Ilves' comments in Israel "irritating"

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote of the irritation caused by a speech given by President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who compared the fate of people deported from Estonia by the Soviets to the sufferings of the Jews during the holocaust, reports EPL Online. “Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who visited Israel [on June 28], had the temerity to say disturbing things publicly, even in the residence of the president of Israel,” noted the newspaper in its article, describing that Ilves had said that the Jews and Estonians were “partners in a similar historic experience.”

Haaretz stated that Ilves did not mention even with one single word the holocaust in his speech, nor the fate of 4,500 Jews living in Estonia during the Second World War. The newspaper accused Ilves of displaying distorted logic by describing the Jews murdered by Estonians and the Estonian assassins as “partners.”

According to the newspaper, the historic fact is that most Estonians, just as the residents of the neighboring countries Latvia and Lithuania, welcomed the arrival of Nazis and considered them liberators instead of oppressors.
What this more realistically reflected was that these countries saw the German army as the lesser of two evils, between Nazism and Communism. They had just been through a brutal Soviet occupation between 1940 and 1941, during which tens of thousands of citizens were executed or deported to Siberia. The Baltic people viewed the German army’s arrival as the means to drive out the Soviet occupiers.

Haaretz went on to assert that “Ilves does not deny the holocaust; he simply ignores it,” calling the Estonian president a “distorter of the holocaust,” explaining that this term, popularized by Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, designates the new kind of leaders in the Baltic States as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. He goes on to claim that these new leaders have been trying to “re-write history since the collapse of the Soviet Union by drawing parallels between the German and Russian occupations.”