AHC WI: American Palestine

Your challenge is make Palestine part of the United States as either an U.S. territory or for bonus points an U.S. state. What political and social consequences would an American Palestine would bring to the table for the U.S. and the rest of the world?
 
WWII equivalent goes much worse, Allied invasion of Europe from across the Atlantic finally wins, leaving the US basically the only surviving significant power. (Think AngloAmerican - Nazi War), but with Britain and the Commonwealth more subordinated to the US as a price of survival.

At the end, the entire world is a US protectorate, or part of a greater US.
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Short of that? Fat chance.
 
If I remember correctly, the US pushed for an American mandate to take over the British Mandate. So, just have the Brits throw their hands in the air and say "let the Yanks deal with it."
 
If I remember correctly, the US pushed for an American mandate to take over the British Mandate. So, just have the Brits throw their hands in the air and say "let the Yanks deal with it."
Actually, it's more that the British wanted to get rid of it but didn't feel that anyone there was worthy of independence, so they tried to get the US to take them off of their hands. The US was having none of it, so the British threw their hands up in the air and said, "Let the UN deal with it."
 
Actually, it's more that the British wanted to get rid of it but didn't feel that anyone there was worthy of independence, so they tried to get the US to take them off of their hands. The US was having none of it, so the British threw their hands up in the air and said, "Let the UN deal with it."

Oh, I was looking at this, I mean yeah it's a UN trusteeship but it would be under American administration.
 
Oh, I was looking at this, I mean yeah it's a UN trusteeship but it would be under American administration.
I was not familiar with that! This is after the United Kingdom tried to pawn it off to the United States, so it was sent to the United Nations...and I guess this was the United States saying, "Okay, so the United Nations solution isn't working, so we guess we'll have to take charge after all". United.

Still, short of sending in the Marines, there's not much that the US could even do. Though I guess they could do that. And something like 20,000 Marines with proper training, equipment, and support could almost certainly make both sides shut up and play nice (at least if/until the guerrilla war and popular uprisings started, like against the British presence).

Still, though, it seems very unlikely. As the article you linked mentions, most of the State Department was firmly against Israel at the time (not for any particular ideological reason, they just thought the Arabs collectively were more important. Actually, you can look at OTL and basically between recognizing Israel as a country and starting to sell arms in 1968, there's a 20 year period during which the US had effectively no relationship with Israel at all. Plus, there's no compelling reason for the US to get their noses dirty in a little region that had already shown itself to be more trouble than it's worth...though I guess it's possible that there could be folks in State who see this as a way for the US to stretch some muscles and begin its career as World Police.

Even then, I can't see it ever becoming anything more than something Philippines-esque; even in the face of mass migration of American Jews to Israel and resulting Amerification of the state, it's still too remote to incorporate (especially since it's not little dinky islands in the Pacific, it's a strip of land on the other side of a sea that's accessed by passing through a narrow strait on the other side of the Atlantic).

Still, as an American protectorate, it would "advance things in the region by 20 years" in that the Arabs would immediately go to the USSR without all this pussy-footing around with Arab Nationalism becoming Arab Socialist Nationalism and whatnot. It also butterflies the Suez War, but I don't know enough about decolonization to predict what that could do.
 
Could some weird shenanigan hand Palestine to the Americans at Versailles? (Well, I suppose actually Sèvres, or alt-San Remo). Like, the French don't trust the British there (too sympathetic to Faysal) and no one is going to let the French over the whole area, but the British get Mosul anyway so they have to give up something... and Armenia was supposed to be under some vague American tutelage but it's gone... the US won the war after all, let 'em gain something. I can't see Negev and Red Sea access in this (very unlikely: the US would almost certainly turn it down, not even graciously) Palestine, though.
 
I was not familiar with that! This is after the United Kingdom tried to pawn it off to the United States, so it was sent to the United Nations...and I guess this was the United States saying, "Okay, so the United Nations solution isn't working, so we guess we'll have to take charge after all". United.

Still, short of sending in the Marines, there's not much that the US could even do. Though I guess they could do that. And something like 20,000 Marines with proper training, equipment, and support could almost certainly make both sides shut up and play nice (at least if/until the guerrilla war and popular uprisings started, like against the British presence).

Still, though, it seems very unlikely. As the article you linked mentions, most of the State Department was firmly against Israel at the time (not for any particular ideological reason, they just thought the Arabs collectively were more important. Actually, you can look at OTL and basically between recognizing Israel as a country and starting to sell arms in 1968, there's a 20 year period during which the US had effectively no relationship with Israel at all. Plus, there's no compelling reason for the US to get their noses dirty in a little region that had already shown itself to be more trouble than it's worth...though I guess it's possible that there could be folks in State who see this as a way for the US to stretch some muscles and begin its career as World Police.

Even then, I can't see it ever becoming anything more than something Philippines-esque; even in the face of mass migration of American Jews to Israel and resulting Amerification of the state, it's still too remote to incorporate (especially since it's not little dinky islands in the Pacific, it's a strip of land on the other side of a sea that's accessed by passing through a narrow strait on the other side of the Atlantic).

Still, as an American protectorate, it would "advance things in the region by 20 years" in that the Arabs would immediately go to the USSR without all this pussy-footing around with Arab Nationalism becoming Arab Socialist Nationalism and whatnot. It also butterflies the Suez War, but I don't know enough about decolonization to predict what that could do.

Haha glad I could help! It was proposed about four months after the UN Partition proposal, and the start of armed conflict, so it was basically the US saying "alright, we're going to sit on you both until you behave".

Sending 20,000 Marines would definitely work to keep the peace, though I'd imagine they'd work with Jewish armed forces like the Haganah to help keep the peace like the British did between the Arab Revolt of '36 and the outbreak of WWII. The issue would be that the State Department was pretty anti-Israel and pro-Arab, but say Harry Truman decided that after WWII the US needed to show it could handle being a superpower, helping a region find peace would be a good start, and it would probably help pro-American sentiment in an already pretty volatile region.

If anything, I'd see some American Zionists or American Jews immigrate to the new American Trusteeship of Palestine, or give arms to the Haganah (the issue would be if Czech arms are still sold to the Haganah, but I'd assume they would be), and the US had pretty stringent immigration laws from the 1920s until around the 1960s. So the US could divert Jewish refugees to Palestine, saying something about "repatriating Jews to their homeland" or something like that. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946 recommended Mandate Palestine take 100,000 Jewish refugees immediately and to improve immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine, but Britain refused - say that the US Trusteeship pushes that through, and suddenly there's at least 750,000 Jews in Palestine with thousands more coming at least every month.

Arab nationalism would probably flourish, if only because they'd see Americans playing colonial master in the Middle East. As for Suez, in OTL it hastened decolonization (effectively, Britain remained west of Suez so without they'd probably focus more on their remaining colonies, federate them, and focus on their Commonwealth as a successor to the Empire), no concept of modern peacekeeping, no Berlin crisis of 1958 or Cuban Missile crisis (Khrushchev saw Suez as his personal victory).
 
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