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Israel collaborated with Holocaust distortion for geopolitical reasons: Top historian

Prominent Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer (Photo by The Times of Israel online newspaper)

A prominent Israeli historian has lambasted the Tel Aviv regime for having “collaborated” with Holocaust distortion and accepting the Polish narrative completely for the sake of political, economic and security gains.

Speaking in a webinar for British educators organized by University College of London, Yehuda Bauer said Israeli authorities are using a fictitious storyline, and playing along with it.

“The problem that we face is the identification of Israel with a distortion of the Holocaust, especially in Poland. The political and economic and security relationship between Israel and Poland is great, why would this problem of the Holocaust come between this?” he said.

He said the Israeli regime “decided to settle it” and sent a two-man team to negotiate with the Poles, “neither of them are experts on the Holocaust or history or Poland”, and they ended up “accepting the Polish narrative completely”.

“Anti-Semitism is defined in those documents, signed on June 28, 2018, as the same thing as anti-Polandism by the Jews. So, 2,000 years of anti-Semitism equals the opposition of some Jews to Poland,” Baurer, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem al-Quds, noted.

“Yad Vashem [Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust] doesn’t normally react. This was an exception. It was so gross, so dangerous. We don’t accept distortion of the Holocaust. What I’m saying is not only directed against the Polish nationalists, but against the collaborators on the Israeli side as well,” he further argued.

Bauer then described distortion as “a completely one-sided mixture of truths and untruths which is more dangerous than outright lies”.

He said, “Distortion is when you say yes it happened, it was terrible, but we didn’t do it – the Germans did it, only them, no-one else. Yes, there were a few bad eggs among us who collaborated, denounced Jews, participated.”

Bauer added that “without a large part of the population, arguably a majority, there could have been no Holocaust, because the Germans didn’t know how to differentiate between Jews and Lithuanians, Jews and Poles, Jews and Hungarians.

“The number of Jews who could be identified from traditional ultra-Orthodox clothing was relatively small. The vast majority looked like everyone else in their neighborhood. Without the help of the local population, no Holocaust could have happened. So, this is a denial of what happened, a distortion,” Bauer pointed out.

Back in April 2017, Bauer dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that the Allies could have saved four million Jews from the Holocaust if they had bombed Nazi death camps from 1942.

“This is utter nonsense. There is absolutely no truth in this,” he said at the time, emphasizing that the combined Anglo-American air forces were incapable of reaching any destination east of Berlin and the Elbe River until early 1944.

“The reason for that is simple: The Anglo-American bombers had no fighter escort that could reach those distances,” the historian highlighted.

“There was no possibility whatsoever of reaching the places where Jews were being killed until [early] 1944,” he said back then.


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