(no subject)

[meanfreepath]

Why does Israel have to be put on the defensive internationally after its commandos use limited force in response to being attacked with potentially deadly weapons? Would anyone be complaining if the men and women of the US Navy were to use lethal force to defend themselves in the course of interdicting Somali pirates?

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

They could not have all gone to America. Only the ones with close relatives who could sponsor them could have gone to America (and a lot of them did), but it took a long time to get the paperwork through, and the Iron Curtain was rapidly falling.

My grandfather, from Budapest, was faced with the choice of settling in Palestine, or being disappeared by the Soviets (this is what happened to all of his high school friends--one of them had a British uncle, so the whole social group got implicated as spies). So he couldn't stay in Eastern Europe at all. He had no family in America, and so couldn't go there. And his home in suburban Budapest had been demolished anyway, so his whole family was homeless, even the ones not being hunted by the Soviets.

My grandmother was liberated from Auschwitz. (Well, not literally, since most people were marched out of Auschwitz a couple months before the camp was liberated; she was liberated from whichever camp it was she was marched to.) Other people had taken her family's house in the meantime. She and her surviving siblings tried to go to Vienna but there were no jobs there, especially not for foreign, homeless, Jewish teenagers, so they went to Prague, where a Jewish Soviet officer warned them that the borders were about to close and they had better not be in Eastern Europe when that happened. Their one American aunt had come back to support the family when the war started, and so was herself stuck in a liberation camp, not in America where she could fill out paperwork so the extended family could immigrate. So... they had two choices: 1) being homeless in France or Italy for a few years until their aunt was set free, sailed back to America, filled out the paperwork, and the US government processed it (one aunt did choose this route; it ended up taking about five years, during which time she and her family lived in a tent in a refugee camp in France, because they weren't allowed to actually settle in Western Europe), or 2) smuggling themselves into Palestine where there was a network in place to help people like them find housing and jobs. That was the Sephardic community that was taking people in.

Anyway, if these things are happening to the Romany, is there any reason to think the Jews would have fared better if they'd stayed in Europe?