2 Nations: 1 Peace? A ATL for Israel and Palestine

This may well be a short lived and controversial thread but I feel such a timeline may have been possible.

POD: 1945. WWII has ended and the full horror of the holocaust has become apparent.

The western allies are determined to ensure that the Jewish people are given not just some form of justice but also full recognition and protection.

Therefore at Yalta and future conferences. The UK, France and the USA decide to create a Jewish homeland in the centre of Europe. The homeland called New Israel encompasses Eastern Germany and Poland. Non-jews are given full statehood.

Question: Would such a entity actually ease the situation in the middle east. My possibly flawed logic sees the lack of a Jewish presence in the Middle East as a better future.

Yes, such a state would have its detractors and enemies but given the OTL in the Middle East, "New Israel" may have been better.
 
I think that if you're going to put a Jewish state P=post WW2 in Europe it would be best to put it in East Prussia/Kalininggrad.
Of course, the Jewish population in Israel/Palestine was quite large by this point, to my knowledge.
Of course, a Jewish state created with minimum displacement and disputes would be in North West Australia
 
Question: Would such a entity actually ease the situation in the middle east. My possibly flawed logic sees the lack of a Jewish presence in the Middle East as a better future.

Yes, such a state would have its detractors and enemies but given the OTL in the Middle East, "New Israel" may have been better.

First, what happens to all the Germans and Poles? There was a similar thread a while back that did this with East Prussia. I'm still not convinced that we wouldn't have Germans demanding to return to their ancestral Elbing or whatever.

Second, good luck getting Polish Jews fresh from the camps to settle anywhere near Germany.

Third, without Israel to focus on, the Arab nations will get to have fun with each other instead. Syria is going to want to annex Jordan, both due to historical claims on the region and possibly ideological reasons (it's not hard to imagine Syria having a government that's against a West-backed monarchy). Syria is going to succeed in annexing Lebanon, sooner or later, de jure or just de facto, and Egypt and Syria are going to have a rumble for dominance.

The only possible way for a Palestinian state to exist is if Jordan, Syria, and Egypt somehow decide that they're not all going to dogpile in. Note that each of these states considers Palestine to be a rightful part of their state (with some accuracy, by the way). Also recall that the entire reason that cis-Jordan and trans-Jordan Palestine were split and not all given to Hussein is because of the Jews. Without a Jewish state there, the British might just decide to let Jordan become Palestine. Which is great, I guess, except that we still don't have a Palestinian state like you seem to want.

More likely, in my opinion, is that Palestine becomes the new place that Egypt and Syria duke it out every time they want to decide who's more important in the Arab world. I see, at the very least, constant low intensity combat between Syrian and Egyptian-aligned guerrillas. At worst, an armistice line at Netanya. OTL, Egypt and Jordan both de facto annexed their parts of the pie immediately (Egypt at least had the grace to keep a puppet government - headquartered in Cairo - in for about a decade).

The fact is that the Palestinians - all two million or so of them - are completely disorganized, and their national identity as a single Palestinian people is not yet very strong. In my opinion, the odds of them not being carved up are very slim.


Of course, the Jewish population in Israel/Palestine was quite large by this point, to my knowledge.

It depends when exactly you mean in the period. There was a lot of Jewish immigration from 1945. But it's more than half a million, in any case

Of course, a Jewish state created with minimum displacement and disputes would be in North West Australia

Or Alaska, or (my new favorite after a rather joking proposal based on "Jewfoundland") Labrador. Sadly, Patagonia is somewhat settled by 1945.
 
Top