Another war

Countless books have been devoted to explaining and describing the events of the Second World War. Yet new ones are always being written: our view of events that are now more than eighty years old is constantly evolving, and opinions differ. Among politicians and in society in general, there are still many who refer to the Second World War when defending their positions. To this day, it remains true that our civilisation had never before experienced a conflict of a similar scale; moreover, this war also made possible one of the most tragic chapters in human history, the Holocaust.

In his latest book, Israeli-German historian Dan Diner offers a perspective that might also be interesting for Czech readers: he recounts the events in Jewish and Arab Palestine in the second half of the 1930s and during the Second World War, where although no battles between the Allies and the Axis took place, the future fate of both the Jewish and Arab communities was fought for with no less ferocity. But Diner does not stop at a mere chronology of events: he describes the Second World War through the lens of the “south”, from a different place than we Europeans are used to. Moreover, when viewed from Palestine, the truly global character of this conflict, where everything was connected to everything else, stands out.

We will see battlefields and events from literally all over the world: Zionist activists, the Arab revolt in Palestine, the rivalry between Russia and Japan in the Far East, Hitler's alliance with Stalin, which fell apart after the German attack on the Soviet Union, the problems of the British Empire in Asia, Africa and Ireland, the nationalist movement in India, the unrest in Iraq and Iran, the interests of the United States in the Pacific and in Europe, the fate of the Polish Anders' Army, the tragedy of European Jews in the death factories, and much more – Diner convincingly shows that the events of the Second World War can only be understood as a whole. And within this global entanglement, the so-called “other, small war” also took place, in which the Jews in Palestine and elsewhere had to fight for their right to continue to exist.