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Israel without the Nazis and the Holocaust

R

Ricardolindo

Well-known member
Location
Portugal
Would Israel exist if the Nazis never came to power and, thus, the Holocaust never happened? I think Israel might have been created, but it would have been a much smaller coastal state centered around Tel Aviv.
 
Ricardolindo said:
Would Israel exist if the Nazis never came to power and, thus, the Holocaust never happened? I think Israel might have been created, but it would have been a much smaller coastal state centered around Tel Aviv.
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I can imagine this question needing to be done with a much lighter hand rather than just throwing it out there, considering the sensitivity that people naturally feel around the idea of just removing potentially the most horrific act of human evil in history from the history of Jewish people and Judaism. I'm sure it's an interesting question, but I'd say it needs a little less bluntness.
 
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Most of the people who fought in 1948 were there before the war. Israel would have a smaller slice of a larger global Jewish population. The Peel and Woodhead proposals preceded WWII and the Holocaust.

There were ideas about getting the Jews of Poland, Hungary, and Romania in particular to Mandatory Palestine before the war started. Jabotinsky compared the Jews of those countries to people living atop a volcano. That's about 4.2 million people. I doubt they'd all end up leaving, but Zionist ideas were much stronger in Poland and Romania in particular than in Germany and Austria.

There would be no rushed exit from the mandate like by the British in 1948 OTL without the hardships of war. The British had no love for the Mufti or the Arab/Syrian Nationalist movement. My guess is that they'd organize a partition between a slice of Palestine for the Hashemites of Jordan and a Jewish State in the rest of it. A more orderly wind-up probably avoids much of the mass exodus of OTL ... but it could also just end up being a mess more akin to the Indian partition. Pick your flavor of mess.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
Most of the people who fought in 1948 were there before the war. Israel would have a smaller slice of a larger global Jewish population. The Peel and Woodhead proposals preceded WWII and the Holocaust.

There were ideas about getting the Jews of Poland, Hungary, and Romania in particular to Mandatory Palestine before the war started. Jabotinsky compared the Jews of those countries to people living atop a volcano. That's about 4.2 million people. I doubt they'd all end up leaving, but Zionist ideas were much stronger in Poland and Romania in particular than in Germany and Austria.

There would be no rushed exit from the mandate like by the British in 1948 OTL without the hardships of war. The British had no love for the Mufti or the Arab/Syrian Nationalist movement. My guess is that they'd organize a partition between a slice of Palestine for the Hashemites of Jordan and a Jewish State in the rest of it. A more orderly wind-up probably avoids much of the mass exodus of OTL ... but it could also just end up being a mess more akin to the Indian partition. Pick your flavor of mess.
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No offense, but you are missing an important point: The Peel and Woodhead partition plans were before World War II but they were after the Nazis came to power. Jewish migration to Palestine actually stagnated in the 20s.
Also, in Hungary, Horthy was not very anti-Semitic, AFAIK.
 
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Yokai Man said:
Who knew we had FIDESZ voters in here
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Can we as a society just agree that all the European (if you’ll allow me the restraint to note say all) dictators during the 20th century are probably not the guys you should be jumping to defend? This goes for the nameless suits in the Eastern bloc, Salazar (Yes, I’m sure he was a very good economist but he was also a military puppet you dumb fucks), Franco (this isn’t even a question), everyone who allied with the fucking Nazis (I’m going insane here) and such
 
Ricardolindo said:
No offense, but you are missing an important point: The Peel and Woodhead partition plans were before World War II but they were after the Nazis came to power. Jewish migration to Palestine actually stagnated in the 20s.
Also, in Hungary, Horthy was not very anti-Semitic, AFAIK.
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Jewish migration picked up again in the 30s not only because of the Germans, but because the US shut its doors and the economic situation got bad in Europe.

Horthy was indifferent towards Jews. He protected some Jews to the extent that they were 'his' Jews, but he wasn't going out of his way to protect the Jews of Hungary. He handed over ~20,000 Jews who did not have Hungarian citizenship to the Germans early in the war, which seems to have been the same position Bulgaria and Vichy France took initially. The Holocaust Museum webpage mentions Horthy handed over the Jews of Hungary in 1944, but doesn't mention that the country was militarily occupied by the Germans two months prior. One could argue that much of what he did was to placate the Germans and/or at the barrel of a gun, rather than purely of his own volition, but that's also a world away from saying he saved Jews or went out of his way to protect Jews.

Lots of antisemitism was less outright and intentional malice and more 'these people count less, and I will pin my problems on them or sell them out first' which, from the perspective of a Jewish person getting attacked or targeted, is a difference which provides little comfort. The Hungarian regime was more willing to drag its feet on German demands when it saw the Germans were losing, but gave the Germans what they wanted when it seemed like the Germans were winning and/or when the Germans straight-up occupied Hungary in 1944.

If anything - this was the ultimate point of Zionism. There were lots of countries where Jews lived nice lives, but unless the Jews had their own country where they could put themselves first, they would eternally be the first on the chopping block when things turned south. That all of the supposedly liberal countries of Europe which accepted Jews as citizens (France, Germany, Hungary, etc.) had turned on the Jews so readily only amplified this point.

Honestly - and this will be the most controversial thing I say in this thread - the Hungarians dragged their feet more than, say, the German public or the French did. None of this should be read as defending the Hungarians (I am not), nor should this be read as signing onto the Jobbik/Fidesz partisan line regarding Hungary in WW2 (I am not). "Everybody else was doing it" is not a moral defense; but at a certain point to me it's just the latest manifestation of a millenium of non-Jewish treatment of Jews, it makes me very mad, but every evil act needs to be contextualized. The reason we celebrate great people who put their necks and lives on the line in the face of evil is because of how utterly weird and uncommon that is. Human beings can be very civil when they are comfortable and tend to fold quickly in the face of evil ... which is why those few who have the resolve to assume great risk for the cause of the betterment of mankind and the historically downtrodden truly are great people. They are righteous among the nations. Horthy was not this. He certainly wasn't the Nazis, the Ustace, or the Iron Guard, but he was in no way a great man either.

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From Wikipedia


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Ricardolindo said:
Thanks for the links. I should have said "AFAIK" like in my previous reply. However, read https://momentmag.com/horthy-jews-budapest/, an article of a Jewish magazine, for a different perspective. I agree with what @Jackson Lennock said.
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Every person has the capacity to do great things when circumstances let them. When the pressure was on, Horthy put his own life and the wellbeing of ethnic Hungarians over Hungarian Jews.

In a different world, he perhaps would have chosen different and ordered the evacuation of the Jews of Hungary if that had been an option on the table. But it wasn't an option on the table, so he handed them all over. From the perspective of somebody who died (Jews especially, but also Roma, Gays, Leftists, etc.), there's little solace in the idea that things could have been better, but for Hungarians who need a story to tell themselves, I see why they cling onto to such ideas.

The history of Central Europe from 1939 is 1989 is totalitarian occupation and evil regimes. They, unfortunately, look for a figuring they can paint as a good guy, but picked one who wasn't a good guy. You could say the American south did something similar, with all of those Confederate statues. Most of those guys were entirely horrid and remained horrid after the war (and those who did not remain horrid didn't get statues). But the white south needed people who were 'their guys' psychologically to put on pedestals and tell themselves 'no, we fought for a good thing - how could we have fought for something as bad as slavery?' Maybe I'm getting too Freudian here, but the power of people's need to tell themselves a story where they aren't the bad guy (or, even worse, where they are the victim) is a powerful and scary thing and can produce very very very bad consequences. In the US, it produced an Apartheid regime for a century. In South Africa, the Afrikaaners likewise viewed themselves as victims of British imperialism (there being literal concentration camps), and it produced an Apartheid regime when those who kept the chip on their shoulder assumed power.
 
Jackson Lennock said:
If anything - this was the ultimate point of Zionism. There were lots of countries where Jews lived nice lives, but unless the Jews had their own country where they could put themselves first, they would eternally be the first on the chopping block when things turned south. That all of the supposedly liberal countries of Europe which accepted Jews as citizens (France, Germany, Hungary, etc.) had turned on the Jews so readily only amplified this point.
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I think it's worth noting, though, that many Jews did not leave until it was too late because they thought it was just another passing wave of anti-Semitism.
 
Ricardolindo said:
I think it's worth noting, though, that many Jews did not leave until it was too late because they thought it was just another passing wave of anti-Semitism.
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4/5 of Jews didn't leave Egypt, and they assimilated out.
4/5 of Jews didn't return from the Babylonian captivity, but they maintained their unique sense of self until the Farhud during WWII.

It's a normal thing for people, even those who've suffered quite a bit, to be resistant to giving up what they know, built, and are used to. Whether one takes the above literally as a historic matter or figuratively/narratively, it's the same principle.
 
For the above reasons Jackson says, Israel will exist in some form and see constant waves of immigration (I assume small ones but frequent) without Nazis because there'll still be a antisemitic regime or event somewhere and Jews wanting to get to a country that won't happen. Tension will still exist with Palestine for the same reason it was pre-Nazis
 
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