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Tuma_al_Zrai
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Name: Arabian Eyes
Country: Lebanon
Metro: Trablus
Birthday: 5/16/1948
Gender: Male
Interests: French desserts (mousse au chocolate, oooohhh), playing my tubleh (derbekeh-think Cuban bongo with an open bottom), Arabic music, Italian opera/ La Traviata, Sitars, ouds, bazouki music, LUBNAN- Kilinai Lin Watan Bitches! French, Slavic curse words, pistachios, toilet humor, espresso-double mochiato, Arak , Armenian Genocide awareness, Freeing Palestine, remembering Qana and the butchers of Sabra and Shatila, the commanding officer now being the prime minister of the Zionist entity.
Expertise: Gourmet foodie, mid-east history and politics, my argileh (an art form, known to the west as "hookah", from the Farsi "hoogah", or vase),flipping out when Americans try to make "middle eastern food" (and trying, ussually failing, to correct them), swelecting Olive Oils/Zayt Zaytoon, wines (I like a stiff, hearty red like a cabernet, but hints of fruit are a nice little undertone, I love Clos St Thomas), kabobs- I am the Sultan of Shish Kabob and the Sheik of Shish Ta'ouk, messing with zionists.
Occupation: Consulting
Industry: Government
Message: message me
AIM:  death2turkey
Member Since:
2/21/2005
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The communists who saved the Jewish state
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| By Aryeh Dayan |
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| Last Update: 09/05/2006 01:44 |
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A colorful flyer, prominently displaying the name and flag of the State of Israel in the middle, is now being handed out all over the Czech capital. It announces the opening of an exhibit at the Military Museum in Prague, which is under the auspices of the Czech ministry of defense. Anyone reading the Czech text on the flyer will discover that the exhibit, which opens at the end of this week, is about one of the most fascinating events in the history of relations between communist Eastern Europe and the State of Israel. Using old photos, copies of yellowing documents and worn models of weapons and uniforms, it will document the military assistance provided by Czechoslovakia in 1948 to the State of Israel, during the toughest stages of the war of independence that was being fought by the newborn state.
It was a brief, but very important episode in the history of that war. It lasted no more than a year, but David Ben-Gurion once stated that thanks to this assistance, which also included the famous Czech rifles as well as ten fighter planes, the IDF was able to win the war. Despite its considerable importance, it has still never received the public recognition it warrants, not in Israel or communist Czechoslovakia and not even in the post-communist Czech Republic. Only now, more than a decade and a half after the fall of Communism, has it started to spark some interest. | The downplaying of this episode and the conscious ignoring of it for over half a century in both countries is a result of clear and understandable political reasons. The communist government in Prague had no reason to highlight the military assistance it provided the state that would later become what it saw as the undisputed agent of American imperialism in the Middle East. The pro-Western government established after the fall of Communism also had no reason to highlight this episode: Anyone looking into it will immediately discover that Czechoslovakia provided the assistance to Israel in the name of the Soviet Union and under its instruction. In Israel too, the episode caused political discomfort: Israeli administrations were uncomfortable recalling the fact that the weapons that saved the IDF in 1948 actually came from the Communist bloc and it was even more uncomfortable to acknowledge that the appeal to the Communist bloc came as a result of the arms embargo the United States imposed on Israel. "Even though I grew up in an air force family, until a few years ago I hardly knew anything about this chapter," says Shosh Dagan, the Israeli curator of the exhibit at the Czech Army Museum. "I remember only that people talked a little, vaguely, about some assistance that came from Czechoslovakia and about some flight training course that took place there once. It was not among the subjects that the air force was in the habit of highlighting." Dagan is the wife of Maj. Gen. (res.) Nehemiah Dagan, who was one of the leaders of the air force and served also as chief education officer. In her visits to the Czech Republic ahead of the exhibit, she found that such forgetfulness also characterized attitudes there regarding the assistance that had been provided.
During one visit, she met a group of former pilots in the Czechoslovakian air force, who in 1948 were instructors in a flight-training course that their air force organized for the Israeli cadets. The meeting with these people, all of them in their eighties, started off very hesitatingly. "I felt they were still afraid to talk," relates Dagan, "they were constantly looking off to the sides, checking if someone else was listening to the conversation. Only after some time, when they began recalling anecdotes from the course, did they loosen up a bit. Then it suddenly turned out that they remembered each and every detail, including the names of their Israeli trainees. I had the impression that they really admired, and still admire to this day, the Israeli air force. And nevertheless, I felt that they had some sort of hold on them, that they were not speaking freely." Dagan sensed that the elderly Czech pilots had a hard time talking about the episode, which for decades was deemed confidential in Czechoslovakia and of the kind that endangered anyone who talked about it.
The first arms deal with Czechoslovakia was signed in January 1948 - less than two months after the UN resolution creating Israel and four months before the state was actually established. Immediately after the Partition Plan was passed, Ben-Gurion began searching for sources to supply arms to the Israeli defense forces, but found that the legal sources in the United States and most European countries were closed off to the institutions of the Jewish state in formation. The only alternative seemed to be illegal arms acquisitions and an appeal to the Soviet bloc.
Representatives of the Jewish Agency signed the deal on behalf of the Israelis, with the approval of David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharet; and on the Czechoslovakian side, army leaders signed with the approval of Prime Minister Klement Gottwald and Defense Minister General Ludovic Swoboda, representatives of the Communist regime that had just been installed in their country. They, for their part, were acting with the knowledge of the Soviet Union, which supported the UN Partition Plan and continued to stand behind it, unlike the U.S. and Britain, even after it led to the start of armed conflict. Against this backdrop, Stalin's government tried to use the arms embargo imposed by the U.S. on the Middle East (but in effect, only on Israel) to bring the new Jewish state closer to him.
German planes and uniforms
As part of the deal signed in January, Czechoslovakia supplied some 50,000 rifles (that remained in use in the IDF for around 30 years), some 6,000 machine guns and around 90 million bullets. But the most important contracts were signed in late April and early May. They promised to supply 25 Messerschmitt fighter planes and arranged for the training - on Czech soil and in Czech military facilities - of Israeli pilots and technicians who would fly and maintain them. The planes, which were disassembled and flown to Israel on large transport planes, after their reassembly played a very important role in halting the Egypt Army's advance south of Ashdod, at a place now called the Ad Halom Junction.
The assistance to the air force continued to flow in during the second half of 1948 - when it consisted of 56 Spitfire fighter planes. These were flown to Israel, some of them by Israeli pilots. Among them were Mordechai Hod, who would become commander of the Israel Air Force, and Danny Shapira, who later became the Aviation Industries' first test pilot. One of these planes crashed in Yugoslavia en route to Israel and the Israeli pilot, Sam Pomeranz, was killed.
Other Israeli pilots, including also Ezer Weizman, did a training course in Czechoslovakia to learn how to fly the Messerschmitts. Most of the air force's first pilots, including Weizman, were veterans of the British Army and only knew how to fly planes used by the British air force during World War II; the Messerschmitt was actually used by the German army in that war. This may be another reason, albeit a psychological one and not a political one, for erasing the Czech assistance to Israel from memory: most of the military equipment provided through it was German made and manufactured in military industrial plants established by the Nazis on occupied Czech territory. Even the uniforms supplied to the Israelis during the training in Czechoslovakia were previously used by soldiers in the Nazi army. These uniforms are also featured in the exhibit opening this week in Prague.
The origin of this exhibit is a modest exhibit that took place four years ago in New York. Peter Gandelowitz, the Czech consul in New York, choose to deepen his country's ties with the Jewish community in the U.S. by means of a small exhibit documenting the military assistance it provided Israel. He approached Dr. Rafi Gimzu, who was the cultural attache at the Israeli consulate in New York, who referred the Czech consul to Shosh Dagan, who had worked for many years as a curator of exhibits at the Diaspora Museum and who was then in New York with her husband, who was working there for the United Jewish Appeal. Dagan curated an exhibit at the Czech consulate, which featured mostly pictures - that she had found in archives in Israel or received from air force veterans who had taken the courses in Czechoslovakia.
Around two years ago, after coming back to Israel, she heard that Ales Knizek, the director of the three museums operating under the auspices of the Czech defense ministry, was visiting Israel as a guest of the air force. Dagan met with him, showed him the pictures she had exhibited in the Czech consulate in New York and suggested organizing a similar exhibit in one of the museums he was in charge of. Six months ago, she was invited to come to Prague to curate the exhibit at the Czech Army Museum.
Downplaying the facts
The Czech exhibit in Prague will be larger and much more comprehensive than the one in New York. In addition to the photos Dagan collected in Israel, there will also be photos and copies of documents she located in Czech archives with the help of a Czech historian employed at the Military Museum. The photos show, among other things, the bases where the Israeli soldiers were trained, the building where the Israeli delegation stayed in Prague, out of which Israeli representatives oversaw the entire operation and also the Czech instructors who commanded the courses. Among the documents to be displayed (some in the Czech original and some translated into English) are versions of the agreements signed by the representatives of the two countries (Chief of Staff Bohumir Buzik and Consul Ehud Avriel), internal correspondence of the Czechoslovakian government relating to the logistic aspects of the aid and also a letter sent by the foreign ministry in Prague to the Ethiopian embassy in Paris.
It turns out that some of the arms shipments sent from Czechoslovakia to Israel were camouflaged as shipments destined for Ethiopia. In addition to the uniforms (formerly used by the Germans) worn by the Israelis, there will also be a sample of the famous Czech rifle. At one point, the organizers considered displaying an old Spitfire plane that is on display at the Czech air force museum, but later on this idea was dropped.
Dagan says the directors of the museum in Prague, who are all from the Czech defense ministry, gave her license to curate the exhibit as she wished and refrained from giving her instructions with regard to the political content. She adds, however, that they did make it clear to her that they planned to add a section to the exhibit that would be curated by museum employees and would focus on the period between the end of World War II and the signing of the deal with Israel. It will document Czechoslovakia's favorable treatment of Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to live there.
It is obvious to Dagan that Czechoslovakia's decision to publicly display the military assistance it provided to Israel politically motivated, to nurture the pro-Western image it wants to project to the world. However, promoting this image required downplaying certain historical facts. And indeed, Dagan decided to downplay them, even though none of the exhibit's organizers asked her too. So, for example, the exhibit does not highlight the fact that the assistance to Israel came at the Soviet Union's behest, in an attempt to bypass the American embargo.
Soviet hopes and aspirations
"The Soviet Union hoped that the military assistance to Israel would promote its transformation into a pro-Soviet state," explains Dagan. "It's no wonder that in January 1949, immediately after the elections for the first Knesset, which Mapai won and the pro-Soviet parties lost, the Czechoslovakian assistance stopped completely." This fact will also not be mentioned in the exhibit along with the fact that among the Israelis involved in establishing contacts between the Jewish Agency and the Communist authorities in Eastern Europe there were also some of the leaders of the Israeli communist party. One of them, Eliahu Gojansky (whose son, Yoram, is married to former MK Tamar Gojansky), was killed in 1948 in a plane crash on the way back from Prague to Israel. According to the prevailing view in the Israel Communist Party in the 1950s, Gojansky's trip to Prague was part of the contacts to arrange the military assistance.
Dagan believes there is no need to mention all these facts in the exhibit because it is an exhibit that is intended, as far as she is concerned "primarily to do historical justice with the Czech people and express the state of Israel's appreciation for the support it gave to it on a personal and human level and not necessarily in the diplomatic sphere." She says it is most important for her "to express appreciation for the people, such as those elderly flight instructors I met in Czechoslovakia. The support they show to this day for Israel is in no way due to the order they received in 1948." | | |
| I'm back bitches!Miss me?
Some starter notes, first off, I have invented a new pantheon, my own set of Gods which explain everything, and I will explain when I again have time, and second, my new obsession with bubble tea.
TenRen Tea Time in NY (trop cher pour d'acheter un toujours, mais parfait pendant il fait jour chaud avec le dejuner). And for the future, excuse me if my occasional French outbursts are misspelled, I've been conversing with Haitians everyday for the past 7 months and have starting slipping into Creole, but I can switch my accent back into Metropolitan French if I need to) | | |
| I was thinking the other day, how many people can the earth really sustain? What magic numebr would allow enough labor for crops and industry yet restrict the massive un-employment and hunger that plagues the so-called developing world? Afterall, most of it was fully developed millenia ago, to the extent that plumbing systems in Mohenjo Daro were actually far more efficient than their modern-day Pakistani equivalents.
Alot of this has to do with birth control when you thinl about it. Too many people having too many kids, and the infra-structure of any city would crumble. It makes me think of Egyptian borth-control efforts in the seventies, which failed due to the ubsurd demand by Coptic and Sunni clergy for ever more kids. The Catholics today have this problem, especially evident in Latin America.
So, what is needed is basically a massive population streamline. My motto: "if you can't support 'em, you can't have 'em!"
In total, the global population should level off within the next century if all goes well, and then hopefully start to decline to a more sustainable billion or so, even less. All this would free up massive amounts of resources and tracts of land and water.
Unfortunatelly, oil resources will be depleted by the time the population finally starts to really fall, but on the up-side, there is allready enough empty land to generate huge ammounts of energy.
For example, what if the baren wastes of the Outback were lined with solar panels? What if the hills of Patagonia were lined with windmills? What if the British coast was fitteed with tidal turbines? All this is possible, and it's here now. All that is needed is an end to corporate money cutting off any real alternative-energy research because it would prematurelly skim their profit margins.
The next step would be more extreme, methane mining in deep space, huge solar stations in high orbit, beaming down energy streams. The only problem is that there is currently no way to convert electric energy into radio waves. That would be awsome. | | |
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My Master Plan
Now I hate to be a party pooper but it's time for some urban reality (NYCJoyce knows what I mean about all of this).
The New York metro system is decrepit, bottom line. It emerged sparkling and clean at the end of the nineties yes, but it was just a fresh venear on the century-old rat-infested hell hole that is the NYC Subway system. Now lines in Queens and Brooklyn are even starting to slip back into the old days, with graffiti like no one's business.
The stations are out-dated, too small, and, frankly, way too fucking dangerous after dark (except, of course, the heavily-guarded and recently gentrified outer-rim districts along parts of the F and G lines).
Whats needed is a total re-building, new lines and tunnels all across the outer boroughs and even in the tangled maze of tunnels that is under-ground Manhattan. New trains in new tunnels. Shit man, even Beirut has a new metro.
My relationship with the system is love-hate, love when the Subway Gods-and yes, a whole other pantheon exists under the black top- and hate when they laugh at me and decide not to co-operate. On a good day I can get from S. Brooklyn to Mid-town in twenty-five minutes
Firstly, I elect that a new line be dug from the 36st N-R-M-D station in Sunset Park (Brooklyn) north-east across (or rather, under) Windsor Terrace and Greenwood Cemetary to the F,Q, 2, 3, 4 and 5 lines in Flatbush and Canarsie. I'll get to why in a minute.
The Brooklyn lines are like spokes, all coming from one central point, downtown Brooklyn, most from Pacific st. If you want to get from one end of the borough to the other, you have to go to the corner and back around, it just takes too long and puts too many people in one spot. This line should continue north to broadway and then into Queens, the borough with the most critical lack in service.
Okay, the way the system was designed was for commuters to get into mid-town. Thats it. Ergo, if you want to get from, say, Coney Island to Astoria or Jackson heights, or even worse the Bronx, you need to go through Manhattan. There are allready far too many people on those trains.
The line from Brooklyn should end in Forest Hills in Queens, were a new terminal (like 5 other trains stop here, a good few end here) should be built with a rail connection to la Guardia (as everyone knows, a bitch to get to and from) and from there a connection to the R or even a faster dirrect shot to mid-town.
Now, this next thing might not make sence but I'll put it on the table anyway: a rail connection under the Narrows, from Brooklyn to Staten Island. Now, I personally advocate the utter destruction of this island and all it's wretched inhabitants, but this is purelly to ease the motorized hell that is the Verizano Narrows bridge (which conveniantly dumps it's un-wanted suburbanites right outside my fucking door). What I mean is two stages, first a Staten island line with many, many parking lots and a New Jersey rail connection, and then a line under the Narrows and dirrectly to (the hopefully new terminal at) 36th st.
Such an action would not only bring the semi-suburban borough of trash (both people and garbage) back into the city's fold, and hopefully scare off some of the assholes into jersey.
Ultra-deep, dirrect-shot lines from both airports, new terminals and trains, nore express lines, new tunnels under ground and water, and a brand-new super-hub in Downtown Brooklyn another century of world-renowned public transport. Oh, and Queens will still need some new trains.
Why? Besides the whole issue of crumbling trains crashing and killing thousands?
There is a new project for development of the norther-west quarter of brooklyn under way. It began in the eighties with artists priced out of manhattan, then the whordes of Yuppies and then the Yuppies with kids. Now, Park Slope, Williamsburg, "Prospect Heights", "Gowanus", Brooklyn Heights, Downtown, and even parts of Windsor Terrace and Red Hook are teeming with them, young urban professionals from interior American cities (I always distinguish between New Yorkers, Americans, and everyone else because New Yorkers are effectivelly transplanted foreigners) . This phenomenon is even affecting Astoria and Marble Hill (Queens and the Bronx, respectivelly).
Now, the Atlantic Yards, an essentially idle lot, will be ripped up for a massive complex of stores, condominium blocks, and even a new basketball stadium.
Of course, only people like me, with no say, remember the whole issue of transport (allready gridlock and bottle-neck on all lines of movement in rush hour, as the area is the city's second transport hub and a natural bottle-neck) and even sanitation. The sewers and electric lines can't handle such a massive influx (residential vs. Soho-level acticity and China-town level population density).
Hence, the rebuilding of the Subway at least as a start. | | |
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