Yeah, this is just trading a Palestinian/Israeli conflict for a Native American/ Israeli conflict, and one that has less basis in history.
The 1948 proposal could have worked, but the Palestinians said “No, thanks” (or “No thanks” or just “No.”
No, it’s trading the Palestinian conflict for a conflict with the US, which was absolutely not going to give up sovereignity over a state.
No, this thread is about colonizing Montana specifically to avoid the ethnic cleansing of Muslims, and frankly the casual accusation of Islamophobia is offensive, unwarranted, and bizarre.
There are plenty of problems with that idea, but Islamophobia isn’t among them.
Well, yeah. That, too. Plopping a bunch of Jews down anywhere and saying “This is theirs now. Previous owners, too bad” probably leads to coflict anywhere. But the proposals the Palestinians turned down time and again were probably the least conflict-laden. Too late now, I’m afraid.
No, it’s paying attention both the news and history. The US has always been Islamophobic, and Israel was always going to be Islamophobic one it was set up as a colonialist project on land inhabited by inconvenient Muslims who would need to be removed or killed.
And again, Montana did have people in it. And the person I was responding to was talking about the Native Americans whose land was stolen in the first place.
I cannot of course stop you from making any arbitrary post into an opportunity to lecture the rest of us about Islamophobia, but this whole thread was exploring ways to avoid giving Muslim land to Jews, and there’s no Muslim claim on any land in Montana, so there’s nobody in this thread who said or even hinted it was fine to give away Muslim land. Quite the opposite in fact.
Yes, I know, because you were replying to me, and I did not in any shape or form suggest that it’s OK to take land from Muslims, and you are invited to stop digging that particular hole.
Anyone who says they think Israel was the better option is supporting giving away Muslim land, by definition.
Ottoman land, anyway.
Of course, Lord Balfour “clearly understood” there would not be any problem with existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…
From a strictly utilitarian point of view, the Zionist project was always going to involve some ethnic cleansing. It wouldn’t have been any more or less moral to take land from Native Americans than from Muslims, but it would have been easier to cleanse people who didn’t share an ethno/religious identity with a fifth of the planet.
If you just oppose ethnic cleansing, period, you can’t really be a Zionist. Of course, you can’t really be an anti-Zionist anymore, either, because that amounts to calling for another ethnic cleansing. Basically, you just end up calling for secular, liberal, multicultural democracy, boring as that may be compared to the thrill of ethno-religious nationalism.
If you want a Jewish State without ethnic cleansing, you’d need to persuade an adequate number of Jews to move somewhere with a democratic government and become the majority. There are just over a million people in Montana, and 7.2 million Jews in Israel, of whom possibly more than a million are fed up with constant wars and the increasing demographic dominance of religious fanatics. Maybe the OP should be in the future tense. If y’all will it, it is no dream. 
(Obviously that’s not an entirely serious proposal, but it’s fun to imagine MAGA’s reaction to a proposed mass immigration of liberal Jews; “We love Israel and Jews sooo much, we’re not anti-Semites like those nasty woke Democrats, we think Jews should be able to live anywhere they want…wait, what?”)
Thank you for that informed clarification and correction.
Nobody in this thread said or implied that.
Judging by their track record, MAGA would simply declare that those liberal Jews are in fact not Jews at all.
As Ben Shapiro so odiously put it:
When people self-identify as Jews in the United States, that doesn’t actually mean that they do anything that has anything to do with Judaism; it means that their last name ends in ‘berger,’ ‘stein’ or something [similar]. And you know, there are a lot of people whose last name ends with ‘berger’ or ‘stein’ who fundamentally reject nearly all Jewish values and are secular leftists – and so they vote like secular leftists.
This is an interesting site. Drop an Israel-sized state over SE Montana and NE Wyoming and you’d displace many times more cattle than people.
I’d wager paying the property owners fair market value through eminent domain would be a minuscule fraction of what Israel/Arab conflicts have cost the US.
It has long been my experience that for the Bible-thumping evangelist types inhabiting MAGA that they are completely baffled by Jews who don’t want to move to Israel. When they find out I’m Jewish they inevitably ask when - not if, WHEN - I plan to move to Israel. When I say I’m not it’s quiz time as to my motivations and querulous questions along the lines of “don’t you want to live with your own kind? Where you belong?”
It’s very clear that they are quite anti-Semitic. They want the Jews to exist (they have a vital role to play in their end-times fantasies) but they want them to exist over there, away from “decent” people.
^ That, too. But would probably still like to deport the lot of them somewhere else just to be sure.
My default response is to look like I’m giving it a lot of thought, and like I’m once again reaching the conclusion I’ve reached before, and reply that yes, but — meaningful pause — it’s a little too warm.
Yes, it was based on the more epic 1958 novel by Leon Uris. Highly recommended reading, IMO.
As an alternative, how about a chunk of Mexico. Some bright people already have a plan.
Is it? I mean, I get that it has enormous ideational and cultural value for adherents of the three Abrahamic religions, and in particular Judaism, of course. But leaving religion aside and looking just at hard data, is it such a valuable piece of land? It’s tiny, short of water and scarce in resources (which makes it all the more impressive what modern Israelis managed to make out of this desert with determination). And as far as the “Levant as a crossroads” idea is concerned: Israel has a few international cargo ports (Haifa and Ashdod on the Mediterranean, Eilat on the Red Sea), but none of them is a first-rate global trade hub. They’re not even the busiest ports in that region - that’d be Port Said, thanks to its location right on the Suez Canal.
One issue that I don’t think has been mentioned is the problem of political ideology. Israel is now an ally of the United States but that wasn’t an obvious future back in 1947. A lot of Zionists were socialists and many people, including the Soviets, thought that Israel would end up as a Soviet ally. The United States wouldn’t have been interested in located a potential enemy in the middle of North America.
“I’d wager paying the property owners fair market value through eminent domain would be a minuscule fraction of what Israel/Arab conflicts have cost the US.” as Dinsdale said.
What I don’t understand (perhaps naively) is why money can’t solve this dispute. My earlier reference to “plopping” Jews down on some piece of land implied that someone would have to pay for plopping rights. Plopping without paying is just invasion and theft of land, but in the past 80 years, how much money has been spent on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I’d guess some incalculable amount well into the trillions, by all parties, just to reach some equitable conclusion that all are satisfied with, or at least don’t resent enough to kill each other over.