly bad about it () if the Holocaust has already happened. You don't have to worry about Dual Loyalty if you don't believe that group exists within (Holocaust), or belongs within (Nuremberg Laws), your country in the first place.

It would be completely anathema for the German state to loudly support German Jews swearing allegiance to a foreign power, if they believe there were German Jews. They barely acknowledge that there are Jews today, alive, in Germany. When they do, it's clear, that they are not Germans, and clearer still that in the German government's opinion, they belong in Israel. IMO, The reasons why Germany has been acting the way they have towards Israel have almost nothing to do with guilt and more with this -

Without doing the napkin math or trying to post all of the statistics on my phone, the Third Reich profited, at minimum, $215B in today's money, from the Holocaust - in seized property, immigration tax, literal gold teeth in Swiss bank accounts. That's not including the sale of assets, for example art, or the profits made from seized companies. So, that's a low-ball estimate, and one that relies on the Nazi appraisal (and reporting) of seized assets, which is another way to say they severely undercounted according to every expert. Add to that corruption, Swiss banks, people trying to cook the books once the war was lost etc. and you are looking at huge amounts of assets, in Germany, today that originated in the Holocaust, often either directly owned by the German government or privatized by them at some point, with the proceeds going to the state treasury.

Germany has paid to date, $87B in reparations. Again, even by the roughest estimate, that leaves $128B of assets originally owned by German Jews still in German hands. With that in mind, let's examine Germany paying reparations to the state of Israel, and not Jewish community themselves, encouraging German Jews to emigrate to Israel not just immediately after the war in West Germany, but in a massive state-funded campaign after unification in 1991 as well.

It raises a lot of questions about that relationship. It would seem as if some people in the German state believe it is preferable, and again, most charitably "less expensive" to pay Israel for all of the Jews to go (and stay) there, than to have a German Jewish community, which might require them to divest some of this portfolio.

There are German laws on the books regarding German citizens who were charged the emigration taxes during the Third Reich. German legal codes are a bit obtuse to me, but so far as I know, for them to be compensated they need to show that their emigration was unjust. You know, that they were German, wished to remain in Germany, and so were unfairly forced to emigrate and give up that 80-90% of their assets. It's connected to right of return, you need to make good on it for the courts to award it to you. Now, if instead people remain in Israel, Canada, whatever, they've forfeited it. This is what I mean about the Nuremberg Laws and the consequences of the Holocaust having a status almost like fait accompli to the German state.

Their logic seems to be that they don't have to return all, or even most, of the money taken from German Jews who were kicked out, if none of them return to Germany.

In fact this was explicitly West German policy (overseen by many civil servants who had served the Third Reich) and is laid out in a recent book, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945. You see, West Germany did not actually take the Nuremberg Laws off the books, so effectively recognized the German Jews who survived the Holocaust as Displaced Persons, and Jews, but implicitly or explicitly, not as Germans. They therefore tirelessly worked to get rid of them alongside the other Displaced Persons. Survivor accounts are pretty unanimous in being told to go “back to Poland”, and “back East” - which is even more troubling since those were well known euphemisms in Nazi Germany for the programme of ghettoization and extermination in Poland. So, the German public, and German government, effectively acted as if the Nuremberg Laws stood, there was no such thing as a German Jew, and Jews were charitably Poland’s problems, if you don’t read that as “go to Hell”.

The publisher is very generous, the full book is far more frank:

“After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish sworking to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.”

At the risk of repeating myself, according to Ian Kershaw’s research, Germany made a tidy profit from the Holocaust. It was not just art and jewels that were seized by people murdered at the camps, property and businesses were seized too. These were not returned to surviving German Jews after the war, because they had been seized “legally", and so survivors would have to go to court, for example to evict the German family that had been living in their apartment since they were deported to Dachau. The occupation authorities preferred not to deal with this, and the German court system, on top of the wartime sympathies and histories of the vast majority of people involved (because Jews had been kicked out of the legal professions and civil service, remember, and reinstatement similarly dragged post 45) also had huge backlogs. All of which to say, the German government had huge amounts of property it would prefer the owners not reclaim. Either because the state literally used melted down gold teeth in Swiss banks, a huge part of the budget of Nazi Germany and West Germany also, but that there were fears that it was “disruptive” to displace good Germany families “just” because the Jews who (“formerly”) owned their homes and businesses turned up alive.

(Remember that Jews trying to flee Germany after 1936 had to surrender their immovable property, and also pay gigantic fees.) Post-war West Germany fully intended to keep this property, and budgets until at least the 1950’s were at least partially made possible with expropriated Jewish wealth.

You’ll never guess how this has been framed in liberal scholarship - all the communists' fault . Take Geller’s Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 :

“Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Jay Howard Geller analyzes the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders. Whereas the West German community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting, the small Jewish community in Eastern Germany was forced to struggle against communist opposition.”



Finally, Germany was not the only country this happened in. The first waves of “communist oppression” in Poland were, well, see for yourself:

“In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.”



Those awful heavy handed communists in Poland and East Germany made people give their poo poo back and reinstated citizenship for Jews and it caused literal riots. West Germany went another route, they moved heaven and earth to deport German Jews: to Israel, to the DDR, and to Poland. They worked to make staying in West Germany intolerable, to the maximal extent that they could.

For instance, they tried to keep the Jews who survived Belsen from moving into the village - they had to remain on the grounds of the concentration camp, even after liberation. Not just the local people of Belsen, but German officials referred to the Survivors as "the camp's prisoners", using a German word referring to convicts. When Survivors tried to start a Yiddish newspaper, the Germans suggested they go to Israel, and claimed that no printing blocks in that language survived in Germany or would be imported. They complained to the American occupation authorities about a passionate Yiddish culture emerging in the DP camps. They insisted that it was communist, and that the Jewish community remaining in Germany was dangerous, both because the Jews themselves were subversive, and because Good Germans would riot if a “criminal element” disturbed German society.

Finally, until the 2000’s, (West) Germans when discussing Holocaust Survivors amongst themselves in academic literature, which is to say decoupled from global Holocaust Studies (in English), referred to Survivors as “Former Prisoners”. This is one of those German compound word things, but basically referring to them as “Ex-Cons” upheld the justice of their imprisonment, aberrant nature etc.

All of this to say, I recommend anyone reading up on West Germany if they want to know about the intentions behind support for Israel.

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

I see people reacting "why is Germany doing this?" vis a vis loyalty oaths to Israel and so on.

If you want a top line explanation before the sources: Germany has accepted, to varying levels of openness, both the completion of the Holocaust, (which is to say, their government's actions towards living Jews in Israel has to be understood as reflecting a domestic belief that there are only dead Jews in Germany), and, for lack of a better word, its legitimacy. Which is not to say any German official alive today will say the Holocaust was good. Instead, they take as a baseline fact, that there is no longer such a thing as a German Jew, and that while there was a historical Jewish community in Germany, the "proper" place for Jews now is in Israel.

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

You might also compare this to Canada, where land acknowledgements and professions of regret about the treatment of First Nations scale with how many First Nations communities live in a particular area. The most anguished statements of regret and radical calls for reparations, land back, decolonialism etc. are the ones that happen where there is no chance of a native community actually making good on it. America is the same way of course.

So, it is with Germany and the Jews. Jews (of German origin) are in Israel, Jews remain only an artifact of history in Germany. Jews living in Germany might actually want the German government to return their property, (more on that in a moment).

So, how can Germany can act in a way that would make Dual Loyalty an irrefutable truth? I mean, imagine demanding that people within your country owe absolute allegiance, on threat of expulsion, to another nation. It's because, if you take the long view, they have accepted the premise of the Nuremberg Laws. This is directly linked to the Holocaust. Not just because the Nuremberg Laws allowed the Holocaust to happen, by effectively making German Jews nationless, but also because you can accept the premise of the Nuremberg Laws, and not feel particularly bad about it () if the Holocaust has already happened. You don't have to worry about Dual Loyalty if you don't believe that group exists within (Holocaust), or belongs within (Nuremberg Laws), your country in the first place.

It would be completely anathema for the German state to loudly support German Jews swearing allegiance to a foreign power, if they believe there were German Jews. They barely acknowledge that there are Jews today, alive, in Germany. When they do, it's clear, that they are not Germans, and clearer still that in the German government's opinion, they belong in Israel. IMO, The reasons why Germany has been acting the way they have towards Israel have almost nothing to do with guilt and more with this -

Without doing the napkin math or trying to post all of the statistics on my phone, the Third Reich profited, at minimum, $215B in today's money, from the Holocaust - in seized property, immigration tax, literal gold teeth in Swiss bank accounts. That's not including the sale of assets, for example art, or the profits made from seized companies. So, that's a low-ball estimate, and one that relies on the Nazi appraisal (and reporting) of seized assets, which is another way to say they severely undercounted according to every expert. Add to that corruption, Swiss banks, people trying to cook the books once the war was lost etc. and you are looking at huge amounts of assets, in Germany, today that originated in the Holocaust, often either directly owned by the German government or privatized by them at some point, with the proceeds going to the state treasury.

Germany has paid to date, $87B in reparations. Again, even by the roughest estimate, that leaves $128B of assets originally owned by German Jews still in German hands. With that in mind, let's examine Germany paying reparations to the state of Israel, and not Jewish community themselves, encouraging German Jews to emigrate to Israel not just immediately after the war in West Germany, but in a massive state-funded campaign after unification in 1991 as well.

It raises a lot of questions about that relationship. It would seem as if some people in the German state believe it is preferable, and again, most charitably "less expensive" to pay Israel for all of the Jews to go (and stay) there, than to have a German Jewish community, which might require them to divest some of this portfolio.

There are German laws on the books regarding German citizens who were charged the emigration taxes during the Third Reich. German legal codes are a bit obtuse to me, but so far as I know, for them to be compensated they need to show that their emigration was unjust. You know, that they were German, wished to remain in Germany, and so were unfairly forced to emigrate and give up that 80-90% of their assets. It's connected to right of return, you need to make good on it for the courts to award it to you. Now, if instead people remain in Israel, Canada, whatever, they've forfeited it. This is what I mean about the Nuremberg Laws and the consequences of the Holocaust having a status almost like fait accompli to the German state.

Their logic seems to be that they don't have to return all, or even most, of the money taken from German Jews who were kicked out, if none of them return to Germany.

In fact this was explicitly West German policy (overseen by many civil servants who had served the Third Reich) and is laid out in a recent book, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945. You see, West Germany did not actually take the Nuremberg Laws off the books, so effectively recognized the German Jews who survived the Holocaust as Displaced Persons, and Jews, but implicitly or explicitly, not as Germans. They therefore tirelessly worked to get rid of them alongside the other Displaced Persons. Survivor accounts are pretty unanimous in being told to go “back to Poland”, and “back East” - which is even more troubling since those were well known euphemisms in Nazi Germany for the programme of ghettoization and extermination in Poland. So, the German public, and German government, effectively acted as if the Nuremberg Laws stood, there was no such thing as a German Jew, and Jews were charitably Poland’s problems, if you don’t read that as “go to Hell”.

The publisher is very generous, the full book is far more frank:

“After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish sworking to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.”

At the risk of repeating myself, according to Ian Kershaw’s research, Germany made a tidy profit from the Holocaust. It was not just art and jewels that were seized by people murdered at the camps, property and businesses were seized too. These were not returned to surviving German Jews after the war, because they had been seized “legally", and so survivors would have to go to court, for example to evict the German family that had been living in their apartment since they were deported to Dachau. The occupation authorities preferred not to deal with this, and the German court system, on top of the wartime sympathies and histories of the vast majority of people involved (because Jews had been kicked out of the legal professions and civil service, remember, and reinstatement similarly dragged post 45) also had huge backlogs. All of which to say, the German government had huge amounts of property it would prefer the owners not reclaim. Either because the state literally used melted down gold teeth in Swiss banks, a huge part of the budget of Nazi Germany and West Germany also, but that there were fears that it was “disruptive” to displace good Germany families “just” because the Jews who (“formerly”) owned their homes and businesses turned up alive.

(Remember that Jews trying to flee Germany after 1936 had to surrender their immovable property, and also pay gigantic fees.) Post-war West Germany fully intended to keep this property, and budgets until at least the 1950’s were at least partially made possible with expropriated Jewish wealth.

You’ll never guess how this has been framed in liberal scholarship - all the communists' fault . Take Geller’s Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 :

“Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Jay Howard Geller analyzes the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders. Whereas the West German community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting, the small Jewish community in Eastern Germany was forced to struggle against communist opposition.”



Finally, Germany was not the only country this happened in. The first waves of “communist oppression” in Poland were, well, see for yourself:

“In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.”



Those awful heavy handed communists in Poland and East Germany made people give their poo poo back and reinstated citizenship for Jews and it caused literal riots. West Germany went another route, they moved heaven and earth to deport German Jews: to Israel, to the DDR, and to Poland. They worked to make staying in West Germany intolerable, to the maximal extent that they could.

For instance, they tried to keep the Jews who survived Belsen from moving into the village - they had to remain on the grounds of the concentration camp, even after liberation. Not just the local people of Belsen, but German officials referred to the Survivors as "the camp's prisoners", using a German word referring to convicts. When Survivors tried to start a Yiddish newspaper, the Germans suggested they go to Israel, and claimed that no printing blocks in that language survived in Germany or would be imported. They complained to the American occupation authorities about a passionate Yiddish culture emerging in the DP camps. They insisted that it was communist, and that the Jewish community remaining in Germany was dangerous, both because the Jews themselves were subversive, and because Good Germans would riot if a “criminal element” disturbed German society.

Finally, until the 2000’s, (West) Germans when discussing Holocaust Survivors amongst themselves in academic literature, which is to say decoupled from global Holocaust Studies (in English), referred to Survivors as “Former Prisoners”. This is one of those German compound word things, but basically referring to them as “Ex-Cons” upheld the justice of their imprisonment, aberrant nature etc.

All of this to say, I recommend anyone reading up on West Germany if they want to know about the intentions behind support for Israel.

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

I see people reacting "why is Germany doing this?" vis a vis loyalty oaths to Israel and so on.

If you want a top line explanation before the sources: Germany has accepted, to varying levels of openness, both the completion of the Holocaust, (which is to say, their government's actions towards living Jews in Israel has to be understood as reflecting a domestic belief that there are only dead Jews in Germany), and, for lack of a better word, its legitimacy. Which is not to say any German official alive today will say the Holocaust was good. Instead, they take as a baseline fact, that there is no longer such a thing as a German Jew, and that while there was a historical Jewish community in Germany, the "proper" place for Jews now is in Israel.

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

You might also compare this to Canada, where land acknowledgements and professions of regret about the treatment of First Nations scale with how many First Nations communities live in a particular area. The most anguished statements of regret and radical calls for reparations, land back, decolonialism etc. are the ones that happen where there is no chance of a native community actually making good on it. America is the same way of course.

So, it is with Germany and the Jews. Jews (of German origin) are in Israel, Jews remain only an artifact of history in Germany. Jews living in Germany might actually want the German government to return their property, (more on that in a moment).

So, how can Germany can act in a way that would make Dual Loyalty an irrefutable truth? I mean, imagine demanding that people within your country owe absolute allegiance, on threat of expulsion, to another nation. It's because, if you take the long view, they have accepted the premise of the Nuremberg Laws. This is directly linked to the Holocaust. Not just because the Nuremberg Laws allowed the Holocaust to happen, by effectively making German Jews nationless, but also because you can accept the premise of the Nuremberg Laws, and not feel particularly bad about it () if the Holocaust has already happened. You don't have to worry about Dual Loyalty if you don't believe that group exists within (Holocaust), or belongs within (Nuremberg Laws), your country in the first place.

It would be completely anathema for the German state to loudly support German Jews swearing allegiance to a foreign power, if they believe there were German Jews. They barely acknowledge that there are Jews today, alive, in Germany. When they do, it's clear, that they are not Germans, and clearer still that in the German government's opinion, they belong in Israel. IMO, The reasons why Germany has been acting the way they have towards Israel have almost nothing to do with guilt and more with this -

Without doing the napkin math or trying to post all of the statistics on my phone, the Third Reich profited, at minimum, $215B in today's money, from the Holocaust - in seized property, immigration tax, literal gold teeth in Swiss bank accounts. That's not including the sale of assets, for example art, or the profits made from seized companies. So, that's a low-ball estimate, and one that relies on the Nazi appraisal (and reporting) of seized assets, which is another way to say they severely undercounted according to every expert. Add to that corruption, Swiss banks, people trying to cook the books once the war was lost etc. and you are looking at huge amounts of assets, in Germany, today that originated in the Holocaust, often either directly owned by the German government or privatized by them at some point, with the proceeds going to the state treasury.

Germany has paid to date, $87B in reparations. Again, even by the roughest estimate, that leaves $128B of assets originally owned by German Jews still in German hands. With that in mind, let's examine Germany paying reparations to the state of Israel, and not Jewish community themselves, encouraging German Jews to emigrate to Israel not just immediately after the war in West Germany, but in a massive state-funded campaign after unification in 1991 as well.

It raises a lot of questions about that relationship. It would seem as if some people in the German state believe it is preferable, and again, most charitably "less expensive" to pay Israel for all of the Jews to go (and stay) there, than to have a German Jewish community, which might require them to divest some of this portfolio.

There are German laws on the books regarding German citizens who were charged the emigration taxes during the Third Reich. German legal codes are a bit obtuse to me, but so far as I know, for them to be compensated they need to show that their emigration was unjust. You know, that they were German, wished to remain in Germany, and so were unfairly forced to emigrate and give up that 80-90% of their assets. It's connected to right of return, you need to make good on it for the courts to award it to you. Now, if instead people remain in Israel, Canada, whatever, they've forfeited it. This is what I mean about the Nuremberg Laws and the consequences of the Holocaust having a status almost like fait accompli to the German state.

Their logic seems to be that they don't have to return all, or even most, of the money taken from German Jews who were kicked out, if none of them return to Germany.

In fact this was explicitly West German policy (overseen by many civil servants who had served the Third Reich) and is laid out in a recent book, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945. You see, West Germany did not actually take the Nuremberg Laws off the books, so effectively recognized the German Jews who survived the Holocaust as Displaced Persons, and Jews, but implicitly or explicitly, not as Germans. They therefore tirelessly worked to get rid of them alongside the other Displaced Persons. Survivor accounts are pretty unanimous in being told to go “back to Poland”, and “back East” - which is even more troubling since those were well known euphemisms in Nazi Germany for the programme of ghettoization and extermination in Poland. So, the German public, and German government, effectively acted as if the Nuremberg Laws stood, there was no such thing as a German Jew, and Jews were charitably Poland’s problems, if you don’t read that as “go to Hell”.

The publisher is very generous, the full book is far more frank:

“After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish sworking to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.”

At the risk of repeating myself, according to Ian Kershaw’s research, Germany made a tidy profit from the Holocaust. It was not just art and jewels that were seized by people murdered at the camps, property and businesses were seized too. These were not returned to surviving German Jews after the war, because they had been seized “legally", and so survivors would have to go to court, for example to evict the German family that had been living in their apartment since they were deported to Dachau. The occupation authorities preferred not to deal with this, and the German court system, on top of the wartime sympathies and histories of the vast majority of people involved (because Jews had been kicked out of the legal professions and civil service, remember, and reinstatement similarly dragged post 45) also had huge backlogs. All of which to say, the German government had huge amounts of property it would prefer the owners not reclaim. Either because the state literally used melted down gold teeth in Swiss banks, a huge part of the budget of Nazi Germany and West Germany also, but that there were fears that it was “disruptive” to displace good Germany families “just” because the Jews who (“formerly”) owned their homes and businesses turned up alive.

(Remember that Jews trying to flee Germany after 1936 had to surrender their immovable property, and also pay gigantic fees.) Post-war West Germany fully intended to keep this property, and budgets until at least the 1950’s were at least partially made possible with expropriated Jewish wealth.

You’ll never guess how this has been framed in liberal scholarship - all the communists' fault . Take Geller’s Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 :

“Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Jay Howard Geller analyzes the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders. Whereas the West German community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting, the small Jewish community in Eastern Germany was forced to struggle against communist opposition.”



Finally, Germany was not the only country this happened in. The first waves of “communist oppression” in Poland were, well, see for yourself:

“In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.”



Those awful heavy handed communists in Poland and East Germany made people give their poo poo back and reinstated citizenship for Jews and it caused literal riots. West Germany went another route, they moved heaven and earth to deport German Jews: to Israel, to the DDR, and to Poland. They worked to make staying in West Germany intolerable, to the maximal extent that they could.

For instance, they tried to keep the Jews who survived Belsen from moving into the village - they had to remain on the grounds of the concentration camp, even after liberation. Not just the local people of Belsen, but German officials referred to the Survivors as "the camp's prisoners", using a German word referring to convicts. When Survivors tried to start a Yiddish newspaper, the Germans suggested they go to Israel, and claimed that no printing blocks in that language survived in Germany or would be imported. They complained to the American occupation authorities about a passionate Yiddish culture emerging in the DP camps. They insisted that it was communist, and that the Jewish community remaining in Germany was dangerous, both because the Jews themselves were subversive, and because Good Germans would riot if a “criminal element” disturbed German society.

Finally, until the 2000’s, (West) Germans when discussing Holocaust Survivors amongst themselves in academic literature, which is to say decoupled from global Holocaust Studies (in English), referred to Survivors as “Former Prisoners”. This is one of those German compound word things, but basically referring to them as “Ex-Cons” upheld the justice of their imprisonment, aberrant nature etc.

All of this to say, I recommend anyone reading up on West Germany if they want to know about the intentions behind support for Israel.

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

I see people reacting "why is Germany doing this?" vis a vis loyalty oaths to Israel and so on.

If you want a top line explanation before the sources: Germany has accepted, to varying levels of openness, both the completion of the Holocaust, (which is to say, their government's actions towards living Jews in Israel has to be understood as reflecting a domestic belief that there are only dead Jews in Germany), and, for lack of a better word, its legitimacy. Which is not to say any German official alive today will say the Holocaust was good. Instead, they take as a baseline fact, that there is no longer such a thing as a German Jew, and that while there was a historical Jewish community in Germany, the "proper" place for Jews now is in Israel.

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

You might also compare this to Canada, where land acknowledgements and professions of regret about the treatment of First Nations scale with how many First Nations communities live in a particular area. The most anguished statements of regret and radical calls for reparations, land back, decolonialism etc. are the ones that happen where there is no chance of a native community actually making good on it. America is the same way of course.

So, it is with Germany and the Jews. Jews (of German origin) are in Israel, Jews remain only an artifact of history in Germany. Jews living in Germany might actually want the German government to return their property, (more on that in a moment).

So, how can Germany can act in a way that would make Dual Loyalty an irrefutable truth? I mean, imagine demanding that people within your country owe absolute allegiance, on threat of expulsion, to another nation. It's because, if you take the long view, they have accepted the premise of the Nuremberg Laws. This is directly linked to the Holocaust. Not just because the Nuremberg Laws allowed the Holocaust to happen, by effectively making German Jews nationless, but also because you can accept the premise of the Nuremberg Laws, and not feel particularly bad about it () if the Holocaust has already happened. You don't have to worry about Dual Loyalty if you don't believe that group exists within (Holocaust), or belongs within (Nuremberg Laws), your country in the first place.

It would be completely anathema for the German state to loudly support German Jews swearing allegiance to a foreign power, if they believe there were German Jews. They barely acknowledge that there are Jews today, alive, in Germany. When they do, it's clear, that they are not Germans, and clearer still that in the German government's opinion, they belong in Israel. IMO, The reasons why Germany has been acting the way they have towards Israel have almost nothing to do with guilt and more with this -

Without doing the napkin math or trying to post all of the statistics on my phone, the Third Reich profited, at minimum, $215B in today's money, from the Holocaust - in seized property, immigration tax, literal gold teeth in Swiss bank accounts. That's not including the sale of assets, for example art, or the profits made from seized companies. So, that's a low-ball estimate, and one that relies on the Nazi appraisal (and reporting) of seized assets, which is another way to say they severely undercounted according to every expert. Add to that corruption, Swiss banks, people trying to cook the books once the war was lost etc. and you are looking at huge amounts of assets, in Germany, today that originated in the Holocaust, often either directly owned by the German government or privatized by them at some point, with the proceeds going to the state treasury.

Germany has paid to date, $87B in reparations. Again, even by the roughest estimate, that leaves $128B of assets originally owned by German Jews still in German hands. With that in mind, let's examine Germany paying reparations to the state of Israel, and not Jewish community themselves, encouraging German Jews to emigrate to Israel not just immediately after the war in West Germany, but in a massive state-funded campaign after unification in 1991 as well.

It raises a lot of questions about that relationship. It would seem as if some people in the German state believe it is preferable, and again, most charitably "less expensive" to pay Israel for all of the Jews to go (and stay) there, than to have a German Jewish community, which might require them to divest some of this portfolio.

There are German laws on the books regarding German citizens who were charged the emigration taxes during the Third Reich. German legal codes are a bit obtuse to me, but so far as I know, for them to be compensated they need to show that their emigration was unjust. You know, that they were German, wished to remain in Germany, and so were unfairly forced to emigrate and give up that 80-90% of their assets. It's connected to right of return, you need to make good on it for the courts to award it to you. Now, if instead people remain in Israel, Canada, whatever, they've forfeited it. This is what I mean about the Nuremberg Laws and the consequences of the Holocaust having a status almost like fait accompli to the German state.

Their logic seems to be that they don't have to return all, or even most, of the money taken from German Jews who were kicked out, if none of them return to Germany.

In fact this was explicitly West German policy (overseen by many civil servants who had served the Third Reich) and is laid out in a recent book, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945. You see, West Germany did not actually take the Nuremberg Laws off the books, so effectively recognized the German Jews who survived the Holocaust as Displaced Persons, and Jews, but implicitly or explicitly, not as Germans. They therefore tirelessly worked to get rid of them alongside the other Displaced Persons. Survivor accounts are pretty unanimous in being told to go “back to Poland”, and “back East” - which is even more troubling since those were well known euphemisms in Nazi Germany for the programme of ghettoization and extermination in Poland. So, the German public, and German government, effectively acted as if the Nuremberg Laws stood, there was no such thing as a German Jew, and Jews were charitably Poland’s problems, if you don’t read that as “go to Hell”.

The publisher is very generous, the full book is far more frank:

“After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish sworking to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.”

At the risk of repeating myself, according to Ian Kershaw’s research, Germany made a tidy profit from the Holocaust. It was not just art and jewels that were seized by people murdered at the camps, property and businesses were seized too. These were not returned to surviving German Jews after the war, because they had been seized “legally", and so survivors would have to go to court, for example to evict the German family that had been living in their apartment since they were deported to Dachau. The occupation authorities preferred not to deal with this, and the German court system, on top of the wartime sympathies and histories of the vast majority of people involved (because Jews had been kicked out of the legal professions and civil service, remember, and reinstatement similarly dragged post 45) also had huge backlogs. All of which to say, the German government had huge amounts of property it would prefer the owners not reclaim. Either because the state literally used melted down gold teeth in Swiss banks, a huge part of the budget of Nazi Germany and West Germany also, but that there were fears that it was “disruptive” to displace good Germany families “just” because the Jews who (“formerly”) owned their homes and businesses turned up alive.

(Remember that Jews trying to flee Germany after 1936 had to surrender their immovable property, and also pay gigantic fees.) Post-war West Germany fully intended to keep this property, and budgets until at least the 1950’s were at least partially made possible with expropriated Jewish wealth.

You’ll never guess how this has been framed in liberal scholarship - all the communists' fault . Take Geller’s Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 :

“Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Jay Howard Geller analyzes the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders. Whereas the West German community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting, the small Jewish community in Eastern Germany was forced to struggle against communist opposition.”



Finally, Germany was not the only country this happened in. The first waves of “communist oppression” in Poland were, well, see for yourself:

“In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.”



Those awful heavy handed communists in Poland and East Germany made people give their poo poo back and reinstated citizenship for Jews and it caused literal riots. West Germany went another route, they moved heaven and earth to deport German Jews: to Israel, to the DDR, and to Poland. They worked to make staying in West Germany intolerable, to the maximal extent that they could.

For instance, they tried to keep the Jews who survived Belsen from moving into the village - they had to remain on the grounds of the concentration camp, even after liberation. Not just the local people of Belsen, but German officials referred to the Survivors as "the camp's prisoners", using a German word referring to convicts. When Survivors tried to start a Yiddish newspaper, the Germans suggested they go to Israel, and claimed that no printing blocks in that language survived in Germany or would be imported. They complained to the American occupation authorities about a passionate Yiddish culture emerging in the DP camps. They insisted that it was communist, and that the Jewish community remaining in Germany was dangerous, both because the Jews themselves were subversive, and because Good Germans would riot if a “criminal element” disturbed German society.

Finally, until the 2000’s, (West) Germans when discussing Holocaust Survivors amongst themselves in academic literature, which is to say decoupled from global Holocaust Studies (in English), referred to Survivors as “Former Prisoners”. This is one of those German compound word things, but basically referring to them as “Ex-Cons” upheld the justice of their imprisonment, aberrant nature etc.

All of this to say, I recommend anyone reading up on West Germany if they want to know about the intentions behind support for Israel.

Shageletic posted:

Ff was backed up and now he's making GBS threads giant bricks of text

ughhhh posted:

What's the deal with the son of Hamas founder that Israeli propaganda keeps wheeling out now and again to say how bad Hamas is?

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

I see people reacting "why is Germany doing this?" vis a vis loyalty oaths to Israel and so on.

If you want a top line explanation before the sources: Germany has accepted, to varying levels of openness, both the completion of the Holocaust, (which is to say, their government's actions towards living Jews in Israel has to be understood as reflecting a domestic belief that there are only dead Jews in Germany), and, for lack of a better word, its legitimacy. Which is not to say any German official alive today will say the Holocaust was good. Instead, they take as a baseline fact, that there is no longer such a thing as a German Jew, and that while there was a historical Jewish community in Germany, the "proper" place for Jews now is in Israel.

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

You might also compare this to Canada, where land acknowledgements and professions of regret about the treatment of First Nations scale with how many First Nations communities live in a particular area. The most anguished statements of regret and radical calls for reparations, land back, decolonialism etc. are the ones that happen where there is no chance of a native community actually making good on it. America is the same way of course.

So, it is with Germany and the Jews. Jews (of German origin) are in Israel, Jews remain only an artifact of history in Germany. Jews living in Germany might actually want the German government to return their property, (more on that in a moment).

So, how can Germany can act in a way that would make Dual Loyalty an irrefutable truth? I mean, imagine demanding that people within your country owe absolute allegiance, on threat of expulsion, to another nation. It's because, if you take the long view, they have accepted the premise of the Nuremberg Laws. This is directly linked to the Holocaust. Not just because the Nuremberg Laws allowed the Holocaust to happen, by effectively making German Jews nationless, but also because you can accept the premise of the Nuremberg Laws, and not feel particularly bad about it () if the Holocaust has already happened. You don't have to worry about Dual Loyalty if you don't believe that group exists within (Holocaust), or belongs within (Nuremberg Laws), your country in the first place.

It would be completely anathema for the German state to loudly support German Jews swearing allegiance to a foreign power, if they believe there were German Jews. They barely acknowledge that there are Jews today, alive, in Germany. When they do, it's clear, that they are not Germans, and clearer still that in the German government's opinion, they belong in Israel. IMO, The reasons why Germany has been acting the way they have towards Israel have almost nothing to do with guilt and more with this -

Without doing the napkin math or trying to post all of the statistics on my phone, the Third Reich profited, at minimum, $215B in today's money, from the Holocaust - in seized property, immigration tax, literal gold teeth in Swiss bank accounts. That's not including the sale of assets, for example art, or the profits made from seized companies. So, that's a low-ball estimate, and one that relies on the Nazi appraisal (and reporting) of seized assets, which is another way to say they severely undercounted according to every expert. Add to that corruption, Swiss banks, people trying to cook the books once the war was lost etc. and you are looking at huge amounts of assets, in Germany, today that originated in the Holocaust, often either directly owned by the German government or privatized by them at some point, with the proceeds going to the state treasury.

Germany has paid to date, $87B in reparations. Again, even by the roughest estimate, that leaves $128B of assets originally owned by German Jews still in German hands. With that in mind, let's examine Germany paying reparations to the state of Israel, and not Jewish community themselves, encouraging German Jews to emigrate to Israel not just immediately after the war in West Germany, but in a massive state-funded campaign after unification in 1991 as well.

It raises a lot of questions about that relationship. It would seem as if some people in the German state believe it is preferable, and again, most charitably "less expensive" to pay Israel for all of the Jews to go (and stay) there, than to have a German Jewish community, which might require them to divest some of this portfolio.

There are German laws on the books regarding German citizens who were charged the emigration taxes during the Third Reich. German legal codes are a bit obtuse to me, but so far as I know, for them to be compensated they need to show that their emigration was unjust. You know, that they were German, wished to remain in Germany, and so were unfairly forced to emigrate and give up that 80-90% of their assets. It's connected to right of return, you need to make good on it for the courts to award it to you. Now, if instead people remain in Israel, Canada, whatever, they've forfeited it. This is what I mean about the Nuremberg Laws and the consequences of the Holocaust having a status almost like fait accompli to the German state.

Their logic seems to be that they don't have to return all, or even most, of the money taken from German Jews who were kicked out, if none of them return to Germany.

In fact this was explicitly West German policy (overseen by many civil servants who had served the Third Reich) and is laid out in a recent book, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945. You see, West Germany did not actually take the Nuremberg Laws off the books, so effectively recognized the German Jews who survived the Holocaust as Displaced Persons, and Jews, but implicitly or explicitly, not as Germans. They therefore tirelessly worked to get rid of them alongside the other Displaced Persons. Survivor accounts are pretty unanimous in being told to go “back to Poland”, and “back East” - which is even more troubling since those were well known euphemisms in Nazi Germany for the programme of ghettoization and extermination in Poland. So, the German public, and German government, effectively acted as if the Nuremberg Laws stood, there was no such thing as a German Jew, and Jews were charitably Poland’s problems, if you don’t read that as “go to Hell”.

The publisher is very generous, the full book is far more frank:

“After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish sworking to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.”

At the risk of repeating myself, according to Ian Kershaw’s research, Germany made a tidy profit from the Holocaust. It was not just art and jewels that were seized by people murdered at the camps, property and businesses were seized too. These were not returned to surviving German Jews after the war, because they had been seized “legally", and so survivors would have to go to court, for example to evict the German family that had been living in their apartment since they were deported to Dachau. The occupation authorities preferred not to deal with this, and the German court system, on top of the wartime sympathies and histories of the vast majority of people involved (because Jews had been kicked out of the legal professions and civil service, remember, and reinstatement similarly dragged post 45) also had huge backlogs. All of which to say, the German government had huge amounts of property it would prefer the owners not reclaim. Either because the state literally used melted down gold teeth in Swiss banks, a huge part of the budget of Nazi Germany and West Germany also, but that there were fears that it was “disruptive” to displace good Germany families “just” because the Jews who (“formerly”) owned their homes and businesses turned up alive.

(Remember that Jews trying to flee Germany after 1936 had to surrender their immovable property, and also pay gigantic fees.) Post-war West Germany fully intended to keep this property, and budgets until at least the 1950’s were at least partially made possible with expropriated Jewish wealth.

You’ll never guess how this has been framed in liberal scholarship - all the communists' fault . Take Geller’s Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 :

“Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Jay Howard Geller analyzes the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders. Whereas the West German community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting, the small Jewish community in Eastern Germany was forced to struggle against communist opposition.”



Finally, Germany was not the only country this happened in. The first waves of “communist oppression” in Poland were, well, see for yourself:

“In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.”



Those awful heavy handed communists in Poland and East Germany made people give their poo poo back and reinstated citizenship for Jews and it caused literal riots. West Germany went another route, they moved heaven and earth to deport German Jews: to Israel, to the DDR, and to Poland. They worked to make staying in West Germany intolerable, to the maximal extent that they could.

For instance, they tried to keep the Jews who survived Belsen from moving into the village - they had to remain on the grounds of the concentration camp, even after liberation. Not just the local people of Belsen, but German officials referred to the Survivors as "the camp's prisoners", using a German word referring to convicts. When Survivors tried to start a Yiddish newspaper, the Germans suggested they go to Israel, and claimed that no printing blocks in that language survived in Germany or would be imported. They complained to the American occupation authorities about a passionate Yiddish culture emerging in the DP camps. They insisted that it was communist, and that the Jewish community remaining in Germany was dangerous, both because the Jews themselves were subversive, and because Good Germans would riot if a “criminal element” disturbed German society.

Finally, until the 2000’s, (West) Germans when discussing Holocaust Survivors amongst themselves in academic literature, which is to say decoupled from global Holocaust Studies (in English), referred to Survivors as “Former Prisoners”. This is one of those German compound word things, but basically referring to them as “Ex-Cons” upheld the justice of their imprisonment, aberrant nature etc.

All of this to say, I recommend anyone reading up on West Germany if they want to know about the intentions behind support for Israel.

ScootsMcSkirt posted:

wb ff

im not reading all of that tho

Frosted Flake posted:

I've been trying to catch up on the thread, and just wanted to get into something real quick:

First, there are several good books on Glider Infantry and glider operations generally. There's been a renewal of interest and some pretty good scholarship lately.

I would agree that Ében-Émael and the Gran Sasso raid, both German operations, were the pinnacle of the form as far as special operations use goes, probably moreso than Pegasus Bridge. Parenthetically, the PRC, DPRK and others, retained gliders well into the Cold War for this purpose. The ability to silently, and accurately, deliver a complete unit to a target without the scattering of a parachute drop remains useful.

The mass use of gliders was limited to the Western Allies and was remarkably successful. The reason people know so little about it, and the reason glider forces disappeared so quickly after the war is due to something that has been noted ITT over and over again, the cult of airborne forces, who are exceedingly good at playing Pentagon politics. The US Airborne lobbied so that Glider troops would not share their insignia and uniforms (jump boots etc.), fought against them receiving wings, bonus pay etc. and reduced the size of the Glider component of US Airborne Divisions in 1944. Ironically, the Glider troops seem to have done a better job in achieving their objectives in the immediate 101st and 82nd zones of responsibility in Normandy, because, as I said about the special operations role, they all arrived together, and landed with heavy weapons, including AT guns, howitzers, jeeps, and airborne tanks (which the US Airborne left but the British paras put to use). British Glider troops also got a good reputation for their service in Market Garden and the Rhine crossings.

What the Glider troops were not good at, was climbing the ranks quickly enough to secure their place upon demobilization, which is exactly what happened to the Machine Gun Corps after the Great War.

Having an institution matters a lot in the military, and whole weapons systems can rise and fall based on office politics, not the test of battle. By way of example, British glider pilots formed the Glider Pilot Regiment, and in the Regimental system, that was a big deal. Not only did it allow them to stick around until 1957, when helicopters and large transport aircraft were better able to replicate their capabilities, but it improved their morale and performance during the war years too. They trained to a very high standard, were organized for their missions after delivering their cargo to the LZ, and in Arnhem in particular, gave a very good account of themselves. US glider pilots seem to mostly have been pilots that washed out of multiengine flight school at some point, were treated accordingly, and after landing seem to have been told to mill around or work their way back to the Allied beaches. They had no pull at all in the USAAF, or US Army generally, certainly not enough to fight for Airborne divisions to retain their glider component after the budget cuts following the war.

More importantly, throughout the early Cold War, glider operations were the ones being referenced when military helicopters were being developed, particularly when large airmobile formations were envisioned. The experience of intact formations landing together and making use of the capacity of the larger Allied gliders to land heavy weapons that led to demands for heavy lift helicopters. It took a long time for rotary wing aircraft to match the Horsa and Hamilcar too. Remember that the Wessex could only carry about a dozen troops, the early model Hueys even fewer. The independent airmobile formation, "Air Cavalry" or otherwise, could not deliver to an LZ what the glider formations could until the Chinook came around pretty far into the Cold War.

Now, the Soviets went another route and just dropped bigger and bigger things by parachute, so that the VDV, as you all know, has tanks, IFVs, APCs, more support vehicles than you can shake a stick at. It's a bit misleading, because the Soviet Union, and certainly the Russian Federation, never actually had enough large transport aircraft to deliver even one VDV division by parachute in a single day, despite fielding several of them. It's not just their approach that differed though, the Russians have different politics where the Airborne are concerned, since they were able to carve out a place for themselves as an arm of service. This is neither here nor there.

Now, aside about gliders notwithstanding, what is the deal with Israeli paratroopers? Well, you can stop right here and read When Failure Thrives: Institutions and the Evolution of Postwar Airborne Forces, which also recaps the above about the US Army Airborne, British (and CW) Paras, and VDV. Paratroops are very, very good at finding political supporting, and carving out institutional niches for themselves. In the Canadian Army today, you basically need three things to progress past Major in a combat arm: Staff College, fluent French, and parachute wings. The same seems to be true just about everywhere.

The commander of US forces in Vietnam, Westmoreland, was an artillery officer in WW2, who saw the planned size reduction of the US Army after Korea and quickly transferred to the 82nd Airborne Division. General Petraeus, who you all know and love, made his career in the 82nd, and spent a good deal of it protecting it and its parachute status. Look at any photo of US Army top brass, as you will far more likely than not, see them wearing parachute wings and 82nd AB patches.

Before I get into the mechanics of it, I'll say that the Israeli Army is the exact same way. The Israeli Airborne has in actuality been lavishly equipped with APCs since 1982, when the unit was given a more generous allotment of M113s than the regular infantry, many of whom were still on trucks or WW2 era half tracks. They were among the very first provided with Namers, and once again more of them on a per-unit basis, when those rolled around. So, clearly it's not the actual parachute capability that lends the Israeli Army institutional backing, what's going on?

This power stems not from their military capabilities but from their (exaggerated) historical significance, reputation, and the symbolic value they hold in Israeli society and military culture. Their status as an elite unit has been sustained over the decades, largely due to strong institutional backing, which has provided them with significant resources and autonomy. This support has enabled them to adapt to new operational requirements while retaining their elite status and significant role within the IDF. Despite their origins and continued identification as airborne forces, the Israeli Paratroopers have effectively transitioned to a mechanized force. Since the 1956 Suez War, there has been a strategic shift towards increased mechanization within the IDF, with the paratroopers being equipped with APCs. This transition reflects a broader trend in Israeli military strategy, emphasizing the importance of mechanized infantry in modern warfare - first because the Armoured corps held all the leadership positions and literally left the infantry behind in 1956, 67 and 73, then because of squishy casualty aversion.

"Following the 1973 war, there was a significant expansion and reorganization of the ground forces. The establishment of more armored divisions, including a reserve paratroop division, and the equipping of all infantry units with APCs, including paratroopers, further cemented the transition to mechanized warfare."

However, the paratroopers have retained their airborne mystique and identity, demonstrating the enduring power of institutional prestige and tradition in the military, in part because in a conscript military that has effectively been turned into summer camp, as has been pointed out repeatedly ITT, they are the one formation that leans towards regular soldiers. That's because anyone who becomes an IDF regular will gravitate toward units that aren't Mickey Mouse bullshit clown shows, because as in the other countries mentioned up top, jump wings become a promotion requirement, and a career soldier will by definition seek promotion, and also since 1982 the Armoured branch lost a lot of institutional pull because Israel mostly needed dismounted troops to beat up Palestinians.

The Paratroops met that last requirement in particular because, being filled to at least partial strength with regulars, they could be used for these occupation duties without call-ups, which Israel desperately needed. Think of them a bit like an internal French Foreign Legion in that sense. Cross-border raids into Lebanon and "real" fighting during the Intifadas required something like the US all-volunteer force, and the Paratroops fit that need. There's a lot more to get in to here, but the gist of it is, the walls and checkpoints have often been manned by reservists, but the Paratroops were considered the only reliable infantry in the IDF - it had nothing to do with their ability to hit the silk.

Just like all the SOF teams getting wiped out on Zero Hour this go round, using the Paras has a fire brigade had limitations. For instance, the setbacks experienced during the 2006 Lebanon War, where two parachute battalions were almost wiped out - their operational plan presupposed Hezbollah would run away at the sight of them - "highlighted tactical limitations and the need for adjustments in training and strategy". The IDF being the IDF, these fuckups did not significantly diminish the institutional strength or prestige of the paratroopers. Their resilience underscores how institutional power and historical reputation can buffer military units from the immediate impacts of battlefield failures.

So, if someone wants to take a crack at it, the decline of the US and UK Glider forces and the persistence of the IDF paras are two sides of the same coin, where who can best play office politics and who can cultivate a mystique determines what forces, even whole weapons systems and operational concepts, stick around.

I'd go further and add that in colonial conflicts, Marines and Paras are the only ones who maintain consistently high morale. The same thing happened to the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the Paras and Royal Marines from Suez through Falklands the the present day, the ARVN, I would guess the US military as well.

Frosted Flake posted:

I've been trying to catch up on the thread, and just wanted to get into something real quick:

First, there are several good books on Glider Infantry and glider operations generally. There's been a renewal of interest and some pretty good scholarship lately.
...

NeonPunk posted:

Do you have any book recommendations on this?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Guys will see this and think "hell yeah"

ScootsMcSkirt posted:

wb ff

im not reading all of that tho

Frosted Flake posted:

I've been trying to catch up on the thread, and just wanted to get into something real quick:

First, there are several good books on Glider Infantry and glider operations generally. There's been a renewal of interest and some pretty good scholarship lately.

I would agree that Ében-Émael and the Gran Sasso raid, both German operations, were the pinnacle of the form as far as special operations use goes, probably moreso than Pegasus Bridge. Parenthetically, the PRC, DPRK and others, retained gliders well into the Cold War for this purpose. The ability to silently, and accurately, deliver a complete unit to a target without the scattering of a parachute drop remains useful.

The mass use of gliders was limited to the Western Allies and was remarkably successful. The reason people know so little about it, and the reason glider forces disappeared so quickly after the war is due to something that has been noted ITT over and over again, the cult of airborne forces, who are exceedingly good at playing Pentagon politics. The US Airborne lobbied so that Glider troops would not share their insignia and uniforms (jump boots etc.), fought against them receiving wings, bonus pay etc. and reduced the size of the Glider component of US Airborne Divisions in 1944. Ironically, the Glider troops seem to have done a better job in achieving their objectives in the immediate 101st and 82nd zones of responsibility in Normandy, because, as I said about the special operations role, they all arrived together, and landed with heavy weapons, including AT guns, howitzers, jeeps, and airborne tanks (which the US Airborne left but the British paras put to use). British Glider troops also got a good reputation for their service in Market Garden and the Rhine crossings.

What the Glider troops were not good at, was climbing the ranks quickly enough to secure their place upon demobilization, which is exactly what happened to the Machine Gun Corps after the Great War.

Having an institution matters a lot in the military, and whole weapons systems can rise and fall based on office politics, not the test of battle. By way of example, British glider pilots formed the Glider Pilot Regiment, and in the Regimental system, that was a big deal. Not only did it allow them to stick around until 1957, when helicopters and large transport aircraft were better able to replicate their capabilities, but it improved their morale and performance during the war years too. They trained to a very high standard, were organized for their missions after delivering their cargo to the LZ, and in Arnhem in particular, gave a very good account of themselves. US glider pilots seem to mostly have been pilots that washed out of multiengine flight school at some point, were treated accordingly, and after landing seem to have been told to mill around or work their way back to the Allied beaches. They had no pull at all in the USAAF, or US Army generally, certainly not enough to fight for Airborne divisions to retain their glider component after the budget cuts following the war.

More importantly, throughout the early Cold War, glider operations were the ones being referenced when military helicopters were being developed, particularly when large airmobile formations were envisioned. The experience of intact formations landing together and making use of the capacity of the larger Allied gliders to land heavy weapons that led to demands for heavy lift helicopters. It took a long time for rotary wing aircraft to match the Horsa and Hamilcar too. Remember that the Wessex could only carry about a dozen troops, the early model Hueys even fewer. The independent airmobile formation, "Air Cavalry" or otherwise, could not deliver to an LZ what the glider formations could until the Chinook came around pretty far into the Cold War.

Now, the Soviets went another route and just dropped bigger and bigger things by parachute, so that the VDV, as you all know, has tanks, IFVs, APCs, more support vehicles than you can shake a stick at. It's a bit misleading, because the Soviet Union, and certainly the Russian Federation, never actually had enough large transport aircraft to deliver even one VDV division by parachute in a single day, despite fielding several of them. It's not just their approach that differed though, the Russians have different politics where the Airborne are concerned, since they were able to carve out a place for themselves as an arm of service. This is neither here nor there.

Now, aside about gliders notwithstanding, what is the deal with Israeli paratroopers? Well, you can stop right here and read When Failure Thrives: Institutions and the Evolution of Postwar Airborne Forces, which also recaps the above about the US Army Airborne, British (and CW) Paras, and VDV. Paratroops are very, very good at finding political supporting, and carving out institutional niches for themselves. In the Canadian Army today, you basically need three things to progress past Major in a combat arm: Staff College, fluent French, and parachute wings. The same seems to be true just about everywhere.

The commander of US forces in Vietnam, Westmoreland, was an artillery officer in WW2, who saw the planned size reduction of the US Army after Korea and quickly transferred to the 82nd Airborne Division. General Petraeus, who you all know and love, made his career in the 82nd, and spent a good deal of it protecting it and its parachute status. Look at any photo of US Army top brass, as you will far more likely than not, see them wearing parachute wings and 82nd AB patches.

Before I get into the mechanics of it, I'll say that the Israeli Army is the exact same way. The Israeli Airborne has in actuality been lavishly equipped with APCs since 1982, when the unit was given a more generous allotment of M113s than the regular infantry, many of whom were still on trucks or WW2 era half tracks. They were among the very first provided with Namers, and once again more of them on a per-unit basis, when those rolled around. So, clearly it's not the actual parachute capability that lends the Israeli Army institutional backing, what's going on?

This power stems not from their military capabilities but from their (exaggerated) historical significance, reputation, and the symbolic value they hold in Israeli society and military culture. Their status as an elite unit has been sustained over the decades, largely due to strong institutional backing, which has provided them with significant resources and autonomy. This support has enabled them to adapt to new operational requirements while retaining their elite status and significant role within the IDF. Despite their origins and continued identification as airborne forces, the Israeli Paratroopers have effectively transitioned to a mechanized force. Since the 1956 Suez War, there has been a strategic shift towards increased mechanization within the IDF, with the paratroopers being equipped with APCs. This transition reflects a broader trend in Israeli military strategy, emphasizing the importance of mechanized infantry in modern warfare - first because the Armoured corps held all the leadership positions and literally left the infantry behind in 1956, 67 and 73, then because of squishy casualty aversion.

"Following the 1973 war, there was a significant expansion and reorganization of the ground forces. The establishment of more armored divisions, including a reserve paratroop division, and the equipping of all infantry units with APCs, including paratroopers, further cemented the transition to mechanized warfare."

However, the paratroopers have retained their airborne mystique and identity, demonstrating the enduring power of institutional prestige and tradition in the military, in part because in a conscript military that has effectively been turned into summer camp, as has been pointed out repeatedly ITT, they are the one formation that leans towards regular soldiers. That's because anyone who becomes an IDF regular will gravitate toward units that aren't Mickey Mouse bullshit clown shows, because as in the other countries mentioned up top, jump wings become a promotion requirement, and a career soldier will by definition seek promotion, and also since 1982 the Armoured branch lost a lot of institutional pull because Israel mostly needed dismounted troops to beat up Palestinians.

The Paratroops met that last requirement in particular because, being filled to at least partial strength with regulars, they could be used for these occupation duties without call-ups, which Israel desperately needed. Think of them a bit like an internal French Foreign Legion in that sense. Cross-border raids into Lebanon and "real" fighting during the Intifadas required something like the US all-volunteer force, and the Paratroops fit that need. There's a lot more to get in to here, but the gist of it is, the walls and checkpoints have often been manned by reservists, but the Paratroops were considered the only reliable infantry in the IDF - it had nothing to do with their ability to hit the silk.

Just like all the SOF teams getting wiped out on Zero Hour this go round, using the Paras has a fire brigade had limitations. For instance, the setbacks experienced during the 2006 Lebanon War, where two parachute battalions were almost wiped out - their operational plan presupposed Hezbollah would run away at the sight of them - "highlighted tactical limitations and the need for adjustments in training and strategy". The IDF being the IDF, these fuckups did not significantly diminish the institutional strength or prestige of the paratroopers. Their resilience underscores how institutional power and historical reputation can buffer military units from the immediate impacts of battlefield failures.

So, if someone wants to take a crack at it, the decline of the US and UK Glider forces and the persistence of the IDF paras are two sides of the same coin, where who can best play office politics and who can cultivate a mystique determines what forces, even whole weapons systems and operational concepts, stick around.

I'd go further and add that in colonial conflicts, Marines and Paras are the only ones who maintain consistently high morale. The same thing happened to the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the Paras and Royal Marines from Suez through Falklands the the present day, the ARVN, I would guess the US military as well.

Spergin Morlock posted:

there may come a point where hamas starts sending their IDF hostages back with horrific injuries and a clear message that its a direct result of the IDF pulling that poo poo

gradenko_2000 posted:

Guys will see this and think "hell yeah"

V. Illych L. posted:

frosted flake go on radio war nerd

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/revolutionaryem/status/1729976562051682316

Frosted Flake posted:

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

guidoanselmi posted:

welcome back FF, I missed your posts

Visiting Cordoba years ago, I remember the museum placards describing the perfidy and tyranny of the Muslims and the righteousness of the reconquista. For some reason, I didn't expect that.

V. Illych L. posted:

frosted flake go on chapo

1stGear posted:

we are so back

euphronius posted:

mf is phone posting that

Grimson posted:

this is a good thread on it, but tl;dr: they're forcing israeli owned ships to divert away from the suez and instead take the long rear end trip around the cape, adding a ton of cost on them from the new length of the trip and also lost revenue from the longer turnaround on their trips

https://x.com/revolutionaryem/status/1729692220528250949?s=20