Saturday 18 November 2023

A Late Idea

Rather than designating an area of land in the Middle East as a Jewish homeland, would it not have been better, and less contentious at the time, to carve out a contiguous bit of Allied and Russian controlled Germany in 1945, equating to an area that would support 6m people, and hand it to the Jews as eminently justifiable reparations?


The area of land required to support 6m people would equate to between 0.087% and 0.0175% of Germany - a very small percentage and about the same size as Israel is. Germany had been soundly beaten in WWII and was in no position to complain. Germany was partitioned anyway (East and West), and another, much smaller partition would have been a mere formality, plus it would have benefitted from the Marshall Plan.

Agreed it would necessitate some mass migration, but that happened anyway in Palestine and would need more for a 2 state solution where neither state was cut in half. That said, a lot of people migrated from east to west in Germany before the Berlin Wall went up.

However, plans to use Palestine were already far advanced, having started in 1922, and Germany didn't finish paying reparations to Israel till 2022.

I know that the Ottomans were soundly beaten in WWI, but it was a long time between the end of WWI and 1948 and the remnants of the Ottomans were quite tolerant of the Jews, until they wanted to create a state in their midst.

There was actually a novel in which this was the premise.


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