Grandma's army

WORLD WAR II – AN UNTOLD STORY Another of the great untold stories has to do with the countless heroic Jews who served in the U.S., British and Russian militaries during the  War. These soldiers’ vital contributions to the Allied war effort remain buried, partly due to a generally accepted myth that Jews were overwhelmingly victims during the Holocaust.  It was believed that only in Israel were there tough, strong, fighting Jews. But there are other, perhaps biased, reasons that these stories have not yet come to light. The tale of an extraordinary, little-known unit, known as X Troop, is a case in point. In 1942,the Germans seemed to be unstoppable in Europe. Desperate to change the course of the war, Winston Churchill and his Chief of Combined Operations decided to create a commando unit of Jewish refugees. Many of them were in concentration camps before their escape to the U.K., and most had lost their families to the Nazis. They came from Germany and Austria as teen...

  From the early hours, on the Sabbath of January 8 th , pilots were already strapped in their cockpits. They were waiting for the inevitable reprisal attack from the humiliated RAF. The hours crept by as the tension mounted. Contrary to the demands of the RAF squadron leaders who were begging for the go-ahead to launch a massive retaliatory strike against Israel, RAF headquarters withheld permission. Instead, the British Foreign Office fired off a furious protest to the Israeli government, demanding compensation for the loss of airmen and aircraft. Truman was condemning  the British for interfering in the Middle East conflict. The British House of Commons was in an uproar. While they were debating the issue, Winston Churchill demanded an explanation for the unreported downing of another British warplane shot down over the coast of Israel the month before ! Although the British Air Ministry tried to dodge the question, Churchill continued to probe. When finally admitting th...

Israel is a country in the Middle East, a piece of real estate so small that one needs a magnifying glass when searching for it on a map. Its main inhabitants, the Jews, together with their brothers and sisters throughout the world , amount to a pathetic less than 0.02 percent   of the world population. As Sir Isaiah Berlin once famously quipped, “The Jews have enjoyed rather too much history and too little geography.” The anti-Semite has a hard time with Jews. They boycott us in academia, journalism, European governments, the marketplace, etc. The trouble with us is that we are constantly breaking the rules. For thousands of years, we have survived powerful empires that did everything to destroy us – the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Germans - and there were plenty to give them a willing hand. In the 20 th century, it looked as if they had finally succeeded. Six million were murdered in the Holocaust. But, instead of disappearing, we decided that after 2,000 yea...