Friday, November 30, 2012

Sudeten Germans and Palestinians

The only European country to vote against recognition of Palestinian statehood was the Czech Republic. I wonder how much this has to do with the common and persistent refusal of both the Czechs and the  Israelis to come to terms with the brutal expulsions and atrocities they both carried out in the 1940s? The Czech Republic like Israel is a state whose modern incarnation is founded upon massive ethnic cleansing. Near the end of WWII the Czechs violently expelled the vast majority of ethnic Germans and Hungarians living in Czechoslovakia. The forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia involved a number of massacres perpetrated against civilians as well as sexual assaults against women. It thus closely paralleled the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians just a few years later.

1 comment:

Leo Tolstoy said...

I'd say it probably has everything to do with it.