Czech Ambassador Tomas Pojar was in the hall attending The Jerusalem Post
Diplomatic Conference in Herzliya on Wednesday when Foreign Minister Avigdor
Liberman made an example of his country, saying Israel was not about to become
“the second Czechoslovakia.”
“All expressions and promises of commitment
to Israel’s security from all around the world remind me of similar commitments
made to Czechoslovakia [in 1938], and the pressure made on the Czech president
to partition the Sudetenland,” Liberman said. “After all the promises and
guarantees that were provided, Nazi Germany occupied all of Czechoslovakia,
bringing an end to its existence.”
Pojar, in an interview afterward with
The Jerusalem Post, replied with a “yes and no” when asked whether there was
validity in that historical comparison.
No, he said, because the
situation in 1938 in Central Europe, and in the world, was drastically different
than the situation today. “The parallels are interesting, but it is not as if
you can easily implement the lessons from one situation onto another, a century
or half-century later.”
But still, he said, there are
similarities.
“There are certain parallels in that Czechoslovakia was the
only democratic country in the entire region at the time,” he said. “There are
parallels about how much guarantees you can get from outside, and how much you
should rely on them.”
Pojar said that in addition to his country’s tragic
experiences during World War II, it also had experiences under
communism.
All this had embedded in the Czechs’ “natural skepticism,” and
a disinclination to believe in immediate “grandiose ideas and miraculous
solutions.”
“We are the most atheistic, non-religious nation in Europe,
if not in the entire world,” he asserted. “We don’t believe in miracles, and we
don’t believe in political miracles and the solutions of ideologies that [posit
that] something can be easily implemented and solved.”
Pojar said the
Czechs realize “there are huge differences between war and peace. It is not only
either war or peace... Even some interim solutions are sometimes better
than crumbled expectations because of grandiose ideas.”
The ambassador
said one of the lessons the Czech Republic learned from its past is that “we
strongly believe that solutions cannot be imposed from the outside, because they
do not work.”
That firm belief is one of the reasons why the Czech
Republic, alone among the 27 EU countries, voted with Israel and seven other
countries at the UN on November 29 against upgrading the Palestinian status at
the UN to that of nonmember state observer.
That vote, and strong Czech-
Israeli ties, makes it a good time to be Prague’s envoy to Israel, he
acknowledged. He said that following the vote he received numerous letters,
emails and phone messages from Israelis thanking his country for its support,
with a few people calling the embassy and saying they now were going to buy
Czech-made Skoda cars.
In another incident, the partner of an employee at
the Czech Embassy received free dental work following the UN vote. “He wanted to
pay, but they said no, this time it is for free,” Pojar said.
The Czech
vote, said Pojar, could be explained on two levels.
On the first level,
he said the Czech Republic has made clear it does not support unilateral steps
by either side.
"We strongly feel that the only way to achieve peace here is through bilateral direct negotiations. We know this from our past in negotiating with the Slovaks,” he said, referring to the negotiations with the Slovaks that led to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of a separate Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. “I’m not saying this is the same situation, but we know the solution can’t be imposed on the outside but must be negotiated on the ground.”
And the second level has to do with a century
of Jewish- Czech relations dating back to Tomas Masaryk, the founder and first
president of Czechoslovakia, who was the first statesmen to visit the Yishuv; to
1948 when Czechoslovakia provided Israel with arms during the War of
Independence; and to former president Vaclav Havel who was the first president
of a former Iron Curtain country to visit Israel, doing so in April
1990.
The UN vote, the ambassador said, was in line with “a tradition of
very close links between the Czechs and the Jewish people, and between the Czech
Republic and Israel.”
Pojar, whose father served as Czechoslovakia’s first ambassador here
from 1990 to 1994, dismissed the notion that Prague, with its vote at
the UN, somehow stood up against the rest of the EU. He said that the
Czech Republic would have preferred had there been a consensus EU
opinion on the matter, and would even HAVE abstained if the entire EU
bloc did so. “It is not
the Czech Republic that broke the consensus,” he said.
Fourteen EU
countries voted for the Palestinian resolution, 12 abstained and only Prague
voted against. The consensus crumbled when France declared it would vote for the
resolution.
Pojar said this vote has not hurt his country’s standing
inside the EU, and that “no one was surprised at our vote.” He also said the
position had “wide popular support among the Czech people.
“It is
definitely not something that can hurt the [Czech] government, because this is
not the major issue that people vote on,” he said. “Our decision was not
domestically driven one way or the other."
Regarding the statement issued
on Monday after a meeting of the EU’s 27 foreign ministers that earned
Jerusalem’s wrath because of its harsh condemnation of Israeli settlement plans,
but a tepid denouncement of Hamas’s pledge to destroy Israel, Pojar said, “If
the statement was written in Prague, it would have been written
differently.”
He said that what was important in these types of
declarations was not necessarily the exact wording, but rather the balance, or
lack of balance, in the statements. He pointed to the clause in Monday’s EU
statement dealing with Gaza, which called for the “immediate, sustained and
unconditional opening of crossings” of goods and people from the Gaza Strip,
saying that while the crossings were an important issue, they were not the main
problem in the Strip.
“The main problem [in Gaza] is that it is ruled by
a terrorist organization, a totalitarian organization with totalitarian views,”
Pojar said. “The real problem of Gaza, and the security and prosperity and
freedom of its people, is the regime in Gaza – not the crossings.”
Asked
if Europe takes Hamas’s statements calling for the destruction of Israel
seriously enough, he said he could not speak about the EU, but that he did not
feel the “mainstream European elites” did so. The elites, he said, were
“sometimes detached from reality, and not only about the Middle East, not only
about Islamists, but also about the economic situation.”