By Allan Stanley Edwars-Krett
When I read about people running for cover in the midst of falling rockets, I am reminded of me as a seven-year-old boy in London in 1940 during the blitz. Every night sirens went off to warn us of enemy planes coming over to bomb us indiscriminately with high explosives and incendiary bombs. In our house we did not go up to bed, we went down into the cellar where our family beds were.
This was an improvement from going into our garden, into the recently built Anderson shelter. We listened to the drone of the planes, the ack-ack fire, the blast of the high explosives, which depending how close the hit, would send reverberations though the walls. We had our buckets of sand and shovels on broom handles, for the adults to rush upstairs to the attic, when they thought an incendiary had pierced the roof, hoping to snuff out the fire before it got started. When the enemy planes with empty bomb bays started their return journey to Germany, the all- clear sounded, we would get ready to walk to school, on the way picking up pieces of shrapnel, some still warm. Sometimes, the school was no longer there, it had received a direct hit from a high explosive! This was the norm for about seven months, although there were daylight air raids as well, and other cities were also being bombed in a similar manner.
Why did this situation arise?
Was it because in the 1930s, Adolph Hitler wished to annihilate the Jewish race and had a strategic plan for world domination? As he gained power in Austria and Germany, concerns were raised outside of Germany, but the European world felt his extreme rhetoric was only for show, and his threats were ignored, even when he supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which provided the German military with combat experience for their latest technology.
In May 1942 Britain started retaliatory air raids on German cities dropping high explosive and incendiaries on cities like Cologne, Berlin, Dresden and others, causing extensive damage, death and fire. By the Time WWII ended in 1945, 75 million people had died, about 20 million in the military and the rest due to deliberate genocide, massacres, mass bombing, disease and starvation.
Iran is using Hamas and Hezbollah, two terrorist groups as testing grounds for their rockets and technology, and if allowed, nuclear devices will be in their arsenal for their proposed domination of the western world.
Both the “moderates” and the “radicals” in Iran want Islam to play a major role in the world scene, whereas America supports a world order which does not differentiate among nations on religious grounds.
Remember Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated on many occasions he is determined to destroy Israel. He states he does not want to eliminate Jews, but rather just to eliminate Israel, and deny its legitimacy and its right to exist. Remember Israel is the indigenous home of the Jewish people for nigh on three thousand years.
For those who are currently being educated by social media and question the legitimacy of Israel and consider Israel a colonizer in the Middle East, I offer some ancient and recent date facts:
After the exodus from Egypt around 1231 BC, the Israelites crossed the Jordan and conquered the Promised Land under the command of Joshua around 1200 BC.
In 586 BCE the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah and the Temple in Jerusalem was razed to the ground. There are a number of artifacts that give credence to this and other historic facts of Jewish presence in what the Romans had renamed as “Palestina”.
In 1917 the Balfour Declaration promised the Jews a homeland in Israel. After which there was the severing by Britain of 70 per cent of what was then known as the Mandate for Palestine into the independent Arab state of Transjordan, now known as Jordan, and the 30 per cent left for Jews, later to be known as Israel.
The 1990 San Remo Conference of the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of “Palestine”. This allocation of a state for the Jews was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922.
In 1945 the League of Nations ceased to exist and assets and responsibilities were handed over to the United Nations which in its Charter accepted the previous resolution of the League.
In 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to partition the land west of the Jordan into a Jewish and Arab state. The Arabs rejected it, but when the British withdrew in May 14, 1948 the modern state of Israel was established.
Simultaneously the Arab armies of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq invaded this tiny new country and encouraged the Arab population to leave so they would have the “pickings” after they had thrown the Jews into the sea.
In subsequent years the Jews in those Arab states and across the Arab world, were dispossessed of their assets and forced to leave those countries.
Bitter fighting took place, Israel prevailed, but Jordan gained control of the old city of Jerusalem with Jewish holy sites as well as Judea and Samaria. Armistice agreements with Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan were signed.
Now in Israel there were Jewish refugees from the Arab countries which had expelled them, and returning Arabs who had left on the advice of their leaders. In Israel the government helped to settle the Jewish refugees with work and housing, making them independent. The leaders of the Arab community decided to keep their refugees in camps relying on UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Work Agency) for support, and to use these Arabs as political pawns in trying to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist in the Middle East.
The signed armistice agreement did not stop belligerency from all the Arab states. Egypt would not allow Israeli shipping to pass through the Suez Canal, Syria used the Golan Heights to shell Israeli farms and villages. In May 1967 Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to further blockade the shipping routes to Israel.
The belligerent rhetoric from the Arabs of a further blood lust and plans to decimate Israel caused her to pre-empt the Arab attack, and Israel launched what is now known as the Six Day War. After six days of fighting Israel broke through the enemy lines and was in a position to march on Cairo, Damascus and Amman. Thus a cease fire was invoked on June 10, 1967.
In September 1967 at the Arab Summit Conference in Khartoum the following resolution was adopted. “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.” From this time point there were many aggressive incidents until October 6, 1973 when the Arabs opened a coordinated surprise attack against Israel from the Suez Canal in the south and from Syria in the north. This became known as the Yom Kippur War, Yom Kippur being the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Israel once again had to defend herself, and despite initial setbacks was able to repulse the two Arab armies and gain the upper hand.
Israel gave back the Sinai desert to the Egyptians in return for a peace treaty, and a peace treaty was signed between Israel and Jordan. (Jordan had in fact seventy per cent of what was known as Palestine after WW1).
Israel was very close in reaching an agreement with the Palestinian Arabs but their leader, an Egyptian named Yasser Arafat has a vision where Israel did not even exist.
After the 1948 war Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip but refused to allow the Palestinians who live there into Egypt or to move elsewhere. Israel took over control of Gaza during the Six Day War of 1967 and unilaterally withdrew in September 2005. Hamas was elected as the Palestinian government for Gaza. The agricultural industries which Israel had developed, and had handed over in functioning mode to the inhabitants of Gaza, were destroyed by Hamas; no attempt was made to continue running them. Hamas’s raison d’être is the total destruction of Israel as is that of Hezbollah and they make no secret of it; it is published in their respective charters.
The parallel between what happened in the 1930s culminating in the start of WWII in 1939 and what is happening now, is remarkably similar. We had a dictator, Hitler of Nazi Germany, promising to rid the world of Jews and now we have Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leader of the theocratic state of Iran, promising to rid the world of Israel, and denying the Holocaust even happened. Both are couched falsely in land disputes, ie Poland and the Sudetenlands of Czechoslovakia in pre-War Europe, dispute of ownership of the ancestral home of the Jews in the Middle East.
The flames were fanned by a total myopic attitude that ignored the war machine being built by Nazi Germany, and similarly the US and others now ignore Iran’s nuclear intentions or achievements, and allow its innate antisemitism as in the 1930s, to continue unabated as shown by the deafening silence of the World and it’s media, the imbalance of reporting on the recent conflict between the terrorist organization Hamas and Israel.
In the 1930s Japan used minor clashes in Manchuria to build up her military power, Italy under Mussolini was encouraged by Hitler with its invasion of Ethiopia and the dropping of gas bombs, Europe expressed its horror but did no more. In 1938 the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Tripartite Pact was formed. We currently have Russia in Syria and supporting Iran, China tensing its muscles economically and militarily, and a world on the brink of recovering from a massive covid 19 pandemic of questionable paternity.
However, there is a major difference in respect of Jews in the 1930s and now. I remember as a seven year old in London, UK, being chased and having stones thrown at me because I was a Jew. It is still happening here, but we will not be lead like lambs to our slaughter as was the case as the world watched in WWII and did nothing. We have a voice and a strength, and if the chips are down and there’s no alternative, Israel would be forced to use her nuclear option, not as Truman used it in 1945 to avoid putting U.S. troops on Japan’s mainland, but to pre-empt Iran using her nuclear weapons to destroy Israel and the Jewish people.
I hope for all our sakes, the world will stop feeding Iran money and ignoring its evil intentions, and that our Western Governments will not stand back and do nothing, as was done in the 1930s, but that they will take action to stop it in its tracks to avoid the possibility of a WWIII.
Allan Stanley Edwards-Krett was born in London, UK in 1932 and lived through the blitz. On watching the rocket attacks from Hamas that rained down on Israel in May this year he submitted a personal story to CAEF about his experience as a child, his understanding of Israel’s historic and legal rights, and his fears for Israel and the Jewish people as the madman of Iran and the Islamist Arabs conspire to eradicate Israel as Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem and others conspired to eradicate the Jewish people. The Nazis did more than conspire—they acted heinously. The fear today is palpable as the Ayatollah and their Iranian proxies, act out on Israel with regularity. Is history repeating itself asks Krett?