Zionist Uganda

Zionist Uganda

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The POD for this timeline is that the Seventh Zionist Congress votes in 1905 to accept the British Uganda Plan as a temporary refuge for Jewish refugees fleeing from Russian persecution. The vote swung in this direction due to a far worse outbreak of anti-semitism in Russia following that nation's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).

1905:

The Seventh Zionist Congress votes to accept the British Uganda Plan (due to even worse anti-semitism in Russia after the end of the Russo-Japanese War). Several armed expeditionary forces are organized, with British approval, to scout out the site for a major settlement on the Mau Plateau (due to the presence of lions and the Massai).

An armed expedition arrives on the Mau Plateau. Ground is broken for what will one day become the city of New Akko. Accompanying the expedition are the first 50 colonists (mostly Russian and Polish Jews). Skirmishes with the Massai are common, although many of the lions killed before they can become much of a threat.

A second group of 300 Russian Jews arrives in Kampala, Uganda. Another armed expedition accompanies them. In Basel, the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO) is founded to recruit more colonists. As the pogroms in Russia see no signs of ebbing, many recuits are found. By the beginning of 1906, some 12,000 Jews have immigrated to both Kampala and New Akko.

1906:

The first Orthodox synagogues are completed in both Kampala and New Akko. At this time, the British authorities under Dr. David Bruce in Uganda are attempting to deal with an outbreak of sleeping sickness, a disease spread by the tetse fly. The outbreak of this disease sends many of the new settlers to New Akko instead.

The Massai attempt to overwealm New Akko several times, but are defeated by the armed members of the expeditionary force. Finally, later in the year, the citizens of New Akko and the Massai reach an agreement to forstall more violence. The settlers recognize the rights of the Massai to use a large portion of the Mau Plateau for their cattle grazing, while the Massai agree to recognize the establishment of several mid-sized kibbutzim (communal farms), which don't interfere with the Massai, as well as to recognize the Jewish holdings in the 5,000 square acres. The Jews also agree to trade with the Massai things such as metal tools. This represents a major breakthrough for the Jews, and serves as the basis for dealing with the natives in the future.

Immigration ships from Eastern Europe arrive at the port of Mombassa. Wagons, escorted by ITO-funded guards, take colonists to Uganda. The nucleus of the future Jewish Defence League can be seen in these armed expeditions. The completion of the Kampala-Mombassa Line will help ease transportation difficulties greatly. Many Jewish immigrants simply stay in and around Mombassa in this early period of time.

1907:

The first great year of immigration. Some 500,000 Russian and Eastern European Jews immigrate to both Uganda and Kenya. In addition to New Akko and Kampala, sizable Jewish communities have been established in Mombassa, Kenya, and in Jinja, Entebbe, Masaka, and Port Bell, Uganda. Many shetls in Eastern Europe simply move together to East Africa. This year also sees another 450,000 Jews immigrate to the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa.

The influx of new colonists is not without its problems. Many Bantu tribes in Uganda are hostile to the new colonists. The appease this anger, many Jews (especially those from the urban centers of the Russian Empire) begin opening schools for the native children. While not religious like the Christian missionary schools, some ideas do rub off. Roads, such as Herzl Road (linking Masaka and Jinja) begin to sping up. The Kampala-Mombassa Line is jump started by the influx of willing labor. It's completion will alow for much more rapid colonization of the surrounding coutryside.

Things are further complicated by the presence of Christian missionaries, many of whom resent the large Jewish presence. Tensions between tribes that have converted to Catholism and Protestant faiths causes outbreaks of violence in northern Uganda. Many Jews stay in the south part of the colony, hugging Lake Victoria.

The British are appreciative, for the most part, of having such a loyal group of colonists, who now outnumber all of the other whites in Uganda combined.

In addition to schools, Jewish doctors open clinics that treat both Jew and African alike. This helps to ebb the sleeping sickness.

In late 1907, Kampala is renamed Tel Aviv ("hill of spring"). The name originates with Nahum Sokolow, the Secretary General of the World Zionist Congress (now a resident of this city). It symbolizes the Jewish dream of renewal and protection in a dangerous world.....
 
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1908-1909:

The major new development this year is the foundation of the Jewish Defence Forces (JDF). Founded by Joseph Trumpledor (who now lives in New Akko instead of Palestine in TTL), the JDF is formed to protect the lives of Jewish property, which had come under attack from the Christian tribes in Uganda. Armed with British weapons, and JDF begins patrolling the outskirts of the Uganda and Kenya settlements.

The JDF faces its first real baptism of fire that same year. In reaction to the growing number of Jewish colonists, the Central-Sudanic (also known as the Nilo-Hamitic) peoples of northern Uganda begin a revolt against the British. Centered mostly around the towns of Gulu, Lira, and Soroti, the fighters cause quite a bit of trouble, until late 1908, when Trumpledor leads the JDF into northern Uganda. Bribing several tribes into helping him, Trumpledor crushes the main rebel force at the Battle of Gulu on November 21, 1908. The grateful British authorities allow Trumpledor to build a massive fortification-Fort Maccabee-in the town of Gulu.

It's later revealed that a few nefarious Christian missionaries secretly encouraged the revolt. Ironically, the end result of this revolt is that missionary activity is curbed by the colonial government of Uganda (now completely dominated by the Jewish immigrants).

Another two million Jews from Eastern, southern, and central Europe immigrate to both Kenya and Uganda from 1908 to 1909. Situated mostly in the Mau Plateau, coastal Kenya (especially around Mombassa), and southern Uganda, the Jews bring about many changes in Britain's East African territories.

For one, Yiddish, along with Swahilli, is becoming the language of trade in both Kenya and Uganda. The Tel Aviv-Fort Maccabee Railway is completed in mid-1909, facilitating greater travel. The Jews continue to reach out to the natives of both Kenya and Uganda, especially in north Uganda. Schools, hospitals, universities, sewage treatment, urban renewal, and agricultural advancements are comming to East Africa.

The British colonials tend to look down at the Jewish effort to improve the lives of the African residents (in OTL, the British tended to learn Swahili rather than teach English). But if they really want to bother......

Meanwhile, the ITO is now working on recruiting more and more skilled Jews from Western Europe to immigrate to East Africa. Most of this new immigration comes from France and Great Britain herself. The French Jews still have sour memories of the Dreyfuss Affair, after all.

By June 1, 1909, some 2.7 million Jews now call Kenya and Uganda home. In Britain, there is talk of granting both Kenya and Uganda dominion status as the Dominion of East Africa, due to the higher percentage of white immigrants than in OTL.

Inspired by the succeses of the Jewish colonies in East Africa, the colonial governments of Upper and Lower Rhodesia invite the Jews to form settlements in those two British colonies. Some 77,000 Jews take this opportunity, mostly younger and more adventurous Jews. They take their idealistic notions with them when dealing with the natives.

Although this whole thing began as a temporary program to house Russian Jews, East Africa is now one of the major focal points of Jewish life. Why go to the swamp-ridden and barren land of Palestine when there are thriving cities, shetls, settlements, and kibbutzim in the verdant lands of East Africa?......
 
1910:

A huge year for Africa, as Great Britain grants dominion status to both South Africa (as the Union of South Africa), and East Africa (Kenya and Uganda, now home to almost 3 million Jews). The Jews prove to be excellent agents for the British when dealing with the natives, as they tend to be the only whites that the natives trust. East Africa's capital will be the city of Nairobi. Another one million immigrants, mostly from Russia and Poland, settle in East Africa this year. Africa is being advertised effectively by the ITO as a paradise. They've even inspired many of the old Zionist settlers of Palestine (those left over from the Aliyahs) to settle in East Africa.

In Uganda, a concerted effort is made to eradicate the tetse fly, by draining the swamps and brackish water that permeates many areas of the former colony. This also ends up eradicating malaria from the area as well (as happened with yellow feaver in Panama and Cuba in OTL). This helps to ease remaining tensions with the northern tribes, who appreciate the Jewish outreach to them.

Chaim Wietzman has now settled in the Jewish settlement of Herzlberg (just outside of Mombassa). He starts the Wietzman School of Agriculture (now the Wietzman Institute of Technology), which is open to Jews, Africans, and Asians alike. Mombassa, now a major Indian Ocean trading port, is home to some of the first light industry in East Africa, as Jewish industrialists begin employing Asians and Blacks in textile factories, creating the nexus of a highly skilled workforce.

Marc Chagall has now settled in New Jerusalem. His paintings from now on combine African and Jewish styles with great liberty.

Meanwhile, another 100,000 Jews, mostly spillovers from the old Ugandan colonies, immigrate to Upper and Lower Rhodesia. Their presence eases tensions with the natives, to the delight of the British colonial agents. Many come due to the overcrowding that the new Russian and Polish immigrants are causing.

Joseph Trumpledor enlarges the JDF, and reorganizes it. The JDF sees its first African recruits, drawn mainly from the recently converted Bantus of Uganda, where the Jewish investment in their well-being is starting to pay off. [It should be noted that while the Jewish faith has strong adversity to conversions, they don't try to stop gentiles from converting on their own]. The British are shocked by the idea of blacks serving in the same regiments as whites, but Trumpledor states that the JDF is religiously bound to accept all qualified Jewish applicants, wherever they may be from. Cavalry sqadrons are added, and Trumpledor keeps his men drilled constantly, to be on the watch for native uprisings (which, due to the positive Jewish interactions, have not happened). Still, it never hurts to be prepared.....

Overall East African policies towards Africans is more modeled on South Africa's system, with enfrancisement comming with property holdings (and in the case of the Jews, education as well). This policy will liberalize quite a lot over the next couple of decades....

Nairobi's name is changed to New Jerusalem, after an influx of some 300,000 new Polish Jews tips the scales in favor of a Jewish majority. This move symbolizes the new faith that the Jews have in their new homeland. It also shows just how much of a backwater Palestine has become. Many former Palestinian settlers are immigrating to East Africa, after all.

The New Jerusalem-Mombassa-Tel Aviv Railway is completed, allowing for a booming trade economy. The Massai continue to roam with their cattle heards unabated, and have largely kept their word of the bargain. They've even allowed the Jews to purchase another 3,500 acres on the Mau plateau, in exchange for more of the well-made tools, and that well made cattle feed from Chaim Weitzman's laborotories [he was a major botonist in OTL, and takes this even further in TTL].......
 
1911-1914:

Another 1.5 million Jews from Eastern Europe immigrate to East Africa. The IPO is now quite adept at spreading stories of the wonderful paradise that East Africa has become for the Jewish faith, along with the stories of exotic wildlife and paintings of beautiful African landscapes (many of them by one Marc Chagall). The Orthodox, in particular, are far less stringent about leaving for East Africa, as they believe that Jews cannot form a state in the Holy Land until the Messiah comes.

The results show themselves soon enough. In 1910, Mombassa is renamed Port Shalom (which is perfect-shalom means "hello," "goodbye," and "peace," -the perfect names for a major port and city). Some 200,000 of these new settlers come to Upper and Lower Rhodesia, greatly boosting the economies of the two colonies.

In 1911, after New York's notorious Triangle Shirtwaist fire, (in which the victims were poor Jewish women laborers), Jacob Schiff, a wealthy American Zionist, begins financing Jewish immigration from "The jungles of New York to the paradise of Africa). Although limited at first, eventually, some 150,000 Jews from the Lower East Side immigrate to East Africa. In Britain, the East End is rapidly emptying of Jews as the poor laborers seek a better life in the wide open spaces of the African frontiers.....

By 1912, Jews completely dominate the coffee trade. Grown in the highlands of Kenya, the farming is done on many kibbutzim. A few token Massai have worked on the Kibbutzim, and fewer still have even converted to Judaism. Another 4,000 acres on the Mau plateau is Jewish owned, and is the maximum estent of Jewish settlement in the area. Most new immigrants go to Tel Aviv or Port Shalom, and areas immediently surrounding it.

By 1913, the big cities of East Africa have been electrified. The great Universities of Port Shalom, Tel Aviv, New Akko, New Jerusalem, and Fort Maccabee (now a major city) are the centers of intellectual life in Africa. The British, by now, are not surprised as the Jews open the doors of these institutions to Africans and Asians as well as whites.

From the very beginning of the Ugandan settlements, Jews allowed their women a say in how the settlements were run (which happened in OTL's Palestinian settlements as well). East Africa's Knesset (Parliament), officially votes to allow women to vote. Qualified African women are guranteed this same provision, further deepening the "Special Relationship" that the Jews enjoy with the natives. More and more natives are taking advantage of the enfrancisement programs, which revolve around education and property. The Jewish respect for native religions deepends the bonds. Since missionaries are discouraged from comming to East Africa, Judaism is the only major religion that many tribes tend to come into contact with.....in Uganda, the formerly hostile Christian tribes have settled down in a bountiful trade with the Jewish colonies on Lake Victoria, Lake Abraham (formerly Lake Kwania), Lake Albert, and Lake Kyoga.

By June of 1914, the Jewish population of the Dominion of East Africa is up to 5.1 million (Orthodox families in particular tend to have large families). The JDF numbers some 25,000 men, with Joseph Trumpledor as their commanding officer.

One June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assasinated in Sarajevo, plunging the world into the fires of the First World War.

For the Jews of East Africa, one era was ending and another was beginning......
 
1914-1919-The Great War:

When Great Britain declared war on Germany in August of 1914, the Dominions of East Africa and South Africa quickly followed. For the Jewish Defence Forces, this was to be their first real action since the 1908 Uganda uprisings.

As there were only 3,000 German troops in German East Africa, Governor Heinrich von Schnee ordered them to refrain from attacking British forces. Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, never one to sit on his tuchuss and do nothing, wasted no time in disobeying the orders.

Vorbeck had visited East Africa a couple of times, and had seen the JDF training excercises, and knew the pain that they could inflict. He had a hearty respect for Joseph Trumpledor in particular, having shared in a Yom Kippur break-the-fast feast with him.

For a while, little happened. Trumpledor wanted his recruits trained properly, while Vorbeck, with only 200 officers and 2,800 Askaris, had few supplies. Despite this, Vorbeck attempted a raid over the border into the settlement of Ramwat David. It might have succeeded, had there not been a major JDF training camp nearby. The raw recruits fought a pitched battle with the Germans. Despite dogged attacks, the recruits held off the German advance. Lettow-Vorbeck, having lost many of his best officers, was forced to retreat.

Both Trumpledor and Vorbeck ended up facing each other from October 2-4, 1914. JDF forces, aided by a battalion of Indians, launched an amphibious assault at the port city of Tanga. Vorbeck fought hard, but he was forced to withdraw from his positions. Having already been mauled by the JDF, and without his most competent officers, who were buried at Ramwat David, Vorbeck was in a very weak position indeed after Kanga, especially as news came of a South African force that was invading from Upper Rhodesia.

By early mid-October, there was little that Vorbeck could do as JDF forces, impossibly strong, overran German East Africa. The Jews already had a strong rapport with the natives (with the notable exception of those who were in the Askaris), who welcomed the JDF as they occupied the major cities. The British ordered Trumpledor to Egypt. Trumpledor was eager to take Jerusalem from the Ottomans, but was stuck defending the Suez Canal from Turkish attacks.

Meanwhile, Vorbeck wasn't done in East Africa. From 1915-1917, he launched guerilla raids at the JDF, hoping to keep the prized warriors from being deployed to the European Theatere. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. London had agreed that former German East Africa would be incorperated into the Dominion of East Africa. Thousands of Rhodesian and East African Jews began flooding into the territory. As their traders already had a good reputation amongst the natives, the transition was fairly smooth. Lettow-Vorbeck bowed to the inevitable and surrendered on February 1, 1917. He spent the rest of the war in a luxurious home in New Jerusalem (Trumpledor, in fact, insisted on it-it was his home).

In 1917, the JDF finally saw some action in the Middle East. Smashing through the Turkish lines bellowing "AMCHA!" (Hebrew for "Our Nation!"), the JDF served as the force that broke the Turks as Edmund Allenby advanced northwards. Jerusalem fell on April 3 of that year. Photographs of a weeping Joseph Trumpledor praying at the Western Wall with his men served as a huge morale booster for East Africa, where millions of Jews celebrated the fall of Jerusalem.

By 1918, the war was finally at an end, with the JDF being the first allied soldiers to enter Damascas (much to the chagrin of Lawrence of Arabia). At the Versailles Conference of 1919, German East Africa was recognized as a possesion of the Dominion of East Africa. Britain also gained a Mandate over Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan.

By now, the Jews were firmly rooted in East Africa. But there was still controversy. Some radical Zionists wanted to immigrate en masse to Palestine. But the vast majority of Jews were content in their established businesses in East Africa, and besides, there was Tanganyka to incorporate properly. East African insitutions, from education to health care, were begining to take root.

Joseph Trumpledor returned to New Jerusalem in triumph. In the elections of 1919, he was elected Prime Minister. Along with Jan Smutts, now the Prime Minister of South Africa, Trumpledor pushed hard for the new League of Nations, which East Africa joined in 1920.

Paul Lettow-Vorbeck bid a tearful goodbye to his friend, and sailed home to Germany. But he would be back one day, as it turned out......

For Joseph Trumpledor, the best days were yet to come.....
 
1920-1929:

Joseph Trumpledor had rode into office as a huge war hero. Now, he would prove that he could govern as effiently as he could wage war.

The first great crisis came as a result of the Russian Civil War. The hated Czar had been overthrown in 1917 and killed on year later. The Provisional Government had been overthrown, and a civil war had erupted between the Whites (reactionaries) and the Reds (Bosheviks). The remaing Jews of Russia faced brutal attacks by the Whites (the crimes of the infamous Baron Roman Ungurn von Sternberg in particular shocks the communities of East Africa). IPO agents need little effort to convince the remaining 2.3 million Russian Jews to immigrate to East Africa. The USA was retreating into isolationism, and in 1924 would enact strict immigration quotas. Jews had only one place to go, and that was to East Africa.

Former German East Africa proved easy to integrate. Towns, settlements, and cities were established, and the natives gained enfracisement. Many of the new refugees from Russia settled in these new territories. Dar es Salaam was renamed Maimonodies in 1923. The Jews began developing their rapport with the local tribes, especially the famed and fearsome Mwamumzenti (the only warriors in east Africa ever to have beaten the Massai in conflict).

In 1922, Upper and Lower Rhodesia both held referendums on their futures. Upper Rhodesia (where Jews made up the majority of the white settlers) voted to join East Africa, while Lower Rhodesia voted to join the Union of South Africa. Jan Smutts was greatly strenghened by the addition of the heavily English and Jewish colony of Lower Rhodesia, and did not lose the election of 1924 (as happened in another universe). Herzog's National Party was reduced to the fringes of the Afrikaner population, and faded into obscurity. Influenced by East Africa, Jan Smutts began a project of enfrancisement for the native South Africans (helped by numerous Jewish agents). Bechuanaland was added to South Africa in 1927, making South Africa one of the two economic powerhouses on the continent (the other being East Africa).

Trouble came in the former German possesion of Rwanda. The territory was divided between the tall, agrarian Tutsis and the short, cattle herding Hutus. Using a descriminatory identification system, the Germans had stoked years of resentment by favoring the Tutsis. An outbreak of violence occured as the Germans withdrew.

The Jewish authorities wasted no time. The guest-book system was outlawed, and the Hutus were fully enfrancised. Many Tutsis were leaving for the new kibbutzim in Tanganyka, and the Hutus soon became loyal citizens of the Dominion of East Africa, leading a lifestyle not unlike the Massai, with vast cattle ranges protected by the government in New Jerusalem.

The influx of Russian refugees led to the Jewish population to stand at 9.1 million by 1924. This didn't inlcude the natives all over the Dominion that were still in the process of converting (to convert to Judaism, you need to show that you mean it.....of course, most natives aren't necessarily Jewish. But many have adopted some Jewish customs and laws.....). Another 1.7 million Jews immigrated out of the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and southern Europe, making Russia, Poland, and the east virtually free of a Jewish presence for the first time in millenia. Many wealthy Jewish families, such as the Rothchilds, assisted the poor Jews of these nations in immigrating.

In the mideast, Britain merged Palestine with the new Heshamite Kingdom of Transjordan in 1925. Some radical Zionists protested, but most Jews shrugged. There was nothing like OTL's Balfour Declaration to hold Britain accountable for.

The Port Shalom-Salisbury-Cape Town Line was built from 1922 to 1926. This served as the basis for the famous Cape-to-Cairo Railway, built with mainly East and South African money and built from 1925 to 1931.

Trade between Jan Smutt's South Africa and Joseph Trumpledor's East Africa led to a surging economy. It was, after all, the Roaring Twenties. The first air service, which distributed mail from Tel Aviv to Cape Town was established in 1928. Aviation became quite popular after Port Shalom's own David bar-Eleazar became the first man to fly non-stop across the Indian Ocean. The films of the Marx Brothers played to packed movie houses. Heavy Industry came to the Dominion in the Roaring Twenties, manufacturing Ernst Manaru's (half Jewish, half Bantu) sturdy Golems (autos resembling the Tin Lisie). The nickname "Golem" symbolized their power over the new highways of East and South Africa.

Joseph Trumpledor celebrated all these acheivements, before retiring in 1928. His retirement seemed to symbolize the end of another era. The people who thought this were right, in more ways than one.....
 
1930-1939:

The Roaring Twenties came to a shocking end with the Wall St. Crash of 1929. The Crash began a ripple effect around the world.

For East Africa, things, for the first time in the nation's history, began to look grim. Factories closed, unemployment rose, and a feeling of despair rose and rose. It seemed Trumpledor's 1928 retirement had taken away more than just the everlasting era of good feelings.....

In the elections of 1931, Levi Eshkol's Labour Party swept to power after years in the wilderness. "So they didn't beat Moses," one Conservative MP was heard to have remarked. Eshkol ran on a platform of economic reform and promises of direct government intervention.

That same year also saw the final completion of the Cape-to-Cairo Railway. King George V rode on the first triumphent ride from Cairo to Cape Town, from which he sailed back to London. A major centerpeice of British pride, it proved to be the first uplift to East African morale in years. As the King passed through New Jerusalem and Port Shalom, he was greeted by huge crowds of his cheering Jewish subjects. "You can't say that Zion doesn't love you, your highness," was what Prime Minister Eshkol was rumored to have said to the monarch in his meeting with him in New Jerusalem.

ITO agents were dispatched to New York, where the situation was far more dire. It wasn't hard to find eager recruits for life in East Africa. Some 230,000 American Jews immigrated to Africa during this time period.

Eshkol acted quickly. Meeting with South Africa's Jan Smutts, both East Africa and South Africa signed an accord to end all trade barriers remaining between the two dominions (there were never that many anyways). The two African dominions had been pushing for greater Imperial preference, but faced resistance from London on the issue. Fustratred, they began their "Deep Friendship," which is solidified today as part of the African Federation. Pretty soon, East Africa was supplying South Africa with practical goods, while South Africa began supplying East Africa with luxury items (like wine, for instance) and mineral goods. The Diamond Trade became a centerpeice of this relationship. Pretty soon, unemployment in both South and East Africa was heading south again. Government-sponsered work programs built new irrigation canals, reseeded grazing land (helping out the Massai's extensive cattle heards), and began experimentation with solar power. Jan Smutts, against his instincts, (but then again, the Jews of East Africa had been right on practically everything thus far), copied these moves, and bound his nation closer with East Africa.

In 1933, Great Britain turned over Nysaland to the Dominion of East Africa. Most of the whites in the colony were Jews anyway. And with the Great Depression raging, it seemed like a very good way to save money. The city of Trumpledor (OTL's Lilongue), became the center of this new aquisition. Many German Jewish immigrants settled in small villages along Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyka.

The most ambitious of these new projects was a hydro-electric project, designed to increase electricity for the numerous towns and cities in East Africa. It turned into a joint project with South Africa (as the project was located on the two nations' borders). Completed by 1936, the projects managed to create cheap electricity for South and East Africa, and allowed for new irrigation canals, which increased the arable land substantialy.

In Europe, things were going from bad to worse. In Germany, the perpetually angry Great War veteran Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Worker's Party (Nazi Party) was becoming the dominent government party. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck angrilly denounced the Nazis. Having seen first hand the power of the Jewish fighting man, he attacked Hitler's ideologies fervently. But without his exploits in OTL, there were far fewer people willing to listen to Vorbeck. After several death threats, he fled with his family back to East Africa in 1932, to New Jerusalem. He became the new neighbor to the aging Joseph Trumpledor, who embraced his former foe like a brother.

Hitler became the absolute ruler of Germany in 1933, and soon, anti-Jewish laws began to be passed. ITO agents desperately warned as many Jews as possible to come to East Africa. Despite the fact that Hitler in Mein Kampf had written: "If only twelve million of those Hebrew vultures had been subject to the gas, the Fatherland would still have maintained the wealthy territories of Africa," the German Jews were at first aloof. Why, they had fervently supported Germany in the Great War, and many had served in the Fatherland's defence. How could their nation turn on them so? But slowly but surely, the trickle of Jewish refugees from Germany became a flood, as every last Jew in Germany, and later Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia fled to East Africa. This accelerated after the events of the Nuremburg Laws (1935) and Kristalnacht (1938). East Africa welcomed each and every one. Albert Einstein, before leaving for Port Shalom, told his wife: "Take a good look at this house. You'll never see it again." Over 1.9 million Jews came in this latest wave of refugees. Sigmund Freud, Enrico Fermi (who had a Jewish wife), Leo Salizard, Edward Teller, and countless others soon found employment in the great universities of the Dominion. In 1938, Salizard, with Einstein's signature, drafted a letter to Eskhol warning him on the devastating effects of a hypothetical uranium bomb.....soon, East Africa began importing uranium from the Belgian Congo for Project Sampson. Efforts to gain the attention of the British government were unsuccesful until after the start of World War II.

The thirties also saw a new problem emerge. Benito Mussolini, the pugnacious dictator of Italy, fancied himself as a reincarnation of Augustus. Remembering the humiliating defeat that his nation had suffered at Adua in 1896, he began to plan for the invasion of Ethiopia.

Emperor Haile Salasie, the Lion of Judah, had long admired the Dominion of East Africa. There was a strong and ancient Jewish community in his nation, going back to the days of Saloman and the Queen of Sheba. As Italy's rhetoric became more belligerant, East Africa, backed strongly by South Africa, tried to force the League to do something substantial.

Instead, the League rolled over like a leaky galleon as Italian troops invaded Ethiopia from Italian Somalailand and Eritrea. The British government refused to close the Suez Canal, allowing Mussolini a clear route towards conquest. Oh, they passed an embargo, but left out oil.

Fustrated by the Mother Country's indifference, the East Africans and South Africans began covert gun running operations to aid to Ethiopians. But it was too little, too late. The Lion of Judah fled to New Jerusalem, along with countless refugees, including the entire Jewish community of the mountain kingdom. The Jewish Defence Forces began mobilizing.

Mussolini, for his part, tired of the Jewish state's annoying sermonizing, and began anti-semitic programs of his own (even worse than in OTL). This led to the complete exodus of the Italian Jews. ITO agents in France, the Low Countries, and Iberia began handing out visas. Most accepted, although some just wouldn't budge, which would cost them dearly later.

In 1938, the Dominion held a referendum on a name change. Wether or not to declare their nation the State of Israel. Despite opposition from the Orthodox, the referendum passed. The Dominion of East Africa became the State of Israel, a Dominion of the British Empire. The Jewish Defence Forces became the Israeli Defence Forces, and became open to everyone, including non-Jews. Watching Neville Chamberlain (the son of the great Joseph Chamberlain) throw the Czechs to the wolves, Jan Smutts and Levi Eshkol began preparing their nations for conflict. They weren't fooled when the British PM claimed he had "Peace in our time!" The die was rapidly being cast......

By 1939, Hitler began making demands of Poland. As there were almost no more Jews left in Europe (and none left in Poland), Hitler began his truely dark deeds on September 1, 1939, when German forces smashed into that long-haplass nation.

Great Britain and France declared war on September 3, followed alomst immediently afterwards by Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India.

"We, the people of Israel, and our brothers-in-arms across the British Empire must make ourselves an arsenal of freedom in a world gone rife with the diseases of evil," declared Prime Minister Eshkol in his nation's declaration of War on Germany. "We will not stop until the German mad-dog has been put down for all time."

World War II was on.......
 
1939-1945: The War Years

1939: In September of 1939, even as the Germans and Soviets began their desembowlment of Poland, Prime Minister Eshkol dispatched Leo Salizard and Albert Einstein on a covert mission to London. There, the two brilliant scientists outlined the ideas of Operation Sampson.

Prime Minister Chamberlain was skeptical of such a Project. Along with many of his advisors. However, one man came out strongly in favor of it. Winston Churchill eloquently explained how such a weapon could quickly end the war in a descisive Allied victory. Reluctantly, Chamberlain agreed to the proposal. Project Sampson was now a fully-funded project of the British Empire. Delighted at hearing the news, Prime Minister Eshkol connacted the Belgian ambassador to secure Israeli rights to mine uranium in the nearby Belgian Congo for the precious metal.

That year, raids by the German commerce raider Atlantis ruthlessly sank dozens of Israeli and South African merchant ships in the Indian Ocean. In responce, the Israeli Navy was born. Starting out with several elderly WWI destroyers, the shipyards of Port Shalom began manufacturing a more modern day force. South African material aided in this endeavor. In December 1939, the Israeli destoryer Trumpledor managed to corner and sink the Atlantis in a short but fierce fight off the coast of Zanzibar. Combined with the recent destruction of the Graff Spree, this proved to be a much needed morale booster for the Allies.

The Israeli Defence Forces called up all able bodied males for training. Hundreds of thousands of young Jews volunteered to crush fascism. The native tribes were also quite happy to enlist in the IDF. English was the language that would bind this force together. A training center for the new Royal Israeli Airforce (RIAF) was built not for from the Serengeti Plain. Training first in old WWI bi-planes, and then in Hawker Hurricanes, the infant RIAF would go on to greatly distinguish itself in the years to come.

The manufacturing centers of Port Shalom, Mamodan, and New Jerusalem began churning out the first tanks that the IDF would employ in a variaty of conditions. Using imported metals from South Africa, the old textile mills of these cities were converted for concentrated effort for victory. The highly developed railways of Eastern and Southern Africa were soon groaning under the weight of war material as South Africa and Israel fully established themselves as bullworks of Imperial democracy.

The Mossad (Israeli intelligence), had started as a nucleus of advisors attatched to native tribes. At the start of the war, a proposal was brought to Levi Eshkol to turn the Mossod into a spy service.

10,000 men from the IDF were soon being deployed to France. They had little to do at first. There was nothing more than a "Phony War" on....which was about to change for the worst.

1940-1941:

The year 1940 was to be one of tragedies and triumphs. Of blood, toil, sweat, and tears. It was to, literally see the finest hour of Israel's sons. In early 1940, it was established by Project Sampson that an actual bomb could be built in January 1940. The administrator of the Project, William George Penny, was delighted to report the findings back to London.

The calm brought on by the Phony War ended as Germany unleashed Blitzreig on Europe. Norway and Denmark were quickly overrun. This was follwed in spring with the conquest of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

The IDF resisted valiently, and took many a German with them. But soon, they were bottled in at Dunkirk with the thousands of trapped British, South African, and French troops.

Mordechai Anielewitz, the commanding officer in charge of the IDF detatchment, ordered his men to resist with all the fury of a wounded, cornered lion. And resist they did. IDF raids were a major detrement to the Germans, and bought the time necessary to evacuate the port. Anielewitz was the last Commonwealth officer to leave the blood stained beaches, but he vowed to return one day.

The fall of Western Europe sent shock waves through Israel. Fearing that Hitler would attempt to seize the colonies of France and Belgium, Israeli troops moved in and occupied the Belgian Congo in June of 1940. This was also done to completely secure the uranium deposits of that strategic colony.

That same month, Mussolini, eager to buy himself the spoils of war at the expected peace conference, declared war on France (as she was falling), and Great Britain. French troops utterly bloodied the Italians in the first town in which they chose to give resistance.

Humiliated, Mussolini ordered the Duke of Aosta, the commander of all Italian forces in East Africa, to invade the Sudan and cut the important Cape-to-Cairo railway. On July 4, taking advantage of his numeratical superioriry, Lieutenant General Guglielmo Nasi struck westward into the Sudan, advancing 300 miles and taking several border towns. Nasi also overran British Somalailand, forcing the British to evacuate Bebera for Aden. Mussolini then thundered of how his Roman Empire would grow to rival Trajan's.

The Israelis viewed the Italians with utter contempt, and rightly so. Despite having 370,000 soldiers and sailors in the region, and 400 aircraft, the Italians lacked modern day weapons. Their Askaris fought well hand-to-hand, but lacked the training to deal with being bombed or srafed.

The IDF, by contrast, numbered well over 275,000 men, and they were backed up by additional troops from South Africa (which contributed another 75,000 men). Then there were the 50,000 men from the Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone (the troops of the King's African Rifles [KAR]).

The Israelis were also extremely well trained, and well motivated. They wasted no time in going after the Italians. Mordechai Anielewitz, now a Major General in the IDF, led the first assault.

On November 15, 1940, the IDF opened up the assault into Italian Somaliland with the seizure of El Wak, a fortefied border town. Over the next week, further IDF raids cleared away numerous Italian garrisons in southern Ethiopia. In New Jerusalem, the Lion of Judah waited patiently for the Israelis to liberate his country.

The Italians had been utterly shattered at El Wak. From then on, it was as close to a cakewalk as campaigns come. By the end of December, Israeli forces had entered Mogadishu, the capital Somaliland. Anielewitz didn't bother taking the Italians prisoner. Virtually all were just glad to out of the war. They would spend the rest of the war "volunteering" on special kibbutzes instead.

The rapid Israeli success allowed for the Royal Navy to recapture British Somaliland in early 1941. The recapture was very easy, not least because the RIAF had wiped out the Italian air base at Diredawa, 300 miles away. The new air superiority utterly demoralized the Italian forces. Many askaris simply melted away, defecting to the IDF. In early February, British and Indian foces advanced into Eritrea, taking several major fortifcations with the extensive help of the RIAF. Mossad agents showed their true value, convincing thousands more Askaris to desert the fight. Many Mossad agents had been former traders in Italian East Africa, and knew the languages and customs well.

By March 30, the British were on the road to Addis Ababa. My mid-April, 1941, the Italians had had enough. The Duke of Aosta surrendered to Major General Anilewitz on April 15, 1941. Emperor Haile Salasie returned to his throne. In a related development, the Emperor asked for Israeli assistance in rebuilding his shattered country. This was to be the basis of the great postwar plans that would reshape Africa for all time.

The Battle for East Africa was won. Now, the IDF had a much tougher fight ahead of them in the sands of North Africa.

On September 13, 1940, Italian forces invaded Egypt from Libya. Three days later, they had reached Sidi Barrani, where they began to fortify their gains.

The South African and Israeli forces in East Africa were immedietly redepolyed to Egypt, greatly bolstering the Commonwealth forces already there. Fresh from crushing the Italians in Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, Major General Anielewitz began his assault on October 15, 1940. Operation Trumpledor began with an advance by General Maurice Rose's 1st Armored Division within the IDF.

Rose, the son of American Jews who had immigrated to East Africa in the early 1900s, proved to be his worth in gold. By October 27, not only had the Italians been thrown out of Egypt by the IDF, but the town of Solum had been taken. Marshall Graziani was thrown into a panic as over 20,000 Italians were taken prisoner by the IDF and their Commonwealth allies. Siddi Barrani fell the same day as Solum, and General Rose stopped in order to firmly establish his supply lines. The RIAF and RAF flew round-the-clock missions against the Italians, who melted back into Libya. The Western Desert Force became XIII Corps.

By November, Rose was ready to continue into Libya. Smashing the Italians backwards, the IDF, aided by the 4th Indian, the Australian 6th Division, and the South African 12th Division (comprised mostly of soldiers from former Lower Rhodesia), captured Tobruk and Bardia, and encircled the Italians at Beda Fromm, capturing some 25,000 men, 200 artillary peices, 100 tanks, and another 1500 vehicles. The pathetic remants of the Italian force retreated to El Agheila by December 9.

Hitler, angered at having to bail out Mussolini, but not wanting a bunch of Jews menacing his Fortress Europe, activated the newly formed Deutsches Afrikakorps, commanded by Erwin Rommel. The trains that transported the men of the Afrika Korps were decked out with anti-semetic grafiti. One succinct message stated: "We're going to Africa to destroy the Jews."

In January 1941, Rommel launched his first assault against the Allied armies advancing towards El Agheila. Facing him was General Rose. The two tankmen fought to a standstill. In the end, Rose was forced to withdraw due to his precariously overstretched supply lines. Rommel advanced forward, only to meet stiff resistance every step of the way. Israeli Hurricanes and German Messcherschmidts fought for the right to strafe each other's colummns. To call the fighting intense between the Germans and the Israelis intense was an understatement, to say the least. One German soldier wrote in his diary: "The Jews are supposed to be subhumans, but they fight more like superhumans. Clearing those bastards out of Bardia cost us plenty."

By February 1941, Rommel had retaken all of Libya except for Tobruk, which was manned by the IDF. Several failed attempts to seize the port resulted in a seige.

XIII Corps attempted to releive the port in Operations Brevity and Battleaxe, both of which failed. However, a raid by South African Commandos and Israeli Maccabees (Israeli special forces) succeeded in destroying several tonnes of Axis munitions, giving the IDF forces bottled down in Tobruk some breathing room. Arthur Wavell was replaced as overall commander by Claude Auchinleck. The overall Allied field command became the British Eighth Army. Besides the remaining forces of the IDF (bolstered by over 100,000 fresh recruits from the homeland), the Eighth Army included two divisions of South Africans, several divisions of South Africans and New Zealanders, and a brigade of Free Frech under Marie-Pierre Koenig.

From March 4 to April 17, 1941, Operation Crusader under Generals Anielewitz, Rose, and Cunningham succeeded in releiving Tobruk and driving Rommel back to El Agheila. Unlike in OTL, the German garrisons at Bardia and Sollum were also recaptured.

By May of 1941, bolstered by fresh Israeli brigades, and not lacking the Australian, New Zealander, and Indian regiments that were sent to their homelands when the Japanese were menacing them, the Eighth Army was able to advance again. In the Second Battle of El Agheila in mid-May, 1941, Generals Rommel and Rose faced off again. This time, Rommel was the one who was forced to withdraw, despite an influx of new supplies. Hand-to-hand fighting between the Israelis and Germans was among some of the most brutal in the entire war. Taking prisoners was rarely practised by either side. The fierce fighting masked the massive buildup of supplies that the Allies were building up behind the bulge that the Israelis had set up.

Rommel was succinctly ordered by Berlin not to give an inch of ground to the "Anglo-Jewish vermin." Rommel never got the chance to follow that order. His staff car was strafed by a RIAF Spitfire on June 3, 1941. The Desert Fox, as his friends and adversaries had begun to call him, died of his extensive wounds two days later. The Afrika Korps began its long retreat.

It it was a very brutal and bloody retreat. The Germans and Jews clashed in one brawl after another across the length and width of Cyrenaica and Tripoltania. Tripoli fell in August 1941. Hitler by this time was focused on his invasion of the USSR, which he had traitorously attacked on June 22. However, this didn't stop him from sending more men into the African meat grinder to try and destroy the Jews, whom Hitler hated with a pathological fury that made his aids shrink before him. As propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary after Hitler got word of the fall of Tripoli: "The Fuhrer is quite right about the threat of the Jewish disease. Should they win this war, they will multiply ceasesly until mankind is incurably corrupted. At the very least, we shall not have this problem with the Slavs......"

For the Afrika Korps, flesh and munitions could only hold out so long. Retreating into Tunisia, the Germans resisted as doggedly as they could at the hated Jewish enemy, which repaid every blow in kind. "The men do not take prisoners. And who can blame them? They're fighting an enemy that views them only with the desire to exterminate. Should we not respond in kind?" wrote General Anielewitz in his diary as the IDF crossed into Tunisia after the Germans in September 1941, with the Commonwealth forces straining to keep up with them. On October 1, 1941, the last members of the much vaunted Afrika Korps retreated on Italian boats back to Fortress Europe. Hitler threw an immense tantrum when he heard of this loss. "Spittle and froth flowed liberally from his jaw as he screamed his head off about Germany's failures. This must be a frightening development for him. If the Jews can beat us in armed combat, then our whole idea about race might be wrong." one aid of Hitler's recorded in his diary.

With the securing of Libya, and the rolling back of pro-Axis forces in the Middle East, the British began to work on swaying the Vichy forces in Algeria and French Equitorial Africa to switch sides. This came as German forces occupied Vichy France itself in November 1941, fearing an inevitable Allied attack. That same month, IDF forces seized the Italian island of Pantaleria. Mussolini, having lost his entire African empire, began a rapid descent into ill-health. Slowly, one-by-one, the Vichy French began to defect to the Allied side, not least due to the smashing victory that the Commonwealth Forces had won in North Africa. Plus, the regeime in Vichy itself was now truely a German puppet, if not already. Admiral Francious Darlan was among the last holdouts. A Free French assassin ended the last block towards Allied consolidation over the African continent.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii brought the United States into the war. World War II was now truely a global conflict. The Japanese began also stuck Malaysia and Singapore that day. With an influx of fresh Commonwealth troops from Africa, the British prepared to implement Operation Matador with strikes into Thailand to preempt a Japanese attack on Malaysia and Singapore itself. Over 50,000 Israeli and South African troops were dispatched from North Africa to Malaysia to aid in the Operation.

Maurice Rose was awarded the Victoria Cross for his role in the destruction of the Afrika Korps, as was Mordachai Anielewitz. This triumph was overshadowed breifly in mid-December, 1941, when Joseph Trumpledor died of a stroke at his home in New Jerusalem. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck gave the eulogy for his friend, as a monolith to the founder of the old JDF was laid to rest.

Now that the continent of Africa was free of and Axis presence, the war would come to Fortress Europe.

1942:

After the destruction of the Axis forces in Africa, things began to quiet down for the Israelis. An attempt to aid the British forces in Asia against the Japanese onslaught proved to be a failure as the Israeli Navy was bloodied by Japanese aircraft and submarines in the Indian Ocean. The Navy was ordered home for the time being.

However, the IDF and the South Africans proved invaluable in Malaysia, where they managed to delay the Japanese advance through Malaysia. Operation Matador only ended when Japanese air and naval power proved to be too overwhelming. The delay, however, was crucial in allowing William Slim to adequetaly prepare defences in Burma. Using his observations from Operation Matador to full effect, Slim avoided full frontal assaults on the Japanese, and used air cover effectivally. As a result, the Japanese were prevented from advancing further than Rangoon. As more reinforcements from India arrived, Slim, commanding XV Corps, began to slowly push back againt the Japanese onslaught.

The Israelis participated major operation in the first half of 1942. Of all the French colonies, Madagascar remained the last pro-Vichy holdout. So, in April of 1942, the Israelis and the South Africans invaded and quickly occupied the island, in order to prevent the Japanese from getting any kind of a toe-hold on the strategic locale. The South Africans agreed to administer the island for the time being. The Israelis had enough on their plate with Somalia (former Italian and British Somaliland) and the Congo.

The Germans had conquered a sizable chunk of the Soviet Union. But what to do with the Slavs? The Slavs were all designated as subhumans [without any Jews, the Slavs are now considered the prime target of Nazi brutality; the few Jews still in Europe are already dead].

The Wannsee Conference, held in January of 1942, was designed to answer these questions. Adolf Eichman was granted the duty of carrying out the goal of extermination. Such cleansing would take place in special camps. Numerous such camps already existed

Project Sampson continued on schedual. After the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway ended the Japanese threat to Australia, Woomera became the site for the Commonwealth's contruction facility. Tel Aviv was the administrative center, where the uranium was refined to build the ultimate weapon.....scientists from all over the Commonwealth were stationed in Israel and Australia....always working. With the intelligence that the British had shared with him, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the launch of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Heavy British aid allowed for the Americans to jump start their program. Some of the men stationed at Los Alamos were Mossad and M15 agents....watching to make sure that none of the research found its way to the Soviets.

Prime Minister Churchill wanted dearly to open up a front in Europe. With the American deployment to Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya in May of 1942, such a front could be realized. Churchill wanted the front to be in the "Soft Underbelly of Europe." The only question would be wether it would be in Italy or the Balkans. Mossad and OSS agents were soon engaged in Operation Mongoose-confusing the enemy greatly as to the target of the invasion. Generals Anielwitz and Auchinleck were ordered to Egypt. Hitler promtly ordered three divisions to occupied-Greece. The Allies did much to encourage the rumor. Fake football matches were held by fake infantry units. Fake wedding notices were posted for non-existant troops. The Israelis contructed dummy tanks, army barracks, and airfields. From their sources in Cairo, the Germans prepared for an onslaught in the Balkans.

Of course, that's what the Allies wanted them to think.

The idea of a Second Front (which Stalin was demanding of his allies), got a field test at the French Channel town of Dieppe. On August 18, Israeli Maccabees, American Rangers, along with British and South African Commandos, (the Israelis and South Africans in particular were considered the best of the Allied special forces units), raided the the town. The raid was an utter success, not least because the Israelis and South Africans had demanded, and got, the right to individually seize the innitiative in the mission. Plans went ahead on planning a return to France....where General Anielewitz had vowed to return.

Mussolini's troubles only grew and grew. Italy had now utterly lost her empire. The Italians now depended on their German "ally" for oil, among other things. The vast majority of Italians only wanted the war to end. Mussolini was beginning to lose control.

Hitler feared this greatly. Operation Alaric was drafted in May as the plan to occupy Italy in the worst-case scenario.

The worst-case scenario came on September 2, 1942, as Operation Torch, the invasion of Sicily was launched. American, British, Canadian, Israeli, and South African forces invaded along a broad front.

The news of the Allied landings shocked the Italians. For the members of the Fascist Grand Council, it was the straw that broke the camal's back. On September 4, Mussolini was arrested by orders of the Council. Marshall Pietro Badoglio became Prime Minister, at the urging of King Victor Emmanuel. A few days later, Italy officially surrendered to the Allies. Jubilation erupted amongst the Italians.

Unfortunately, the Germans had other ideas. Operation Alaric went into affect as German troops occupied the Italian boot. But it was too late to secure Sicily. Messina had been occupied by the IDF, at the urging of General Rose. This denied the Germans the chance to land on the island. The remnants of the Italian armed forces eagerly defected to the Allies. Prime Minister Badoglio and the House of Savoy was forced to flee Naples on a South African destroyer as the Germans closed in. Sardinia, Corsica, and the lower 2/3rds of the Italian Boot were in Allied hands by late October. Field Marshall Kesselring, the overall German military commander in Italy, was forced to pull back steadily as Allied armies began their long march up the Boot.

In the later part of 1942, the German and Soviet armies at Stalingrad marched towards their respective destinies.

In Israel itself, total mobilzation had occured. Every able-bodied male civilian was in the IDF. The automobile and textile factories were converted to churning out tanks, aircraft, and jeeps. Nummberless guns and countless tonnes of ammunition. The booming industrial economy in both Israel and South Africa shook off the last effects (and there were not that many) of the Depression.

The Israeli administrators in the Congo and Somalia began contruction of roads, schools, hospitals, and other nesecities of civilized life. Israeli ideas waffed across these two administrative zones like the smell of freshly cooked gafilte fish. The Israeli and South African attempts at mining the precious minerals of the Congo brought large-scale development to that portion of the world.

For the native Somalis and Congolese, such luxuries made the prospects of going back under colonial rule of any kind all the more odious.

1943:

January 1943 brought news of the fall of Naples, which the Germans had ruthlessly rigged with explosives and other booby-traps. It took weeks to properly secure the city and repair its port.

In a seperate action, the Israeli Navy assisted in the liberation of Rhodes, which the Germans had seized only two years earlier.

February brought news of the anihilation of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. From then on, the Reich's armies in the East would be on a retreat that would make the fall of the Afrika Korps look like a hiccup. But the grim job of slaughtering Poles, Ukranians, Czechs, Great Russians, Roma and Senti, and Belarusians would continue. Even as the Reich's transportation systems strained under the job of fighting a war and commiting genocide, the horrific task would continue.

Mossad agents began to slip into Western Europe, to aid the burgeoning resistance movements. The Mossad had trained the Czech expatriates who had killed Reinhard Heydrich in May of 1942. In addition to crippling the German Norsk hydroelectric plant in Norway, Mossad agents contented themselves with directing increasingly bolder and bolder attacks. Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, died under the guns of the French Resistance in March of 1943 thanks to the Mossad's intelligence.

Of all the nations of conquered Europe, Denmark was unique. To maintain Danish cooperation, the Jews of that nation had not been harmed. ITO agents had failed to get any Danish Jews to immigrate before the war. They were an integral part of the Danish nation, after all. But after the fall of that nation in 1940, 8,000 Jews remained trapped under German domination. But they remained under the protection of the Danish people. The German administrators decided it to be more trouble than it was worth to seize them.

But as news came of the IDF's defeat of the Afrika Korps, and other IDF actions, the pressure mounted. Hitler personally ordered the Jews of that nation liquidated. A mole in the German Foreign Ministry alerted members of the Danish government. Aided by Mossad agents, the Danes succeeded in evacuating all 8,000 Jews to neutral Sweden aboard fishing boats. Hitler threw yet another tantrum. The only major concentration of Jews in Europe had escaped him. This episode led to a huge increase in Israeli-made arms to the Danish resistance, among other things.

The summer of 1943's big news was the fight for Monte Cassino, a fortified monestary on the road to Rome. A stalemate ensued, until Israeli Maccabees and South African Commandos (reafirming their legendary status) attacked and eliminated the main part of the German garrison, allowing for the Allies to seize the monestary without having to destroy it. By June of 1943, the Allies were in Rome. The Germans continued their retreat northwards....doing their best to cause as much pain to the advancing Allies as possible....especially to the blasted IDF.

Benito Mussolini had been arrested after his fall from power. The former Duce had been turned over the Allies at the insistance of the IDF. He was now interred in Cyprus, guarded by Italian-Jewish expatriates that he had driven from his nation in the late '30s. They took delight in taunting the tinpot Caesar at every opportunity. Keeping his legs shackled, he was denied visitors. In the end, he was found hanging from his cell on July 11, 1943.

No great loss.

With the rapid progress that the Allies had been making in Italy, Churchill brought up his desire to liberate the Balkans before the Soviets could get anywhere near them. The Israelis had already liberated Rhodes, after all. But Churchill found himself overuled by the Allied Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower. A Second Front should come in Europe. But not to the Balkans. General Anielewitz fully backed Ike. He wanted to go back to France. Badly.

In Italy, the Allies had reached the Arno Line, and were busy hacking it to bits. The IDF's routine hadn't changed. Prisoners were rarely taken. Working in tandum with their South African comrades-in-armes, the Israelis proved once and for all the utter stupidity of the German racial dogmas. Leading the charges, the Israelis and South Africans punched through the Arno Line in August, and through the Gothic Line-Kesselring's grand fortefication, in September. Winnie, eager for the Western Allies to be in Vienna, urged them forwards. In the end, Generals Mud and Winter ground the fighting in northern Italy to a halt.

In Russia, the Germans were crushed in the Battle of Kursk. Soviet forces began their surge towards the Reich.

In October, Mossad agents assasinated Ante Pavelich, the sadistic head of the Croatian Ustashe, which had fallen on the Serbs in an orgy of bloodshed.

Plans continued to be drafted for Operation Overloard-the invasion of Western Europe. While all this was going on, Operation Fortitude was launched, in the spirit of Operation Mongoose. The Israelis proved to be the perfect actors in the scheme. Anywhere they were rumored to land was sure to gain Hitler's fullest attention. The Fuhrer, still in a dangerous rage after the news came to him of Mussolini's death in an Israeli prison, bought every rumor of possible Israeli deployments hook, line, and sinker. Rumors came that the Jews would strike at Norway. Hitler kept several divisions stationed around Trondheim. Rumors came that the Jews would strike at Greece. Hitler kept several divisions around Athens. Rumor came that the IDF would be deployed to several points around the Balkans. Hitler stationed heavy divisions around each locale (there were around 7 possible landing points leaked to the Germans by the British and Israelis).

Once again, it was what the Allies wanted the Germans to think.

At Los Alamos, Mossad agents tipped off the Americans that one of the scientists, one Klaus Fuches, was a Communist. Fuches dissapeared from the site (it should be mentioned that the Rosenburgs now live in New Akko, while David Greenglass is at Woomera).

The end of 1943 brought new optimism to the Allied cause. Italy was all but liberated, the Russians were pushing the Germans out of their country kilometer by bloody kilometer, and the Japanese were being pushed back in Asia and the Pacific. 1944 would be the year when the nails began to fall into the coffin of Hitler's Thousandd Year Reich.

1944:

Preparations for Operation Overlord began in earnest. The spring of 1944 was schedualed as the tentative time period for the invasion.

The Allies would land in Normandy. The Americans at Omaha and Utah Beaches, the British and Canadians would land at both Juno and Gold. The Israelis and South Africans would land at Sword. Mordachai Anielewitz would keep his 1940 vow to return.

Maurice Rose was withdrawn from Italy in order to play his part in Operation Fortitude. The man who had beaten Rommel was put in charge of an utterly mythical detatchmant of the IDF. The Germans soon got a juicy tidbit to report to Hitler. Maurice Rose would be in charge of the real assault at Calais; Normandy would be the site of diversionary raids only. It appeared that the typically-devious Jews wanted the Germans to be fooled into thinking that their assault on Calais would gain releif through the diversion at Normandy.

Oh how Hitler gloated. Those damned Jews weren't so clever after all. When the Israelis began their assault, they'd find the main German forces solidly entrenched at Calais, waiting for them.

The Allies sighed with relief. Hook, line, and sinker.

June of 1944 would be the target date. Hopefully, the Channel would cooperate.

In Italy, the overall Allied Commander, Sir Harold Alexander, began his assault against Kesselring. Italian partisans, aided by the now ubiquitous Mossad agents, upped their ante against the German occupiers. Florence fell. With the aid of the partisans, Milan, Pisa, Bologna, Verona, and Venice were soon in Allied hands. The Brenner Pass was within reach.

The IDF was slowly being withdrawn to England in preparation for Operation Overlord. Churchill's pressure to drive to Vienna began to slacken as Normandy replaced Vienna in importance.

Field Marshall Kesselring was ordered not to give up one inch of Italian soil to the "Jewish-Allied vermin." But the constant partisan attacks, combined with the drangon's breath of the Allied armies, led Kesselring to bow to the inevitable. He surrendered to the British in late April of 1944. Italy, except for a few small chunks, was free of the invaders. Fresh divisions of the IDF were soon deployed to Italy to replace the veterans, who had departed for Britain.

Alexander then drew up a plan to go for the Brenner Pass. Hitler was starting to lose control. He spent more and more time huddled in his Berlin bunker, as the RAF, USAAF, and, to a lesser extent, RIAF, pounded the capital to rubble.

The Soviets were busy consolidating the Ukraine and liberating the Baltic states. The first horrific discoveries were being made. Babbi Yar, a ravine outside of Kiev, was discovered to contain the bodies of thousands of innocent Ukranian civilians. Whole sections of the Ukraine were devoid of people. It appeared that the worst had come to pass. The Russians, from then on, were far more unwilling to take prisoners. The drive to the west began in earnest.

Harold Alexander planned to make raids into the Balkans to coordinate with the Normandy invasion. There wasn't too much more he could do until more reinforcements from Israel and South Africa were deployed. His best units were going to England, or being earmarked for an attack on the south of France. The new units of the IDF gained their baptism of fire in the seizure of the port of Trieste, where Fascism's grandfather, Gabriel D'unzzio had birthed the nefarious movement.

Yugoslavia hardly required a large Allied invasion. The Yugoslavs, under Tito and Mikhailovich were doing an excellent job of liberating themselves. The Germans still had large divisions encamped at Dubrovnik, Split, Hvar, Vis, and Cetinje waiting for invasions that never would come. The Mossad proved instrumental in gunrunning operations to the Yugoslavs.

June 6, 1944 brouught D-Day. Right on cue, the IDF and the South Africans landed at Sword, and captured the city of Caen (which would have taken another month to take in another universe). Bellowing "Amcha!" and "BuLala!" respectivally, the Israelis and South Africans battled the crack 21st Panzer outside the city. General Anielewitz fought with all the ferocity that he could muster, leading from the front lines. A lucky German shell put an end to Mordachai Anielewitz's illustrious career, but he had managed to keep his promise. Maurice Rose soon arrived to take over.

Hitler held the large German divisions at Calais for another five agonizing days, by which time it was too late. Mid-June had Hitler still thinking that Normandy was a diversion. But by then, the Allied armies had broken out of the beach heads and linked up. Late June and July had the Allies consolidate their territory in northern France, as Brittany was liberated, even as the hedgerows bedeviled the Allied armies.

July 20 had seen Hitler surviving an attempt on his life. The Devil protects his own, they say. Walther Model, Hitler's fireman (named that for his ability to handle crisis situations), was brought in to salvage the disaster now facing the Germans in France.

August saw the German Fifth Panzer Army and Seventh Army surrounded and utterly destroyed in the Argentan-Falaise pocket. The IDF and the South Africans, mostly veterans of Italy, proved instrumental in plugging the hole. 75,000 Germans were trapped. An attempt by Model to break them out failed, and the Germans suffered their worst defeat since the end of the Italian campaign.

The rest of August saw the American, British, Israeli, and South African armies driving across France. Paris was finally free again, and spared the destruction that Hitler had planned for it. Soon, the only thing stopping the Allies from moving past Verdun was the lack of fuel. The Allies had also landed in southern France during this time.

A sore point remained among the Allies. Charles de Gaulle, now back in Paris, angrilly demanded that Madagascar be returned to French control. After much feet dragging, the island was recognized as French again.

The Israelis and South Africans found themselves aiding the British and Canadians in their drive to invest the Channel Ports. Belgium was invaded, with Brussels falling on September 1. Antwerp, the all-important port, fell soon afterwards before the Germans could demolish the docks and wharves. The Israelis and South Africans cleared the Germans out of the 60-mile Schelde Estuary, allowing for the free flow of supplies to and from the key port. Logistics became much more easier. Optmism abounded in the Allied armies. Plans to drive into Germany itself were drawn up.

To the east, the Soviets had entered Poland, where evidence of atrocities to rival Stalin's gulags were discovered. The sight of so many emaciated Polish, Roma, and other Slavic survivors of the extermination camps led many Soviets to gun down every German that they could find.

Meeting with General Eisenhower in Brussels, General Bernard Law Montgomery, who had distinguished himself in the Italian campaign, drew up a new scheme to bring the war to Germany itself, through the generous use of the Allied parachutists who had not seen action since D-Day. The Allied 1st Airborne included the US 101st Airborne, the US 82nd Airborne, a Polish brigade, and the Israeli Trumpledor Regiment. The plan called for the Allied 1st Airborne to sieze a series of bridges and canals after landing along a highway connecting the Dutch cities of Eindoheven, Nijmegan and Arnhem. This was the phase of the venture called Market. Phase Garden called for the South African, Israeli, and British armored forces to drive through this passageway 99 miles to the Zuider Zee, the wheel around to the east, outflanking the West Wall, and go on to seize the Ruhr.

It was a very bold proposal. Eisenhower, itching to use the airborne reserves, approved it. September 17 was the jump-off date. With the Schelde Estuary already cleared, things would go much smoother.

The landings were a success, although intense resistance from the 9th SS Panzer Division was harsher than expected. The Trumpledor Brigade proved instrumental to the Americans in seizing the bridge over the Waal. Israeli and South African tanks soon led the way in the Commonwealth attack, with Maurice Rose at the healm. The 9th SS put up a stuborn fight, it was nothing the victor of El Agheila coulnd't handle. Clearing the new corridor, the Commonwealth forces had managed to clear their objectives. The operation, feared by some Allied strategists as too risky, gave the Allies the Ruhr. Germany's industrial heartland was now in Allied hands.

Sepp Dietrich and Walther Model both commited suicide over their failures. Hitler collapsed on the floor of his bunker in utter agony. "The war is lost!" This was the first time he had uttered those words. Jews had smashed through some of the best of the Whermacht. Jews!

Adolf Hitler, for the rest of the war, remained huddled in his bunker, steadily losing touch with reality. Occasionaly ranting at aids for imaginary offenses, and more than often starring into space glassy eyed, Hitler was no longer really in control.

Germany had been utterly sapped by this latest setback. The fall of the Ruhr was confunded as Allied troops managed to seize the city of Aachen. The bell was rapidly tolling on all fronts. In the east, the Russians were in Warsaw and marching into East Prussia. In the Balkans, the Yugoslavs were laying seige to the German troops still encamped with their Croat allies. The IDF had driven the Germans, with the aid of the British and the Israeli Navy, out of the Dodencanese Islands, and off of Crete. With their landing in Athens, the Germans simply melted away, except for the fanatical Nazis who stayed to get butchered by the Israelis. General Alexander had cleared the Brenner Pass, and was on the road to Innsbruck. Everything was rapidly falling apart.

With the Ruhr secured, and with supplies flowing from Antwerp uninterupted, the Allies began moving deeper into Germany. The Remegan Bridge was seized, and the entire Rhineland was soon lost. Israeli troops took personal joy in ransacking the home where Joseph Goebeles had grown up. Cologne fell. Frankfurt fell. Stuttgart fell. Rotterdam fell. Kassel fell. Amsterdam fell.

By mid-October, Innsbruck had fallen, and Commonwealth forces were on their way towards Salzburg. Numberless Allied soldiers were crossing the Rhein into the German heartland.

Israeli officials met with the provincal Belgian government in late October to discuss the status of the Congo. The Belgians wanted it back. The Israelis reminded the Belgians that their infastructure was utterly devastated. They would have a hard enough time putting themselves back together again, much less running a part of Africa that had been little more than the stomping grounds of the King. In the end, the Belgians reluctanly relented. Until the Congo could gain a responsible self-government, the Congo would stay under their jurisdiction. The government in New Jerusalem quickly passed laws forbidding any civilian settlements in the Congo to underscore the point.

Alerted by Mossad agents, the RIAF and RAF plastered Peenmunde, where research for the V-1 and V-2s, which had ravaged London throughout the year, had gone on. Several German rocket scientists were killed.

The rest of 1944 was spend tearing the Reich to peices. Allied forces in the west were now approaching the Weser River. Israeli and South African forces siezed Emden, Wilhelmshaven, and Bremen. Hamburg was now in sight.

During this time, William Slim began his drive on Singapore, echoing the Japanese advance over two years earlier. The city would fall in January 1945, restoring British pride greatly.

East Prussia was soon lost to the Germans, as the Soviets cut a fairly vengeful swath across that region that would have made Sherman himself take note.

Hitler was no longer really in touch with reality anymore.

Winston Churchill was now pressuring for a drive on Berlin. Winnie had no desire to see the Russians encamped there first. The Commonwealth forces in North Germany now had one final goal: March on Berlin!

For the Israeli soldiers camped in Bremen, this would be their last great trek of the war. To the south, more of their bretheren were marching on Salzburg. Operation Infinity was drawn up. It called for the quick seizure of Hamburg, followed by a sprint to the German capital before the Russians could cross the Oder. It was set to begin in early December of 1944.

Opposing the Commonwealth forces was Major General Johannes Blaskowitz, who had barely made it out of Amsterdam as the South Africans seized the city. His troops were extremely low on morale. Their cause was utterly empty. The Jews were not subhumans, that much was clear. Making his headquarters in Hamburg, Blaskowitz vowed to resist.

Operation Infinity began with a massive air and aritillary bombardment of the German positions in the early morning hours of December 4, 1944. Maccabees and Commandos again led the way in taking out the command headquarters and officers. Mossad intelligence crippled the supply depots that the army depended on. The Israelis and British, flanked by the South Africans and Canadians, had Hamburg surrounded by December 8. General Blaskowitz commited suicide even as the city's commandment, General Alvin Woltz, was forced to surrender.

The fall of Hamburg, followed by news that the Allies had taken Bertchesgaden drove Hitler close to his breaking point. He was now huddling in his bunker, speaking to no one but his mistress, Eva Braun. Army Group South, under the command of Fredrich Schultz, was rapidly being squeezed by the South African forces to his south, and the Franco-American armies to the north.

Allied forces in central Germany had begun to discover the camps. Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, Dauchau.....when the Israeli troops saw images of the emaciated Slavic and Roma survivors, they often lost control. On IDF brigade began gunning down the German troops who were trying to surrender.....until General Eishenhower put out specific orders forbidding such acts.

In late December 1944, Somalia, its native tribes placated by promises of autonomy and by the wealth had sprung up through the new investment in infastructure, was officially annexed by the state of Israel. East Africa was now almost etirely an integral part of the Jewish nation.

The rest of 1944 saw the Allies further desembowel the Third Reich. By New Year's Eve, Commonwealth Forces had made it to Wismar. Soviet forces were clearing Pomerania. The Race to Berlin would soon get very interesting indeed......1945 would see the beginings of a Brave New World, even as the old one lay dying on the funeral pryre of Hitler's wretched Reich.

1945:

As 1945 dawned, the Allies continued to run rampart over a shattered Germany. Soviet forces were in Vienna (to Chuchill's chagrin). American forces entered Madgeburg. The French and Americans were closing in on Nuremburg. And in north Germany, Commonwealth forces were racing to beat the Soviets to Berlin.

Berlin was one of many topics that came up at the Yalta Conference in January 1945. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met to settle the boundaries of postwar Europe.

Berlin remained a contentious issue. Stalin and Churchill both had drawn lines in the sand. Roosevelt tried to negotiate. In the end, they agreed that Poland would gain Pomerania, Silesia, and a godly portion of East Prussia. Roosevelt also got Stalin's word that free and democratic elections would be held in Poland and Eastern Europe (which meant that Communism would be the new dominating philosophy, to say the least, as it turned out).

Berlin would be divided into four quarters: Russian, American, British, and French. Germany would be divided into American, British, and French zones of occupation.

Stalin also agreed, at some point, to enter the war against Japan, which was also on the ropes at this point. The Russo-Japanese War was still a memory, after all.

The failure to agree on who would take Berlin spelled out the message loud and clear: whoever took the city would be drawing a line for the future of the world. Commonwealth forces set out from Wismar, and American forces set out from Madgeburg. The Soviets were busy taking their time consolidating their holds over the Balkans, and weren't in as great a rush to take the city.

The Commonwealth's Twenty-First Army Group, under General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, raced towards Berlin. Israeli, South African, Canadian, and British forces were salivating at the idea of finally putting the Nazi mad-dog down for all time. The Israelis in particular were adamant at wanting Hitler and his surviving minions to pay for their crimes. Himmler had already commited suicide after being captured by South African soldiers, and Goering was in American custody. Goebeles and Bormann were trapped in Berlin with Hitler, whose mind now resembled a child's.

An utterly insane child, to say the least.

The Battle of Berlin occured as Soviet, Commonwealth, and American forces converged on the capital almost simoltaneously. The race for the capital soon became a race for the Reichstag (which was won by Soviet troops). But the Israelis cared heavily about finding the mad-dog (Hitler) who had started this whole war. More than a few of the IDF forces were of German origin. They hadn't forgotton their native country's betrayal.

The fighting was intense. As Lieutenant Joseph Peled wrote in his diary:"By the Brandenburg Gate, as our forces fought their way down the East-West Axis, our tanks came under attack from some Hitler Youth members wielding those sodding rockets....." [panzerfausts] ".....at us. We tried yelling at them to get them to disarm. They of course didn't. Oh, they must have felt so eager to go kill a Jewish 'subhuman' or two. Of course, we had no choice but to machine-gun them. Who in G-d's name sends children to die for a sodding madman? More than that, who in the hell taught them that rubbish in the first place? May G-d have mercy on this sodding country, for we'll give it none." Such thoughts dominated the members of the IDF.

In the end, several Maccabees discovered Hitler's bunker. Blowing down the doors and fighting a confused, desperate battle down the stairwells and in the corridors, the Israelis came across a stooped man with sunken eyes, clad in a ragged greatcoat and wearing a diaper. It was clear that the man had attempted to shave off a mustache, but had done a poor job at it. Blood flowed freely from his mouth, which was open in some horrible, hellish laugh. A blonde woman lay dead beside him. The smell of gunpowder hung lankly in the air. The Maccabees dragged the corpses out with them.

Thus, Adolf Hitler passed onto a far more hotter realm than the Germany he had brought destruction to.

With the end of the war, Africa began to change for the better. In South Africa, the Fagan Commission's recomendation of de-segregation was begininng to be implemented. Prime Minister Smuts embraced those results. He was in little danger of any kind of Afrikaner backlash, as his electoral base was amongst the Enlgish and Jewish colonists.

Israel didn't really have many segregation laws.....enfrancisement had always been based on education and property rights, and the Jews, more than any other group of colonists in Africa, had tried to implement them to actually benefit as many as possible.

Debate had started in Israel on just who constituted a Jew. Numerous tribes, most notably the Tutsis, Ugandan Bantus, and the Mwamunzenti had begun adopting Jewish customs (ranging from a few to many). The Orthodox and Hasidic elements of Israeli society stubornly insisted that a strict biblical interpratation be followed.

But there was a growing number of Jews who were starting to take a more secular approach to life. This manifested itself in the growth of Reform movement, which had spread from the United States. Reformers advocated, among other things, total seperation of "church and state," and relaxing the old tracts frowning on conversions. Besides, many argued, if the natives were denied being recognized as Jews simply due to a lack of Orthodoxy, they could always simply vote away the State of Israel.

Meanwhile, the Knesset voted to accept over 100,000 Polish "DPs" (Displaced Persons). Despite some Conservative resistance, Prime Minister Eshkol got the directive passed. "If we had lacked our beloved refuge, then it would have been us in those camps," said the PM during the floor debate.

Jan Smuts and Levi Eshkol both met in the city of Salisbury in April of 1945 to discuss the future of Africa. Both men had embraced the new United Nations to replace the decrepit League of Nations. Now, they both had several paths in front of them. Israel and South Africa, from the 1930s onward, had developed strong economic ties. The war had led to the industrialization of both nations, and a surging economy in each country as well.

Prime Minister Eshkol suggested that since the great colonial powers of Britain and France had been bankrupted by the great conflict, that they would soon be leaving their colonies. Such a hasty departure could very well create great zones of conflict and civil strife.

Smuts suggested that a new sort of union should be formed to ensure stablity in the expected decolonization rush.

Out of the Salisbury Accords, signed in May of 1945 came the foundation for the entity that has turned Africa into a model of democracy and economic growth. The African Federation was meant to promote a stable zone of economic growth. The State of Israel and the Union of South Africa were the founding members. Each nation in the Federation would remain sovereign, but would be be a vehicle for eventual economic unity. The Federation's Parliament would be in Salisbury, South Africa.

The Kingdom of Ethiopia joined in June of 1945. The Ethiopians were staunch allies of the State of Israel, and the Israelis were already helping Haile Salasie's kingdom develop a stable democratic government, as well as a strong economic foundation. Ethiopian students were taken to the finest Israeli schools.

The Israelis continued to move towards further economic and political enfracisement. The Labour Party led the way, not least because Eshkol saw it as a way to squeeze the Conservatives, who were also forced to embrace the new programs for political survival.

With the defeat of Germany, the Commonwealth's Project Sampson would instead be fully directed at Japan, now in its own death throws. The militarists in the Japanese government, blinded by their own extreme traditions and harsh worldview, refused to yield to the obvious.

Finally, in July of 1945, the first atomic bomb in human history, Herzl, was detonated at Woomera. The world would never be the same again. This was soon followed by the American detonation of its own bomb, Fat Man, at Los Alamos.

In August of 1945, two atomic bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Nagasaki (the Commwealth's), and Hiroshima (the USA). Followed by Stalin's invasion of Manchuria, the Kuriles, and Japan's portion of Sakhalin Island. Stalin, feeling cheated by lacking a zone of occupation in Germany (whose borders were now at OTL's present day borders), settled for the consolidation of the buffer states in Eastern Europe conquered by the Red Army.

The African Federation remained staunchly anti-communist. The Jews in particular disliked it, since they had no reason to love Russia, the nation that had begat their 20th century Exodus to East Africa.

In late 1945, the Israelis managed to get an interim parliament elected for the Congo. Economic development had spread to the Congo as a result of the Israeli mining expeditions. The Republic of the Congo, with its capital in Kinshasha, would join the African Federation as a full member in 1950. Until then, it remained an Israeli Trust Territory.

The Polish DPs began arriving in Israel, settling mainly in Mogadishu. South Africa took in over 250,000 DPs during this time, firmly eroding the already fringe National Party, which folded without much fanfare in late 1945. This came as the members of the IDF began returning home in greater numbers. The IDF veterans formed the bedrock of the new Labour election strategy. In the elections of 1945, they ran dozens of veterans as candidates, and solidified their majorities in the Knesset.

The Federation gained its fourth member in November 1945. The Republic of Liberia had close ties to the United States. For a long time it had been one of two free African nations. Now, it was part of a growing family.
 
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1946-1950:

This time period saw the beginnings of the "Long Boom"-the economic growth that the African Federation would enjoy for over two decades. The heavy industry of both Israel and South Africa played an important role in driving this growth.

Both Israel and South Africa became fully-fledged nuclear powers during this time, with Israel detonating its first bomb in the Indian Ocean. South Africa, with Israeli aid, became a nuclear power by 1947.

Both Israel and South Africa led the push for a strong British Commonwealth to bind the nations of the British Empire together, in light of the independence of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Jordan in 1948.

In 1949, both South Africa and Israel joined the NATO Alliance to counteract the Soviet Union.

In 1950, the Republic of the Congo was admitted into the African Federation, becoming a prospoerous exporter of minerals. The Congolese government allowed for the Israelis and South Africans to maintain scientific research stations in the Congo Basin. Among those working there was Dr. Jonas Salk, whose parents had been recruited to immigrate to Israel in the early part of the 20th century. He continued his research into the polio vaccine, among other things. His main competitor was Dr. Hilary Kaprowski, a Polish exaptriate who had come to Mogadishu in 1945.

At the University of Port Shalom, Edwin Land, another American Jewish immigrant, continued his work into new photography and lumination techniques. His work would make Israel a center of the camera industry.....mirroring the United States, a "Baby Boom" had developed in both Israel and South Africa. This was inspired by the returning veterans of World War II. In Israel, they spread out in new settlements and kibbutzim.

This created a serious environmental crisis. The Knesset, in order to save the Big 5 from extiction, began a program of conservation in the form of vast "Preserves."

South Africa was experiencing a new wave of immigration. More immigrants were comming to South Africa from the British Isles, looking for work and warm climes.

By 1950, the African Federation had created a bullwork of democracy and prosperity on the African continent. Levi Eshkol, in his final adress as Prime Minister, urged the State of Israel to "....continue Israel's reputation as a refuge for all those who are despised because they refuse to bow one certain way." This statement would become the basis for Israel's humanitarian foreign policy in the decades to come.

It was a time of transitions. Jan Smuts died in 1950. The giant of African democracy was interred outside the African Federation Parliament in Salisbury, alongside the recently moved crypt of Josepth Trumpledor. David Ben-Gurion led a Conservative revival in 1950. His first major crises would come in that year, as the communist North Koreans, with Stalin's encouragement, invaded South Korea.

Israel and South Africa both responded by joining the UN force setting out to aid the South Koreans. Veterans in both nations were called up. Maurice Rose would get a chance to shine once again in the mountains and valleys of the Korean Peninsula.
 
"We must look towards Africa. We must look at the State of Israel. We must look at the Union of South Africa. We must look at the members of the African Federation. We must look towards these nations, and ask ourselves: Why can't America enjoy the racial equality that the members of the African Federation enjoy today?"

-Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1959)

1950-1959:

The first year of the 1950s was dominated by the Korean War. On June 25, 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States and the UN decided to intervene.

Israel and South Africa both sent troops to aid the UN force. Maurice Rose was brought out of retirement to lead the IDF in battle.

By August, the situation was becoming desperate. The American Eighth Army had been pushed back to the Pusan Perimeter. The first units of the Israelis and South Africans landed in Pusan in August.

Where the infant American CIA had failed, the Israeli Mossad would succeed. For one, the Mossad had agents who could speak Korean. The influx of fresh Israeli and South African troops is at least one major reason why the NKPA would try and fail to breach the front lines.

Israeli forces under Maurice Rose went ashore at Inchon on September 15, 1950. The IDF began marching with the Americans to Seoul.

The capital of South Korea was recaptured on September 27. The North Koreans had been expelled.

While all this was going on, the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Maccabees were planning their own mission. Led by the elegantly named Moshe Macfarlane David, the Maccabees put a plan in motion to cripple the North Koreans once and for all. Tipped off my the Mossad, David's men made their move in early October, as South Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in a move to reunite their country, the Maccabees ambushed the plane of Kim Il Sung as he attempted to flee to China. The notorious Korean despot died under the guns of David's men, who barely survived the chase back to UN lines.

This continued the essential Israeli strategy for dealing with enemies:Cut off the head, and eradicate the cancer. Klaus Barbie, Reinhard Heydrich, and Ante Pavelich now had company in the bowels of hell thanks to that Israeli maxim.

Without any sort of leadership whatsoever, the NKPA crumbled as Pyongyang fell to UN forces.

The Mossad alerted the IDF that the Communist Chinese were massing on the border. General Rose reported these findings to MacArthur. The Israelis began feeding misleading intelligence to the PLA. The Chinese were planning their first attack on October 25. They thought that they would be facing Republic of Korea (ROK) forces.

In fact, they would be facing the Israeli 12th Armored Division-which included part of Mordachai Anielewitz's old unit. The Israelis prepared for the onslaught. They were aided by two divisions of South African armored brigades. Once again, the two African nations would be comrades-in-arms.

On October 25, the Chinese surged confidently towards what they assumed were the weakly manned ROK possitions. Instead, they encountered the full fury of the Israelis and South Africans, who fought the Chinese to a standstill. Although severely bloodied, the UN forces held.

This effectivaly prevented the American Eighth Army from being exposed to a Chinese attack. Fresh Israeli and South African divisions bolstered the American forces occupying Unsan. The Chinese, sapped by the mauling they had received at the hands of the Israelis and South Africans, failed to give battle. Little stopped the UN forces from occupying the rest of North Korea. Maurice Rose was careful to deploy ROK forces ahead of the IDF as they approached the Chinese boarder.

In early November, the Chinese attacked yet again. This time, they aimed for the American Eighth Army at Chosan. Tipped off by the Israelis, General MacArthur was well prepared to face the 200,000 Chinese troops that swarmed across the borders. Although briefly overwealmed by the sheer numbers that the Chinese possesed, the American line held.

By this time, the Soviets had long cut their losses with the North Koreans. With the death of Kim Il Sung, there was no regeime to reinstall in Pyongyang, of which there was now little hope of ever recapturing. Mao Zedong, although insenced that his troops had failed to drive the UN forces out of Korea, also began withdrawing their support. While no peace treaty would be signed between the PRC and the ROK until the 1980s, the war had been won. Korea was now completely free. The ROK turned into a staunch American and African Federation ally in the UN thanks to their intervention in the war.

The Israeli Ambassador to the UN, former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, drafted a resolution to bring the war to an end. The Soviet Union, boycotting over the body's refusal to recognize Communist China, declined to veto the resolution. ROK forces occupied the high ground above the Yalu River. The PRC reluctantly agreed to a Demiliterized Zone (DMZ) that stretched along the entire Yalu River. This was agreed to on January 21, 1951, with accords in New York and Seoul.

Syngman Rhee, now the ruler of a united Korea, requested several IDF brigades stay behind and train the ROK. This was part of a larger agreement with the African Federation, which included a very lucrative trade deal to boost the Korean economy.

Maurice Rose returned yet again in triumph home to the State of Israel. He retired to the settlement of Yad El, not far from Ramwat Dawid. Ramwat Dawid was now the center of the Israeli Military Accademy (IMA), built around the site of the famous 1914 skirmish between the Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck and the old Jewish Defence Force's raw recruits. A secondary accademy was opened at Fort Maccabee, which would become the main training center for the African Federation's Grand Army in 1955.

1951 saw two new nations joining the African Federation. Libya and Tunisia had been under de-facto Commonwealth control since the end of the North African campaign. Tunisia's independence had been recognized by France only as it came under the African Federation's now sizable military umbrella. Libya, receiving extensive Federation aid in developing its infastructure, saw a major boost when South African engineers, drilling for water, discovered what proved to be a huge reserve of petroleum. Such wealth, when mixed with the mineral wealth of South Africa and the Congo, and the heavy industry of both South Africa and Israel, led to a surging economy.

In 1952, Douglas MacArthur rose his heroism from Korea into the Oval Office, as a Republican.

1953 saw the establishment of the Grand Army, drawn from the military of the different nations of the Federation. This was in reaction to increasing anti-colonial unrest that was erupting in Madagascar, Algeria, Sierra Leone, and Egypt. The nationalists in these nations desired for their nations to become part of the ever growing and ever prosperous African Federation.

The Soviet Union tried their best to influence these movements. Resenting the South Africans and Israelis for their interference in Korea, the USSR wanted willing allies throughout the "Third World."

In 1955, a union between the Gold Coast and British Togo produced the nation of Ghana, under the leadership of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. He immediently took his nation into the African Federation.

The French were facing severe tensions in Algeria, and were trying desperately to contain a revolt on Madagascar. The Malagasy remembered the much more benevolent rule of the South Africans and Israelis during the Second World War very well. In the end, the French were forced to abandon the island, which joined the AF in 1956. That same year, Sudan, recently fully detatched from Egypt, also joined the AF.

At this stage, the African Federation included ten nations. The Federation's Parliament needed a more fuctional way to communicate.

The answer came from the State of Israel. In the 1910s, Polish immigrant L.L. Zamenhof had tried to bridge the gap between the African residents and Jewish settlers through an artificial language. This language, Esperanto, had eased helped ease tensions between the two groups.

Continued by his son Adam (who died in the Shoah in another universe), Esperanto had slowly begun to spread. Mostly confined to the urban centers of Israel, the language had begun to spill over into South Africa before the Second World War.

With the establishment of the African Federation, a new language was needed to bind the Federation together. The Akademio de Esperanto, a language institute in Port Shalom that had existed since the 1930s, began dispatching educators to establish similar centers throughout the Federation. Esperanto continued to spread. In the comming decades, it would become the language that would bind Africa together.

In Algeria, the French had decended into a huge morass in 1954, as nationalists, pro-Federation activists, and French loyalists clashed in a bloody fights across the wretched country. Despite Federation Prime Minister Lumumba's calls for mediation, the French, still stinging over the loss of Madagascar, angrilly spurned all efforts at brokering a cease-fire.

Trouble came for the Federation in 1956. Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Egyptian nationalist army officer, had seized power in 1952 from the corrupt monarchy of King Farouk. Bowing to American and Federation pressure, Farouk was allowed to leave unharmed.

The Jordanians, who remained staunch British allies, went on alert.

Nasser had solicited Federation, American, and British support for the building of the Aswan Dam. All was going smoothly until Nasser signed an arms deal with Czechoslovakia. All western aid vanished, and to raise funds for the project, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.

Nasser dismissed the threats of Western intervention. Unfortunately, on October 29, 1956, British, French, and Israeli paratroopers seized control of the Canal. That same day, the Federation's Grand Army launched an offensive against Egyptian forces along the Sudanese border. Jordanian troops invaded the Sinai Peninsula.

Coalition forces advanced steadily. Their military might was too overwealming. The Soviet Union threatened to intervene. The possibilty of another world war became likely, until the US backtracked and forced the "coalition" into backing down. Federation forces took their time in leaving Egypt.....

In the US, African-Americans, inspired by the stories of equality that blacks in Israel and South Africa enjoyed, began their long campaign for equality.

Meanwhile, the conflict in Algeria was only worsening. The FLN was taking a strident turn for the worse.

The Middle East and North Africa was becoming part of the Great Game that the Cold War brought to the world. In the Middle East, Jordan remained a loyal ally to the UK. Saudi Arabia, bought off with American dollars during WWII, remained generally pro-western. The UK and USA had kept Iran in the western column in the early fifties by installing the Shah.

Sryia, Egypt, and Iraq had become willing Soviet allies, mostly motivated by nationalist tendencies. The Jews of Syria and Iraq had fled en masse to Israel when the Baathists had come to power.

These new Jewish immigrants were Sephardic Jews. The extreme majority of Israeli Jews were Ashkenazi. These new Jews mostly settled in former Somalia, away from the great cities to the south.

The Federation expanded yet again in 1958. Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Guinea, and newly freed Cameroon (having won a three year struggle for independence against France) joined the AF.

Pro-Federation nationalist movements were starting up activity in both Angola and Mozambique. The rebels eyed the great prosperity enjoyed by the super-economies of both Israel and South Africa, and the growing standards of living ejoyed by the other Federation members.

The 1960s would only accelerate the trend towards further African unity.
 
1960-1969:

The 1960s would accelerate the trend towards African unity and prosperity. In 1960, Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, Upper Volta, Gabon, the Congo (the old French-ruled section), the Central African Republic, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast gained independence. The African Federation expanded dramatically again.

The old nations of French Equitorial Africa (along with several other Frenh colonies) were combined again in the Union of Baraka in 1961. It's capital would be in a revitalized Timbuktu. Baraka, an Arabic word which literally means "blessing" (and a Sufi word that refers to a sense of divine presence), the Union (between Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Niger, Chad, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, Benin, Togo, the Central African Republic, and Upper Volta), was meant to give these African nations more representation in the African Parliament. Formerly French Congo was united with the Republic of Congo.

Nigeria, Britain's last colony on the African continent, began to forment due to ethnic tensions between Christians and Muslims. The Federation's Grand Army (mostly Israeli units), was deployed to the nation in 1962 to preempt any spread in tensions. A new constitution, which liberally borrowed from South Africa's and America's, specifically federalized power through checks and balances, secularized the nation, and granted proportional representation to the different ethnic groups.

1962 also saw the war in Algeria come to a shuddering end. Once in power, however, the FLN purged all pro-Federation parties from the new government, making the new nation a one-party state. Dissidents fled to Baraka or Libya. Algeria would remain a trouble spot for many years to come.

In 1963, the Bank of Africa was established. Based in the booming city of Lagos, Nigeria, the BA copied the American Federal Reserve. That same year, the African pound-sterling became the new currency of the AF.

Angola and Mozambique remained hot spots. Portugal, still under a military dictatorship, refused all attempts at Federation negotiation.

In 1964, yielding to Federation pressure, France abandoned its last colony in Africa. The new nation of Djibouti immediately joined the AF.

That year saw Israel secure the Jewish holy sites once and for all. It had already purchased the Dead Sea Scrolls from Jordan in 1947. Now, the State of Israel aimed for something bigger. Approaching the Jordanian ambassador, Prime Minister Golda Meir (whom David Ben-Gurion had once described as the only man in his cabinet), offered to purchase the Western Wall from the Kingdom. King Hussein agreed to the deal; the Israeli offer was very generous.

There was an immediate uproar from the Orthodox community. But Meir defied her Conservative Party "wild men" (as she often called them), and pushed through support for the proposal through the Knesset. Israeli cargo ships began the process in early 1965 of shipping the stones of Saloman's Wall to Eretz Yisrael.

In the Kingdom of Jordan, as the Israeli working crews got moving, they were confronted by the city's old-time Jewish residents. Some even tried attacking the workmen, but were held back by the Jordanian police. After eight months of backbreaking work, the Wall was reasembled in New Jerusalem.

The Orthodox at first refused to visit the Wall; it wasn't in the right spot! But as the decades went on, the Orthodox, who were remined that no Jewish state was meant for the Holy Land until the Messiah came, began to trickle back. An extreme majority to this day refuse to worship at the wall. Many of Jordan's remaining Jews immigrated to Israel over the years due to the Wall's relocation.

The rest of the 1960s was spent attempting to further integrate the Federation. Due to ethnic tensions in Sudan between the Arabs of the north and the African tribes to the south, the country was split between the Republic of North Sudan and the Union of the White Nile. An attempted coup in the Central African Republic by a former French colonial officer named Jean Bokassa was put down by Grand Army units. Bokassa was executed for treason. Tensions in Biafra required the presence of more Israeli peacekeepers. To preempt possible conflict between the Eritrean subjects in Ethiopia, the Eritreans gained their own parliament in 1967 (along the lines of the Scottish and Welsh assemblies in OTL).

With the large-scale discovery of oil in Nigeria, and diamonds in Baraka (in the old Central African Republic), the AF's economy continued to climb. Esperanto became more and more established as Africa's unifying language. [Unlike in OTL, Esperanto combines many more Africanized words in its vocabulary].

Portugal was now heavily involved in the ongoing guerilla unrest in Angola and Mozambique. The Federation threatened to drive the Portugese out of all of their remaining colonies in Africa unless they agreed to negotiate.

The Portuagese, facing bankruptcy from the continuous conflict in the two colonies, agreed to the Kinshaha Accord, signed in 1967. Angola and Mozambique would become Trust Territories of the Federation until self-government could be attained. Huge crowds in Maputo and Luanda gathered to celebrate as the Portuagese flags came down, and the blue, green, and white of the AF rose to replace them. The pattern followed with Angola and Mozambique as it did with the other freed colonies: students to Israeli and South African schools (easily the best in Africa), heavy aid to build up a proper infastructure, and adoption of the Federation's unified economy.

Not a few Portuagese residents of the two former colonies chose to immigrate to South Africa.

During this time, the AF became involved with the conflict brewing in Yeman. Assisted by the British, AF forces crushed the communistic People's Democratic Republic of Yeman. The Yeman Arab Republic was established soon afterwards. During the fighting, which lasted from 1967 to 1968, the RIAF evacuated Yeman's sizable Jewish population, which was stranded in the fighting. Along with the other Sephardic immigrants, the Yemanites, who had been that nation's best jewlers and craftsmen, they settled in special kibbutzim in former Somalia. Mogadishu itself had a heavy Polish presence from the '40s era DPs.

During the 1960s, the AF became in involved in the Space Race. The Federation's first satellite, Smuts, was launched from the Einstein Rocketry Base [OTL's Malindi]. Similar bases were soon constructed in the Congo and Baraka as well.

The Congo and the nearby locales had yielded some frightening results for the Israeli and South African scientists stationed there. In 1965, a would-be Israeli explorer, one Maurice Netanyahu, had sickened and died after exploring Kitum Cave in Mount Herzl [Mount Elgon] National Park in Israel. The devastating disease had caused him to bleed out horrendously in a New Akko hospital room. The disease was named Akko [OTL's Marburg], after 51 people in the city died from the spread of the infection (mostly doctors and nurses in the hospital).

However, the Congo yielded even worse new diseases, particularly in the Ebola region. Ebola Kinshasa [OTL's Ebola Zaire], and White Nile Ebola [OTL's Ebola Sudan] had extremely high fatallity rates. Ebola Kinshasa (with a fatallity rate of 90%) gained its name by killing over 450 people in the Congo's capital in 1968 [Due to the region's higher development than in OTL, the disease spreads faster and causes more fatallities early on]. Federation troops had to be deployed to stop the city from decending into chaos.

Another disease was discovered during this time. It had all begun in the '50s when Dr. Hilary Kaprowski, competing with Jonas Salk for a polio vaccine, had stumbled on a strange sickness in the Congo while working with patients for his new vaccination program. A tribesman was dying of a disease that seemed to be wasting him away. Several villagers tested positive for the disease. In 1969, the Wietzman Journal of Medical Science dubbed the new virus Kaprowski's Disease [OTL's HIV/AIDS], after the original finder of the virus. The disease seemed to do in years what Ebola did in only weeks or days. Doctors from all over Africa began receiving training on how to recognize symptoms in the hopes of containing the spread.

Unfortunately, the disease had already showed up in people such as gays and prostitutes in the great cities of the AF. It was soon established that straight people could catch the disease as well. (It had also apparently spread out of Africa to urban centers in both Europe and North America [due to more westerners visiting Africa due to the more prosperous economy]). Efforts were soon underway in the great universities of Israel and South Africa on trying to procure a vaccine. This wouldn't be remotely successful for several more decades.

Some Orthodox elements in Israel called the new outbreaks God's punishment for moving the symbols of Judaism out of the Holy Land, but fortunately, they were laregely ignored.

Thus the sixties ended for the African Federation with the challenges of a new era layed out clearly in front of them.
 
"Africa was the birthplace of the human race. With the efforts of our beloved Federation, Africa will become the leader of the human race as well......."

-Prime Minister Helen Suzman of the Union of South Africa, in a speech to the Salisbury Parliament, May 1979.

1970-1979

The 1970s saw the last outposts of colonial Africa fall into the embrace of the African Federation. France granted independence to Comoros (including the island of Mayotte) in 1970, which promtly joined the AF. After the collapse of Portugal's military dictatorship in 1974, Cape Verde,, and Sao Tome and Principe gained seats in the Salisbury Parliament. Mauritius and the Seycelles joined the following year. Spain granted independence to Equitorial Guinea, which also joined that year.

In 1970, Gamel Abdul Nasser died suddenly of a heart attack on his way to adress the Arab League [by now little more than a Soviet front group]. His second-in-command, Anwar Sadat, became the President of Egypt.

Sadat began to reverse Egypt's decades of hostility towards the African Federation and the West. He visited Salisbury in 1972 to promote "peace and reconcilation." By 1974, the Egyptians had liberalized their trade with the AF. A year later, Egypt officially came into the Federation.

As part of the deal, Egypt began to liberalize politcally. Dissidents were freed. In the elections for a new Egyptian parliament, the pro-Federation Egyptian Democratic Party crushed the Muslim Brotherhood to attain a solid majority.

Algeria was left alone as one of the few nations in Africa not a member of the AF. Finally, in the spring of 1975, pro-AF members of the army overthrew dicator Houri Boumediene. The former despot died grusomely by firing sqad.

Also that year, Spain granted indpendence to the Rio de Oro. This area was immediently claimed by the Kingdom of Morroco. But the Oro, under the new name of Western Sahara, quickly requested admission to the Union of Baraka.

Morroco threatened war if the Union took in Western Sahara. The union went ahead anyway. Morroco invaded.

The Morrocan War, which only lasted four months, demonstrated the full might of the Federation's Grand Army. Led by the ultra-modern infantry, airborne, and armored units of Israel and South Africa, the Grand Army smashed the Morrocans in every battle, and forced a peace treaty on the Kingdom in late 1975. The Morrocans were shocked to find that instead of being punished with further territorial losses and sanctions, that they were being invited to join the AF.

The King, realizing that this would give his nation access to the mineral reserves that were reported in the former Oro, accepted. Over time, the Kingdom of Morroco reformed into more of a constitutional monarchy.

Africa was now united under a single entity.

In the early 1970s, as a sideshow of the American quagmire in Vietnam, the Maoist Khemer Rouge had begun a campaign of violence against the American backed government of Lon Nol. As the Khemer Rouge neared Phenom Penh, the Israelis decided to act. Not wanting a repeat of the inaction that had doomed so many Slavs in Eastern Europe before WWII, the ships of the Israeli Navy began Operation Rose: the evacuation of southern Cambodia. As Cambodian refugees began to flee their country, the Israeli Navy was there to scoop them up and take them to Israel. ITO agents fanned through Penom Penh, handing out visas to as many as possible (echoing the actions of Swedish diplomat Raol Wallenburg, who rescued many Slavs from their cattle cards by personally handing out visas-he later won the Nobel Peace Prize). In the end, some 500,000 Cambodians were evacuated to Israel. "Little Cambodias" are now common in the big coastal cities.

During this time, the Israeli Navy also rescued countles Vietemese "Boat People" as they fled their homeland. With their devotion to family values and education, these refugees found a welcome home.

The first five years of the 1970s exposed the depth of the Reform/Orthodox split in Israel. The "Radical Reformers" eagerly embraced the "New Laws" of Judaism, proposed by a Tutsi convert named Uriah Tasiru. Tasiru embraced the following "additions" to the Jewish faith:

Openess and Embracing: This New Law basically allowed for fully-fledged conversions to take place without the "restrictivness" of the Orthodox.

Fullness Through Strengh: This New Law called for the "embracement of the martial history of the Jewish people in past, present, and future." The heros of this law include Mordachai Anielewitz, Joseph Trumpledor, and Maurice Rose.

The Brotherhood of Human Goodness: This final New Law basically allowed for fully-fledged "conversion work" to be practised. Tasiru had practised this eagerly, working long and hard to convert his fellow Tutsis to this brand of Judaism.

The Orthodox angrilly refused to have anything to do with this "Gross heresy." Even many Reform Jews felt unconfortable with this new sect of Judaism, as it basically re-wrote whole sections of the Old Testament.

But the Radical Reformers, who were eager to marginalize the Orthodox, embraced Tasiru. Over time, the "Tasiru Sect" of Judaism expanded rapidly, proving popular with the African residents of Israel. The side effect was that a number of these adherents got elected to the Knesset. Elected mainly by the African-dominated areas, they caucused with the Labour Party. This marginalized the Conservatives. If they acknologed this new form of Judaism, they would lose their Orthodox base (the Orthodox were turning to their own parties anyways). But this would permanently ally the African consituents with Labour, turning the Knesset into a monopoly.

The Conservatives, after the death of Golda Mier, acknologed this faith as "perfectly legitamate in our secular democracy of Eretz Yisrael." The words of Menachim Begin did much to keep the "Tasiru Sect" from allying completely with Labour.

Of course, the Orthodox remained outraged. "This insult cannot be tolerated!" thundered MP Meir Kahane. But Kahane was soon marginalized, as his seat went to the Conservative Party in the 1977 elections.

During the latter portion of the 1970s, the pathogens of the Congo were largely contained. Labs worked around the clock to produce cures. Agressive family planning helped prevent the further spread of Koprowski's Disease.

The African Federation maintained a GDP that was reapidly approaching the levels of Western Europe and the USA. Inflation, however, threatened to derail the "Long Boom" for the Europeans, Americans, and Africans.

The Bank of Africa moved quickly to tighten the money supply, causing a recession throughout much of the Federation. However, this did stop inflation from growing worse, and the united economy was well underway to recovery by 1978.

But events in the Middle East threatened to derail the entire World Stage.

Iran, under the Shah, had been a staunch ally of the USA. But political repression and harsh poverty made him ripe for a fall. In 1979, he was ousted by the Ayatollah Khomenei, who denounced the West as a "Great Satan." The Shah fled to Libya with his family and many under dissidents. Iran's Jewish population was evacuated by the Israelis. Khomenei declared an economic boycott on the west, and encouraged Muslim nations everywhere to do the same.

Of course, the AF undermined this by continuing to sell West African and Sudanese oil at regular market prices. All this did was lead to the economic decline of the Islamic Republic.

1979 also saw the USSR invade Afghanistan to prop up a Communist regeime. The USA, still smarting from Vietnam, began depolying aid from Pakistan to bleed out the Russians.

The Israelis, who had a phobic dislike of all things Russian, began gunrunning operations as well.

The 1980s soon rolled around.
 
"The end of the Cold War is a new chance to remake our planet for the best. The African Federation and her allies across the globe will lead the charge for a new dawn of freedom."

-Federation Prime Minister Judah Kaplan, 1989, in his Adress to Parliament.

1980-1989:

By the beginning of the 1980s, scientists in the Congolese, South African, and Israeli labs had managed to stem the outbreaks of Kaproski's Disease. People suffering the disease were given massive doses of "Kaproski's Cocktail," a combination of various drugs. Administered by doctors all over the Federation, Kaproski's Disease was soon contained.

The Ebola strains were a tougher nut to crack. They easily mutated. This was exemplified by the ourbreak of an airborne version of the disease in 1982 in a lab near the Israeli city of Zangwill. Ebola Zangwill only killed monkeys, but it could have easily spread to humans. This caused an uproar, and severe questions in the Knesset.

By 1980, with Federation aid, Yeman had developed into the most progressive state in the Middle East, with a strong trading relationship with the AF (and Israel in particular). But it was still a surprise in 1981 when Yeman applied for membership in the AF.

This caused plenty of debate in the Salisbury Parliament. Many argued that since this was the African Federation, that Yeman's membership was out of the question. But proponents (mostly Israelis), reminded the body that Mauritius was farther away from Africa than Yeman, and that traders from Yeman had long frequented Africa.

After much debate, Yeman would be admitted into the AF in 1986.

Gunrunning operations to the Afghani Mujahadeen continued unabated. Israeli and South African made weapons were soon being weilded by the guerillas as they ruthlessly attacked the Russian invaders.

Iran and Iraq, in the meantime, had gone to war. The Israelis viewed this as an excellent opportunity to weaken the power of both Fundemtalist Iran and the Soviet-friendly regeime in Iraq, led by the brutish Saddam Hussein. The Mossad, in one of their more daring raids, pulled off the destruction of Iraq's nuclear facility of Osirak, and made it look like an Iranian attack. The Mossad also began gunrunning operations to the Kurds in both Iraq and Iran.

In 1985, the Salisbury Parliament voted to implement the Shamir Plan (named after Israeli MP Joseph Shamir). The plan called for a massive long-term plan to "make the Sahara Bloom." Part of the rational was to provide North Africa with cheaper electricity and to give the AF a corner on global food production.

By early 1986, construction had already begun on the Quattara Canal, which would turn the famous Depression into a large salt-water sea. Plans were soon being drafted for other mega-canals to transport water from the Congo to the Nile, and from Lake Nasser to the Meditteranean. Millions of acres of desert would be transformed into usable farmland. The Shamir Plan called for the projects to be completed by the early 2000s.

Oman became the second non-African nation to apply for AF membership. Fortunately, the ice had been broken by the entry of Yeman. The Omanis, to meet membership requirements, reformed their government to allow women to vote. Oman would join in 1988.

The membership of Yeman and the prospective membership of Oman began to alarm King Fahd of ever amoral Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. True, the Mossad had been instrumental in preempting a planned seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979 by Islamic extremists. Fahd was beginning to be alarmed because ideas from the African Federation (and from the liberal regeime in Jordan), had begun to influence Saudi society. Women were beginning to pressure for greater rights. The more liberal clerics were calling for the opening of Saudi society.

Saudi Arabia was no longer even as seccure with its oil reserves, not least because the western nations were buying more petrol from West Africa and the Republic of Sudan.

Unfortunately, a backlash was brewing from the more conservative elements in Saudi society; from the plethora of princes and from the growing fundamentalist movement that viewed the democratic and secular ideals from the AF as threats.

Fahd's government began to crack down on both liberal and conservative elements. This promted outrage from both sides, especially from the conservative princes secretly bankrolling these nefarious movements. The tensions led the Mossad to warn Prime Minister Lazar Prozleman that the tense environment in Saudi Arabia could "lead to the French Revolution in reverse," with theocratic elements taking control.

In other developments, 1986 saw the a peace accord being signed between the Republic of Korea and the People's Republic of China, ending almost forty years of hostilliy. South Africa's UN Ambassador, Steven Biko, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering the Treaty of Pyongyang.

China itself was changing. Deng Xiopang's market reforms had improved the Chinese economy. This led to an upsurge in pro-democracy groups, who were influenced by American, European, and African popular culture and political ideals. This would lead to the massacre of students in Tianneman Square in 1989. China would continue to open up economically, but would remain far more closed politically.

In 1987, after the death of Ayatollah Khomenei, Iraq, its economy in shambles, and Iran, having lost much of its zeal, agreed to end the seven-year conflict.

Meanwhile, the USSR had withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1987. The presence of Israeli arms amongst the Afghani rebels had hardened the anti-semitism that already permeated Soviet society [without the Halocaust, anti-semitism is far more widespread in the USSR]. The Soviet Union, with its economy utterly dilapadated from the Cold War, Afghanistan, and its own economic system, was collapsing, utterly rotton to the core. Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms had led nowhere. One after another, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Albania had overthrown their Communist regiems. The USSR itself was beginning to disentegrate. The Baltic States, Central Asian Republics, and the states of the Caucusus were now rife with independence movements.

Numerous elements in the Soviet hirearchy, influenced by xenophobic and anti-semetic passions, pushed for a crackdown. When Gorbachev refused, he was overthrown in a coup in 1989 orchestrated by several hard-core anti-semites in the army, who viewed his reforms as "Jewish-Imperialist inspired drivel." This led to conflict between the pro-Gorbachev elements in the Soviet Army. Pro and anti-Gorbachev crowds began clashing in the streets of Russia's major cities. Gorbachev himself barely escaped to Finland with his entourage.

Thus, the Second Russian Civil War was sparked. The Baltic States, Belarus, the Ukraine, Modavia, and the Central Asian and Caucusus Republics all took advantage of the growing chaos in Russia itself to declare independence.

Russia proper, by 1989, was a war torn zone in which whole armies clashed in favor of either the now right-wing elements or in favor of the ideals of reform. In some cases, tactical nuclear weapons were used on the opposing sides.

Thus, the 1990s began.....an era that would see the clashes that would decide wether the map would be completely free or stuck with a few tyranical blotches.
 
Note: TheMann deserves credit for several ideas from this decade.

"The New World Order is a multipolar one, but also a democratic one."

-President George Herbert Walker Bush, 1990, in a speech to the Salisbury Parliament.

1990-1999:

The 1990s were decade of great challenges for the African Federation. But this would be the decade that would cement their superpower status for all time.

By early 1990, Russia was in a state of almost total collapse. Anarchy had erupted. Starvation was common in the cities. Columns of refugees snaked away from the rapacious armies fighting every which way.

South Africa invited over 300,000 Russian immigrants that year. Israel, with some reluctance (due to an entrenched phobic hatred of everything Russian), took in 75,000 Russians, settling them in the far north of the country.

As Russia collapsed, the UN Security Council voted to send in peacekeeping forces to Siberia and Central Asia, to prevent Russia's vast arsenal of WMDs from falling into the wrong hands. Russian scientists were hired away by the AF, EC, and USA.

President Bush authorized American troops to secure Russian WMD sites in Siberia. Japan used the chaos further north to justify amending their constitution to rearm. Chinese forces were massing in Manchuria.

With the eyes of the world turned north, Iraq's Saddam Hussein made his move. In April of 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and occupied Kuwait, using the excuse of unpaid debts (when in fact, the opposite was true; Iraq owed Kuwait money). The Kuwaiti Royal Family barely made it out of Kuwait City ahead of the Republican Guard. The Iraqis went on an orgy of rape and pillaging.

Unfortunately, Saddam had grossly misjudged the international situation. His actions threatened the states of the Gulf, all allies of the African Federation.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was thrown into crisis. To appease the growing anger of the conservative elements, the King allowed for the militia of wealthy zealot Osama bin Laden to be deployed against the Iraqis. Bin Laden, the son of one of the Kingdom's most highly paid building companies, had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

This caused strong protests from the liberal elements in Saudi society. So, King Fahd also invited the West to contribute troops to protect his country.

The nearest bloc of western countries was the AF. The Salisbury Parliament authorized the deployment of the Grand Army to the Kingdom.

The USA and Europe, preoccupied with the situation in Russia, were prevented from sending large numbers of troops. Most of the fighting would have to be left to the African Federation.

The full strength of the Grand Army would be put on display for all the world to see. Israeli and South African armored and air brigades, Nigerian, Barakan, and Egyptian heavy infantry units, and multiple divisions from all over the rest of the AF. They were deployed well away from Bin Laden's Militia of God. The MOG was stationed in front of Medina and Mecca.

It would prove in the long run to be a fatal mistake.

Deployed to bolster the collapsing Saudi lines that were being driven south from newly captured Khafji, the Israeli 9th Armored Division and the South African 3rd Armored Grenadiers pulled no punches against the Iraqis. Israeli, South African, and Nigerian Eleazar IIs (similar to OTL's F-15) swept the Iraqis from the skies. Soon enough, the Iraqi advance had been stopped cold.

Meanwhile, Mossad agents were being slipped into Iraq to foster revolts from the Shiite and Kurdish citizens who had long been persecuted by Saddam's Sunni dominated regeime. Egyptian, Sudanese, White Nile, and Ethiopian units were deployed to Jordan to blunt a possible Iraqi incursion there.

By May 1990, the line was fully stable. AF forces recaptured Khafji on May 4. By May 6, the last Iraqi units had fled into Kuwait, which had erupted in a general revolt against the Iraqis.

May 8 saw the IDF lead the charge into Kuwait. Two days later, with Saddam's air force no longer in existance, Kuwait City was liberated. The streets were filled with celebrating civilians, who greeted the AF forces with flowers and cheers.

With Kuwait liberated, the AF's Ministry of Defense authorized the forces there for a drive on Baghdad.

It was as the first Israeli and South African troops crossed the border that they ran into Saddam's chemical and biological arsenal. This was the result of a crash program that the USA and UK had assisted with during the Iran/Iraq War. Over 4,000 frontline Af troops, mostly Israelis and South Africans perished.

International condemnation was swift. The Israelis and South Africans warned that a similar attack would bring about a mushroom cloud on Baghdad.

Saddam contented himself by launching his scud missles into Saudi Arabia and Jordan. But it was too little, too late. AF planes systematically destroyed every Iraqi military and industrial target that they could find. The retreating Republican Guard was utterly massacred while retreating from Kuwait to Basra, which soon became known as the "Highway of Death."

Meanwhile, Bin Laden's MOG causing trouble for the Saudis. The MOG, which numbered some 70,000 young men (mostly Saudis), was refusing to vacate their positions in front of Mecca and Medina. Instead, they retreated into the city in a bid to solidfy their possitions. A mole in the Saudi defense ministry alerted Bin Laden that Saudi troops planned to arrest him. So he ordered the MOG into the Holy Cities. A stalemate ensued.

Basra fell in late June. Iraq might have had a large army, but it was poorly led and poorly armed. AF forces were soon being held back only by the masses of surrendering Iraqi troops.

Saddam was being forced to deal with a huge Kurdish and Shiite revolt in his nation. The AF took the opportunity to be the first bloc of nations to recognize the Republic of Kurdistan and the Republic of Basra, a Shia state.

For Saddam, the bell was now tolling. Attempting to flee Baghdad to one of his numerous hideouts, his car was ambushed by a Shiite militia that was operating from Saddam [Sadr] City, a slum in Baghdad.

They had been tipped off by the Mossad, of course.

Iraq was now completely collapsing, mirroring the fall of Russia to the north. The opposing armies in the Second Russian Civil War had laregely bled out. Right wingers, led by ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, seized power briefly in Moscow, only to be pushed from power when it was leaked by the Mossad that Zhirinovsky was not purely Russian as he claimed, but that he was of both Khazakh and Jewish extraction. Zhirinovsky's body was found crumpled in Red Square not long afterwards.

Lithuania, in the meantime, had seized Kalliningrad, forcing the Russian residents to accept South African offers of a safe haven. In Siberia, the residents of American-occupied Magadan and Vladivostok petitioned to become full U.S. territories.

Congress had debated long and hard about this. President Bush was not eager to repeat Vietnam on the Russian steppes, but he wanted America to have the ability to disable Russia's vast and now abandoned arsenals of WMD. In the end, both cities became UN Trust Territories of the USA. This came as Siberia split from the rest of the nation to form the Union of Siberia, an authoritarian and xenophobic state. European Russia became the Republic of Russia, a much reduced state depending on European aid to stay afloat. Mossad agents tipped off American and European forces as to the location of the former Soviet missle silos and WMD labs, which were gradually hunted down and destroyed.

Japan, in the meantime, flexed her muscle by taking control of Sakhalin Island and the Kuriles. The Russian residents left en masse for the USA and Canada, which offered them assylum. President Bush recognized that a "New World Order" had formed-one in which the strong democratic blocs (America, Europe, and Africa), would be fighting rogue nations to establish stability and prosperity. Japan also proposed to the US that the two nations establish a "joint-occupation" over the Kamchatka Peninsula. This was eventually accepted by Congress, although it became clear that Japan was building extensive "settlements" in the Siberian vastness under US protection.

The Chinese protested angrilly. Tensions rose over Taiwan and Siberia. America was on alert.

By July of 1990, Iraq was divided into three nations. The Sunni Union of Iraq, the Shiite Republic of Basra, and the Republic of Kurdistan, centered in Kirkuk. Tensions had immediently risen between the Kurds and Turks. In the end, the Israelis brokered a deal in which they would gurantee Kurdistan's borders with Turkey. The Turkish government began "unofficially" encouraging Kurdish immigration to their "homeland."

By this time, the Saudi military had launched an attack on MOG possitions outside of both Holy Cities. The fighting unleased gross civil unrest throughout the country. At the request of Basra, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, AF units (mostly Yemmeni and Omani troops), were stationed in those respective nations to prevent violence from spilling over.

The Saudi Civil War, fought between religious fundemantalists and more secular reformers, was a brutal one. Bankrolled by their princely backers, the fundementalists fought tooth and nail against the reformers, who had lacked the resources that the religious extremists had. The MOG convinced many Saudi soldiers to defect to their cause of "purifying the lands of Islam of western decadence."

Militias clashed in the major Saudi cities, with the fundemtalists gaining the edge. The House of Saud fell like the House of Usher. King Fahd died at the hands of his own bodyguards. The princes of Saudi Arabia fled to North America and Europe, leaving their homeland to descend into chaos.

Finally, the UN authorized direct intervention in the conflict. AF forces began moving in to destroy the forces of the MOG and their extremist allies. By the time that the fighting ended, in October of 1990, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was no more. A loose network of sheikdoms and emirates had emerged across the Arabian peninsula. The only ones left were ruled over by the pro-reform and pro-democracy Arabians (Bin Laden having been killed by the Commandos and Maccabees in September), who began requesting membership in the AF.

In the end, in November of 1990, after meeting in Riyadh, the liberal sheiks and emirs announced to formation of the Union of Arabia, a confederation of emirates and sheikdoms that would gurantee basic human rights and freedoms, including women's rights. Only then was the Union granted membership in the AF. This was followed by Jordan joining the AF in January 1991.

By early 1991, with the AF having multiple members from off the continent, the Salisbury Parliament in favor of the Truxwald Proposal (named after South African MP Marius Truxwald):

-The name of the African Federation, after July of 1991, would be changed into the Federation of Democratic Nations (FDN).

-The currency of the FDN (after January of 1997) would be the Federation pound stirling.

-A Constitutional Convention would be held in Salisbury to hammer out a new document to further unify the FDN.

-A new capital would be built more easily accesable to the new members of the FDN.

In the spring of 1991, construction began on the city of Baraka near Bangui. It seemed the perfect name for a new capital of this sort of union. By May 1991, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kurdistan, and the Republic of Basra had all requested admission into Federation. All woud be integrated by in by 1993.

1992 saw Nelson Mandela retire after three terms as South Africa's president. The African National Congress narrowly lost power to the South African Progressive Party, led by Journalist Rian Malan. He selected Thabo Mbeki and Steven Biko as the new vice-presidents. Mandela was awarded with his own Federation stamp. He had done well for a man who had started as a prosperous farmer, and the Federation always honored its heros.

1992 also saw New York Governor Mario Cuomo defeat GHW Bush for the presidency. With a lackluster economy, (and no steller American victory in the Gulf War to even give him an early edge, it was as close to a cakewalk as campaigns come in American politics).

Bush had been challenged in his primary by paleoconvervative Patrick Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. Buchanan had nearly won the New Hampshire primary. His thinly veiled attacks on the "Israeli and African moneymen who dominate our political system") saw anti-semitism rearing its ugly head yet again amongst populist politicians on both of the far ends of the American political spectrum.

1993 saw the establishment of the Union of West Africa between Nigeria, Ghana, the Gambia, and Cameroon. Nigeria, as one of the most prosperous states in Africa after Israel and South Africa, was trying to show its political weight in the new FDN.

Also that year, Lebanon would finally taste freedom. In the 1980s, the Syrians, encouraged by the Soviets, had sparked a civil war between the Shiite, Sunni, and Maronite Christian communities. Syrian forces had occupied that nation. But by 1993, with African and Jordanian diplomacy, the conflict had come to an end.

The FDN warned the Syrians that they would enforce UN resolutions calling for their withdrawl through an armed attack. After whitnessing the Gulf War, the Syrians had no desire to suffer the same fate as Iraq. Syrian troops left the nation, and in 1994, Rafiq Hariri became President, promtly taking his nation into the embraces of the FDN.

Throughout the 1990s, a new issue began to haunt Africa. Global Warming was starting to make things tedious for residents of the old AF. From droughts in Israel and South Africa to the creeping sands in Baraka (even as the Shamir Plan made them bloom), and forest fires in the Congo sparked new concerns about the impact of man on the environment (with the industrialization of Africa, Global Warming is starting to have an earlier effect).

The Salisbury Parliament passed new laws mandating the programs to curb gasoline use and cap carbon emmissions. This meant with strong protests among the MPs from Libya, West Africa, Arabia, the Gulf nations, and Sudan. To compensate them, the new laws mandated that the centers of manufacturing for alternative fuels and such would be in the nations most effected by the transitions.

Research into fussion power was among the initiatives started by these programs.

In 1995, the European Union and FDN announced plans to build as massive suspension bridge over the Streight of Gibralter, to symbolize the new prosperity that the two zones enjoyed. The European Union had adopted many of the reforms that had made the businesses of Africa flourish. Now, they were the FDN's biggest trading partners.

Not to be outdone, the USA, Canada, and Mexico, the founders of NAFTA, all signed free trade accords with the FDN. President Cuomo wanted his nation to be at the center of another competitor for the FDN and EU. This had led to a backlash amongst the far right in the 1994 elections, but his liberal policies had brought greater prosperity for the USA, and by extension North America. He would beat Jack Kemp in the 1996 by a fairly healthy margin. Gradually, the nations of Central America and the Caribbean would also enter NAFTA.

The last few years of the twentieth century was spent further integrating the world. An international high-speed railroad would be opened in 1998, connecting London and Cape Town, running through Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo, Khartoum, Tel Aviv, New Akko, Jerusalem, Kinshasa, Luanda, Walvis Bay and Keetmanshoop. A second arm of it would be opened in 2003, running from Cape Town back to Mamodan via Port Elisabeth, Durban, Johannesburg, Bulawayo, Salisbury and Beira. Tourism and trade boomed.

With European aid, the Republic of Russia (including only European Russia by this point), reformed into a democracy, and a free market economy. Central Asia, with FDN and European aid, also began the same sort of reforms. By 2000, Russia, Chechneya, Armenia, Turkey (which was forced to make amends for its genocide of the Armenians in order to become a candidate nation), the former Warsaw Pact nations, and Khazakstan were officially candidate countries for EU membership, while the rest of the former Central Asian SSRs began to looke towards FDN membership.

All of this came as Yugoslavia continued to go the way of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Starting with Slovenia and Croatia, and continuing with Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bosnia, Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians fought each other for over nationalistic and tribalistic squables. Franjo Tudgman of Croatia and Slobadan Melosevic of Yugoslavia were the biggest offenders to the international community. NATO forces, comprising mostly of Israeli and South African forces, had already intervened in 1995 to prevent the Serbs from slaughtering innocent refugees at Sebrencia. In 1999, Israeli and South African troops led the way in toppling Melosovic, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September 1999. Millions of ethnic Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, and countless others were offered assylum in Israel and South Africa, as well as in the Egyptian and Barakan agricultural colonies.

In 1999, twenty years after the fall of the Shah, the Second Iranian Revolution removed the Mullahs from power, in scenes that made the fall of Houri Boemediene, Saddam Hussein, Slobadan Melosovic, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky look like a walk in the park. The new Republic of Iran reformed into a peaceful democratic state, and became a close ally (though not a member) of the FDN. Membership talks began on a low level, but for the time being, Iran was content to act as the bridge between the FDN and Asia.

India during the course of the 1990s, had begun the process of scrapping it's monsterous beauracracy. By 1999, India was a huge trading partner for the FDN. Indian immigrants to Israel and South Africa began increasing. That year, India also gained Most Favored Nation status with the US when it came to trade, something that the tensions between China and the US negated.

By the year 2000, the world was largely a peaceful one. The nations of North America were preparing to adopt the US dollar as their currency. Israel and South Africa remained centers of freedom and prosperity, being labled by both the UN and Economist as the number 1 and 2 places to live in the world, respectivally. 45 to 50 million Jews (depending on who you ask constitutes a Jew) resided in the world, free from the spectre of persecution for the first time in millenia, with over 80% living in Israel (and the rest remaining scattered in North America, South Africa, and Australia). The Shamir Plan had kept its promises, and the Shahara was blooming. Settlers from all over the FDN (and from Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia) were moving the cheap plots of land among the lush greenery. The Gibralter Bridge remains under construction, along with the International Space Station (with a heavy degree of FDN contributions). The glass towers and broad, leafy avenues of the new FDN captial, Baraka, gleam a healthy glow, as though to symbolize Africa's status as a beacon of light and justice.

2000 saw the Union of Iraq finally join the FDN, a sign that perhaps swords would finally be beaten into plowshares.

That year, Vice President Gephardt rode to healthy US economy and peaceful global situation to the White House over Senator John McCain of Arizona.

Tensions still exist, however. Pakistan and India continue to glare at each other with nuclear weapons. The feifdoms in the Union of Siberia remain frozen hellholes. And international observers speak of a probable showdown between the People's Republic of China on one side, and of the USA, Japan, and Korea on the other.

But the world is largely stable, largely prosperous, and (for the most part), free. The 21st Century, the world's intellectuals argued, would eventually lead humanity to an age of peace.
 
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"Democracy is a right to be fought for, and not an institution to be trampled on....by anyone......"

-Federation Prime Minister Jonas Obawe, in his 2007 Adress to the Barakan Parliament.

2000-2009:

As the 21st Century dawned, the nations of the ever prosperous Federation of Democratic Nations relaxed in the afterglow of the bountious 1990s. The fruits of peace were very enjoyable. From the expanding agricultural colonies of North Africa to the confortable urban centers all over the FDN, an African and Middle Eastern version of the Era of Good Feelings was in full swing. South African and Israeli movies played to crowded theatres around the FDN. Lagos, Cape Town, and Port Shalom became the new ceners for the mostdaring designs, as African, Asian, and European styles were liberally combined in the spirit of Marc Chagall's paintings.

In 2002, the members of the NAFTA trade bloc adopted the U.S. dollar as their currency. Idle speculation of a possible political union remained idle, as no one in Canada or the US was ready for a version of the Barakan Parliament, although Mexico's Vicente Fox continued to push hard for a North American version of the EU and FDN.

South America as a whole remained prosperous. Trade with the FDN and NAFTA had led to growing economies all over the continent. Despite the attempts of clowns such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to throw monkey wrenches in the geopolitical situation of the day. Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia were receiving technical aid from both the USA and FDN.

Chavez, however, would foister a backlash against "The Imperialist money lenders in Washington and Baraka." Bolivia and Peru elected similar governments to his in 2002. An attempt to overthrow Chavez in 2003 (backed by the USA and the FDN), failed.

By contrast, an FDN-backed coup in Syria sucessfully removed the Assad dynasty from power. A new democratic government assembled in Damascas, and promtly petitioned to join the FDN. After technical aid and "reconstruction" of infastructure, Syria would join in 2005.

In 2004, the Republic of Iran declared war on Afghanistan after yet another Iranian diplomat was murdered in Herat by agents of the theocratic Taliban. Such actions had brought the two nations to the verge of war in 1999, before the Second Iranian Revolution. Now, the gloves would come off. The Barakan Parliament offered its aid to the Iranians, who accepted.

Unfortunately, this touched off a crisis with one of the Taliban's few allies-Pervez Mushareff's Pakistan. The Pakistanies weren't eager to be surrounded by the power of India on the one side and the FDN and its allies on the other. Pakistan mobilized its army, and stationed them close to the border with both Afghanistan and India.

The 2004 Afghan War brought the Grand Army's full might on display yet again. By the latter part of the year, the FDN/Iranian-backed Northern Alliance, under the command of Achmed Shah Massoud (who had survived far longer than in another universe), soon entered Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. The ubiquitous Mossad agents assisted in the capture of Mullah Omar, along with several of the old Iranian clerics who had barely beaten the lynch mobs in 1999.

It was during this time that illegal immigration from the Union of Siberia and Manchuria into America's Siberian Trust Territories became a major controversy. Stories of PLA soldiers gunning down desperate would-be refugees caused outrage amongst the American public at large. Warlords in the UOS were the targets of many Special Forces operations, among other things.

In late 2004, Massoud called a Loya Jurga to vote on a new constitution. Afghanistan, under his leadership (and with extensive aid from the FDN), finally began to recover from decades of war and repression. Roads, schools, hospitals, and other African luxuries were being rapidly imported. Afghanistan now joined Iran as a staunch ally of the FDN.

Pakistan remained a problem for several reasons. For one, the Saudi expatriates who had been driven from their homeland after the Saudi Civil War had mostly fled there. Groups such as al Qaida ("the base"), and the Sons of bin Laden operated in the North-West frontier Province, and recruited shamelessly from the madrasses and mosques throughout the country. With the Union of Arabia cracking down on Wahabism, Pakistan, along, to a lesser extent, with Indonesia, became the focal point of Islamic extremism. The Hambali became one of the more infamous of these "new terrorists), especially after his bombing a Bali nightclub frequented by Australians in 2005 and the Israeli and South African embassies in Jakarta in 2007. The Hambali was captured in 2009, and sentensed to death soon afterwards.

May of 2004 saw Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Malta, Cyprus, and Slovenia officially join the EU. As the Balkans simmered to a historical lull in violence, the Republic of Russia and the Republic of Khazakstan negotiated 2015 as their date of entry into the EU, along with Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, and Chechneya.

Azerbaijan, by contrast, applied for membership in the FDN. That nation, after settling its border disputes with Armenia, entered the FDN in 2007.

The Middle East was settling down into its new situation. The fifties-era plans for revitalizing Baghdad by Frank Lloyd Wright were dusted off and applied with full enthusiasm. Massive deselization plants, modeled closely on the original Benghazi facility, began terraforming portions of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Jordan in the spirity of the old Shamir Project. Massive solar plants went up all over the Middle East. Lebanon's Bekaa Valley became the site of major housing and aqueduct projects. The International Railway Line (IRL) was extended to Baghdad, Riyadh, Tehran, and Alma-Ata.

The 2008 Olympics were held in Cape Town. China remained to closed off to even consider granting the '08 games to Beijing. Instead, Africa was honored with its third Olympiad (after the 1968 Lagos Olympics and the 1996 New Jerusalem games).

In Siberia, the situation remained tense between the Chinese on one side and the Japanese, Koreans, and Americans on the other. Japan had rapidly expanded its colonies in the Kamchatka Peninsula, to the protests of China. The American military bases at Magadan and Vladivostok were strenghened. A new mini-Cold War had developed between China and the United States. The Chinese, during the 2000s, were forced to contend with unrest in Xianjing from the Uighirs. Every time the Chinese introduced a resolution condeming the Japanese and Americans for their "disgusting imperialism" in Siberia, the Japanese countered with resolutions demanding that the Chinese halt persecution of its Uighir and Tibeten minorities. To counteract the charges of "imperialism," the Japanese UN Ambassador, at the culmination of a fearsome debate with his Chinese counterpart in early 2009, pulled out satellite images of the continued Chinese build-up in Manchuria. "You can run, Mr. Ambassador, but you cannot hide," became the new catchprahse of the year.

The UN Security Coucil's Permanent Seats (numbering only four since the collapse of Russia), finally expanded in 2009. With American and British sponsership, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, and India gained permanent seats. The Democratic Bloc was dramatically strenghened.

As 2010 rapidly approached, the divisions between the Free World and the "Tyrant's Bloc" would become more and more clear. A confrontation was bound to occur sooner or later.
 
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Note: Credit to this post also goes to TheMann for his excellent ideas, which I was able to use a majority of for this latest decade.


"This newest struggle between the forces of good and evil must end in Ayman al Zawahiri's complete and utter destruction."

-Anwar al-Husseini, Egypt's Ambassador to the UN in a speech to the Security Council after the devastating terror attacks of 7/7/17.

2010-2019

2010 opened with massive celebrations in both Israel and South Africa, as both nations celebrated the 100-year-anniversary of the granting of their Dominion status. Queen Elizabeth II was greeted by roaring crowds of both African nations during her royal visit.

On February 28, 2010, the Gibralter Suspension Bridge was completed after 15 years of work. Moroccan Prime Minister Mohammed Al-Kuan and Spanish Prime Minister Hector Salvador would officially open the 31-mile-long bridge on April. With 16 lanes for highway traffic, along with two IRL lines cross it. To further celebrate

Afghanistan had finally acheived full stability, as Prime Minister Massoud finally retired. Israeli agricultural aid bore fruit as Afghanistan's infamous opium fields were plowed over.

That year, Turkmenistan joined the FDN, while Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgestan contented themselves with observer status in the Barakan Parliament.

Pakistan fortefied her borders, and tried to hunker down against the spread of the democratic winds blowing through the region.

In the Far East, Japan officially annexed the Kamchatka Peninsula, to harsh Chinese condemnation. Tensions increased dramatically.

However, the events that would cause some of the most contentious trouble on the World Stage in this decade came in South America. A political rival assasinated Hugo Chavez while he was reviewing a military parade. This led to a brutal three year civil conflict as various militias attempted to seize the country.

Finally, in 2013, Brazil drafted a UN resolution to send peacekeepers into the rapidly desintegrating country. American, Mexican, Canadian, and Brazilian troops enter the country in August 2013 to destroy the militias. However, the Venezuelans don't trust either the North Americans or the Brazilians. Venezuela's UN ambassador drafts a resolution asking the FDN to send a peacekeeping force instead. After due deliberation, the Barakan Parliament votes to send in a substantial force-a force of 45,000 South African, Israeli, West African, Barakan, and Arabian troops. The Brazilians and North Americans withdraw in October 2013.

This causes somewhat of a backlash in the United States. Senator William Savi (R-ID), called the withdrawl "a shamless kow-tow to the rivals of these United States." Savi, a nasty man and closet anti-semite, was the darling of the far-right. Most Republicans refused to associate themselves with him at all.

By 2014, Venezuela had stabilized. Brazilian President Luis Mila de Silva Dirani, in a conference organized in Santiago, Chile, called for a South American organization to compete with the European Union, NAFTA zone, and the FDN. This mementous conference led to the signing of the Rio Accords in 2015, calling for the establishment of a legislative body to meet in the city of La Paz, Bolivia, modeled off the the FDN's Barakan Parliament. The plan called for the peso to become the continent's new currency by 2020, and for the South American Confederation to assemble in the La Paz assembly by 2018. Brazil, Argentinia, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador became the founding members of the SAC.

May 1, 2015 saw the European Union expand yet again, with the Republic of Russia, Turkey, Montenegro, Belarus, Bosnia, Khazakstan, Chechneya, Armenia, Georgia, and the Ukraine finally joining as full members. Moldavia took the opportunity to join itself with Romania (which had joined in 2007).

2015 also saw the United States return to the Moon, laying the groundwork for Tranquility Base, the first permanent human settlement. Scientists from the EU and the FDN were also stationed there. Plans for an international mission to Mars by 2030 were soon being layed out in Baraka, Brasillia, Brussels, Tokyo, Canberra, and Washington.

By 2016, other than the tense situations in Pakistan and China, the world truely was a peaceful place. Vietnam began moving towards free market reforms, and finally fully buried the hatchet with the United States with a free trade agreement in May 2016.

Unfortunately, that played into the hands of the "Nativist Wing" of the Republican Party. The ideological heirs of Barry Goldwater and Phyliss Schafly, the Nativists used the discontent among the Republican base to give Bill Savi a shocking win over the incumbent Republican President, Mitt Romney. Romney angrilly refused to endorse Savi at the Republican convention, and led the group Republicans for Warner, referring to the campaign of Virginia senator Mark Warner.

The presidential election of 2016 was never really close at all. Slvi's campaign, already far behind in the polls, suffered a fatal blow when Savi was cought remarking to a reporter from The American Conservative: "Yeah, the f*cking Jews, n*ggers, and sand n*ggers have total control over everything in this whole damn country.

On election night, Mark Warner became the first American presidential candidate to win every state since George Washington's unanimous victory in the late 18th century. Savi was eventually arrested in Boise for drunk driving, where he made yet another anti-semitic rant to the arresting officer.

No great loss.

2016 saw the FDN suffer directly from the attacks of Ayman al Zawahiri's al Qaida. Zawahiri, an Egyptian expatriate who had fled Egypt in the 1980s to Saudi Arabia, and from there to Pakistan, organized a devastating attack on the IRL's Gulf Line not far from Dubai on March 11. 208 people died as the train derailed at 185 miles per hour.

Pervez Mushareff was immediently accused of aiding an abetting terrorism. Al Qaida claimed responsibility.

Indian Prime Minister Shami Aiwase demanded that Mushareff root out and destroy the "barbarians who would perpatrate such an attack." The Pakistanis dragged their feet on the issue.

Then came September 5, 2016.

That day, forty bombs detonated in Mumbai, killing over 700 Indians. The same day, al Qaida gunmen opened fire on the Indian Parliament while it was in session, killing 4 MPs.

Ayman al Zawahiri again claimed responsibility. The attacks had caused their intended efftect. Mob violence had broekn out in India against Muslims. The Indian Army was deployed to stop the violence, which lasted for weeks. Prime Minister Aiwase offered direct compensation to the victims of the mob violence, and offered them the chance to leave for another nation if they so desired. In the end, some 600,000 Indian Muslims immigrated to Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Yeman, settling in the big cities and agricultural colonies.

The Barakan Parliament began rushing through anti-terror legislation. The nations of the FDN began severing diplomatic relations with Pakistan. The Barakan Parliament also passed a "total embargo" on the Pakistanis until al Qaida was rooted out of that nation.

Pakistan's economy, which was dependent on trade from the FDN and their allies, began to collapse under the strain.

In 2017, al Qaida would pull the attacks that would doom both it for all time.

On July 17, 2017, suicide bombers attacked a luxury hotel in Mogadishu, killing 24 people. Similar attacks were launched in Cape Town, Maputo, Port Shalom, and New Jerusalem. On that terrible day, some 450 people were killed.

The Barakan Parliament's action was swift. The entire body voted unanimously for a declaration of war on Pakistan. Iran and Afghanistan soon followed.

On July 25, the Israeli and South African navies began shelling Karachi. Iranian Eleazar IVs began attacking Pakistani air bases in the Northwest Frontier Province.

Ayman al Zawahiri was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Quetta. Mossad agents arranged for Mushareff to die in an ambush by rivals in the Pakistani military.

Pakistan then collapsed into the same chaos that had torn apart Russia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Saudi Arabia. Al Qaida's de facto head, Jehangir Mashar al-Ramadi was killed by the Maccabees in the Kyber Pass on August 8.

Finally, Pakistan sued for peace. Troops from Baraka, Arabia, Basra, and West Africa were stationed throughout the country until democratic elections could be held.

In November 2017, Pakistan gained its first democratic goverment in decades. President Mahmoud Letani would be sworn in on January 10, 2018. FDN aid began pouring into the devastated country.

The Pakistani War finally became the cataylst for Iran and Afghanistan becoming full members of the FDN in 2018. Pakistan became an associated member of the organization, gaining observer status that same year.

That same year, the first hydrogen fuled jetlineer, the African Aeorospece Type 415, entered the fleets of El Al, British Airways, Royal South African Aiways, KLM, and Emirates Airways. Flying at Mach-2, and with a range of 9,000 miles, the plane soon becomes yet another symbol of African strength and vitallity.

The airforces of the FDN also saw a major update in their jet fighters. The hydorgen engines were utilized for the Israeli Eleazar V, the South African Impala F-70, and the West African K7 Avenger. All would enter active service in 2025.

2019 saw the invention of the K-1 Formula at the Weitzman Technical Institute. The new formula proved its weight in gold, as it was able to make barren land bloom in a matter of weeks with a minimum of water. The inventor of the formula, Dr. Paul Rosenwieg, would gain the Nobel Prize for this invention.

The invention of K-1 led to the Kaplinsky Plan (named for Israeli MP Nicholas Kaplinsky), which was was adopted by the Barakan Parliament. It called for the complete irrigation of the Rub-al-Khali, the remainder of the Sahara, the Kalahari, and the deserts of Iran. Along with increasing the agricultural ouput, it's hoped that further immigration from nations such as Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and Pakistan can draw down the targeted pools of potential al Qaida recruits, namely young Muslim men.

2019 saw yet another technological breakthrough from the Israelis. On July 8, 2019, researchers at the University of New Akko announced that they have perfected an Irradiator. This revolutionary device uses isotopes of Iodine 137 and other highly reactive radioactive elements to change the size of radioactive atoms. This process renders reactor-hot nuclear waste harmless in a matter of minutes.

Belarus and the Ukraine asked the FDN to bring equipment to their nations to clean up their nations from the notorious Chernobyl accident. 14 weeks was all the time needed to clean up the mess, and on April 26, 2020, the area would be declared fully habitable again, 34 days to the nuclear disaster. The former Soviet Republics in Central Asia also utilized the device to clear away decades of nuclear debris, and the government of Russia used it to purify their test sites from the early days of the Cold War. The USA also used the device to clean away decades of nuclear waste.

With the FDN at the healm of human progress, the world continued on its march to freedom and prosperity on a truely universal scale.
 
Note: TheMann deserves credit for several ideas in this section of the TL.


"Enough of blood and anguish. Enough."

-Israeli Prime Minister Mordechai bar-Mdisho at the signing of the Barakan Accords, 2025.
2020-2029

The first half of the 2020s were spent "blooming" the remaining deserts of both Africa and the Middle East. The vast agricultural lands of the FDN caused a depression in global agricultural prices, causing friction with the US and EU. This would remain a contentious issue for the rest of the decades. Over ten million people from Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Thailand were granted land in these bountiful new territories.

In 2022, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) became a reality, as the NAFTA zone and South American Confederation signed the historic trade agreement in Panama City, Panama.

In 2024, the Japanese and American governments announced plans for the Bering Strait Bridge. The 127-mile-long bridge was hoped to boost economic development for the Siberian Trust Territories, and was also expected to link the Americas with the rest of the IRL. The Japanese, by this time, had completely assimilated the Kamchatka Peninsula.

That same year, under a UN observer force, the citizens of Vladivostok and Magadan voted on their futures. The citizens of the American Trust Territories voted overwhelmingly for full American territorial status. The new territories of Yakutia and Beringia soon came into being.

The Chinese, stung by this latest insult, began casting their eyes on the rest of the Union of Siberia, where anarchy reigned. However, to invade the UOS, the Chinese would have to pass through Mongolia, which was an American/Japanese ally.

The die was cast on May 24, 2025. Using trumped up charges that Mongolian troops had violated Chinese territory, the People's Liberation Army launched an invasion of Mongolia. Within twenty-four hours, the entire country had been occupied.

The invasion was roundly condemned in the UN. A resolution drafted by the American, Indian, and Japanese ambassadors called for the complete withdrawl of Chinese troops from Mongolia by June 7, 2025. Otherwise, there would be war.

American troops were quickly deployed to the new Siberian territories. US troops were also deployed to Korea, and Taiwan. The Japanese Defence Forces were mobilized.

China ignored the UN resolution, and began moving troops into the UOS, occupying the city of Chita by June 6. Dogfights between Allied and Chinese planes had already begun.

The Barakan Parliament passed a resolution declaring a state of war between the FDN and PRC on June 8, even as American, Korean, and Chinese troops began clashing along the Yalu and Ussuri Rivers.

Taiwan took the opportunity to delcare full independence from the PRC. Chinese missles promtly began bombarding Taipei, destroying Taipei 101 and killing thousands. American and Chinese naval vessels began dueling in between the Mainland and Taiwan, which resulted largely in the destruction of the People's Liberation Navy.

In Siberia and Korea, the Americans and Japanese were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. However, Allied control of the air ensured that the Chinese attempts to drive on Vladivostok and Magadan would be ground to a bloody halt.

The Grand Army found itself deployed to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mossad agents began gunrunning operations to prospective rebel groups in both Tibet and Xinjiang. The new jet fighters from West Africa, Israel, and South Africa began their baptism of fire against the People's Liberation Air Foce.

It was largely one-sided. The pilots of the FDN had reputations as being among the best in the world.

The European Union also declared war on China. Russian troops began moving into the UOS, destroying the remaining warlords and reclaiming most of their long divided country. Eurofigher IIIs (modeled after the Israeli Eleazars), were soon engaging the PLAF over Chita.

In July, 2025, a joint FDN/EU task force launched a ground invasion of China from Khazakstan. The Ughirs eagerly greeted them as liberators, while the Chinese residents were far more subdued.

India was dragged into the war when PLAF fighter-bombers violated Indian airspace. In conjunction with the Allied operations to the north, Indian forces began attacks into Tibet.

By July, the Allies had managed to drive the Chinese out of Siberia. Manchuria was soon under a continuous Allied bombardment.

Seeking to bring an end to the war, the Mossad began a mass hacking attack against the Chinese government's Internet censors. Images of the horrific fighting in Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Tibet was soon being filtered into millions of Chinese PCs.

This led to mass student protests against the government of the PRC. The students were outraged by the extent of the carnage that had engulfed their country. Clashes between the police and students were common in the big cities, with the largest being in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing itself.

Meanwhile, the Maccabees and Commandos began a campaign against China's nuclear arsenal. Unfortunately, at one base in Inner Mongolia, the PLA commander, in panic, launched seven missles from the base.

Four were shot down by the Allies. Unfortunately, three managed to find their targets-the Japanese Kamchatkan city of New Kyoto, the Korean city of Inchon, and the other, with its guided systems shot, ended up landing among Allied troop formations outside of Urumqi.

Over three million people died in from the missle strikes, including over 70,000 Israeli and South African troops.

August 4, the day of the nuclear strikes, would become a day of mourning across the FDN.

The Allied responce was swift and deadly. Harbin was destroyed by the Americans. The remaining Chinese missle bases were destroyed by South African and Israeli bombs.

The nuclear devastation sent an electric current through the student protesters. Fearing their demise at the hands of Allied bombs and missles, the protests grew far more violent. Beijing decended into chaos. Mossad agents took the opportunity to disable the entire city's power grid.

With Beijing cut off from the rest of the country, things rapidly began to fall apart for the Chinese. The Uighirs declared independence. Indian forces, having secured Lhasa, declared an independent Tibet. Another FDN/EU army entered Mongolia.

In Beijing, the students were slowly gaining the upper hand over the police and PLA units. Mossad agents, masquerading government pronouncements, caused great confusion among government forces. Finally, the students managed to overpower the last police units, and stormed the Politburo, which remained holled up with the loss of the power. Finally, one reform member of the Politburo, Zhang Enlai, declared himself premier. When this happened, the Mossad restored enough electricity for Enlai to get a message out to the Allied High Command, asking to discuss an end to hostillities.

The short Chinese War had claimed over twelve million lives, mostly civilians. Now, however, peace would be at hand.

The Barakan Accords, signed in late August of 2025, forced the new Chinese government to recognize the independence of Tibet and Xinjiang. The Communist Party was to be dismantled, and China would pay reparations to the nations of Mongolia, Japan, and Korea. China's nuclear arsenal would be permanently dismantled. Free elections were schedualed for 2027.

The issue of Taiwan remained controversial. In the end, Taiwan's representative agreed that a referendum on the future relationship between the two Chinas would be held in 2035. Until then, the Republic of China (ROC), would be recognized by the government in Beijing in Taipei.

The Republic of Russia restablished jurisdiction over the former Union of Siberia. In a seperate treaty, signed in Vladivostok, the Russians agreed to recognize American jurisdiction over the two territories.

FDN teams arrived in devastated China with their irradiators for assesments. It became clear that it would take at least two years to fully purify the devastated lands.

Tibet signed a treaty of alliance with New Dehli. The Dalai Lama would return to Lhasa in 2028, as Buddhist monestaries were reopened.

As the world began to recover from the Chinese War, a second disaster struck.

In July 2027, the Cascadia faultline erupted in the Pacific Northwest, causing a massive tsunami similar to the one which had devasted the Indian Ocean in 2004 (which had killed hundreds of Israelis). Although the big cities were protected from the wave, Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver were still heavily damaged. Around 2,568 people were killed in 8.2 quake.

The FDN pledged over $40 billion in aid to the beleagured citizens of the Pacific Northwest. With the generous FDN aid, the people of the Northwest were soon able to rebuild properly. One of the new buildings reconstructed in Seattle was named "Federation Tower" in honor of the generocity of the FDN. Port Shalom, which had been hard hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, became Seattle's newest Sister City.

As a result of Cascadia, the most vulnerable cities to earthquakes across the globe began refitting themselves for the next big one. San Francisco and Los Angeles in particular put heavy emphasis on earthquake protection messures, which, as it turned out, would be life-savers later on.

2027 also saw decades of tyranny end in China as the new National Assembly met in Beijing.

To ease relations, the Japanese government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commitee in 2028 to bring the full details of Japan's brutal war in China to light. The Chinese, in turn, sent reparations to the Japanese to assist in the rebuilding of New Kyoto. Zhang Enlai began calling for a new Asian-Pacific organization to facilitate the spread of human rights and democracy.....as well as to compete with Europe, the FDN, and the Americas.

Due to the twin economic shocks of the Chinese War and Cascadia Earthquake, the international mission to Mars was postponed until 2035. Construction on the Bering Strait Bridge was also delayed for the time being. Plans, however, were drafted to extend the IRL through Siberia to Vladivostok, and eventually over the Bering Strait Bridge to the Americas. Another line would extend through China, India, and South East Asia.

The 2020s had been a true "time of troubles." The 2030s would be a time for healing.
 
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"Is it possible that we could see and end to armed conflicts by 2050? I certainly think so."

-UN Secretary General Constantine Van Fontenburg of South Africa, in remarks made to the Associated Press, September 4, 2038.

2030-2039

The 2030s would later be viewed as time period of healing and consolidation. In the Aftermath of the Chinese War, the dream of beating swords into plowshares became more and more pronounced.

From 2030 to 2035, the IRL was extended from New Dehli to Beijing, and from Beijing to Pyongyang and Soeul. From Beijing through to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Kuala Lumpor, and Singapore.

By 2031, the world economy began to recover from the twin shocks of the Chinese War and the Cascadia Earthquake.

In 2031, the Federation of Democratic Nations went through its last major round of expansion. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgestan, the Maldives, and the new Republic of Xinjiang became members of the FDN.

As the K-1 Formula was applied to the deserts of the FDN, the waves of immigration from India and southeast Asia continued unabated. As a result, South Africa and Israel's already substantial Indian, Malay, and Indonesian minorities became more and more pronounced. However, it was nothing that the "African melting pots" couldn't handle.

In Asia, Zhang Enlai's dream of new Pan-Asian/Pacific Union began to get off the ground with the signing of a massive free trade agreement between India, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, and Japan. In 2033, the Hong Kong Accords established a timetable for establishment of the APTO (Asian-Pacific Treaty Organization). The new APTO was headquartered in Singapore, solidifying that nation's status as an International Hub. Malaysia, Bangladesh, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and East Timor would join soon afterwards. APTO was the new 800-lb gorilla in the room, as it's prospective unified economy had the possibility to bury every other power bloc in the world, even the NAFTA and FDN zones.

The new Federal Republic of China began to confront decades of Communist neglect. Rural poverty and extreme industrial pollution remained the biggest issues.

The Barakan Parliament voted in 2034 to accept over 500,000 Chinese refugees. Many of the refugees were settled in the vast agricultural colonies in Baraka, the Union of Arabia, and Iran, joining the decendents of the waves of southeast Asian and Indian immigrants, who had formed many new cities and towns in thier own right; the biggest being New Hyderbad, Arabia, Port Ghandi, Oman, and New Jakarta, Iran.

2035 was dominated by the the International Mission to Mars. Astronauts from Europe, America, Brazil, the FDN, Australia, Japan, India, and China planted the flag of the UN on the surface of the Red Planet. "Yet another stop on humanity's march to the stars," said Israeli astronaut Joseph MacGregor bin-Hayem. More remembered is the sardonic reply from West Africa's Orin Sebastian Moreye: "Joe, stop copying my speeches."

July 2035 saw the completion of US-Japanese Bering Strait Bridge. The International Railroad Line soon dusted off the plans to extend the IRL across the bridge to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Bogota, Santiago, and looping all the way back through Brasillia and Reclife through Caracas all the way to the US East Coast to Quebec City, Toronto, and then back to the Bering Streight Bridge. It was estimated that it would take another seven or so years to complete the newest addition to the line.

On November 5, 2035, the citizens of Taiwan narrowly voted in favor of reunifying with the Mainland. With the end of Communism, there was little hurdle to left to reintegrating. The prospect of wealthy (though war-devastated) Taiwan reuinting with the Mainland did much to boost investment in China by itself.

In 2037, the United States formally set the border with the State of Japan at the Kamchatka Peninsula. The territories of Beringia and Yakutia soon entered the Union as the 52nd and 53rd states, respectivally.

That same year saw yet another major disaster strike the United States. The great Los Angeles quake, an 8.0 monstrocity, killed over 1,000 people and devastated whole portions of the metropolis. However, the extensive quake-proofing measures installed in the 2020s after the Cascadia Earthquake saved many lives and prevented even worse devastation. Once again, donations from the FDN allowed for the a quick reconstruction.

A UN survey conducted in 2039 found a total population of some 71 million Jews, 85% of which lived in the State of Israel. The remainder were scattered in South Africa, the United States, West Africa (where the Tasiru Sect had cought on strong), and Australia. However, many Orthodox Jews publically disputed those figures, claiming that the Tasiru Sect wasn't even part of the Jewish religion (if taken away by itself, the Tasiru Sect numbered some 14 million, mostly centered in Israel, the Congo, South Africa, and West Africa).

By the time of the 100th anniversary of the start of World War II and the beginnings of Hitler's Halocaust, it seemed that the world would finally put its differences behind it for a new tommorow.
 
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"Ahh, the Americans. They always have so much fun at their NAFTA meetings......because they don't go anywhere afterwards...."

-From the diary of South African MP Edward van Schreckenling, 2/16/2049

2040-2049:

The first half of the 2040s saw the International Railroad Line complete construction of its new route through the Western Hemisphere; with the completion of the Toronto-Anchorage line in 2044, it was now possible to take the train from Glasgow to Buenos Aires if your heart so desired. Some dared to speak that a new "World Government" was forming out of the free trade agreements and the construction of the IRL.

In 2045, the United States, after decades of delay, joined the International Criminal Court, which was based in Lagos, West Africa.

The first half of the 2040s also saw multiple observances of the 100th anniversaries of the great battles and campaigns of World War II. Chancellor Eisenbach of Germany paid the traditional trip of sorrow to the infamous death camps of Eastern Europe, where so many Slavs and other dissidents had met their deaths at the hands of Hitler's henchmen. Among those who attended the 100th anniversary of the liberation of Auchwitz-Burkinau by the Soviets was the FDN's Prime Minister, Israel's Niklaus Eindoski, a decendent of one of the 100,000 Polish DPs that the Israelis had accepted after the war. His remarks at the former death camp said it all: "If our new global community can accomplish anything, it can make sure that events such as these never occur among the human race again." Of course, his usage of the words "global community" was seized upon by the hyper-nationalists across the world (and the remaining Nativists in the United States) as "proof" that a tyrannical one-world government was forming before their eyes.

In the United States and Western Europe, the Tasiru Sect began to attract its first great wave of converts. In the USA in particular, this proved to be popular among the African-American community. The Orthodox continued to stew over this newest development, but that was all they could really do.

The Nativists in the United States began to take out their angst over "foreign subversion" on the growing numbers of converts to Judaism's Tasiru Sect. A series of firebombings of Tasiru Synagogues in late 2045 in Atlanta, New York, Jackson, Miami, and Los Angeles brought a harsh diplomatic condemnation from the Israelis, until the FBI rolled up the militias which had carried out the attacks.

2045 also saw the NAFTA zone began negotiations on a possible constitution and governing body, mirroring the assemblies that the FDN, EU, SAC, and APTO had long possesed. Unfortunately, this led to a backlash in the 2046 midterm elections. President Rodriguez suffered a defeat in the elections of 2048 from a "Live American," candidate, Senator Paul Trambach of Michigan. This immediently halted the proposed 2050 Constitutional Convention in Kansas City on a governing body for the NAFTA zone. The other leaders from the NAFTA nations tried to trend a fine line, in the hopes that President-elect Trambach wouldn't undo all of the progress that had been made in the last sixty years. One of Trambach's first acts would be to withdraw the USA from the International Criminal Court, oblivious to international condemnation.

The FDN remained sedate as usual. The unoficial motto of the organization was the "union of subdued excitement." Other than the completing of reconstruction of Xiajiang, there wasn't much left do. Most of the immigrants flowing into Israel and South Africa were now from China, twenty years after the end of the Chinese War. The Federal Republic of China had an unoficial policy of eroding the high levels of urban and rural poverty by "encouraging" immigration. The FDN was more than happy to take them. The towns of New Beijing, Arabia, Zhang-He, Yeman, New Guangzhou, Israel [OTL's Karin, Somalia], and New Shanghai, Madagascar were the largest concentration of these new Chinese immigrants, who would do much to encourage the continual technological development of the FDN.

The 2040s saw the continued development of space travel. The South African-made Kadu-class spaceplane and the Israeli-made Kanye-class probe became the newest tools in humanity's scientific arsenals. The first permanent settlement on Mars, Port Democracy, was established in 2049. The Israelis launched the first interstellar probe to the Alpha Centauri system that same year. The UN ambassadors of both Israel and South Africa continued to push for the foundation of an International Space Agency (ISA), which would consolidate the efforts of the various blocs into one agency. This met with considerable resistance from the USA's new nativist-oriented government in the latter part of the decade, to international furor.

The 2050s, it seemed, would see only continuous progress......despite, as it turned out, the efforts of certain individuals and even Mother Nature to slow things down.
 
"It'll be pleasant to return to normality."

Moshe Tasiru ben-Talal, Israel's ambassador to the USA, after the electoral defeat of President Trambach, 2052, in his diary.

2050-2059

President Trambach remained somewhat popular with the American electorate, although the Republicans lost seats in Congress during the midterms.

That same year, the leaders of the USA, South Africa, Israel, China, and Korea gathered in Soeul to mark the 100th anniversary of the Korean War. It was at this gathering that Paul Trambach displayed his lack of empathy and diplomatic fortitude. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Tasiru Ring remarked to an aid: "This is what 'Living America' means?" Trambach, in his hasty remarks, misplaced the names of several key battles, and smugly claimed that General MacArthur alone was responsible for the eventual victory (he refused to acknowledge the UN). This caused an ugly diplomatic incident. In the USA itself, the backlash from the previous administration's policies began to wear off, as many questioned Trambach's ability to govern.

Tactless, President Trambach, in a desperate bid to fully secure his base, withdrew from several popular international accords, including the 2003 Accord with banned land mines, and the Rio Accords of 1997, which had ensured that the industrialized nations would reduce carbon emissions.

Instead, this caused the pendulum to swing the other way. President Trambach, in yet another desperate bid to secure reelection through his nativist base, expressed his full support for an amendment that would have made English the official language of the USA. The effects were ugly. The Latin American members of NAFTA threatened to withdraw, and the Hispanic base in the USA itself swung sharply to the Democrats.

In the end, President Trambach not only lost to 2052 elections (to New Mexico's Governor Samuel Martinez), but the Democrats managed to retake Congress. President-elect Martinez promised to reauthorize the International Accords that Trambach had withdrawn from. The world breathed a sigh of relief.

In the USA, this pounded the last nail into the coffin of America's Nativist Wing. As Barakan Prime Minister Ishmael Mahmoud Tafa remarked in his diary in 2052: "God bless the Americans. In the end, they always do what's right."

In 2054, representatives from NAFTA, SAC, APTO, EU and the FDN met in Baraka to hammer out the International Space Accord. The new document called for the formation of the Earth Space Agency, which would pool the planet's resources into scientific development and space exploration. The key points of the accord occured as followed:

  • The Central Command of the ESA shall be in New York City, under the control of a Space Habitation Council, to be governed under the guidence of rotating (every two years) representatives from the different trade zones and power blocs. A President shall command the ESA for a single six year term.
  • Rocketry development shall take place in Woomera, Australia, Karoo, South Africa, and Huntsville, USA.
  • Launch sites of the ESA shall be based in the Soloman Islands, Khazakstan, Xinjiang, Israel, Baraka, Florida, and French Guinea. Tracking centers shall be established in Houston, Reclife, Honolulu, Baikonur, Port Shalom, and Singapore.
  • Research into robotics shall be based in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Lagos.
  • Terrestrial vehicle testing shall take place in Arabia, Australia, Brazil, and the Congo.

This marked a totally new begining for mankind as a whole. For the first time united in a common goal, the sky itself would cease to be a limit.

The second decade of the twenty-first century saw technology continue its march forwards. Seperate research teams in the United States, West Africa, Korea, and Japan began working on increasing artificial intelligence.

Israel and the Congo, by contrast, remained centers of biological research. 2055 would finally see a cure for the dreaded Akko and Ebola White Nile diseases come from the premier universities of those two African nations.

Immigration from China continued, although at a slightly smaller pace than in the previous decades. The Chinese population of West Africa, Baraka, Libya, South Africa, and Israel increased immensley.

By 2055, the Brooking Institution's Freedom Index showed that, for the first time in the history of civilization, human rights and democracy was enjoyed across the world stage.

In the USA, President Martinez, fresh from reelection in 2056, would call forr a Constitutional Convention for the NAFTA zone in St. Louis in 2059. That same year, the Japanese began construction on the world's first mile-high building in Tokyo. The mammouth project would become the newest symbol of Japanese pride, over 110 years after their loss in World War II.

In 2057, engineers from all over the world met in Gibralter, in the shaddow of the Gibralter Suspension Bridge, to begin discussions on how to build a floating tunnel from New York to London, thereby increasing the IRL's so-called "Link of Civilization."

In the end, delegates from the APTO called for the design to be tested by builing such a project from Darwin to Papua New Guinea, and from Papua New Guinea to the various Indonesian islands until the mainland was reached, thereby linking Australia with the main IRL line.

However, even as the world was finally settling down to savor this new calm in geopolitics, yet another major disaster struck.

The last time the New Madrid faultline had ruptured, it had been when the 19th century was young. On July 2, 2058, New Madrid ruptured with an 8.3 quake, which killed over 60,000 Americans making it the deadliest earthquake in American history. The fact that this quake erupted as the 4th of July weekend was approaching only made things worse. Whole sections of Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, and Des Moines were reduced to rubble.

This newest disaster sapped the now highly integrated world economy, causing a two year recession (and the delay of the implementation of the Australasian Bridge Project). Foreign aid from the Federation of Democratic Nations and the other members of the NAFTA zone was heavy, once again smoothing reconstruction, although it would be almost five years before the affected regions was restored.

As a long term result, the world began examining other possible zones where such disasters could strike. The 2060s would see these projects come into full effect, among other things. In addition to that, humanity would begin to take its biggest steps to date into the Solar System.
 
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