Several days ago, I had a conversation with Professor Raphael Israeli, one of the leading scholars of Islam at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
“The world wants Israel to be the new Czechoslovakia, it appeases Iran like during the Second World War, when nobody tried to save the Jews", he asserted..
According to Professor Israeli, “the Iranian regime is based on a violent, messianic, eschatological and mad cult which believes that the return of their Messiah will come through a tribulation, a catastrophic event. Like Adolf Hitler, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to extinguish the Jewish people”.
Professor’s Israeli comparison with Prague has another, deeper aspect, beyond appeasement.
Czechoslovakia’s situation in 1938 is similar to Israel’s in 2012. A young vibrant state, the only liberal democracy in Eastern Europe, it had Skoda, one of the world’s largest industrial military complexes, and an army of a million and a half soldiers.
Its Nazi neighbor demanded the annexation of the Sudeten region, settled by three million Germans. But the Sudeten mountains, like Israel’s Samaria, were the only position from which the Bohemian plain, with the capital, Prague, was defensible.
Hitler’s demand was “Land for Peace”.
The cowardly British diplomacy turned the victim into the aggressor and justified “the claims of a national minority to just treatment”, by the “Czech bully”. Chamberlain flew to Munich, where he signed the Sudetenland over to Hitler. He returned with a piece of paper bearing Hitler’s signature and “peace for our time”. Chamberlain sold out the brave Czech democracy, which had military and industrial power that worried the Nazi Third Reich, to “Herr Hitler”, as Winston Churchill called him.
When Czechoslovakia was a flourishing democracy, the Jews in Palestine were busy laying the foundation stones of their state. They based their claim to the land of their fathers on the Balfour Declaration, which promised, in the name of the British Empire, to permit the Jews to once again build their national home in the land of Israel.
But in the period 1938-39, instead of dealing with Hitler’s death cult, His Majesty’s government was busy preparing the infamous White Paper, intended to appease the Arabs by restricting Jews’ immigration. This decision was taken by the British cabinet, headed by Neville Chamberlain, the very same Chamberlain who had already sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
And now? The Western democracies are appeasing a mad dictatorship once again, and they ask a tiny democracy to give up its mountains, now called Migron and Itamar.
In 1939, Hitler entered Prague without firing a shot. Czechoslovakia was wiped off the map.
In the end, Hitler was beaten, but 50 to 60 million “victims of peace” were no more.
Will the West be ready to sacrifice Israel on the altar of “realism”, when Iran’s knife will descend on Isaac?
And will the Jewish state's leadership dutifully bind Israel on the altar?