Sad stories grow from happy ones - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
We marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day last week with Holland holding various celebrations to commemorate the liberation of their country by Canadian soldiers. There were, amazingly, a couple of dozen survivors of that war, between the ages of 98 and 102, who visited Holland for the event.
It was moving, too, to see school children, born several generations after the war ended, laying flowers on the graves of the more than 7,600 Canadians who died in the eight-month campaign to liberate the Netherlands, and saying out loud the names of the men buried there who died freeing a country that would have seemed so foreign before the war.
The sad thing is that while they may work very hard to remember World War II in the Netherlands, most in the world have forgotten the lessons of that war. Up to 10.7 million soldiers and 24 million civilians died in the former Soviet Union after Germany invaded. The countries had been allied at one point before Germany turned against Russia, before being beaten back.
The Soviets controlled most of the eastern parts of Europe from the end of World War II to 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and countries like Ukraine, Hungary and Poland regained their freedom. Now, under President Vladimir Putin, the country is supposedly not Communist any more, with Putin alone being a billionaire. Yet the old ambitions to rebuild the Soviet empire remain, and Putin has invaded and recaptured Crimea from Ukraine, and has now invaded Ukraine, so far held back by very determined Ukrainians.
Meanwhile the stubborn war continues between Israel and Palestine. In World War II, an estimated six million Jews in parts of Europe occupied by Germany’s Adolf Hitler from Poland to France were rounded up and gassed in death camps or worked to
death.
At the end of World War II, allied opponents of Hitler, feeling guilty of the atrocities, created a homeland for the Jewish people in a country formerly controlled by Britain. The problem was the Palestinians who occupied the land weren’t pleased with being kicked off their land. Following World War II there were 750,000 Palestinian refugees, but today, some 5.9 million Palestinian refugees are eligible for United Nations services.
Nearly one-third of the registered Palestinian refugees, more than 1.5 million individuals, live in 58 recognized Palestine refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Perhaps understandably, Palestinians have never been happy, first with the establishment of Israel, and further by the extension of Israel’s territory, often as a result of Israel’s victories after attacks by Palestinians in a long series of wars dating back to 1948. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Palestine does not have a democratic government. The current conflict began on October 7, 2023 when Hamas-led Palestinian rebels invaded Israel, killed more than 1,000 people, many of them innocent young people attending a concert, and took hundreds of hostages, some of whom have been released, some of whom have died.
In retaliation, Israel attacked in a prolonged war. As of this week, nearly 53,000 people in Palestine have been killed by the Israeli invasion. Hamas has hidden many of the hostages in tunnels, some of them, according to Israel, under hospitals, which they have, at times, attacked.
The problem is how far to trust the Israeli government, even though it was elected. Much of the population has turned against its own government which has tacked more and more to the extreme right.
Meanwhile, farther north on the border with Gaza, some Israeli settlers on the West Bank have been claiming more land from their Arab neighbours and one wonders how long it is before there’s outright conflict there.
The difficulty in choosing the “right” side has been made clear even in Canada. Often, seeing the horrid death toll among Palestinians, protesters have demonstrated against Israel. Somehow they seem to forget that this all began because of an attack by Hamas, through tunnels, that killed Israelis and took hostages.
Both these wars, in Ukraine and Palestine, have links back to the results of World War II. That war brought happy stories, such as the Dutch families who bought farms in rural Ontario and enriched our lives, but in the victory there were also the seeds of future conflicts.
I have lived in relative peace all my life. I’ve been fortunate that smaller conflicts like the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, never spiralled into something bigger. Here’s hoping for my children’s and grandchildren’s sake we can avoid another World War.