No actually he got it right, they were in the offense: buying land, creating militias, occupying/buying legally and illegally land, using fair and unfair tactics to bring their numbers to near a million. And then post-WW2 once the partition plans happened they switched to defense of what the partition deemed their land.
What land did the Yishuv procure illegally, and by what standard were the Irgun/Lehi/Haganah more "offensive" than the intermittent Arab pogroms in the region?
Looking at the historical record of early Jewish land acquisition in Palestine reveals a complex web of legal maneuvering, administrative corruption, and systematic circumvention of Ottoman restrictions that merits careful examination beyond simplistic narratives of either legitimate purchase or outright theft.
The Ottoman Empire's approach to Jewish settlement evolved significantly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, creating a framework that was both restrictive on paper and porous in practice. From 1882 through 1918, the Ottomans maintained continuous restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_land_purchase_in_Palestine), culminating in the 1892 government decision to prohibit land sales to Jews entirely, even those holding Ottoman citizenship. This prohibition emerged partly in response to earlier exploitation schemes, including the manufacturing of fraudulent citizenships (https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3479960). The documentary evidence for these schemes remains somewhat contentious, Turkish academic sources provide the most detailed accounts given their unique access to Ottoman archives and linguistic capabilities, though their interpretations must be weighed against potential bias of them being Muslim.
These restrictions operated within a broader context of Ottoman administrative transformation that inadvertently facilitated the very outcomes they sought to prevent. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 was an ambitious attempt to formalize land registration for increased tax revenues and centralized state control, but its implementation created what can only be described as a bureaucratic labyrinth of opportunities. The law's requirement for land registration encountered widespread resistance from peasant cultivators (fellahin), who, whether through genuine fear of taxation and military conscription or manipulation by Levantine elites, frequently declined to register lands their families had worked for generations.
This reluctance opened the door for local notables, merchants, and urban elites, primarily from Lebanon, Damascus, and Jerusalem, to register large tracts of communally held village lands under their own names, effectively transforming traditional cultivators into tenants on ancestral land. In a profound sense, this represents the original sin of dispossession that preceded and enabled subsequent Jewish land acquisition, creating a class of absentee landlords who would later prove willing sellers to Jewish purchasing organizations.
The methods employed to circumvent Ottoman restrictions reveal the persistent gap between imperial policy and provincial implementation that characterized late Ottoman administration. Despite Sultan Abdul Hamid's explicit instructions to resist Jewish immigration and settlement, systematic administrative corruption rendered these directives largely ineffective. As documented by contemporary analysis, "the corruption of the Ottoman administrative apparatus prevented its implementation, consequently, the Zionists—by paying bribes—were able to purchase a lot of land" (https://eng.alzaytouna.net/2020/05/22/article-did-the-palestinians-sell-their-land-and-leave-it-to-the-jews/).
Contemporary Ottoman documents detail extensive bribery networks that enabled Jewish land purchases, with one 1886 investigation revealing officials who illegally granted citizenship to 272 Jewish immigrants in Haifa alone (https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3479960). The Jewish Virtual Library acknowledges this clandestine dimension, noting that "each purchase entailed a cumbersome bureaucratic procedure vis-à-vis the local Turkish authorities. This situation, coupled with the frequent need to resort to bribery in official dealings, gave the Jewish purchases a clandestine complexion that would recur in subsequent years" (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-redeemers-of-the-land-quot).
Aside from simple corruption, Jewish purchasing organizations developed sophisticated legal circumvention strategies, including "payments to local officials, the use of European passports, and the registration of land under consular entities" that "allowed buyers to circumvent some restrictions" (https://allisrael.com/blog/the-legal-case-for-jewish-land-acquisition). These methods exploited the complex jurisdictional overlaps inherent in the Ottoman Empire's millet system (parallel to the land refroms) and capitulations regime, transforming legal complexity into practical opportunity.
The scale of these acquisitions, proved significant in establishing precedents for larger transfers. By 1918, Jewish organizations had acquired approximately 1.5% of Brittish Palestine's total area, "which they bought mainly from Lebanese feudal landlords... or from the Ottoman administration through public auction in which the lands of Palestinian peasants who are unable to pay their taxes are sold" (https://eng.alzaytouna.net/2020/05/22/article-did-the-palestinians-sell-their-land-and-leave-it-to-the-jews/).
The Shaw Commission's 1929 findings illuminate the enduring pattern of absentee landlord sales: "90% of lands bought up to that time came from absentee landlords. During the 1930s the proportion fell to 80%. In the last decade of the mandate they were about 73%" (https://www.beki.org/dvartorah/landlaw/). This data reveals how the fundamental structure of land acquisition remained consistent even as the mandate period progressed.
Administrative dysfunction, legal complexity, and economic pressure created conditions where formal restrictions proved meaningless against determined circumvention efforts. In my opinion, circumventing the law and using a whole arsenal of loopholes and "akshually it is legal" is absolutely not legal.
As for your second claim, Irgun/Lehi are another category from the Haganah. Irgun literally dropped the "self-restraint" and just started doing terrorist attacks (https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks) and started just killing Arabs because of the righoid mentality of "kill Arab good" which is pervasive in Israel today. As for why are they offensive, easy, anything that Jews did in Palestine was an offensive strategy because it was not their land. Just like anything the American colonist did to the indigenous Indians in the 1700-1900s is an offensive act, or was Manifest Destiny done as a sort of defense. This is not a value or a moral judgement, modern Israel is not the ancestral land of the Jews but a modern creation, and that creation necessitated getting the land and the people. As for the people, most of the early immigration and Aliyah was mainly European in origin, not Mizrahi. That happened much later starting in the 1930s (once Zionism was evolving into the defensive stance). Saying so, this is in no case a justification for the pogroms that the Jews suffered in Europe or in many MENA countries.
Good collection of information, thankyou. Herzlean Zionism was totally opposed to this kind of surreptitious settlement and thought a charter granted by the Ottoman was a sine qua non of success.
> "Contemporary Ottoman documents detail extensive bribery networks that enabled Jewish land purchases"
If bribery was a standard component of doing business with Ottoman officials, and bribery makes the agreements non-lawful (and in any case non-compliance with top-level directives regarding land-registration was rampant), then by that standard the empire was a "lawless territory" and it's a little weird to single out jewish settlers for doing business extra-legally. Or are you going to say that Ottoman officials didn't require bribes when dealing with non-jews?
> "Just like anything the American colonist did to the indigenous Indians in the 1700-1900s is an offensive act"
Yeah... that also seems pretty simplistic to me, especially given that most native-american land losses were also a result of purchase agreements. If the Comanche come at your homestead with the intention of raping your wife and flaying your children, I think reasonable standards of self-defence apply.
You seem to have glossed over the other arguments that make this important:
- Jews and foreigners were not able to buy land from 1892 onwards, yet they still did it through corruption and bribery
- That land was not properly acquired, and was bought from absentee landlords who were not the proper owners. If I steal a car, legally register it (by bribing) and sell it to you. Do you understand that the original owner will be unhappy?
Please, were are the sources or info to claim that most native land in the US was a result of purchase agreements?
This seems rather simplistic for me because seeing Spanish history I am more familiar in, and how the Spanish treated the natives more humanly yet they lost their land through conquest and plunder. The Comanche might be raiding your homestead because the US governement didnt respect the treaty, went to war and gained that land in conquest, not sale.
I don't think you are wrong exactly, but I don't think it matters so much. Orderly private land ownership is a condition of a modern economy, but every pre-modern society had a complex patchwork of grazing rights, common use, rents that were were really freehold, freehold that was really rent etc. etc. The process of regularizing is into a system where land could be bought and sold on the open market was pretty messy and messed up just about everywhere. It had to be that way because orderly legal systems that could deliver regular justice were an end state of this process, not a condition.
Today, most Palestinians live in cities and towns, and there's no way it can be otherwise because there isn't space for millions of people to live here as subsistence farmers. Whether a a given Palestinian has a high or low standard of living today is a function of his ability to sell his labour and skills, not whether his great grandad did or did not get fair compensation for being evicted from his shitty farm. I'm not saying it isn't important for understanding how Arabs behaved in the early 20th century, but it's almost the quintessential case of something that people should move on from today.
> "Jews and foreigners were not able to buy land from 1892 onwards, yet they still did it through corruption and bribery"
I heard you the first time. I'm saying by that your description it sounds like nobody was paying much attention to the Sultan in the first place, so what does "illegal" even mean in the context of a society where you don't have a centralised lawful authority?
Obviously I understand why Arab peasant farmers evicted from their lands would be upset about it, but I also know the Arab population of Palestine actually increased during the Yishuv, partly as a result of natural birthrates but also due to immigration from other Arab countries. Apparently because the Yishuv offered better prospects for housing and employment than was to be found in Jordan/Egypt/Syria/etc. So... I just don't buy the argument that Palestine was an especially awful place to be an Arab, at least pre-1948.
> "Please, were are the sources or info to claim that most native land in the US was a result of purchase agreements?"
Obviously a lot of sales that were legal on paper were complicated by language barriers, unclear delineation of tribal authority and signatories being plied with booze or bribed or subject to hidden clauses, but the extent of forceful or manipulated expropriation of NA lands tends to be grossly exaggerated.
> "The Comanche might be raiding your homestead because the US governement didnt respect the treaty"
In the particular case of the Comanche I can say that pretty definitely wasn't true- the Comanche had been waging wars of extermination against other native american tribes for decades before white settlers ever entered the picture, so this was just business as usual from their PoV. (The intervention of the Texas Rangers probably saved the Apache from extinction, for example, even if the Rangers themselves weren't above the occasional massacre.)
What about DNA and physical appearance - which average people used to be better knowledgeable about 100 years ago. The region of Palestine is the origin of 50% or so of Ashkenazi Jews's heritage, plus the original home of their liturgical language. It definitely is the ancestral land of Jews in a sense, even if it is in a distinct sense than the ancestral land status of most countries in the world. Even Moroccan and Turkish Jews are closer in DNA to Lebanese/Christian Palestinians than to Muslim Moroccans and Turks.
Yeah and French people are genetically impring by the Italic peoples, should that be enough of a claim for Italians to claim all of France too? Southern Spain has a big North African imprint, should it go to Morocco?
No one argues that 2000 years ago Jews lived and inhabited what was Judea and Samaria, but the ancestral land doesnt give you a legitimate claim for it. If it does, then Italy can claim all of France/Spain and Greece. Greece can claim Iran, Ukraine can claim Finland and so on. The fact that a polity or kingdom existed at a specific time doesnt give you the claim to it in a way.
As for Hebrew, modern Hebrew is in a kind of way artificial. It was a dead language for many centuries that was revived in the 19th. This means many words are lost, pronounciations are not the same (or unknown) and basically Modern Hebrew is a Frankestein of a language that kept the basic grammar intact but added a lot of Yiddish/European/Arabic influences into it.
Kind of if today we wanted to speak Latin, and we had to use the word computer or car into it.
Look I'm not saying it's a foolproof claim, my overall point is that few groups around the world who lived so far from their homeland remained as distinctive as Jews were prior to the 20th century. Greece claiming Iran or Ukraine is not comparable, maybe Hungary claiming a piece of steppe Russia, where they immigrated from 1000 years ago, seems more comparable, although they obviously were not in need of a state. Jews were in 1900. I know Hebrew was revived, which is why I said it was their liturgical language. That being said, the fact that most Jews are a distinct ethnicity, which was well-known to 19th century Europeans and Middle Easterners, has been confirmed by modern DNA, even if significant South Euro ancestry does exist.
Zionism did not predict the Holocaust, nor was it predicated on preventing the Holocaust. It precedes the Holocaust by decades, as you well know, but choose to ignore.
Zionism did successfully provide a refuge for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis before the Holocaust and fleeing other pogroms before then, and all of that before the state even. I exist because my grandmother escaped as a teen from Germany through Switzerland to British Mandate Palestine. Her family that stayed was destroyed. Similarly, Israel successfully prevented satelessness for the IDP Jews stuck in concentration camps by the Allies after the war, and the nearly million MENA Jews scapegoated by Arab societies during their ‘decolonization’, like the barbaric Algerians revoking the citizenship of Algerian Jews.
Zionism was justified before and after WW2 for the same exact reasons, and non-Zionists and antizionists have no answers for the questions Zionism addresses.
I think NZ's general argument is that the human and financial resources poured into Zionism could have spent more effectively on either a jewish ethnostate in some other part of the world (where there would have been less coordinated Arab hostility) and/or on lobbying for allowing jewish refugees into other western countries (e.g, the US or Argentina.)
You can debate how true that is, but NZ isn't "ignoring" Zionism preceding the holocaust. He's contending that either Territorialism specifically or refugee resettlement programs in other countries more generally would have been more long-term strategically sound (and potentially have averted the holocaust entirely by siphoning off europe's jewish population before they could be murdered.)
NonZionism is about as pointless of an intellectual exercise as writing alternate history fiction - simplified toddlerism along the lines of “what would happen if pigs flew”.
Israel exists, for a reason, due to actual historical events that Jews could not influence as poor, persecuted minorities. Zionists weaved and dodged between violent antisemitism and immigration restrictions in the new world, and the impending collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is deeply stupid to waste time with the “what ifs” when there was zero influence Jews had on whether the US would accept millions more Jews as immigrants in the 1920s-1950s. The fact is that the US, Canada and Brazil turned back Jewish refugees into the hands of the Nazis before, during and after the war. WTF are we even talking about here with these retarded hypotheticals? These events happened, Israel was created due to them, and Israel has existed as a stable democracy longer than most EU countries. It went from a poor developing nation to a higher GDP per capita than former imperial powers UK and France. The rest of the Arab world, similarly carved from the carcass of empires, is either in failed state mode or teetering on the verge, and the reason it emptied of minorities (including the Jews) is due to Islamism and Pan-Arabism, not Zionism.
If you're hypothesising about the state of world jewry in a world without Israel, you're already engaging in "retarded hypotheticals", so I don't know why this counts against NZ in particular. You could stand to dial back your tone a notch, by the way.
The main reason why the Territorialist movement broke down is essentially because jews themselves couldn't seem to muster the enthusiasm for locations other than palestine and dramatically underestimated arab allergies to jewish settlement, which was kind of a self-inflicted limitation, even if it (obviously) doesn't excuse the atrocities of the NSDAP or earlier european pogroms.
Those other options would have been retarded, to borrow language from the alleged “wisely educated”, as they are now struggling with their own post colonial divisions along Christian vs Muslim and interethnic lines, and had Jews been there, oh boy. Suggesting Uganda or whatnot as an alternative is laughable. Birobidzhan similarity worked out soooo well, that retarded antizionist Michael Chabon also had to engage in laughably childish alternate history fiction to blow some smoke up our collective asses about a non Zionist refuge.
As I mentioned before, in the real world, along the real timeline, New World democracies shut their doors in the face of Jewish immigration. The hypothetical moving of Eastern Europeans to Western Europe would have resulted in the exact same slaughter during the Holocaust, as the Nazis didn’t give a fuck differentiating between Haredi Pale of Settlement Jews and secular Amsterdam Jews. Give us a fucking break. “Rightoids” may be dumb, but no dumber than leftist nerds engaging in world building an alternate history.
Don’t tone police me, buddy. Your guy uses “gay” and “retarded” etc, so the pearl clutching is kinda pathetic.
> "Those other options would have been retarded, to borrow language from the alleged “wisely educated”, as they are now struggling with their own post colonial divisions along Christian vs Muslim and interethnic lines"
I think NZ's go-to example was Argentina, and western democracies shutting their door to jewish refugees occurred long after Zionism got going. If you're going to argue Zionism long-preceded the holocaust, that cuts both ways.
> "Your guy uses “gay” and “retarded” etc, so the pearl clutching is kinda pathetic"
I have my own reservations about NZ describing mythological attachment to blood and soil as automatically dysfunctional, for reasons I might get into, but the vast majority of what he writes is more civil than that. Every sentence you write seems to be dripping with this barely-veiled contempt for whoever might be reading you.
No need to veil anything - I have contempt for you and him and other people who hate Israel and Israelis and try to offer alternatives that aren't alternatives to the problems actually addressed by Zionism. It's not perfect, but was far better, did far more real world good than Birobidzhan and the Uganda Plan or migration to the New World. Without Zionism there would be a lot less Jews alive today, and arguably very few Jews at all.
Zionism got going heavily in the 1920s, exactly when the US and nearly all of the New World shut the door on Jewish immigration. I pay attention to real history, not your alternate one. That's also when a huge number of Jews were trying to escape Europe and the Arab World. According to you the MS St. Louis never happened, or maybe could have landed in Argentina. Plus, did your alternate history consider what an idiotic place Argentina turned out to be under Peron and subsequent Juntas, and did you miss out on Argentinian Jews escaping Argentina to places like...Israel?
Playing alternate history is a retarded way to avoid real history and reality, and expand on how you would have made Star Wars better if you and not dumb George Lucas were in charge. Pathetic nerd bullshit, and both of you could use some growing up.
Well, she went from a middle class existence to supporting herself at 15 and her 12 year old sister through road construction and being a maid in Israel. Basically went to poverty with no parents, uncles or aunts in an instant. The Swiss weren’t going to support thousands of destitute Jewish children - their economy was built on Jewish gold teeth. And as a reminder, the Americas - USA, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, were already refusing Jewish refugees trying to escape the Nazis, turning their ships back to Europe (see MS St. Louis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis ). By the time she arrived in Israel her parents were already murdered, and her younger brother would later be shipped to Auschwitz and be murdered there as a child. There was nothing to promise that Germany wouldn’t invade Switzerland as they did Austria a few years earlier - that’s why.
When Europe and the Americas shut the door in the face of Jewish refugees a few of them found their way to remote places like China and British Mandate Palestine, or in other words the land of Israel. Most of them did not, and got murdered. Zionism proved its worth before the Holocaust. Any Non Zionist or antizionist Jew is kindly invited to fuck off and live in any other country, and remember that when their antisemitic friends persecute Jews (including them), even their disingenuous assface is welcome to find refuge in Israel.
My chief concern in this blog is the cultural, ethical and spiritual havoc that Zionism is wreaking on the Jewish people, so it's good that you come here periodically to confirm I'm not hallucinating it.
When I visit family in Israel it's nothing but joy, great food, great beaches. Your spiritual problem is the result of you being an Israel hater living under the protection of the Israelis you hate in Haspin or wherever it is in the Golan that folks like you congregate. Too far from the beach, too hot, shit food in the Katzrin center (the laffa is sub-par, the pizzas are atrocious). The rest of us don't have the spiritual problems you have with your curmudgeonly, ungrateful idiotic outlook.
Why don't you move your ass back to the UK - it's full of Jew haters like yourself, and Israel haters (the two usually are in complete overlap). Too many Muslims? Too many Sam Kriss type know-nothing know-it-alls crammed into every space? I'm really curious, because your personal safety depends on the IDF and other Israelis stepping up to do what you don't. "Ethical havoc" is funny - another clown complaining when Jews hit back at Islamists. Should be doing it the way some loser with zero understanding of the military suggests from his border town, I'm sure. As for "on the Jewish people", you seem to hate us, asshat. If we're all despicable, and you're such a smart petulant observer, do you really care? You're exactly like grifter Norm Finkelstein and narcissist Peter Beinart, both of which are so concerned with the Jewish people they want them all dead.
Seems like your chief concern is coming up with less interesting, less thought through versions of The Man in the High Castle. You're not offering any actual ideas, you're lamenting how history didn't unfold as well as your variant of Nerd Imagines What If history. Basically you never got over your edgelord days of hating everyone and everything, "everyone is stupid", but lacking any coherent alternative beyond an alternate history.
Zionism is literally what got you the right to live in a home in the Golan Heights, defended by the military of a sovereign Jewish nation. I don't speak for you or know your exact circumstances, but how exactly is that indicative of cultural havoc? Anti-Zionists would argue that you're currently residing in "occupied Syria." If Zionism is such an inconvenience to you, why not move back to the UK where you also hold a passport?
It could be that Zionism is what allows me to live in the Golan Heights, and that it is also wreaking havoc on the Jewish people. These are not even superficially contradictory.
This is one of the clearest and most unsentimental takes I’ve read. People forget that post-WWII wasn’t about moral victories—it was about cold, hard logistics. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had nowhere to go, Europe didn’t want them back, and the Yishuv was the only functioning infrastructure prepared to absorb them. The Arab leadership backed the wrong side in the biggest global conflict in history and paid a relatively mild price for it. Ethnostate creation after WWII was messy and brutal everywhere, not just in Palestine. Israel isn’t some bizarre historical injustice—it’s just one more case of realpolitik in action. History doesn’t care about feelings, it cares about timing, power, and consequences.
I used to work with a lot of people from Eastern Europe + Balkans.
They would often go off on long explanations of some 20th century event that had halved their people’s territory or left a few hundred thousand people dead.
The creation of the 🇮🇱 is pretty much in the same ballpark. In many ways it’s tedious that it takes up so much bandwidth in 2025 in a way that other nearby disputes are ignored.
I think the general argument is that most of these disputes don't pertain to countries which currently receive direct military aid/assistance from the US. Although... the Saudis remain regular customers for US arms sales despite involvement in the war with Yemen (~500K dead) and China doesn't get nearly as much pressure for BDS from the left over their treatment of the Uyghurs. So... yeah, the outrage does seem a little selective.
I guess NZ's general take is that Israel can't control the world, only it's own actions, so... even if the double-standard is glaring you kinda have to work within it.
Yes that, but also because the main reason for the double standard is that the Palestinians automatically have the whole Muslim world on their side, and they control the majority of the world's oil, and this was a known known when deciding to go all in on this thing.
That doesn't really explain why there's virtually zero fuss over the Uyghurs or Rohingyas, though, if Muslims automatically side with other Muslims vs. non-Muslims. Either ethnic solidarity or specifically religious concerns about control of Jerusalem have to be the driving factor here.
That's true, certainly the fact that they are both Arab and Muslim, and the importance of Jerusalem give it much greater salience. However, what I am really missing out in that equation is not just that the Palestinians have a billion natural allies, it's that Israel has none and little to offer. Conversely, China is, well, China and can push it's weight around.
It's an interesting question about why Burma isn't a bigger issue for Muslims, but, in truth, non Muslims in general also don't have much interest in south east Asia, except for sex tourism. It's kind of 'over there'.
The real answer is Muslims have an inherent Arabic superiority complex. Most Arabs wont care about Bangladeshis dying or whatever, even if they are Muslims because it is remote. But someone speaking your same language and same culture makes it more close.
That and also Dar-al-Islam vs Dar-al-Harb, losing Palestine as the symbol of their inherent weakness against the West and modernity, Palestine becoming the crux of the Islamic identity crisis and thus they see retaking Palestine as a religious endeavour that will show favour from Allah (Muslims are also a choosen people remember), and will be the turning point against the infidels and usher the new Golden Age of Islam.
I am writing something on this, but basically Palestine became the symbol of Islam's weakness against the West and modernity. Jamal al-din al-Afghani touched on the symptoms and it is that in the era of colonization and industrialization, Europe became the top dog in everything. Islamic civilization saw it as God forsaking them, because why else would the inferior spiritual infidels be so superior everywhere else. The answer for that came in 2 ways, but both the same: we must reform Islam.
The disagreement came in how: some people saw the reform as doubling down on tradition and basically recreating the times of the Sahabba (when Mohammed was alive in early Islam), and thus for that you need to become ultra-orthodox (what would become Wahabbism and the Islamic Brotherhood). The other answer is: we need to become more Westernet than the Westerners which is why pan-Arabism, secularism and Socialism were so popular for a time in the Arabic world. Basically ever since 1794 Islam has been between 2 poles: the Socialist-secular one and the Wahabbi one. Nowadays we are closer to the second because of Gulf oil and gas.
Both sides are and were incapable of fighting for Islam. And their worst betrayal is that Jews, who were seen as inferior dhimmis, fought and won against the Arabs and took their land. Not only their land but the holy land. Not only that, but they are also thriving in that land that has nothing other than deserts, and us Muslims are unable to do anything because they managed to bribe the big powers into protecting them (see the AIPAC and EFI). This is why Palestine regardless of anything political or humane was and is so important for Muslim and Arab/Muslim leaders.
This is legit the reason why Palestine is so important to Muslims while Burma or East Turkestan is uncared for.
Well... I'm HBD-pilled, so I have my own theories as to why the Muslim world hasn't caught up, though I am sorta scratching my head as to how a 20 point genetic IQ gap could have opened north and south of the mediterranean, and probably in recent history. The vanished Gardens of Cordoba, and all that.
I still don't get your argument that the Holocaust didn't vindicate Zionism. Zionism is just a form of territorialism that had several practical advantages that territorialism lacked, e.g. it was close to Europe, Jews actually wanted to go there even not at gunpoint, and the Western world powers were generally sympathetic to the idea.
If you think Zionism was a mistake how do you think relocating hundreds of thousands of Jews to British East Africa would have gone? If you think Israel is a Jewish Rhodesia now wait til you see the hypothetical Jewish East Africa Territory.
Not to mention territorialism had no chance of actually happening either. Unless by "territorialism" we just mean the sentiment that "boy it sure would be good if the Jews were somewhere safer during world war 2" in which case shkoyach. Where? How?
I don't see how this was really relevant given the technological conditions of the time. A ship is a ship, whether you sit on it for 12 hours or for 30.
2. "Jews actually wanted to go there even not at gunpoint"
The Jews who wanted to go there were pious Chassidic types who wanted to vibe out on tzedaka, precisely the people the Zionists didn't want. Other Jews had to be propagandized to at great length to want to go EY, which was itself a massive waste of resources. Even that didn't actually achieve much until America imposed immigration restrictions.
3. 'and the Western world powers were generally sympathetic to the idea.'
That was the Herzlean theory, but he didn't actually achieve anything. Of course, the Balfour Declaration revived his idea from the dead (or so it appeared).
4. "Unless by "territorialism" we just mean the sentiment that "boy it sure would be good if the Jews were somewhere safer during world war 2" in which case shkoyach. Where? How?"
100,000-150,000 Jews went to Argentina in the years 1880-1920. The benefits of going there over Eretz Yisrael were obvious: there was land going cheap, the native population was already wiped out in advance, and it had a growing economy with lots of opportunities and a labour shortage. There was the Jewish Colonization Association that facilitated this, but it had a fraction of the resources behind it that Zionism had. I think, conservatively, that had even half of the resources expended on Zionism been directed this way, then 2 million Jews would have got out in time.
I'm finding it very hard to grasp your starting assumption that countries in the 1930s had an unlimited tolerance for Jewish immigration. It kind of assumes the only people with agency are Eastern European Jewish intellectuals picking countries out of a hat. In the real world, other countries were not willing to take a significant number of Jews in at the time, starting even well before the Holocaust. There was a brief period of time when places like Argentina and the US would take anyone who came (and millions came) but that door was well and truly closed by that point, which is why Palestine was seeing any significant amount of immigration at all. There was one place on Earth that was specifically incorporated to receive an unlimited number of Jewish refugees and that was not completely coincidentally the place the Zionists were focused on - and of course, that didn't really work either because the UK and the Arabs were violently opposed to it. But this is not that exceptional. No place on Earth was willing or would ever be willing to accept a large number of refugees at that point in time. It's not like they weren't asked. The US literally sent ships back to Germany.
Which is again another way Zionism (or at least the variety of Zionism that saw Jewish sovereignty as essential) was vindicated. The nachtasyl only works so long as the sovereign of the receiving territory is willing to let Jews go there. Without complete control of immigration, territorialism could be turned off any time a country decided it had enough Jews, which every country in the 1930s did, except of course for those countries that decided that they had too many Jews.
>I don't see how this was really relevant given the technological conditions of the time. A ship is a ship, whether you sit on it for 12 hours or for 30.
It did make a big difference. Lots of Zionists went back and forth between Palestine and Europe frequently because the journey was easy and cheap. It was easier to decide to emigrate to Palestine if you knew your family and life back home was not that far away. Communication with family back home was quicker too.
>Other Jews had to be propagandized to at great length to want to go EY, which was itself a massive waste of resources.
There's a reason Zionism was better at winning Jews over than territorialism - and why it appealed to religious and irreligious Jews alike. The desire to return to Zion is already baked in. You have recognized this attachment as irrational, but irrational or not, it is there, and it would have been irrational to ignore.
>Even that didn't actually achieve much until America imposed immigration restrictions.
You are clearly aware of this fact but also seem to think that Argentina did not exist in the same universe, despite Argentina also deciding it was letting in too many Jews int the 1930s. There is no universe where an actually existing country in the interwar period would have let in 2 million Jews.
>That was the Herzlean theory, but he didn't actually achieve anything. Of course, the Balfour Declaration revived his idea from the dead (or so it appeared).
Handwaving away the Balfour Declaration is a bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln "other than that, how was the show?" The Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Conference enshrined in international law that Palestine was for Jews - which would not have been possible if the Western world didn't already think that. Zionism's success was a very near thing - hard to imagine it working at all if every world power thought Jews had no relationship to Palestine.
The debates between Territorialism and Zionism happened in the 1900s and 1910s when many countries had open immigration, or were actively encouraging it. The explicit terms of the debate were whether it was important to get large numbers of Jews out quickly (the territorialist, but also Herzlean position) or whether it was not, in fact, important (the Zionist position). Your belief that explicitly and consciously choosing not to optimise for evacuation didn't in any way decrease the amount of evacuation just seems very implausible.
You are articulating a very unrealistic model in which the only factor that made countries close the gates of immigration to Jews was how many Jews had already come, in which case it was hopeless to solve the issue by emigration. In reality the two factors were *total* levels of immigration from all sources and independent political trends. The simple common sense assumption is that if, during the window that was open in America, Australia, Argentina and other countries, resources had been put behind facilitating more Jewish emigration, then more Jews would have emigrated. Others would have lost out (e.g. Poles, southern Italians). Indeed, as we see today, if a minority group gets big enough, it can effectively hack the political system to block immigration restrictions indefinitely.
Another factor is that, in addition to funding trips, giving grants and loans etc. another thing Zionists could have done instead of sinking money into their black hole would have been lobbying for immigration. Clearly, they got very good at lobbying- hence the Balfour Declaration - so imagine what they could have achieved if they had been able to look for high marginal utility options, not stuck with Palestine only.
Of course, by the 1930s everything was very different. The point is that Zionism blew the Jewish people's chances decades before that.
First, you're ascribing to the territorialists the position that all they wanted was emigration, which is not really true. They were also looking for a Jewish homeland, in the sense of a specific territory to dump a lot of Jews in at once. Their dispute with Zionism was that Palestine wasn't available then and it wasn't worth waiting around for but some other territory might be available now. (They were wrong.) In other words, both the Zionists and the territorialists were fighting for the support of that minority of Jews who (i) believed the Jews should leave Europe but (ii) shouldn't simply disperse throughout the world as individuals but (iii) should concentrate in one area.
Both Zionism and territorialism were decidedly less popular than "Emigrate to America" which had the rabid and enthusiastic support of 2,000,000 Jews who moved to New York between 1880 and World War I. And the hundreds of thousands of Jews who moved to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, Australia, the UK, etc. And of course, Zionists, emigrationists, and territorialists were all combined a minority compared to the Jews who stayed.
If Zionism hadn't existed, and instead, all of its resources been focused on emigration, would more Jews have emigrated? Yes, but only marginally. Jewish immigration to the US already constituted 50% of all European immigration to the US at that time and that itself was enough to lead to immigration restrictions. Even according to your assumption that American immigration restrictionists were completely agnostic as to the percentage of its immigrants are Jewish or other kinds of Europeans (which I really doubt), upping the total amount of Jews in the shorter term would not have kept the doors open longer or kept them open the same amount of time, but would have closed them sooner. At the time there were not a finite number of slots - whoever wanted to come could come. More Jews coming in would not mean less Poles - it would mean more Jews and the same amount of Poles that otherwise came and thus more immigrants sooner, and thus the doors close sooner.
And the idea that if Zionist efforts had been redirected at territorialism then territorialism would have succeeded strikes me as even further off base. Again, territorialism runs into virtually all of the same headaches that Zionism does. Nobody has a wide open expanse of land that they think they can give away to millions of Jews without prohibitive political blowback, either from their own citizens or the native inhabitants of their colonies.
Nevertheless, the British went along with Zionism because enough people running the British government believed that Jews naturally belonged in Palestine. They thought they were doing the right thing, and righting a historical injustice. Weizmann wasn't pushing on an open door exactly but there was enough buy-in from the people running the British government at the time to make it plausible so that his prodigious lobbying skills could bear fruit.
You gave the example of Argentina, and Argentina topped out at about 130,000 Jewish immigrants before World War II. The argument that, actually, Argentina, a country of 8 million people would have taken in 2,000,000 more Jews than it did before clamping down on immigration sooner strikes me as extremely farfetched. But if you want to make that argument - or an argument for Kenya or Madagascar or Grand Island in the Niagara River you have to show your work.
To reiterate what I said earlier, I think the Zionists were correct that the Territorialists would fail to create an independent Jewish homeland anywhere else, and there efforts would degenerate into generic resettlement projects, it's just that I think that's a good thing. About the one thing Pinsker and Herzl shared was a conviction that emancipation was a delusion, and the condition of the Jew could only be solved by becoming a majority somewhere. Obviously, they were just totally wrong about this, and the Dreyfus affair was actually an aberration, not a harbinger of anything. The real issue was that (a) Eastern Europe was a nuthouse of competing nationalisms with not enough space for all of them and (b) Germany went mental, but was also much more military competent than should be possible given how bonkers it went. So, actually the priority was just getting Jews out of the Eastern Europe before it became a slaughterhouse. Jews do just fine as a minority in lots of countries.
So, for example, it's overwhelmingly likely that the Uganda Plan would have been a big failure, and the 50,000 Jews who went would have ended up fleeing Idi Amin and coming to Leicester with the Indians. And? Thus what you have to do is add up all the potential gains from just helping Jews to go wherever is taking at any given point, plus lobbying for looser immigration instead of Palestine. An extra 100,000 in Argentina, an extra 300,000 in the US, an extra 80,000 in Australia. Pretty soon, you're talking real numbers.
As the cherry on top, if you don't have Zionism spooking the Arabs, then Palestine could have continued to be the favored destination for the frummies who from 1912s onwards have the Aguda to organize immigration.
I dunno, this just sounds like an argument that territorialism > zionism because it would have failed quicker and eventually evolved into emigrationism, a movement which already existed and was more successful than either.
And even this isn't persuasive. Zionism is bad because had it never existed *maybe* 50,000 Jews might have gone to Uganda and been ethnically cleansed to England later? Why is that better than the hundreds of thousands of Jews who went to Palestine because of Zionism and whose descendants live there persecution free even now?
And then *maybe* the Jews would have been able to persuade richer countries to take in substantially more Jews when, by all accounts, all the political pressure in the world was against doing so?
>Thus what you have to do is add up all the potential gains from just helping Jews to go wherever is taking at any given point, plus lobbying for looser immigration instead of Palestine. An extra 100,000 in Argentina, an extra 300,000 in the US, an extra 80,000 in Australia. Pretty soon, you're talking real numbers.
Purely on a "saving Jews from the Holocaust" scale, Zionism ultimately saved like 600,000 Jews. To the extent that you're arguing that territorialism would have failed quicker than Zionism and then morphed into emigrationism which underpants gnome would have resulted in >600,000 Jews escaping the Nazis, the numbers you are throwing around are still not approaching Zionism's results and have the further disadvantage of being speculative.
>About the one thing Pinsker and Herzl shared was a conviction that emancipation was a delusion, and the condition of the Jew could only be solved by becoming a majority somewhere. Obviously, they were just totally wrong about this, and the Dreyfus affair was actually an aberration, not a harbinger of anything. The real issue was that (a) Eastern Europe was a nuthouse of competing nationalisms with not enough space for all of them and (b) Germany went mental, but was also much more military competent than should be possible given how bonkers it went.
This is a bit like your handwaving away Zionism as a failure, except for the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. Leaving the Dreyfus Affair aside, which I think the historical record is unclear on whether it was a particular impetus for Herzl, I really don't see how you can definitively argue that emancipation was going to end well.
a. As you acknowledge, most of the nationalist movements in Eastern Europe did not have a role for the Jews
b. the Holocaust
c. Stalin's antisemitism and the Communist attempt to stamp out Judaism
And I'm not even sure this is limited to Jews. The fact that Europe now prides itself as a bastion of tolerant states is only because they have by and large finished their ethnic cleansing of their minorities. Those states like the former Yugoslavia that did not finish their ethnic cleansing immediately after World War II delayed it until the 90s. And now even countries like Germany and the UK are strongly reconsidering their demographics.
> "There is no universe where an actually existing country in the interwar period would have let in 2 million Jews"
Maybe not in the interwar period, but Zionism had been active long before the 1930s, and the fact that land in Palestine was both exorbitantly priced and fiercely contested wasn't hard to notice for anyone with eyes.
I mean... I don't really want to make the argument that other countries should have been ethically obliged to take in infinity refugees from other regions of the world either (we can see in the modern era how easily that sentiment can be abused.) But if I was a jewish person in the late-19th-century debating from a purely rationalistic and self-interested PoV on how to maximise jewish safety, the non-Zionist option has some arguments to commend it.
The precise time periods don't really matter because the greater the demand for Jews to emigrate the less the willingness of states to take in Jews. There are brief pockets of time where for manifest destiny reasons some settler colony states were willing to take in unrestricted amounts of Jewish immigrants but only up to a point, and each country reached that point well before the Holocaust. If more Jews immigrated earlier they would have shut the valve off earlier.
Additionally, it's not like Jewish emigration to Argentina and the US was not a popular option at the time it was allowed. Millions of Jews left for the Americas, Australia, and South Africa. "Emigration" was a much more successful movement than Zionism!
I think NZ's argument is that the money poured into the Yishuv and land purchase arrangements in the Palestinian territories could have been more efficiently allocated to relocating jewish refugees to other countries. You can debate how true that is, but it's a separate argument from the viability of a jewish ethnostate outside of the levant.
Yes. The main Zionist argument against territorialism is that it would inevitably fizzle out into just generic resettlement and, at most, some kind of vague local autonomy. This was pretty accurate but, like, so what?
I think the real argument Zionism could make against territorialism is that without Jewish control over immigration there is never any guarantee that any country will allow Jews in in appreciable numbers, and for Jewish control over immigration you need sovereignty. It's not a coincidence that at exactly the same time that Jewish demand for emigration peaked, Western tolerance for Jewish immigration hit its nadir.
Even in Palestine, the slice of land specifically set aside by the world for Jewish immigration, severely restricted Jewish immigration in the 1930s.
There's a school of thought that says "if only more Jews had moved to Palestine in the 1920s when immigration was allowed then the Holocaust would have been avoided" but this is delusional. If more Jews came earlier, the Arabs would have revolted earlier and the British would have closed the door sooner.
> " If more Jews came earlier, the Arabs would have revolted earlier and the British would have closed the door sooner"
Yes, but perhaps moving to a region of the world with less baked-in anti-semitism, no Dome of the Rock, and thus no sense of cultural cachet within the Arab/Muslim world would have mitigated that issue.
I mean... the catch here is that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the anti-immigration camp either. Without the Ellis Island generation, there would probably have been no New Deal, and by extension no Civil Rights acts and no plague of institutionalised wokeness from the 1960s onwards. Jews weren't solely responsible for that (the Irish diaspora were also major players in pushing the Overton window, for example, not to mention feminism), but maintaining national cohesion is actually important and numbers and desire to assimilate are relevant to that.
In principle there could have been a middle ground where jewish refugees were physically sheltered but not naturalised as citizens, but this runs into the same complaints about stateless jews being treated as kaffirs and living at the fickle mercy of gentile tolerance, as they were for the last couple of millennia. Or being sent back to live in post-war Germany/Russia, which they obviously wouldn't be thrilled about. A jewish ethnostate of some description seemed like the only long-term fix, the question is whether Palestine was the right place to put it.
But that's the whole thing - there was no other place for a Jewish ethnostate. The Zionists (correctly) recognized that it was either Palestine or bust. Everywhere is important to somebody.
Have you read the Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon? It's a murder mystery set in an alternative history where the US agrees to take millions of Jewish refugees from Europe and do what you suggest - stick them in a territory in Sitka, Alaska for 50 years but not give them citizenship. The book takes place as the Sitka District is about to revert to Alaskan control and the Jews have to find places to take them in.
But the premise of NZ's argument that the Holocaust vindicates territorialism over Zionism is that other countries would be willing to take in more Jews. But disputing that premise is half of why I disagree.
Whether or not a Jewish ethnostate is actually viable is, to me, the separate and irrelevant question.
I used to think that accepting the Uganda proposal would have been a good idea for those looking to flee the pogroms unfolding in Eastern Europe . The more I learned about the proposal the more I realized that accepting it would have been an absolute disaster. It had all the downsides of Palestine and none of the redeeming factors. It was an offer of a largely undeveloped and isolated piece of land without the topography or arable land capable of making it a sustainable one for a large group. The native population itself did not agree and was hostile to the idea of a Zionist takeover. To top it all off the British who were making the proposal did not have the undisputed sovereignty over the land .They had only recently taken over, never established a firm foothold and their presence was still being resisted by the indigenous population. How could such an idea possibly have worked out?
The Uganda proposal and its alternative history proponents are moronic. People 100 years ago were more wise to the reality that Jews did originate in Palestine/Middle East, unlike the many idiots today who believe in Khazar/"Eastern European" and now "fully Italian" theories. Sure, some European supporters of Zionism might have wanted Jews out of Europe due to their anti-semitism, but at least they knew where the return address for them was.
Riffing off the Coolidge comment: Antisemitic American presidents (and British ones) created Israel by refusing Jewish immigration.
In the counter-factual open borders scenario, 6 million Jews flee continental Europe between 1924 and 1939 as things are starting to heat up.
As a result of mass Jewish immigration, there is no Holocaust -- no "never again." Nothing to point to and say "antisemitism leads to this." As a result, America ends up doing some version of the Holocaust instead of Germany. Instead of Japanese, Italian, and German interment camps, it's Jewish internment camps.
Remember that part of the reason why Germany after 1919 became so antisemitic was because Polish Jews were leaving Poland en masse, since the government there was explicitly anti-Jew. They thought Germany had a better political climate and economy (it did), but the result was a huge upsurge in anti-Jewish sentiment, specifically against Ostjuden.
> " As a result, America ends up doing some version of the Holocaust instead of Germany. Instead of Japanese, Italian, and German interment camps, it's Jewish internment camps."
I don't recall that millions of Japanese or German-americans wound up shot, starved, or fed into gas chambers in WW2, so this seems like something of a hyperbolic comparison.
No, because they weren't Jewish and America wasn't taken over by the likes of Father Coughlin or Lindbergh. You're acting as if America in 1924 and Germany in 1914 were such different countries!
Near as I can tell, the US already had a non-trivial Jewish population in 1900 which roughly tripled by 1945, so if you're seriously contending that Coolidge et al would have been willing and able to implement a policy of genocide in response to rapid jewish immigration I don't see why it didn't happen?
You're not reading what I wrote. "taken over by the likes of Father Coughlin or Lindbergh." You're trying to prove that 6 million immigrants would have no impact on the country because you're theologically committed to the idea that American democracy is invincible or something? Not good faith.
Conjuring a US holocaust out of the historical aether when the real-world US already had large and expanding migrant populations of dubious political alignment is what I would call "Not Good Faith".
Similarly, Jabotinsky writes about how Germany had had a long and deep history of antisemitism. It didn’t start with Polish waves of immigration to Germany. Remember, Herzl was writing The Jewish State as a response the to Dreyfus affair in France a generation earlier. Jew-hatred was all over Europe.
I am republishing V. Jabotinsky’s last book, The Jewish War Front, written in 1940, shortly before he died.
Much of it is about exactly this, the failure of the Evian Conference, and how he knew Israel needed to be created. Most of the Jews who were about to murdered were still alive in 1940, but Jabotinksy was frantically scrambling to figure out how to migrate what he estimated to be five million Jews to the Yishuv.
Jabotinsky is the only Zionist who predicted a Holocaust-type catastrophe, and so Zionist history tends to cite him a lot in this regard, but he was unrepresentative of the movement at large (though he was, in this way, a more faithful pupil of Herzl).
“It was, under the circumstances, about as fair a deal as could be done, while necessitating the displacement of the smallest number of people possible in order to get two solid ethnic majorities in place.”
500,000 Jews and 450,000 Arabs constitutes a solid ethnic majority?
What you were saying here contradicts what you say in your essay “Better in than out?”, in which you state, following Benny Morris, that “it was necessary to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1947-48 to make the demographics numbers add up and allow Israel to be viable”. If this level of population transfer/ethnic cleansing was necessary in order for Israel to be born, the original partition plan obviously wasn’t viable, was it? Which makes me think that perhaps the Jewish leadership accepted it in bad faith for PR reasons, knowing that the Arabs had rejected it and that it was therefore never going to be implemented.
Sure, successful implementation of the partition plan would have required probably about 300,000 people to move, 90% of them Arab. You've never moved house?
Well, okay, I didn’t know population transfer was part of the 1947 plan. I’ll have to look into that. I’m not sure what the Peel Commission of ten years earlier has got to do with it.
The Peel Commision was the first practical proposal for partition. Obviously, since the 1947 plan actually gave the Jews more territory than the Peel plan, it was understood that people were going have to move to make it work.
One aspect here to remember is that, while Zionist claims of Arabs flooding into Palestine following the arrival of Zionists are 90% fake, there had been significant movement of Arabs within Palestine to the Jewish areas of settlement, which were genuinely underpopulated beforehand. I really don't think it's such a big deal for someone who has been 1.5 generations in the Galilee to get a check and move to Ramallah. Arabs really are too testy.
I have now had time to have a look at the report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine of 1947, which recommended partition. I can find no reference to a proposed exchange of populations.
The Committee notes that there will be a large Arab minority in the proposed Jewish state and admits that it will be a problem, but does not suggest solving the problem by population transfers:
“The Arab State will organize the substantial majority of Arabs in Palestine into a political body containing an insignificant minority of Jews; but in the Jewish State there will be a considerable minority of Arabs. That is the demerit of the scheme.”
The Committee goes on to point out that there are “solid populations” of Arabs in two non-contiguous areas of the country and suggests solving this problem by setting the boundaries in such a way that there are links between the two, not by moving the inhabitants:
“Maps for Palestine have been faced with the separation of the solid Arab population in Judea and Samaria from the Arab population in Galilee. To include the whole of Galilee in a Jewish State provides contiguous frontiers, but it also results in the inclusion of the large Arab population of Western Galilee in the Jewish State and weakens the Arab State economically and politically by denying to it a developed Arab area. In the present partition scheme, these problems have been solved, by a definition of boundaries which provides two important links, one between Western Galilee and Samaria and one in the south near Gaza.”
The fact that Jaffa is almost entirely Arab is noted and the Committee suggests that “on balance” it would be better for it to be part of the Jewish state rather than to become an Arab enclave. The possibility of solving the problem by moving the Arabs out is not discussed:
“Jaffa, which has an Arab population of about 70,000, is entirely Arab except for two Jewish quarters. It is contiguous with Tel Aviv and would either have to be treated as an enclave or else be included in the Jewish State. On balance, and having in mind the difficulties which an enclave involves, not least from the economic point at view, it was thought better to suggest that Jaffa be included in the Jewish State, on the assumption that it would have a large measure of local autonomy and that the port would be under the administration of the Economic Union.”
So I can see no evidence for your assertion that “it was understood that people were going to have to move to make it work”. On the contrary, the partition plan seems to have been based on the assumption everybody would stay put.
Literally the day after the partition plan was adopted, Arabs shot up five Jews on a bus. Obviously, there were a range of possible outcomes, and no doubt the partition plan architects leaned towards the optimistic end of things, but I think precisely no people sincerely believed everyone in Palestine would just accept the plan and that would be that. They did the fairest partition they could, and left it to the people on the ground to work out the rest.
When I first came across your blog, I found it quite refreshing. Some interesting articles about Israel from someone who lives in Israel and from a broadly pro-Israel perspective, but without all the tedious Hasbara talking points (Palestinians don’t exist; they don’t want a state, they just want to kill Jews; did you know Arab women in Israel can become doctors; did you know we have lots of gay people? etc. etc.).
One of the characteristics of a Hasbarist is that they don’t engage in argument in good faith, they deflect. Never mind the particular point you are putting to me, here is an example of an Arab doing something bad!
I questioned your assertion that the partition plan of 1947 would have led to “solid ethnic majorities” without population transfers. You responded that population transfers were part of the plan. I took the trouble to check this by reading the 1947 UNSCOP report. I pointed out to you that, contrary to your assertion, the plan appears to have been based on the assumption that nobody would move.
Your response to this is an anecdote about some Arabs killing some Jews on a bus the day after the plan was accepted. What point are you trying to make? That Arabs rejected partition and were prepared to use violence to prevent it? I know that. Who is denying that? This doesn’t refute my point that the original plan did not include population transfers and that therefore it would not have resulted, had it been implemented, in states with solid ethnic majorities.
The architects of the plan obviously knew the situation on the ground, and that it was exceedingly unlikely that, given the country was already on the brink of Civil War, a Jewish state with a 55% majority was un-violable. The Peel Commission a full ten years before had made clear than a significantly smaller Jewish state would require transfer. Thus my view is that everyone knew that transfer was going to happen in some way or another. I think your analysis requires imputing an implausible degree of naivity or ignorance to the architects of the partition plan. I don't even really know what Hasbara has to do with it. To the contrary, I would have thought that transfer as an unstated premise of the partition plan actually places the Arab decision to reject it and go to war in a more sympathetic light.
A bit tangent to the main topic, but in this and other pieces you advocate the idea that one of the few ways - maybe the only one? It's your call - for a group of people to live peacefully somewhere is to be ethnically or at least religiously homogeneous - better if both. Don't you think that some level of syncretism - or maybe even better, some level of coexistence between different communities, like in some form of millet system reworked to drop the Muslim imperialism bit - could also work? If not, why?
Had the resources and energy used to convert Jews to the modern Zionist sect and coerce governments like that of the U.S. to support the state of Israel been used instead to convince governments to accept more Jewish immigrants, no state of Israel would have been justified for the reasons you give. That would require integration. But such energy and passion from Judaism for Jews to integrate would admittedly be a ridiculous expectation. Genuine integration would include the denunciation of the racial-supremacist-mythology of Judaism. It would be the end of Judaism; good for humanity but obviously not good for the cult.
The idea if territorialism was dead on arrival for many reasons but most importantly, there is no reason to assume that the Uganda would have turned into anything other than a Jewish Rhodesia. It would have nor had the almost guaranteed support of most of the Jewish people when the going got tough, nor the help of evangelicals.
I see your point. Thanks. But there was also offense during the fighting “The IDF captured about 50 large Arab villages outside of the boundaries of the proposed Jewish State and a larger number of hamlets and Bedouin encampments. 350 square kilometres of the proposed Jewish State were under the control of the Arab forces, while 700 square kilometres of the proposed Arab State were under the control of the IDF. “ per Wiki
A fair number of Palestinian Arabs did fight for the British during the war. They didn’t fight the British as the Arab Revolt had just been crushed. But yes the main leader Husseini allied with the Nazis. I don’t know what his approval rating was. But he was their main political leader.
In a 1943 memorandum, Winston Churchill wrote "With the exception of Ibn Saud and the Emir Abdullah, both of whom had been good and faithful followers, the Arabs have been virtually of no use to us in the present war. They have taken no part in the fighting, except in so far as they were involved in the Iraq rebellion against us. They have created no new claims upon the Allies, should we be victorious.”
During WWII, over 33,000 Jews from the Yishuv enlisted in the British army, as compared with 9000 Palestinian Arabs, over half of whom deserted or were discharged. More broadly, around 1.5 million Jews fought for the Allies, which contributed to the Zionist argument that Jews as a collective had earned a nation-state in the post-war world that the victors were building.
You equating the Jews of the Yishuv with worldwide Jewry is a sneaky falsehood you have tried to slip. Most Jews (alive) at that time were either in the Soviet Union or in the US. So they scarcely "volunteered" to fight as those countries had mandatory conscription. As for Palestinians I would tend to agree, there were many Nazi sympathies in Brittish Palestine due to the "enemy of enemy is a friend" phenomena.
If you equate all Jews to the Yishuv/Zionist Jews, then the actions of all Arabs or Muslims should also equate to those of the Jews. Around 5M Muslims fought for the Allies. Some 350,000-400,000 Arabs from the Levantine and Maghreb fought on the Allied side, versus some 3000 in the Wehrmacht.
The Jews who lived in Morocco (colony of then Vichy Governement) were protected by the King and the elites. There are many arguments here that a majority of Arabs were on the Allied side versus the Axis one so I dont understand your argument or the one Mascil Binah is trying to explain
What is sneaky about stating facts and numbers? The overall Jewish contribution to the war effort was part of the Zionist argument at the time. Rabbi Abbas Silver to the UN in 1947: “Surely the Jewish people is no less deserving than other peoples whose national freedom and independence have been established and whose representatives are now seated here. The Jews were your allies in the war, and joined their sacrifices to yours to achieve a common victory.” It’s a little sneaky on your end to imply that conscription renders wartime sacrifices mute. Would you tell a Russian on Victory Day that he has nothing to commemorate, since the Russians only fought because they were forced into it?
I quoted Churchill regarding the contributions of Arabs, not Muslims in general. His memorandum was written in the context of Arab demands on the British in Palestine, which were concurrent with a pro-Axis rebellion in Iraq and the Palestinian leader, Mufti al-Husseini, propagandizing for the Nazis. Separately, Churchill praised the Indian Muslims who fought in the British Indian Army. And indeed, like the Jews, the Indian Muslims gained their own state after WWII. My point isn’t that no Arabs or Muslims fought for the Allies. The contributions of North African Muslims to the Free French, for example, should be praised. It’s that the establishment of the state of Israel must be placed in its historical context, ie, the aftermath of WWII, during which:
- As stated in the article, 250,000 Jews were living in displaced persons camps in Europe, and no countries wanted to accept them other than the Jewish proto-state in British Palestine. (Incidentally, Jews who tried to return to their homes in Poland were subject to pogroms.) About 850,000 Jews were already in Palestine, a number of them previous refugees from Nazism. A Jewish state was the logical solution for what to do with over a million otherwise stateless people.
- The Jews were not only victims of the Nazis, but also fought on the Allied side, both on behalf of the Yishuv and in the various Allied armies. This naturally made the Allies more sympathetic to their claims.
- The Arab war record was decidedly more mixed. The Palestinian Arab leadership, in particular, had sided with the Nazis. (And not just the Palestinian Arabs. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood received funding from the Nazis, there was a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Iraq, etc.) Indeed, former Nazis fought for the Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence.
In that context, establishing a small state for the Jews (and a state for the Palestinian Arabs!) in British Palestine seems like a reasonable decision.
As you said the Yishuv fought in the war. Ben Gurion and other Zionists leaders encouraged this. That’s how Dayan got his eye patch. And there were many Jews of the Yishuv who fought for the British. As you said tens of thousands. And then the Zionist organizations in Europe did the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:
I agree with your reasoning when it comes to establishing a state for the Jews and Arabs.
Ofc not, conscription doesnt render effort and sacrifice mute, but it makes it less impactful compared with voluntary efforts ofc. What I was arguing about sneakiness is when you talked about Jews, you includes Worldwide Jewry yet when talking about Arabs you talked about Palestinians only.
The argument that the Jews were allies, thus deserve a state is historically false of sorts. There are many peoples who fought in WW2 yet got fucked from their aspiration (Algerians seeking decolonization and other decolonization movements come to mind). The Jews got a state because they would have gotten it one way or another, and after the Holocaust it was better to basically give them one.
Indian Muslims got their state for the same reason that Jews got theirs, it was untenable to not give it to them. I feel like you are underestimating the agency of the people acting in these contexts. The UK was in no shape to police or ensure the colonial system it has pre-war so it let go if its most troublesome areas first to try and keep the rest.
Also, to point out, the Arab war record is more mixed because France and the UK betrayed the Arabs in WW1. There is a historical context to it too. If the Brittish had betrayed the Zionists/Yishuv and for some reason Nazi Germany/the Axis tried to help Israel (to get rid of the Jews), then in that timeline Ben Gurion would have gladly sides with the maniac. Jews didnt help the Allies out of moral superiority but out of alignement of interests and context.
Sure, Palestinians had incentives to side with the Nazis, but there were Palestinian leaders who understood that this was a dopey decision to make., it's just that they weren't in control. It's a cliche to say that Palestinians have been doomed by their terrible leadership, but it's also true.
Palestinians just like the average Arab society doomed by its shitty leadership and elites (ask yourself why circa 10M moroccans are in Europe and 1M in Israel).
But Israelis, as the true semitic cousins of the Arabs, are also getting there slowly. In less than 50 years it will be a battle between who has the most incompetent leadership, Israelis or Arabs (the losers ofc being their respective populations)
Of course many nations “deserve” a state but never got one. The Kurds immediately spring to mind. But the Zionist path to statehood was helped by their material contribution to the Allied war efforts, while the Palestinian Arabs were hurt by their leadership’s decision to side with the Nazis (and general recalcitrance). Even then, the UN voted for the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state alongside the Jewish one. The argument made to the UN by Silver was that Jewish wartime sacrifices helped make the case for Jewish statehood. It obviously wasn't the only argument, but it carried weight in the immediate aftermath of the largest war in history. Listing the number of Indian Muslims who fought in the British Indian Army or Berbers who fought for the Free French isn’t all that relevant here, unless you consider Palestine the homeland of all Muslims.
The argument that the Allies betrayed the Arabs in WWI is overstated. The British allied with a not very effective Hashemite leader in Arabia and then installed two of his sons to lead mandates largely won through British arms (Transjordan and Iraq). Most Arabs didn’t care about Arab nationalism and were more offended that they were now ruled by Christian powers instead of the Muslim Ottomans. As for the Zionists, many of them did regard themselves as having been betrayed by the British as a result of the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Ben-Gurion famously said, “We shall fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”
Fair point on your first paragraph, although I believe that Jews fighting had little to do with the decision to give them a state, more like there are around a million remaining Jews in Europe and no one wanted them.
I mean they betrayed them, the Allies are also the French I remind you. They carved Lebanon from Syria to manufacture a state where the Christians were in majority so that they can be used as the Management population of the “protectorate”. Syria was carved in a similar way to push minorities against each other.
And Arabs includes Levantine Arabs, and the Desert ones. I mean true, Arabs cares little who ruled them as long as as he was Muslim and had the mandate of heaven (Caliphate), the fact that Arab nationalism fitted than nicely is just another plus point.
Yeah, Lehi comes to mind bombing the Brittish minister in Palestine. The Zionists had the luck of the century of being guided by smart, pragmatic leaders kinda like the Turks lucked out with Atatürk and the Singaporeans with Lee Kwan Yew.
There are groups that are so adapted to a particular ecological niche that they just kind of whither without it: Bushmen, Pygmies, Aboriginals. But any people who can formulated the phrase 'mystical connection of people to soil' don't actually have it. Even Bantus are built for expansion and exploration.
This is something I actually wanted to push back against, since if we're going to take the preservation-of-biocultural-diversity agenda seriously then this is eventually going to end up at some kind of territorial partitioning of the planet's surface between different human ecotypes, as well as stamping out most large-scale migration and brain-drain effects.
Getting people to stay put and invest in their local communities and wider nation requires incentives, and you can either use the carrot or the stick. Romanticising a history and mythology connected to particular people and places near where you happen to live is one of the more effective carrots for getting people to defend and build up their country, and may be the only option in the case of lower-income communities or nations.
For better or worse, this impulse was obviously the major catalyst and schelling-point for Zionism. Rather than saying the "mystical nationalist connection of people to soil" is automatically dysfunctional, one could point out that the Hebraic cultural connection to the holy land is deeper, older and more complex than what the Arabs could plausibly claim. Maybe not enough to claim sole possession, but enough to justify some degree of territorial concessions in the region.
“Jews gradually moved from offence to defence. “ Don’t you mean defense to offense?
Correct, thankyou.
No actually he got it right, they were in the offense: buying land, creating militias, occupying/buying legally and illegally land, using fair and unfair tactics to bring their numbers to near a million. And then post-WW2 once the partition plans happened they switched to defense of what the partition deemed their land.
What land did the Yishuv procure illegally, and by what standard were the Irgun/Lehi/Haganah more "offensive" than the intermittent Arab pogroms in the region?
Ok claim by claim.
Looking at the historical record of early Jewish land acquisition in Palestine reveals a complex web of legal maneuvering, administrative corruption, and systematic circumvention of Ottoman restrictions that merits careful examination beyond simplistic narratives of either legitimate purchase or outright theft.
The Ottoman Empire's approach to Jewish settlement evolved significantly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, creating a framework that was both restrictive on paper and porous in practice. From 1882 through 1918, the Ottomans maintained continuous restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_land_purchase_in_Palestine), culminating in the 1892 government decision to prohibit land sales to Jews entirely, even those holding Ottoman citizenship. This prohibition emerged partly in response to earlier exploitation schemes, including the manufacturing of fraudulent citizenships (https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3479960). The documentary evidence for these schemes remains somewhat contentious, Turkish academic sources provide the most detailed accounts given their unique access to Ottoman archives and linguistic capabilities, though their interpretations must be weighed against potential bias of them being Muslim.
These restrictions operated within a broader context of Ottoman administrative transformation that inadvertently facilitated the very outcomes they sought to prevent. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 was an ambitious attempt to formalize land registration for increased tax revenues and centralized state control, but its implementation created what can only be described as a bureaucratic labyrinth of opportunities. The law's requirement for land registration encountered widespread resistance from peasant cultivators (fellahin), who, whether through genuine fear of taxation and military conscription or manipulation by Levantine elites, frequently declined to register lands their families had worked for generations.
This reluctance opened the door for local notables, merchants, and urban elites, primarily from Lebanon, Damascus, and Jerusalem, to register large tracts of communally held village lands under their own names, effectively transforming traditional cultivators into tenants on ancestral land. In a profound sense, this represents the original sin of dispossession that preceded and enabled subsequent Jewish land acquisition, creating a class of absentee landlords who would later prove willing sellers to Jewish purchasing organizations.
The methods employed to circumvent Ottoman restrictions reveal the persistent gap between imperial policy and provincial implementation that characterized late Ottoman administration. Despite Sultan Abdul Hamid's explicit instructions to resist Jewish immigration and settlement, systematic administrative corruption rendered these directives largely ineffective. As documented by contemporary analysis, "the corruption of the Ottoman administrative apparatus prevented its implementation, consequently, the Zionists—by paying bribes—were able to purchase a lot of land" (https://eng.alzaytouna.net/2020/05/22/article-did-the-palestinians-sell-their-land-and-leave-it-to-the-jews/).
Contemporary Ottoman documents detail extensive bribery networks that enabled Jewish land purchases, with one 1886 investigation revealing officials who illegally granted citizenship to 272 Jewish immigrants in Haifa alone (https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3479960). The Jewish Virtual Library acknowledges this clandestine dimension, noting that "each purchase entailed a cumbersome bureaucratic procedure vis-à-vis the local Turkish authorities. This situation, coupled with the frequent need to resort to bribery in official dealings, gave the Jewish purchases a clandestine complexion that would recur in subsequent years" (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-redeemers-of-the-land-quot).
Aside from simple corruption, Jewish purchasing organizations developed sophisticated legal circumvention strategies, including "payments to local officials, the use of European passports, and the registration of land under consular entities" that "allowed buyers to circumvent some restrictions" (https://allisrael.com/blog/the-legal-case-for-jewish-land-acquisition). These methods exploited the complex jurisdictional overlaps inherent in the Ottoman Empire's millet system (parallel to the land refroms) and capitulations regime, transforming legal complexity into practical opportunity.
The scale of these acquisitions, proved significant in establishing precedents for larger transfers. By 1918, Jewish organizations had acquired approximately 1.5% of Brittish Palestine's total area, "which they bought mainly from Lebanese feudal landlords... or from the Ottoman administration through public auction in which the lands of Palestinian peasants who are unable to pay their taxes are sold" (https://eng.alzaytouna.net/2020/05/22/article-did-the-palestinians-sell-their-land-and-leave-it-to-the-jews/).
The Shaw Commission's 1929 findings illuminate the enduring pattern of absentee landlord sales: "90% of lands bought up to that time came from absentee landlords. During the 1930s the proportion fell to 80%. In the last decade of the mandate they were about 73%" (https://www.beki.org/dvartorah/landlaw/). This data reveals how the fundamental structure of land acquisition remained consistent even as the mandate period progressed.
Administrative dysfunction, legal complexity, and economic pressure created conditions where formal restrictions proved meaningless against determined circumvention efforts. In my opinion, circumventing the law and using a whole arsenal of loopholes and "akshually it is legal" is absolutely not legal.
As for your second claim, Irgun/Lehi are another category from the Haganah. Irgun literally dropped the "self-restraint" and just started doing terrorist attacks (https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks) and started just killing Arabs because of the righoid mentality of "kill Arab good" which is pervasive in Israel today. As for why are they offensive, easy, anything that Jews did in Palestine was an offensive strategy because it was not their land. Just like anything the American colonist did to the indigenous Indians in the 1700-1900s is an offensive act, or was Manifest Destiny done as a sort of defense. This is not a value or a moral judgement, modern Israel is not the ancestral land of the Jews but a modern creation, and that creation necessitated getting the land and the people. As for the people, most of the early immigration and Aliyah was mainly European in origin, not Mizrahi. That happened much later starting in the 1930s (once Zionism was evolving into the defensive stance). Saying so, this is in no case a justification for the pogroms that the Jews suffered in Europe or in many MENA countries.
Good collection of information, thankyou. Herzlean Zionism was totally opposed to this kind of surreptitious settlement and thought a charter granted by the Ottoman was a sine qua non of success.
> "Contemporary Ottoman documents detail extensive bribery networks that enabled Jewish land purchases"
If bribery was a standard component of doing business with Ottoman officials, and bribery makes the agreements non-lawful (and in any case non-compliance with top-level directives regarding land-registration was rampant), then by that standard the empire was a "lawless territory" and it's a little weird to single out jewish settlers for doing business extra-legally. Or are you going to say that Ottoman officials didn't require bribes when dealing with non-jews?
> "Just like anything the American colonist did to the indigenous Indians in the 1700-1900s is an offensive act"
Yeah... that also seems pretty simplistic to me, especially given that most native-american land losses were also a result of purchase agreements. If the Comanche come at your homestead with the intention of raping your wife and flaying your children, I think reasonable standards of self-defence apply.
You seem to have glossed over the other arguments that make this important:
- Jews and foreigners were not able to buy land from 1892 onwards, yet they still did it through corruption and bribery
- That land was not properly acquired, and was bought from absentee landlords who were not the proper owners. If I steal a car, legally register it (by bribing) and sell it to you. Do you understand that the original owner will be unhappy?
Please, were are the sources or info to claim that most native land in the US was a result of purchase agreements?
This seems rather simplistic for me because seeing Spanish history I am more familiar in, and how the Spanish treated the natives more humanly yet they lost their land through conquest and plunder. The Comanche might be raiding your homestead because the US governement didnt respect the treaty, went to war and gained that land in conquest, not sale.
I don't think you are wrong exactly, but I don't think it matters so much. Orderly private land ownership is a condition of a modern economy, but every pre-modern society had a complex patchwork of grazing rights, common use, rents that were were really freehold, freehold that was really rent etc. etc. The process of regularizing is into a system where land could be bought and sold on the open market was pretty messy and messed up just about everywhere. It had to be that way because orderly legal systems that could deliver regular justice were an end state of this process, not a condition.
Today, most Palestinians live in cities and towns, and there's no way it can be otherwise because there isn't space for millions of people to live here as subsistence farmers. Whether a a given Palestinian has a high or low standard of living today is a function of his ability to sell his labour and skills, not whether his great grandad did or did not get fair compensation for being evicted from his shitty farm. I'm not saying it isn't important for understanding how Arabs behaved in the early 20th century, but it's almost the quintessential case of something that people should move on from today.
> "Jews and foreigners were not able to buy land from 1892 onwards, yet they still did it through corruption and bribery"
I heard you the first time. I'm saying by that your description it sounds like nobody was paying much attention to the Sultan in the first place, so what does "illegal" even mean in the context of a society where you don't have a centralised lawful authority?
Obviously I understand why Arab peasant farmers evicted from their lands would be upset about it, but I also know the Arab population of Palestine actually increased during the Yishuv, partly as a result of natural birthrates but also due to immigration from other Arab countries. Apparently because the Yishuv offered better prospects for housing and employment than was to be found in Jordan/Egypt/Syria/etc. So... I just don't buy the argument that Palestine was an especially awful place to be an Arab, at least pre-1948.
> "Please, were are the sources or info to claim that most native land in the US was a result of purchase agreements?"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Not-Stolen-Truth-European-Colonialism-ebook/dp/B0C4M6L4LH/
Obviously a lot of sales that were legal on paper were complicated by language barriers, unclear delineation of tribal authority and signatories being plied with booze or bribed or subject to hidden clauses, but the extent of forceful or manipulated expropriation of NA lands tends to be grossly exaggerated.
> "The Comanche might be raiding your homestead because the US governement didnt respect the treaty"
In the particular case of the Comanche I can say that pretty definitely wasn't true- the Comanche had been waging wars of extermination against other native american tribes for decades before white settlers ever entered the picture, so this was just business as usual from their PoV. (The intervention of the Texas Rangers probably saved the Apache from extinction, for example, even if the Rangers themselves weren't above the occasional massacre.)
What about DNA and physical appearance - which average people used to be better knowledgeable about 100 years ago. The region of Palestine is the origin of 50% or so of Ashkenazi Jews's heritage, plus the original home of their liturgical language. It definitely is the ancestral land of Jews in a sense, even if it is in a distinct sense than the ancestral land status of most countries in the world. Even Moroccan and Turkish Jews are closer in DNA to Lebanese/Christian Palestinians than to Muslim Moroccans and Turks.
Yeah and French people are genetically impring by the Italic peoples, should that be enough of a claim for Italians to claim all of France too? Southern Spain has a big North African imprint, should it go to Morocco?
No one argues that 2000 years ago Jews lived and inhabited what was Judea and Samaria, but the ancestral land doesnt give you a legitimate claim for it. If it does, then Italy can claim all of France/Spain and Greece. Greece can claim Iran, Ukraine can claim Finland and so on. The fact that a polity or kingdom existed at a specific time doesnt give you the claim to it in a way.
As for Hebrew, modern Hebrew is in a kind of way artificial. It was a dead language for many centuries that was revived in the 19th. This means many words are lost, pronounciations are not the same (or unknown) and basically Modern Hebrew is a Frankestein of a language that kept the basic grammar intact but added a lot of Yiddish/European/Arabic influences into it.
Kind of if today we wanted to speak Latin, and we had to use the word computer or car into it.
Look I'm not saying it's a foolproof claim, my overall point is that few groups around the world who lived so far from their homeland remained as distinctive as Jews were prior to the 20th century. Greece claiming Iran or Ukraine is not comparable, maybe Hungary claiming a piece of steppe Russia, where they immigrated from 1000 years ago, seems more comparable, although they obviously were not in need of a state. Jews were in 1900. I know Hebrew was revived, which is why I said it was their liturgical language. That being said, the fact that most Jews are a distinct ethnicity, which was well-known to 19th century Europeans and Middle Easterners, has been confirmed by modern DNA, even if significant South Euro ancestry does exist.
Zionism did not predict the Holocaust, nor was it predicated on preventing the Holocaust. It precedes the Holocaust by decades, as you well know, but choose to ignore.
Zionism did successfully provide a refuge for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis before the Holocaust and fleeing other pogroms before then, and all of that before the state even. I exist because my grandmother escaped as a teen from Germany through Switzerland to British Mandate Palestine. Her family that stayed was destroyed. Similarly, Israel successfully prevented satelessness for the IDP Jews stuck in concentration camps by the Allies after the war, and the nearly million MENA Jews scapegoated by Arab societies during their ‘decolonization’, like the barbaric Algerians revoking the citizenship of Algerian Jews.
Zionism was justified before and after WW2 for the same exact reasons, and non-Zionists and antizionists have no answers for the questions Zionism addresses.
I think NZ's general argument is that the human and financial resources poured into Zionism could have spent more effectively on either a jewish ethnostate in some other part of the world (where there would have been less coordinated Arab hostility) and/or on lobbying for allowing jewish refugees into other western countries (e.g, the US or Argentina.)
https://nonzionism.com/p/ww2-justifies-the-state-of-israel/comment/136293993
You can debate how true that is, but NZ isn't "ignoring" Zionism preceding the holocaust. He's contending that either Territorialism specifically or refugee resettlement programs in other countries more generally would have been more long-term strategically sound (and potentially have averted the holocaust entirely by siphoning off europe's jewish population before they could be murdered.)
NonZionism is about as pointless of an intellectual exercise as writing alternate history fiction - simplified toddlerism along the lines of “what would happen if pigs flew”.
Israel exists, for a reason, due to actual historical events that Jews could not influence as poor, persecuted minorities. Zionists weaved and dodged between violent antisemitism and immigration restrictions in the new world, and the impending collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is deeply stupid to waste time with the “what ifs” when there was zero influence Jews had on whether the US would accept millions more Jews as immigrants in the 1920s-1950s. The fact is that the US, Canada and Brazil turned back Jewish refugees into the hands of the Nazis before, during and after the war. WTF are we even talking about here with these retarded hypotheticals? These events happened, Israel was created due to them, and Israel has existed as a stable democracy longer than most EU countries. It went from a poor developing nation to a higher GDP per capita than former imperial powers UK and France. The rest of the Arab world, similarly carved from the carcass of empires, is either in failed state mode or teetering on the verge, and the reason it emptied of minorities (including the Jews) is due to Islamism and Pan-Arabism, not Zionism.
If you're hypothesising about the state of world jewry in a world without Israel, you're already engaging in "retarded hypotheticals", so I don't know why this counts against NZ in particular. You could stand to dial back your tone a notch, by the way.
The main reason why the Territorialist movement broke down is essentially because jews themselves couldn't seem to muster the enthusiasm for locations other than palestine and dramatically underestimated arab allergies to jewish settlement, which was kind of a self-inflicted limitation, even if it (obviously) doesn't excuse the atrocities of the NSDAP or earlier european pogroms.
Those other options would have been retarded, to borrow language from the alleged “wisely educated”, as they are now struggling with their own post colonial divisions along Christian vs Muslim and interethnic lines, and had Jews been there, oh boy. Suggesting Uganda or whatnot as an alternative is laughable. Birobidzhan similarity worked out soooo well, that retarded antizionist Michael Chabon also had to engage in laughably childish alternate history fiction to blow some smoke up our collective asses about a non Zionist refuge.
As I mentioned before, in the real world, along the real timeline, New World democracies shut their doors in the face of Jewish immigration. The hypothetical moving of Eastern Europeans to Western Europe would have resulted in the exact same slaughter during the Holocaust, as the Nazis didn’t give a fuck differentiating between Haredi Pale of Settlement Jews and secular Amsterdam Jews. Give us a fucking break. “Rightoids” may be dumb, but no dumber than leftist nerds engaging in world building an alternate history.
Don’t tone police me, buddy. Your guy uses “gay” and “retarded” etc, so the pearl clutching is kinda pathetic.
> "Those other options would have been retarded, to borrow language from the alleged “wisely educated”, as they are now struggling with their own post colonial divisions along Christian vs Muslim and interethnic lines"
I think NZ's go-to example was Argentina, and western democracies shutting their door to jewish refugees occurred long after Zionism got going. If you're going to argue Zionism long-preceded the holocaust, that cuts both ways.
https://nonzionism.com/p/ww2-justifies-the-state-of-israel/comment/136450258
> "Your guy uses “gay” and “retarded” etc, so the pearl clutching is kinda pathetic"
I have my own reservations about NZ describing mythological attachment to blood and soil as automatically dysfunctional, for reasons I might get into, but the vast majority of what he writes is more civil than that. Every sentence you write seems to be dripping with this barely-veiled contempt for whoever might be reading you.
No need to veil anything - I have contempt for you and him and other people who hate Israel and Israelis and try to offer alternatives that aren't alternatives to the problems actually addressed by Zionism. It's not perfect, but was far better, did far more real world good than Birobidzhan and the Uganda Plan or migration to the New World. Without Zionism there would be a lot less Jews alive today, and arguably very few Jews at all.
Zionism got going heavily in the 1920s, exactly when the US and nearly all of the New World shut the door on Jewish immigration. I pay attention to real history, not your alternate one. That's also when a huge number of Jews were trying to escape Europe and the Arab World. According to you the MS St. Louis never happened, or maybe could have landed in Argentina. Plus, did your alternate history consider what an idiotic place Argentina turned out to be under Peron and subsequent Juntas, and did you miss out on Argentinian Jews escaping Argentina to places like...Israel?
Playing alternate history is a retarded way to avoid real history and reality, and expand on how you would have made Star Wars better if you and not dumb George Lucas were in charge. Pathetic nerd bullshit, and both of you could use some growing up.
Is there any particular reason she couldn't just have stayed in Switzerland?
Well, she went from a middle class existence to supporting herself at 15 and her 12 year old sister through road construction and being a maid in Israel. Basically went to poverty with no parents, uncles or aunts in an instant. The Swiss weren’t going to support thousands of destitute Jewish children - their economy was built on Jewish gold teeth. And as a reminder, the Americas - USA, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, were already refusing Jewish refugees trying to escape the Nazis, turning their ships back to Europe (see MS St. Louis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis ). By the time she arrived in Israel her parents were already murdered, and her younger brother would later be shipped to Auschwitz and be murdered there as a child. There was nothing to promise that Germany wouldn’t invade Switzerland as they did Austria a few years earlier - that’s why.
When Europe and the Americas shut the door in the face of Jewish refugees a few of them found their way to remote places like China and British Mandate Palestine, or in other words the land of Israel. Most of them did not, and got murdered. Zionism proved its worth before the Holocaust. Any Non Zionist or antizionist Jew is kindly invited to fuck off and live in any other country, and remember that when their antisemitic friends persecute Jews (including them), even their disingenuous assface is welcome to find refuge in Israel.
My chief concern in this blog is the cultural, ethical and spiritual havoc that Zionism is wreaking on the Jewish people, so it's good that you come here periodically to confirm I'm not hallucinating it.
When I visit family in Israel it's nothing but joy, great food, great beaches. Your spiritual problem is the result of you being an Israel hater living under the protection of the Israelis you hate in Haspin or wherever it is in the Golan that folks like you congregate. Too far from the beach, too hot, shit food in the Katzrin center (the laffa is sub-par, the pizzas are atrocious). The rest of us don't have the spiritual problems you have with your curmudgeonly, ungrateful idiotic outlook.
Why don't you move your ass back to the UK - it's full of Jew haters like yourself, and Israel haters (the two usually are in complete overlap). Too many Muslims? Too many Sam Kriss type know-nothing know-it-alls crammed into every space? I'm really curious, because your personal safety depends on the IDF and other Israelis stepping up to do what you don't. "Ethical havoc" is funny - another clown complaining when Jews hit back at Islamists. Should be doing it the way some loser with zero understanding of the military suggests from his border town, I'm sure. As for "on the Jewish people", you seem to hate us, asshat. If we're all despicable, and you're such a smart petulant observer, do you really care? You're exactly like grifter Norm Finkelstein and narcissist Peter Beinart, both of which are so concerned with the Jewish people they want them all dead.
Seems like your chief concern is coming up with less interesting, less thought through versions of The Man in the High Castle. You're not offering any actual ideas, you're lamenting how history didn't unfold as well as your variant of Nerd Imagines What If history. Basically you never got over your edgelord days of hating everyone and everything, "everyone is stupid", but lacking any coherent alternative beyond an alternate history.
Zionism is literally what got you the right to live in a home in the Golan Heights, defended by the military of a sovereign Jewish nation. I don't speak for you or know your exact circumstances, but how exactly is that indicative of cultural havoc? Anti-Zionists would argue that you're currently residing in "occupied Syria." If Zionism is such an inconvenience to you, why not move back to the UK where you also hold a passport?
It could be that Zionism is what allows me to live in the Golan Heights, and that it is also wreaking havoc on the Jewish people. These are not even superficially contradictory.
This is one of the clearest and most unsentimental takes I’ve read. People forget that post-WWII wasn’t about moral victories—it was about cold, hard logistics. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had nowhere to go, Europe didn’t want them back, and the Yishuv was the only functioning infrastructure prepared to absorb them. The Arab leadership backed the wrong side in the biggest global conflict in history and paid a relatively mild price for it. Ethnostate creation after WWII was messy and brutal everywhere, not just in Palestine. Israel isn’t some bizarre historical injustice—it’s just one more case of realpolitik in action. History doesn’t care about feelings, it cares about timing, power, and consequences.
I used to work with a lot of people from Eastern Europe + Balkans.
They would often go off on long explanations of some 20th century event that had halved their people’s territory or left a few hundred thousand people dead.
The creation of the 🇮🇱 is pretty much in the same ballpark. In many ways it’s tedious that it takes up so much bandwidth in 2025 in a way that other nearby disputes are ignored.
I think the general argument is that most of these disputes don't pertain to countries which currently receive direct military aid/assistance from the US. Although... the Saudis remain regular customers for US arms sales despite involvement in the war with Yemen (~500K dead) and China doesn't get nearly as much pressure for BDS from the left over their treatment of the Uyghurs. So... yeah, the outrage does seem a little selective.
I guess NZ's general take is that Israel can't control the world, only it's own actions, so... even if the double-standard is glaring you kinda have to work within it.
Yes that, but also because the main reason for the double standard is that the Palestinians automatically have the whole Muslim world on their side, and they control the majority of the world's oil, and this was a known known when deciding to go all in on this thing.
That doesn't really explain why there's virtually zero fuss over the Uyghurs or Rohingyas, though, if Muslims automatically side with other Muslims vs. non-Muslims. Either ethnic solidarity or specifically religious concerns about control of Jerusalem have to be the driving factor here.
That's true, certainly the fact that they are both Arab and Muslim, and the importance of Jerusalem give it much greater salience. However, what I am really missing out in that equation is not just that the Palestinians have a billion natural allies, it's that Israel has none and little to offer. Conversely, China is, well, China and can push it's weight around.
It's an interesting question about why Burma isn't a bigger issue for Muslims, but, in truth, non Muslims in general also don't have much interest in south east Asia, except for sex tourism. It's kind of 'over there'.
The real answer is Muslims have an inherent Arabic superiority complex. Most Arabs wont care about Bangladeshis dying or whatever, even if they are Muslims because it is remote. But someone speaking your same language and same culture makes it more close.
That and also Dar-al-Islam vs Dar-al-Harb, losing Palestine as the symbol of their inherent weakness against the West and modernity, Palestine becoming the crux of the Islamic identity crisis and thus they see retaking Palestine as a religious endeavour that will show favour from Allah (Muslims are also a choosen people remember), and will be the turning point against the infidels and usher the new Golden Age of Islam.
I am writing something on this, but basically Palestine became the symbol of Islam's weakness against the West and modernity. Jamal al-din al-Afghani touched on the symptoms and it is that in the era of colonization and industrialization, Europe became the top dog in everything. Islamic civilization saw it as God forsaking them, because why else would the inferior spiritual infidels be so superior everywhere else. The answer for that came in 2 ways, but both the same: we must reform Islam.
The disagreement came in how: some people saw the reform as doubling down on tradition and basically recreating the times of the Sahabba (when Mohammed was alive in early Islam), and thus for that you need to become ultra-orthodox (what would become Wahabbism and the Islamic Brotherhood). The other answer is: we need to become more Westernet than the Westerners which is why pan-Arabism, secularism and Socialism were so popular for a time in the Arabic world. Basically ever since 1794 Islam has been between 2 poles: the Socialist-secular one and the Wahabbi one. Nowadays we are closer to the second because of Gulf oil and gas.
Both sides are and were incapable of fighting for Islam. And their worst betrayal is that Jews, who were seen as inferior dhimmis, fought and won against the Arabs and took their land. Not only their land but the holy land. Not only that, but they are also thriving in that land that has nothing other than deserts, and us Muslims are unable to do anything because they managed to bribe the big powers into protecting them (see the AIPAC and EFI). This is why Palestine regardless of anything political or humane was and is so important for Muslim and Arab/Muslim leaders.
This is legit the reason why Palestine is so important to Muslims while Burma or East Turkestan is uncared for.
Well... I'm HBD-pilled, so I have my own theories as to why the Muslim world hasn't caught up, though I am sorta scratching my head as to how a 20 point genetic IQ gap could have opened north and south of the mediterranean, and probably in recent history. The vanished Gardens of Cordoba, and all that.
I still don't get your argument that the Holocaust didn't vindicate Zionism. Zionism is just a form of territorialism that had several practical advantages that territorialism lacked, e.g. it was close to Europe, Jews actually wanted to go there even not at gunpoint, and the Western world powers were generally sympathetic to the idea.
If you think Zionism was a mistake how do you think relocating hundreds of thousands of Jews to British East Africa would have gone? If you think Israel is a Jewish Rhodesia now wait til you see the hypothetical Jewish East Africa Territory.
Not to mention territorialism had no chance of actually happening either. Unless by "territorialism" we just mean the sentiment that "boy it sure would be good if the Jews were somewhere safer during world war 2" in which case shkoyach. Where? How?
1. "it was close to Europe"
I don't see how this was really relevant given the technological conditions of the time. A ship is a ship, whether you sit on it for 12 hours or for 30.
2. "Jews actually wanted to go there even not at gunpoint"
The Jews who wanted to go there were pious Chassidic types who wanted to vibe out on tzedaka, precisely the people the Zionists didn't want. Other Jews had to be propagandized to at great length to want to go EY, which was itself a massive waste of resources. Even that didn't actually achieve much until America imposed immigration restrictions.
3. 'and the Western world powers were generally sympathetic to the idea.'
That was the Herzlean theory, but he didn't actually achieve anything. Of course, the Balfour Declaration revived his idea from the dead (or so it appeared).
4. "Unless by "territorialism" we just mean the sentiment that "boy it sure would be good if the Jews were somewhere safer during world war 2" in which case shkoyach. Where? How?"
100,000-150,000 Jews went to Argentina in the years 1880-1920. The benefits of going there over Eretz Yisrael were obvious: there was land going cheap, the native population was already wiped out in advance, and it had a growing economy with lots of opportunities and a labour shortage. There was the Jewish Colonization Association that facilitated this, but it had a fraction of the resources behind it that Zionism had. I think, conservatively, that had even half of the resources expended on Zionism been directed this way, then 2 million Jews would have got out in time.
I'm finding it very hard to grasp your starting assumption that countries in the 1930s had an unlimited tolerance for Jewish immigration. It kind of assumes the only people with agency are Eastern European Jewish intellectuals picking countries out of a hat. In the real world, other countries were not willing to take a significant number of Jews in at the time, starting even well before the Holocaust. There was a brief period of time when places like Argentina and the US would take anyone who came (and millions came) but that door was well and truly closed by that point, which is why Palestine was seeing any significant amount of immigration at all. There was one place on Earth that was specifically incorporated to receive an unlimited number of Jewish refugees and that was not completely coincidentally the place the Zionists were focused on - and of course, that didn't really work either because the UK and the Arabs were violently opposed to it. But this is not that exceptional. No place on Earth was willing or would ever be willing to accept a large number of refugees at that point in time. It's not like they weren't asked. The US literally sent ships back to Germany.
Which is again another way Zionism (or at least the variety of Zionism that saw Jewish sovereignty as essential) was vindicated. The nachtasyl only works so long as the sovereign of the receiving territory is willing to let Jews go there. Without complete control of immigration, territorialism could be turned off any time a country decided it had enough Jews, which every country in the 1930s did, except of course for those countries that decided that they had too many Jews.
>I don't see how this was really relevant given the technological conditions of the time. A ship is a ship, whether you sit on it for 12 hours or for 30.
It did make a big difference. Lots of Zionists went back and forth between Palestine and Europe frequently because the journey was easy and cheap. It was easier to decide to emigrate to Palestine if you knew your family and life back home was not that far away. Communication with family back home was quicker too.
>Other Jews had to be propagandized to at great length to want to go EY, which was itself a massive waste of resources.
There's a reason Zionism was better at winning Jews over than territorialism - and why it appealed to religious and irreligious Jews alike. The desire to return to Zion is already baked in. You have recognized this attachment as irrational, but irrational or not, it is there, and it would have been irrational to ignore.
>Even that didn't actually achieve much until America imposed immigration restrictions.
You are clearly aware of this fact but also seem to think that Argentina did not exist in the same universe, despite Argentina also deciding it was letting in too many Jews int the 1930s. There is no universe where an actually existing country in the interwar period would have let in 2 million Jews.
>That was the Herzlean theory, but he didn't actually achieve anything. Of course, the Balfour Declaration revived his idea from the dead (or so it appeared).
Handwaving away the Balfour Declaration is a bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln "other than that, how was the show?" The Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Conference enshrined in international law that Palestine was for Jews - which would not have been possible if the Western world didn't already think that. Zionism's success was a very near thing - hard to imagine it working at all if every world power thought Jews had no relationship to Palestine.
The debates between Territorialism and Zionism happened in the 1900s and 1910s when many countries had open immigration, or were actively encouraging it. The explicit terms of the debate were whether it was important to get large numbers of Jews out quickly (the territorialist, but also Herzlean position) or whether it was not, in fact, important (the Zionist position). Your belief that explicitly and consciously choosing not to optimise for evacuation didn't in any way decrease the amount of evacuation just seems very implausible.
You are articulating a very unrealistic model in which the only factor that made countries close the gates of immigration to Jews was how many Jews had already come, in which case it was hopeless to solve the issue by emigration. In reality the two factors were *total* levels of immigration from all sources and independent political trends. The simple common sense assumption is that if, during the window that was open in America, Australia, Argentina and other countries, resources had been put behind facilitating more Jewish emigration, then more Jews would have emigrated. Others would have lost out (e.g. Poles, southern Italians). Indeed, as we see today, if a minority group gets big enough, it can effectively hack the political system to block immigration restrictions indefinitely.
Another factor is that, in addition to funding trips, giving grants and loans etc. another thing Zionists could have done instead of sinking money into their black hole would have been lobbying for immigration. Clearly, they got very good at lobbying- hence the Balfour Declaration - so imagine what they could have achieved if they had been able to look for high marginal utility options, not stuck with Palestine only.
Of course, by the 1930s everything was very different. The point is that Zionism blew the Jewish people's chances decades before that.
First, you're ascribing to the territorialists the position that all they wanted was emigration, which is not really true. They were also looking for a Jewish homeland, in the sense of a specific territory to dump a lot of Jews in at once. Their dispute with Zionism was that Palestine wasn't available then and it wasn't worth waiting around for but some other territory might be available now. (They were wrong.) In other words, both the Zionists and the territorialists were fighting for the support of that minority of Jews who (i) believed the Jews should leave Europe but (ii) shouldn't simply disperse throughout the world as individuals but (iii) should concentrate in one area.
Both Zionism and territorialism were decidedly less popular than "Emigrate to America" which had the rabid and enthusiastic support of 2,000,000 Jews who moved to New York between 1880 and World War I. And the hundreds of thousands of Jews who moved to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, Australia, the UK, etc. And of course, Zionists, emigrationists, and territorialists were all combined a minority compared to the Jews who stayed.
If Zionism hadn't existed, and instead, all of its resources been focused on emigration, would more Jews have emigrated? Yes, but only marginally. Jewish immigration to the US already constituted 50% of all European immigration to the US at that time and that itself was enough to lead to immigration restrictions. Even according to your assumption that American immigration restrictionists were completely agnostic as to the percentage of its immigrants are Jewish or other kinds of Europeans (which I really doubt), upping the total amount of Jews in the shorter term would not have kept the doors open longer or kept them open the same amount of time, but would have closed them sooner. At the time there were not a finite number of slots - whoever wanted to come could come. More Jews coming in would not mean less Poles - it would mean more Jews and the same amount of Poles that otherwise came and thus more immigrants sooner, and thus the doors close sooner.
And the idea that if Zionist efforts had been redirected at territorialism then territorialism would have succeeded strikes me as even further off base. Again, territorialism runs into virtually all of the same headaches that Zionism does. Nobody has a wide open expanse of land that they think they can give away to millions of Jews without prohibitive political blowback, either from their own citizens or the native inhabitants of their colonies.
Nevertheless, the British went along with Zionism because enough people running the British government believed that Jews naturally belonged in Palestine. They thought they were doing the right thing, and righting a historical injustice. Weizmann wasn't pushing on an open door exactly but there was enough buy-in from the people running the British government at the time to make it plausible so that his prodigious lobbying skills could bear fruit.
You gave the example of Argentina, and Argentina topped out at about 130,000 Jewish immigrants before World War II. The argument that, actually, Argentina, a country of 8 million people would have taken in 2,000,000 more Jews than it did before clamping down on immigration sooner strikes me as extremely farfetched. But if you want to make that argument - or an argument for Kenya or Madagascar or Grand Island in the Niagara River you have to show your work.
To reiterate what I said earlier, I think the Zionists were correct that the Territorialists would fail to create an independent Jewish homeland anywhere else, and there efforts would degenerate into generic resettlement projects, it's just that I think that's a good thing. About the one thing Pinsker and Herzl shared was a conviction that emancipation was a delusion, and the condition of the Jew could only be solved by becoming a majority somewhere. Obviously, they were just totally wrong about this, and the Dreyfus affair was actually an aberration, not a harbinger of anything. The real issue was that (a) Eastern Europe was a nuthouse of competing nationalisms with not enough space for all of them and (b) Germany went mental, but was also much more military competent than should be possible given how bonkers it went. So, actually the priority was just getting Jews out of the Eastern Europe before it became a slaughterhouse. Jews do just fine as a minority in lots of countries.
So, for example, it's overwhelmingly likely that the Uganda Plan would have been a big failure, and the 50,000 Jews who went would have ended up fleeing Idi Amin and coming to Leicester with the Indians. And? Thus what you have to do is add up all the potential gains from just helping Jews to go wherever is taking at any given point, plus lobbying for looser immigration instead of Palestine. An extra 100,000 in Argentina, an extra 300,000 in the US, an extra 80,000 in Australia. Pretty soon, you're talking real numbers.
As the cherry on top, if you don't have Zionism spooking the Arabs, then Palestine could have continued to be the favored destination for the frummies who from 1912s onwards have the Aguda to organize immigration.
I dunno, this just sounds like an argument that territorialism > zionism because it would have failed quicker and eventually evolved into emigrationism, a movement which already existed and was more successful than either.
And even this isn't persuasive. Zionism is bad because had it never existed *maybe* 50,000 Jews might have gone to Uganda and been ethnically cleansed to England later? Why is that better than the hundreds of thousands of Jews who went to Palestine because of Zionism and whose descendants live there persecution free even now?
And then *maybe* the Jews would have been able to persuade richer countries to take in substantially more Jews when, by all accounts, all the political pressure in the world was against doing so?
>Thus what you have to do is add up all the potential gains from just helping Jews to go wherever is taking at any given point, plus lobbying for looser immigration instead of Palestine. An extra 100,000 in Argentina, an extra 300,000 in the US, an extra 80,000 in Australia. Pretty soon, you're talking real numbers.
Purely on a "saving Jews from the Holocaust" scale, Zionism ultimately saved like 600,000 Jews. To the extent that you're arguing that territorialism would have failed quicker than Zionism and then morphed into emigrationism which underpants gnome would have resulted in >600,000 Jews escaping the Nazis, the numbers you are throwing around are still not approaching Zionism's results and have the further disadvantage of being speculative.
>About the one thing Pinsker and Herzl shared was a conviction that emancipation was a delusion, and the condition of the Jew could only be solved by becoming a majority somewhere. Obviously, they were just totally wrong about this, and the Dreyfus affair was actually an aberration, not a harbinger of anything. The real issue was that (a) Eastern Europe was a nuthouse of competing nationalisms with not enough space for all of them and (b) Germany went mental, but was also much more military competent than should be possible given how bonkers it went.
This is a bit like your handwaving away Zionism as a failure, except for the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. Leaving the Dreyfus Affair aside, which I think the historical record is unclear on whether it was a particular impetus for Herzl, I really don't see how you can definitively argue that emancipation was going to end well.
a. As you acknowledge, most of the nationalist movements in Eastern Europe did not have a role for the Jews
b. the Holocaust
c. Stalin's antisemitism and the Communist attempt to stamp out Judaism
And I'm not even sure this is limited to Jews. The fact that Europe now prides itself as a bastion of tolerant states is only because they have by and large finished their ethnic cleansing of their minorities. Those states like the former Yugoslavia that did not finish their ethnic cleansing immediately after World War II delayed it until the 90s. And now even countries like Germany and the UK are strongly reconsidering their demographics.
> "There is no universe where an actually existing country in the interwar period would have let in 2 million Jews"
Maybe not in the interwar period, but Zionism had been active long before the 1930s, and the fact that land in Palestine was both exorbitantly priced and fiercely contested wasn't hard to notice for anyone with eyes.
I mean... I don't really want to make the argument that other countries should have been ethically obliged to take in infinity refugees from other regions of the world either (we can see in the modern era how easily that sentiment can be abused.) But if I was a jewish person in the late-19th-century debating from a purely rationalistic and self-interested PoV on how to maximise jewish safety, the non-Zionist option has some arguments to commend it.
The precise time periods don't really matter because the greater the demand for Jews to emigrate the less the willingness of states to take in Jews. There are brief pockets of time where for manifest destiny reasons some settler colony states were willing to take in unrestricted amounts of Jewish immigrants but only up to a point, and each country reached that point well before the Holocaust. If more Jews immigrated earlier they would have shut the valve off earlier.
Additionally, it's not like Jewish emigration to Argentina and the US was not a popular option at the time it was allowed. Millions of Jews left for the Americas, Australia, and South Africa. "Emigration" was a much more successful movement than Zionism!
I think NZ's argument is that the money poured into the Yishuv and land purchase arrangements in the Palestinian territories could have been more efficiently allocated to relocating jewish refugees to other countries. You can debate how true that is, but it's a separate argument from the viability of a jewish ethnostate outside of the levant.
Yes. The main Zionist argument against territorialism is that it would inevitably fizzle out into just generic resettlement and, at most, some kind of vague local autonomy. This was pretty accurate but, like, so what?
I think the real argument Zionism could make against territorialism is that without Jewish control over immigration there is never any guarantee that any country will allow Jews in in appreciable numbers, and for Jewish control over immigration you need sovereignty. It's not a coincidence that at exactly the same time that Jewish demand for emigration peaked, Western tolerance for Jewish immigration hit its nadir.
Even in Palestine, the slice of land specifically set aside by the world for Jewish immigration, severely restricted Jewish immigration in the 1930s.
There's a school of thought that says "if only more Jews had moved to Palestine in the 1920s when immigration was allowed then the Holocaust would have been avoided" but this is delusional. If more Jews came earlier, the Arabs would have revolted earlier and the British would have closed the door sooner.
> " If more Jews came earlier, the Arabs would have revolted earlier and the British would have closed the door sooner"
Yes, but perhaps moving to a region of the world with less baked-in anti-semitism, no Dome of the Rock, and thus no sense of cultural cachet within the Arab/Muslim world would have mitigated that issue.
I mean... the catch here is that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the anti-immigration camp either. Without the Ellis Island generation, there would probably have been no New Deal, and by extension no Civil Rights acts and no plague of institutionalised wokeness from the 1960s onwards. Jews weren't solely responsible for that (the Irish diaspora were also major players in pushing the Overton window, for example, not to mention feminism), but maintaining national cohesion is actually important and numbers and desire to assimilate are relevant to that.
In principle there could have been a middle ground where jewish refugees were physically sheltered but not naturalised as citizens, but this runs into the same complaints about stateless jews being treated as kaffirs and living at the fickle mercy of gentile tolerance, as they were for the last couple of millennia. Or being sent back to live in post-war Germany/Russia, which they obviously wouldn't be thrilled about. A jewish ethnostate of some description seemed like the only long-term fix, the question is whether Palestine was the right place to put it.
But that's the whole thing - there was no other place for a Jewish ethnostate. The Zionists (correctly) recognized that it was either Palestine or bust. Everywhere is important to somebody.
Have you read the Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon? It's a murder mystery set in an alternative history where the US agrees to take millions of Jewish refugees from Europe and do what you suggest - stick them in a territory in Sitka, Alaska for 50 years but not give them citizenship. The book takes place as the Sitka District is about to revert to Alaskan control and the Jews have to find places to take them in.
But the premise of NZ's argument that the Holocaust vindicates territorialism over Zionism is that other countries would be willing to take in more Jews. But disputing that premise is half of why I disagree.
Whether or not a Jewish ethnostate is actually viable is, to me, the separate and irrelevant question.
I used to think that accepting the Uganda proposal would have been a good idea for those looking to flee the pogroms unfolding in Eastern Europe . The more I learned about the proposal the more I realized that accepting it would have been an absolute disaster. It had all the downsides of Palestine and none of the redeeming factors. It was an offer of a largely undeveloped and isolated piece of land without the topography or arable land capable of making it a sustainable one for a large group. The native population itself did not agree and was hostile to the idea of a Zionist takeover. To top it all off the British who were making the proposal did not have the undisputed sovereignty over the land .They had only recently taken over, never established a firm foothold and their presence was still being resisted by the indigenous population. How could such an idea possibly have worked out?
The Uganda proposal and its alternative history proponents are moronic. People 100 years ago were more wise to the reality that Jews did originate in Palestine/Middle East, unlike the many idiots today who believe in Khazar/"Eastern European" and now "fully Italian" theories. Sure, some European supporters of Zionism might have wanted Jews out of Europe due to their anti-semitism, but at least they knew where the return address for them was.
Riffing off the Coolidge comment: Antisemitic American presidents (and British ones) created Israel by refusing Jewish immigration.
In the counter-factual open borders scenario, 6 million Jews flee continental Europe between 1924 and 1939 as things are starting to heat up.
As a result of mass Jewish immigration, there is no Holocaust -- no "never again." Nothing to point to and say "antisemitism leads to this." As a result, America ends up doing some version of the Holocaust instead of Germany. Instead of Japanese, Italian, and German interment camps, it's Jewish internment camps.
Remember that part of the reason why Germany after 1919 became so antisemitic was because Polish Jews were leaving Poland en masse, since the government there was explicitly anti-Jew. They thought Germany had a better political climate and economy (it did), but the result was a huge upsurge in anti-Jewish sentiment, specifically against Ostjuden.
So, err, pass the bong, or did we do that already?
> " As a result, America ends up doing some version of the Holocaust instead of Germany. Instead of Japanese, Italian, and German interment camps, it's Jewish internment camps."
I don't recall that millions of Japanese or German-americans wound up shot, starved, or fed into gas chambers in WW2, so this seems like something of a hyperbolic comparison.
No, because they weren't Jewish and America wasn't taken over by the likes of Father Coughlin or Lindbergh. You're acting as if America in 1924 and Germany in 1914 were such different countries!
Near as I can tell, the US already had a non-trivial Jewish population in 1900 which roughly tripled by 1945, so if you're seriously contending that Coolidge et al would have been willing and able to implement a policy of genocide in response to rapid jewish immigration I don't see why it didn't happen?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jewish_population#Modern_era
You're not reading what I wrote. "taken over by the likes of Father Coughlin or Lindbergh." You're trying to prove that 6 million immigrants would have no impact on the country because you're theologically committed to the idea that American democracy is invincible or something? Not good faith.
Conjuring a US holocaust out of the historical aether when the real-world US already had large and expanding migrant populations of dubious political alignment is what I would call "Not Good Faith".
you have no clue how much 6 million jews is and how close America was to fascism. How would you feel if you didn't have breakfast this morning?
Where's the evidence either of those people wanted mass killings of jews?
Similarly, Jabotinsky writes about how Germany had had a long and deep history of antisemitism. It didn’t start with Polish waves of immigration to Germany. Remember, Herzl was writing The Jewish State as a response the to Dreyfus affair in France a generation earlier. Jew-hatred was all over Europe.
I am republishing V. Jabotinsky’s last book, The Jewish War Front, written in 1940, shortly before he died.
Much of it is about exactly this, the failure of the Evian Conference, and how he knew Israel needed to be created. Most of the Jews who were about to murdered were still alive in 1940, but Jabotinksy was frantically scrambling to figure out how to migrate what he estimated to be five million Jews to the Yishuv.
Jabotinsky is the only Zionist who predicted a Holocaust-type catastrophe, and so Zionist history tends to cite him a lot in this regard, but he was unrepresentative of the movement at large (though he was, in this way, a more faithful pupil of Herzl).
“It was, under the circumstances, about as fair a deal as could be done, while necessitating the displacement of the smallest number of people possible in order to get two solid ethnic majorities in place.”
500,000 Jews and 450,000 Arabs constitutes a solid ethnic majority?
What you were saying here contradicts what you say in your essay “Better in than out?”, in which you state, following Benny Morris, that “it was necessary to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1947-48 to make the demographics numbers add up and allow Israel to be viable”. If this level of population transfer/ethnic cleansing was necessary in order for Israel to be born, the original partition plan obviously wasn’t viable, was it? Which makes me think that perhaps the Jewish leadership accepted it in bad faith for PR reasons, knowing that the Arabs had rejected it and that it was therefore never going to be implemented.
Sure, successful implementation of the partition plan would have required probably about 300,000 people to move, 90% of them Arab. You've never moved house?
Well, you say it was understood that people would have to move. I’ll have to take your word for that for the time being. I wasn’t aware of that.
I haven’t made any comment about whether asking people to move would have been a big deal or whether Arabs are testy or not.
Well, okay, I didn’t know population transfer was part of the 1947 plan. I’ll have to look into that. I’m not sure what the Peel Commission of ten years earlier has got to do with it.
The Peel Commision was the first practical proposal for partition. Obviously, since the 1947 plan actually gave the Jews more territory than the Peel plan, it was understood that people were going have to move to make it work.
One aspect here to remember is that, while Zionist claims of Arabs flooding into Palestine following the arrival of Zionists are 90% fake, there had been significant movement of Arabs within Palestine to the Jewish areas of settlement, which were genuinely underpopulated beforehand. I really don't think it's such a big deal for someone who has been 1.5 generations in the Galilee to get a check and move to Ramallah. Arabs really are too testy.
I have now had time to have a look at the report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine of 1947, which recommended partition. I can find no reference to a proposed exchange of populations.
Here is the relevant portion of the report:
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_Special_Committee_on_Palestine_Report/Chapter_VI
The Committee notes that there will be a large Arab minority in the proposed Jewish state and admits that it will be a problem, but does not suggest solving the problem by population transfers:
“The Arab State will organize the substantial majority of Arabs in Palestine into a political body containing an insignificant minority of Jews; but in the Jewish State there will be a considerable minority of Arabs. That is the demerit of the scheme.”
The Committee goes on to point out that there are “solid populations” of Arabs in two non-contiguous areas of the country and suggests solving this problem by setting the boundaries in such a way that there are links between the two, not by moving the inhabitants:
“Maps for Palestine have been faced with the separation of the solid Arab population in Judea and Samaria from the Arab population in Galilee. To include the whole of Galilee in a Jewish State provides contiguous frontiers, but it also results in the inclusion of the large Arab population of Western Galilee in the Jewish State and weakens the Arab State economically and politically by denying to it a developed Arab area. In the present partition scheme, these problems have been solved, by a definition of boundaries which provides two important links, one between Western Galilee and Samaria and one in the south near Gaza.”
The fact that Jaffa is almost entirely Arab is noted and the Committee suggests that “on balance” it would be better for it to be part of the Jewish state rather than to become an Arab enclave. The possibility of solving the problem by moving the Arabs out is not discussed:
“Jaffa, which has an Arab population of about 70,000, is entirely Arab except for two Jewish quarters. It is contiguous with Tel Aviv and would either have to be treated as an enclave or else be included in the Jewish State. On balance, and having in mind the difficulties which an enclave involves, not least from the economic point at view, it was thought better to suggest that Jaffa be included in the Jewish State, on the assumption that it would have a large measure of local autonomy and that the port would be under the administration of the Economic Union.”
So I can see no evidence for your assertion that “it was understood that people were going to have to move to make it work”. On the contrary, the partition plan seems to have been based on the assumption everybody would stay put.
Literally the day after the partition plan was adopted, Arabs shot up five Jews on a bus. Obviously, there were a range of possible outcomes, and no doubt the partition plan architects leaned towards the optimistic end of things, but I think precisely no people sincerely believed everyone in Palestine would just accept the plan and that would be that. They did the fairest partition they could, and left it to the people on the ground to work out the rest.
When I first came across your blog, I found it quite refreshing. Some interesting articles about Israel from someone who lives in Israel and from a broadly pro-Israel perspective, but without all the tedious Hasbara talking points (Palestinians don’t exist; they don’t want a state, they just want to kill Jews; did you know Arab women in Israel can become doctors; did you know we have lots of gay people? etc. etc.).
One of the characteristics of a Hasbarist is that they don’t engage in argument in good faith, they deflect. Never mind the particular point you are putting to me, here is an example of an Arab doing something bad!
I questioned your assertion that the partition plan of 1947 would have led to “solid ethnic majorities” without population transfers. You responded that population transfers were part of the plan. I took the trouble to check this by reading the 1947 UNSCOP report. I pointed out to you that, contrary to your assertion, the plan appears to have been based on the assumption that nobody would move.
Your response to this is an anecdote about some Arabs killing some Jews on a bus the day after the plan was accepted. What point are you trying to make? That Arabs rejected partition and were prepared to use violence to prevent it? I know that. Who is denying that? This doesn’t refute my point that the original plan did not include population transfers and that therefore it would not have resulted, had it been implemented, in states with solid ethnic majorities.
So, despite appearances, just another Hasbarist?
The architects of the plan obviously knew the situation on the ground, and that it was exceedingly unlikely that, given the country was already on the brink of Civil War, a Jewish state with a 55% majority was un-violable. The Peel Commission a full ten years before had made clear than a significantly smaller Jewish state would require transfer. Thus my view is that everyone knew that transfer was going to happen in some way or another. I think your analysis requires imputing an implausible degree of naivity or ignorance to the architects of the partition plan. I don't even really know what Hasbara has to do with it. To the contrary, I would have thought that transfer as an unstated premise of the partition plan actually places the Arab decision to reject it and go to war in a more sympathetic light.
But what I mean is that that wasn’t actually in the plan, was it? So the plan as originally conceived could not have worked.
Of course it was part of the plan. This had already been made clear by the Peel Commission.
A bit tangent to the main topic, but in this and other pieces you advocate the idea that one of the few ways - maybe the only one? It's your call - for a group of people to live peacefully somewhere is to be ethnically or at least religiously homogeneous - better if both. Don't you think that some level of syncretism - or maybe even better, some level of coexistence between different communities, like in some form of millet system reworked to drop the Muslim imperialism bit - could also work? If not, why?
Had the resources and energy used to convert Jews to the modern Zionist sect and coerce governments like that of the U.S. to support the state of Israel been used instead to convince governments to accept more Jewish immigrants, no state of Israel would have been justified for the reasons you give. That would require integration. But such energy and passion from Judaism for Jews to integrate would admittedly be a ridiculous expectation. Genuine integration would include the denunciation of the racial-supremacist-mythology of Judaism. It would be the end of Judaism; good for humanity but obviously not good for the cult.
The idea if territorialism was dead on arrival for many reasons but most importantly, there is no reason to assume that the Uganda would have turned into anything other than a Jewish Rhodesia. It would have nor had the almost guaranteed support of most of the Jewish people when the going got tough, nor the help of evangelicals.
I see your point. Thanks. But there was also offense during the fighting “The IDF captured about 50 large Arab villages outside of the boundaries of the proposed Jewish State and a larger number of hamlets and Bedouin encampments. 350 square kilometres of the proposed Jewish State were under the control of the Arab forces, while 700 square kilometres of the proposed Arab State were under the control of the IDF. “ per Wiki
Convincing but ... the name of the blog is psyop?
A fair number of Palestinian Arabs did fight for the British during the war. They didn’t fight the British as the Arab Revolt had just been crushed. But yes the main leader Husseini allied with the Nazis. I don’t know what his approval rating was. But he was their main political leader.
In a 1943 memorandum, Winston Churchill wrote "With the exception of Ibn Saud and the Emir Abdullah, both of whom had been good and faithful followers, the Arabs have been virtually of no use to us in the present war. They have taken no part in the fighting, except in so far as they were involved in the Iraq rebellion against us. They have created no new claims upon the Allies, should we be victorious.”
During WWII, over 33,000 Jews from the Yishuv enlisted in the British army, as compared with 9000 Palestinian Arabs, over half of whom deserted or were discharged. More broadly, around 1.5 million Jews fought for the Allies, which contributed to the Zionist argument that Jews as a collective had earned a nation-state in the post-war world that the victors were building.
You equating the Jews of the Yishuv with worldwide Jewry is a sneaky falsehood you have tried to slip. Most Jews (alive) at that time were either in the Soviet Union or in the US. So they scarcely "volunteered" to fight as those countries had mandatory conscription. As for Palestinians I would tend to agree, there were many Nazi sympathies in Brittish Palestine due to the "enemy of enemy is a friend" phenomena.
If you equate all Jews to the Yishuv/Zionist Jews, then the actions of all Arabs or Muslims should also equate to those of the Jews. Around 5M Muslims fought for the Allies. Some 350,000-400,000 Arabs from the Levantine and Maghreb fought on the Allied side, versus some 3000 in the Wehrmacht.
The Jews who lived in Morocco (colony of then Vichy Governement) were protected by the King and the elites. There are many arguments here that a majority of Arabs were on the Allied side versus the Axis one so I dont understand your argument or the one Mascil Binah is trying to explain
What is sneaky about stating facts and numbers? The overall Jewish contribution to the war effort was part of the Zionist argument at the time. Rabbi Abbas Silver to the UN in 1947: “Surely the Jewish people is no less deserving than other peoples whose national freedom and independence have been established and whose representatives are now seated here. The Jews were your allies in the war, and joined their sacrifices to yours to achieve a common victory.” It’s a little sneaky on your end to imply that conscription renders wartime sacrifices mute. Would you tell a Russian on Victory Day that he has nothing to commemorate, since the Russians only fought because they were forced into it?
I quoted Churchill regarding the contributions of Arabs, not Muslims in general. His memorandum was written in the context of Arab demands on the British in Palestine, which were concurrent with a pro-Axis rebellion in Iraq and the Palestinian leader, Mufti al-Husseini, propagandizing for the Nazis. Separately, Churchill praised the Indian Muslims who fought in the British Indian Army. And indeed, like the Jews, the Indian Muslims gained their own state after WWII. My point isn’t that no Arabs or Muslims fought for the Allies. The contributions of North African Muslims to the Free French, for example, should be praised. It’s that the establishment of the state of Israel must be placed in its historical context, ie, the aftermath of WWII, during which:
- As stated in the article, 250,000 Jews were living in displaced persons camps in Europe, and no countries wanted to accept them other than the Jewish proto-state in British Palestine. (Incidentally, Jews who tried to return to their homes in Poland were subject to pogroms.) About 850,000 Jews were already in Palestine, a number of them previous refugees from Nazism. A Jewish state was the logical solution for what to do with over a million otherwise stateless people.
- The Jews were not only victims of the Nazis, but also fought on the Allied side, both on behalf of the Yishuv and in the various Allied armies. This naturally made the Allies more sympathetic to their claims.
- The Arab war record was decidedly more mixed. The Palestinian Arab leadership, in particular, had sided with the Nazis. (And not just the Palestinian Arabs. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood received funding from the Nazis, there was a Nazi-inspired pogrom in Iraq, etc.) Indeed, former Nazis fought for the Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence.
In that context, establishing a small state for the Jews (and a state for the Palestinian Arabs!) in British Palestine seems like a reasonable decision.
As you said the Yishuv fought in the war. Ben Gurion and other Zionists leaders encouraged this. That’s how Dayan got his eye patch. And there were many Jews of the Yishuv who fought for the British. As you said tens of thousands. And then the Zionist organizations in Europe did the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:
I agree with your reasoning when it comes to establishing a state for the Jews and Arabs.
Ofc not, conscription doesnt render effort and sacrifice mute, but it makes it less impactful compared with voluntary efforts ofc. What I was arguing about sneakiness is when you talked about Jews, you includes Worldwide Jewry yet when talking about Arabs you talked about Palestinians only.
The argument that the Jews were allies, thus deserve a state is historically false of sorts. There are many peoples who fought in WW2 yet got fucked from their aspiration (Algerians seeking decolonization and other decolonization movements come to mind). The Jews got a state because they would have gotten it one way or another, and after the Holocaust it was better to basically give them one.
Indian Muslims got their state for the same reason that Jews got theirs, it was untenable to not give it to them. I feel like you are underestimating the agency of the people acting in these contexts. The UK was in no shape to police or ensure the colonial system it has pre-war so it let go if its most troublesome areas first to try and keep the rest.
Also, to point out, the Arab war record is more mixed because France and the UK betrayed the Arabs in WW1. There is a historical context to it too. If the Brittish had betrayed the Zionists/Yishuv and for some reason Nazi Germany/the Axis tried to help Israel (to get rid of the Jews), then in that timeline Ben Gurion would have gladly sides with the maniac. Jews didnt help the Allies out of moral superiority but out of alignement of interests and context.
Sure, Palestinians had incentives to side with the Nazis, but there were Palestinian leaders who understood that this was a dopey decision to make., it's just that they weren't in control. It's a cliche to say that Palestinians have been doomed by their terrible leadership, but it's also true.
Palestinians just like the average Arab society doomed by its shitty leadership and elites (ask yourself why circa 10M moroccans are in Europe and 1M in Israel).
But Israelis, as the true semitic cousins of the Arabs, are also getting there slowly. In less than 50 years it will be a battle between who has the most incompetent leadership, Israelis or Arabs (the losers ofc being their respective populations)
Of course many nations “deserve” a state but never got one. The Kurds immediately spring to mind. But the Zionist path to statehood was helped by their material contribution to the Allied war efforts, while the Palestinian Arabs were hurt by their leadership’s decision to side with the Nazis (and general recalcitrance). Even then, the UN voted for the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state alongside the Jewish one. The argument made to the UN by Silver was that Jewish wartime sacrifices helped make the case for Jewish statehood. It obviously wasn't the only argument, but it carried weight in the immediate aftermath of the largest war in history. Listing the number of Indian Muslims who fought in the British Indian Army or Berbers who fought for the Free French isn’t all that relevant here, unless you consider Palestine the homeland of all Muslims.
The argument that the Allies betrayed the Arabs in WWI is overstated. The British allied with a not very effective Hashemite leader in Arabia and then installed two of his sons to lead mandates largely won through British arms (Transjordan and Iraq). Most Arabs didn’t care about Arab nationalism and were more offended that they were now ruled by Christian powers instead of the Muslim Ottomans. As for the Zionists, many of them did regard themselves as having been betrayed by the British as a result of the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Ben-Gurion famously said, “We shall fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”
Fair point on your first paragraph, although I believe that Jews fighting had little to do with the decision to give them a state, more like there are around a million remaining Jews in Europe and no one wanted them.
I mean they betrayed them, the Allies are also the French I remind you. They carved Lebanon from Syria to manufacture a state where the Christians were in majority so that they can be used as the Management population of the “protectorate”. Syria was carved in a similar way to push minorities against each other.
And Arabs includes Levantine Arabs, and the Desert ones. I mean true, Arabs cares little who ruled them as long as as he was Muslim and had the mandate of heaven (Caliphate), the fact that Arab nationalism fitted than nicely is just another plus point.
Yeah, Lehi comes to mind bombing the Brittish minister in Palestine. The Zionists had the luck of the century of being guided by smart, pragmatic leaders kinda like the Turks lucked out with Atatürk and the Singaporeans with Lee Kwan Yew.
Blocked for being a predatory pederast.
There are groups that are so adapted to a particular ecological niche that they just kind of whither without it: Bushmen, Pygmies, Aboriginals. But any people who can formulated the phrase 'mystical connection of people to soil' don't actually have it. Even Bantus are built for expansion and exploration.
This is something I actually wanted to push back against, since if we're going to take the preservation-of-biocultural-diversity agenda seriously then this is eventually going to end up at some kind of territorial partitioning of the planet's surface between different human ecotypes, as well as stamping out most large-scale migration and brain-drain effects.
Getting people to stay put and invest in their local communities and wider nation requires incentives, and you can either use the carrot or the stick. Romanticising a history and mythology connected to particular people and places near where you happen to live is one of the more effective carrots for getting people to defend and build up their country, and may be the only option in the case of lower-income communities or nations.
For better or worse, this impulse was obviously the major catalyst and schelling-point for Zionism. Rather than saying the "mystical nationalist connection of people to soil" is automatically dysfunctional, one could point out that the Hebraic cultural connection to the holy land is deeper, older and more complex than what the Arabs could plausibly claim. Maybe not enough to claim sole possession, but enough to justify some degree of territorial concessions in the region.