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Excerpts from one of reviews of Timothy Snyder's book "Black Earth":
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251753/black-earth-by-timothy-snyder/
"(...) One of the most unusual features of Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth, writes Christopher R. Browning in his New York Review of Books review, is the many pages Snyder devotes to Poland, Zionism, and Palestine. At the center of this story is the short-lived alliance between the Polish government and the Zionist Revisionist Movement during the late 1930s, explored in the book’s first four chapters (the third titled “The Promise of Palestine”) and revisited in the conclusion. After Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s death, the ruling circles in Poland advocated solving the country’s so-called Jewish problem through the emigration of a large part of the Jewish population (estimated at about 3 million on the eve of the war). For that purpose, Snyder recounts, the Polish government lent public support to Revisionist Zionist leaders and paramilitary groups and even financed and trained them. Their hope was that these Jews would wage a campaign of resistance and terror against the British mandatory authorities in Palestine and establish a Jewish state open to large-scale Jewish emigration.
Why is the history of Revisionist Zionism and their Polish supporters so central to a book that claims we have misunderstood the Holocaust and purports to offer a new explanation for it? The Polish-Zionist Revisionist alliance is in fact so central to Snyder’s account that the four main Zionist Revisionist protagonists in his story—Vladimir Jabotinsky, Avraham Stern, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin—are mentioned in the book more often than Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill combined.
One place to start is by situating Snyder’s discussion of Revisionist Zionism within its context in the book, namely an alliance that never materialized between Germany and Poland. As Snyder tells us, Adolf Hitler had initially hoped to draw Poland into a joint war of aggression against the Soviet Union. After some negotiations, Polish leaders rejected Hitler’s overtures. They determined that maintaining the status quo in Europe would benefit Poland more than war and feared that they would become a German satellite state following the Soviet Union’s defeat. Snyder, however, proposes that Hitler’s dream of a Polish-German alliance failed not merely because of Poland’s political calculations but ultimately because of ideological divisions. The failure to reach an agreement and the ensuing German invasion of Poland, he writes, “resulted from deep differences on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy.” Snyder sums up these differences two pages later: 'The covert essence of German foreign policy in the late 1930s was the ambition to build a vast racial empire in eastern Europe; the covert essence of Polish foreign policy was to create a State of Israel in Palestine from the territories granted by the League of Nations mandate to the British Empire.' (...)"
^^^
Indeed, most of key Zionists who created Israel were citizens of Pre-War Poland. Jewish militias and paramilitary groups in Palestine were trained by Poland with financial support of the Polish government, and later Polish Jewish soldiers from the Polish Army of General Anders joined them (they were allowed to stay in Palestine, while the rest of his army moved to Italy and fought at Monte Cassino). Israel's Army was literally created from former soldiers of the Polish Army.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251753/black-earth-by-timothy-snyder/
"(...) One of the most unusual features of Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth, writes Christopher R. Browning in his New York Review of Books review, is the many pages Snyder devotes to Poland, Zionism, and Palestine. At the center of this story is the short-lived alliance between the Polish government and the Zionist Revisionist Movement during the late 1930s, explored in the book’s first four chapters (the third titled “The Promise of Palestine”) and revisited in the conclusion. After Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s death, the ruling circles in Poland advocated solving the country’s so-called Jewish problem through the emigration of a large part of the Jewish population (estimated at about 3 million on the eve of the war). For that purpose, Snyder recounts, the Polish government lent public support to Revisionist Zionist leaders and paramilitary groups and even financed and trained them. Their hope was that these Jews would wage a campaign of resistance and terror against the British mandatory authorities in Palestine and establish a Jewish state open to large-scale Jewish emigration.
Why is the history of Revisionist Zionism and their Polish supporters so central to a book that claims we have misunderstood the Holocaust and purports to offer a new explanation for it? The Polish-Zionist Revisionist alliance is in fact so central to Snyder’s account that the four main Zionist Revisionist protagonists in his story—Vladimir Jabotinsky, Avraham Stern, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin—are mentioned in the book more often than Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill combined.
One place to start is by situating Snyder’s discussion of Revisionist Zionism within its context in the book, namely an alliance that never materialized between Germany and Poland. As Snyder tells us, Adolf Hitler had initially hoped to draw Poland into a joint war of aggression against the Soviet Union. After some negotiations, Polish leaders rejected Hitler’s overtures. They determined that maintaining the status quo in Europe would benefit Poland more than war and feared that they would become a German satellite state following the Soviet Union’s defeat. Snyder, however, proposes that Hitler’s dream of a Polish-German alliance failed not merely because of Poland’s political calculations but ultimately because of ideological divisions. The failure to reach an agreement and the ensuing German invasion of Poland, he writes, “resulted from deep differences on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy.” Snyder sums up these differences two pages later: 'The covert essence of German foreign policy in the late 1930s was the ambition to build a vast racial empire in eastern Europe; the covert essence of Polish foreign policy was to create a State of Israel in Palestine from the territories granted by the League of Nations mandate to the British Empire.' (...)"
^^^
Indeed, most of key Zionists who created Israel were citizens of Pre-War Poland. Jewish militias and paramilitary groups in Palestine were trained by Poland with financial support of the Polish government, and later Polish Jewish soldiers from the Polish Army of General Anders joined them (they were allowed to stay in Palestine, while the rest of his army moved to Italy and fought at Monte Cassino). Israel's Army was literally created from former soldiers of the Polish Army.
