No, like many other empires of the time, they carried off the learned and the skilled craftsmen to better their own empire. Others were carried off as slaves. Those who were left were the farmers and the unskilled who somehow avoided slavery.
First, even if all of your arguments were correct, all you would have shown that it was impractical. That is miles from being anti-Semitic, and you are the one who is offensive for suggesting that.
Second, your arguments are not correct IMO. You act as if
a) the default behavior for post-war Germans would be to murder Jews
b) there would be no bar to them doing so
c) this contrasts with the flowers and candy they received from the Arabs and Palestinians in Israel
IMO they would have been much better protected in Germany. Even in the 70’s, when I was stationed in Germany, there were US troops in almost every town of any size. Immediately after the war, there were probably a lot more. It is highly offensive for you to suggest that US troops would turn a blind eye to Nazi murderers massacring the Jews, after they had knowledge of the death camps. In fact, it’s highly offensive to assume that the post-war Germans would immediately go on a killing spree if Jews immigrated into their towns.
Besides, they needn’t be “surrounded by Nazis,” they could have been given, say the corner of Baden-Wurttemberg that is lightly populated, has access to the Rhine, and has a longer border with France and Switzerland than Germany. There would be no need to expel the people already living there – unlike you, I imagine the average German would want to make amends for the insane people who ran his country during the war, and would do what he could to help the immigrants.
I picked that after about two minutes of googling, so It’s probably not the best location, but I don’t see how it could be worse than a desert surrounded by hostile Arabs, who as you pointed out yourself, tried to wipe them out in 1948.
Yes, you are. I was isolating one of many reasons advanced for justifying the establishment of Israel, namely reparations for the Holocaust. I’m well aware, as I imagine everyone over ten years old is, that Jews feel a connection to Israel that has nothing to do with the war, and that there was significant Jewish immigration to Palestine before the war.
And in my wildest imagination, I didn’t think anyone would consider that if a homeland were established in Germany as reparations, it would be mandatory for Jews living elsewhere to pack up and move there.
Debatable, but modern geopolitical legitimacy probably began to take shape after the treaty of Westphalia (1648), the principles of which have been incorporated by the UN.
I think in a way, the location of Israel in such hostile territory was a good thing in the sense that it forced the newly-created nation to put its military chops to the test right away. The next several decades saw Israel become such a military powerhouse that it was taken seriously by the rest of the world in a way that I can’t imagine would have been true of some cordoned-off section of Germany presided over by American peacekeepers.
It was a trial of fire that they ultimately survived and emerged from much stronger.
I think they actually showed remarkable restraint by not just keeping all of the territory that they won in the 1967 war and telling the other countries to go shit in their hat. With that being said, they’re not doing themselves any favors by stringing along the Palestinian territories indefinitely and offering them no realistic hope of political and economic viability. Their government is also corrupt as hell.
Well a very large part of the problem is that the neighboring states refuse to let the Palestinians migrate to their countries and give them citizenship.
And those particular Palestinians aren’t going to accept becoming Israeli citizens (unlike the 21% of Israeli citizens who are Arabs) because they don’t consider Israel to be a legitimate state.
So it leaves a permanent deadlock where those people won’t accept being a part of the state that surrounds them, and can’t move to neighboring states because they won’t have them.
Is that so, though? There are about 6 million diaspora Palestinians, and I very much doubt that Israel would be willing to let anything like that number of them become citizens of Israel as currently constituted, so whether the Palestinians would or wouldn’t accept it is kind of a moot point.
AFAICT a lot of Palestinians, both in the West Bank and elsewhere, would be perfectly willing to be citizens of a single secular democratic state in the entire territory of Israel/Palestine with equal rights for all citizens. Since the territory is their historic homeland at least as much as it is for Jewish Israelis, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable desire.
And while I’m a single individual who isn’t part of either one and doesn’t think highly of either, it is the only solution that I’d be willing to support when it came to US Policy and tax dollars. But I got no say in it.
My alternative (not quite serious but less than 100% joking) solution is to turn the entire region into a sea of radioactive glass so that NO ONE GETS TO LIVE THERE.
While I sympathize with your frustration, I think “100% joking” is a far better approach to this proposed alternative than “less than 100% joking”.
I’m NOT advocating killing anyone.
No, this is more of a “if none of you can play nice in this region, NO ONE can play in this region” things.
Move the people out, glass the region.
Still works better in the “100% joking” category, IMO.
Taking it seriously for a moment, part of the problem with these hyperbolically extreme proposals is that they have an unintended effect of legitimizing the status quo. If we keep emphasizing the complete hopelessness or impossibility of any satisfactory change, that just implicitly reinforces the inevitability of the current situation. “Another world is possible” by itself is admittedly pretty feeble as an effective force for change, but it’s better than “Another world is impossible”.
I’m not saying it would be impractical. The Allies were able to do anything they wanted with German territory. There was nothing to prevent them from setting this up. It would be dangerous and insulting, but not impractical.
In 1947 no one knew what the default behavior of Germans would be. The default behavior for wartime Germans was to murder Jews or to turn a blind eye to the murder of Jews, except for a few laudatory exceptions.
Remember also that Germans had been exposed to 12 years of unremitting anti-Semitic propaganda. The amazing turn that Germany took was far from obvious in 1947.
Already covered. The Allies did nothing to protect Jews during the war. It was not easy for Jewish refugees to come to the US from Nazi Germany before the war. (Sure, easy if your name was Einstein.) They were preventing refugees from going to Palestine after the war. Why would Jews trust them to change their policies to protect them?
There was already a self-defense structure in Palestine, which there wouldn’t be in Germany.
My father was on occupation duty after the war. The threat wasn’t going to be that year, the threat was when the occupation troops left. The Air Force was conducting bombing raids all over the place, but bombing the railroad lines leading to the camps to maybe prevent more people from being moved there was considered unimportant. Are you sure that it was reasonable to expect that the Allies would rush back into Germany to protect Jews? Anti-semitism was far from dead in the 1950s, especially in the higher level of government.
Are you serious? My father ran an officer’s club and employed Germans. I can assure you that none of them said “Jewish American soldier, we are so sorry for what happened.” Do you also think that southerners in 1868 just welcomed newly freed slaves with open arms?
Germany was in terrible shape. Don’t you think Germans desperate to rebuild would resent a lot of resources being used on Jews who they were taught were vermin? Hell, I have a TV program filmed in Berlin in 1951 which had a drive through the city. It was not about showing rubble, but rubble was everywhere.
You sure that it was reasonable to assume that the French or Swiss would open their borders in case of trouble?
It so happens that my daughter spent a college year abroad in Tubingen, and her husband comes from Stuttgart. I don’t know what it was like in 1947 but recently it isn’t a place I’d think the Germans would be so willing to give up.
For some odd reason, Jews in 1947 didn’t feel very welcome in Europe. And the proposal was not to move everyone to the Negev. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are hardly desert cities. However little land Jews owned in Palestine, it was more than they owned in Nazi Germany.
But let’s also remember the resolution was about government, not land. A peaceful transition would have let the Palestinians keep their land.
And, by the way, how much did anyone help to preserve the UN resolution in 1948? About as many as would preserve a Jewish state in Germany, in other words none. UN peacekeepers clear out as soon as there is trouble. Not that I blame them. As was proven by events, Jews in Palestine were in much better shape to protect themselves than refugees moved to Germany would be.
The whole point of Israel is that we can’t expect anyone to protect us but ourselves. Remember, from 1933 - 1939 the world did fuck all to protect Jews in Germany. Once the memory of the Holocaust dimmed, why expect the world to do anything if there was a new threat?
BTW, have any links to Jewish organizations of major size wishing to set up a Jewish state in Germany?
No doubt - but who is going to guarantee equal rights if radical factions of either side take over?
The current world environment does not make this solution seem very feasible, however much it is appealing in the abstract.
I think that’s the crux of it, and as I alluded to before, why the ensuing wars against Israel after its creation allowed the point to be made in a way that wouldn’t have been possible under other circumstances. The dog that had been kicked around by everyone finally bit back, and now the world knows not to fuck with that dog. People may espouse anti-Semitic rhetoric and the odd synagogue may be vandalized but there is no way that anything like the Holocaust can happen again. Not to the Jews, anyway.
Er…no.
The British Mandate was made by the League of Nations, which made the UK the custodian rather than the owner. The UK found it impossible to resolve, let alone impose, a balance between Arab and Jewish demands in relation to Jewish settlers and the governance of the mandated territory, and handed the issue back to the UNO as the League’s successor. Israel created itself despite, or at least without the active agreement of, the UK, and within borders resulting from the 1948 conflict, not those originally laid down by the UNO.
Certainly the parties of god don’t want any part of such a solution.
Chimera was wrong in that the neighboring countries have enabled a large diaspora. They generally don’t offer citizenship, though. On that part of his point Chimera was spot on. Many of those in the diaspora aren’t well integrated into their new countries. In some countries they are forbidden from holding certain kinds of jobs or owning property. Mass expulsions, and threats of them have happened. Living in relatively shitty decades old refugee camps is still very much the reality for many of them in Israel’s Arab neighbors. Palestinians in the diaspora are effectively a discriminated against permanent lower class in many of the countries that have accepted them.
Do you feel the Palestinians would accept Jewish Israelis as fellow citizens with equal rights in this hypothetical country? Because I have my doubts.
From that article:
It sounds like Syria and Jordan have an opportunity to step up here either by granting these people citizenship or by creating a Palestinian state out of their own territory, which is much larger than Israel. It seems to me that Israel is simply too small to be expected to give up any more territory. Lebanon is also too small, so that country should not have to contribute territory IMO. Syria and Jordan are both significantly larger than Israel.
The Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 before the League of Nations or the United Nations existed. The creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was a British policy; the later sanctions by international bodies were just an agreement to that.