Alternate Locations for Israel

The immigration restrictions are part of the reason I thought of Labrador in the first place - they have very little political power; if London wants Jews in Goose Bay, there's not a whole lot the Newfies can do about it, compared to northern Australia or something.
 
You can rule out Madagascar; it was only ever referred to in Mein Kampf, the prison ramblings of a sociopath who considered Judaism to be an inherited blood born disease. Madagascar was an island which as far as Hitler knew had nothing of value on it and was unappealing to Aryan settlement and would therefore be perfectly suitable as a type of leper colony. Once he was in power there was no revival of the idea, the Nazis just wanted the Jews gone, they really couldn’t care less where they went. Since getting poor Jews out of the Reich required the support of wealthy Jews it suited them to team up with the existing Zionist organisations smuggling Jews into Palestine.

Madagascar has actually been discussed at least in the German Foreign Ministry during 1940/41. But basically you are right concerning the motivation as well as the feasibility of the plan. It was an evil utopia - it is fodder for relativists.

The co-operation between Jewish organisations (within and outside of the Reich) and German institutions was seen as a win-win-situation. Or rather a win-rob-situation. For the legal provisions ("Reichsfluchtsteuer" and additional expenses) and the circumstances of this migration made it easy for the German government to get its hands on large parts of anybody leaving the Reich.
 
Summary of proposals:
I was participating in a thread on krautchan's /int/ asking people to pick their 3 preferred neighboring countries; an Israeli proposed "the US, Canada, and France - basically where Newfoundland is". Newfoundland in large and sparsely populated - though sparse is more than none. On the other hand, Labrador has today a population of something like 30,000 today; in the time period of 1920-1940 it was even smaller (5,200 in 1942). Plus, Newfoundland and Labrador was a small Dominion with relatively little political pull; it wouldn't have been too hard for the British to hijack it and turn it into a Jewish state. Economically, Labrador seems to have decent soil the handful of times anyone's bothered farming there, they have a huge river for hydro power, they have fish, iron, nickle, may have offshore oil and/or gas, and lots of trees. Unfortunately, I'm currently in the middle of another large timeline and haven't had the opportunity to explore this idea.


We should have taken it...
 
The immigration restrictions are part of the reason I thought of Labrador in the first place - they have very little political power; if London wants Jews in Goose Bay, there's not a whole lot the Newfies can do about it, compared to northern Australia or something.


I would think there actually would have been quite a lot the Newfoundlanders could have done about it, despite their perculiar circumstances. The British government would have still needed to come to some sort of arrangement with the residents, who I am sure were commonly accepted to be British.

Racial and immigration issues did tend to motivate the Dominions in the 20th century - see Australia, NZ, Canada and South Africa (not just the obvious, but also Chinese labour scares). Like now, immigration and "aliens" have always been hot button topics. Especially during the Depression and a period of direct rule due in part to financial collapse.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Madagascar has actually been discussed at least in the German Foreign Ministry during 1940/41. But basically you are right concerning the motivation as well as the feasibility of the plan. It was an evil utopia - it is fodder for relativists.

The co-operation between Jewish organisations (within and outside of the Reich) and German institutions was seen as a win-win-situation. Or rather a win-rob-situation. For the legal provisions ("Reichsfluchtsteuer" and additional expenses) and the circumstances of this migration made it easy for the German government to get its hands on large parts of anybody leaving the Reich.

The logistics of removing the Jews was the key to considering Madagascar. The Germans had concluded that the Polish population was simply too large to be killed, and the Poles had to be moved. Some of the plans moved most of the Polish population as far as Central Asia. The Nazi were less certain on the Jews. Some believe their were simply too many Jews to kill and they would need to be relocated, while others believed they could all be killed. Madagascar was simply part of Vichy France, and the Far side of the world to the Nazi's.

Initially, the Germans were killing the Jews with roving death squads. They would go to a village, round of Jews and other undesirable, dig a pit, and shoot the Jews. By the end of the war, these squads had killed about 1.5 million Jews in 4 years. To reach 6 million Jews, it would have extrapolated out to 16 years, or 1957. In 1942, the first Death Camp went into operation to deal with the logistical issues.
 
I would think there actually would have been quite a lot the Newfoundlanders could have done about it, despite their perculiar circumstances. The British government would have still needed to come to some sort of arrangement with the residents, who I am sure were commonly accepted to be British.

Racial and immigration issues did tend to motivate the Dominions in the 20th century - see Australia, NZ, Canada and South Africa (not just the obvious, but also Chinese labour scares). Like now, immigration and "aliens" have always been hot button topics. Especially during the Depression and a period of direct rule due in part to financial collapse.

You've definitely got a point about that. There's no way the UK is just going to be able to sign a piece of paper declaring Labrador a Jewish homeland and not face any flack from the locals, not to mention their own parliament. That being said I still maintain my scenario is somewhat realistic as it gets around this problem.

You see, in my scenario the Jewish refugees were not intended to become permanent residents of Labrador. Both the authorities and the Jewish community see Labrador as a purgatory of sorts, a holding area for the Jews until they can immigrate elsewhere. Rather they are used in a rather Machiavellian sense to develop the region through cheap labor and by soliciting support for the measure from the American Jewish Community. Eventually, due to it's complete isolation, the growing community around Western Labrador becomes a convenient place for the UK to place Jewish refugees who in their eyes might be "5th column" threats. The damage they can do is limited and they'll be more productive there than sitting by idly in an internment camp somewhere.

Now fast forward a few years and you've got a mining operation in Labrador that's booming along with a thriving community of Jewish refugees. There's pressure from the locals for them to head off to Israel or somewhere else and be replaced by locals, and indeed many most likely would like to emigrate and leave the frozen wilderness of Western Labrador. Yet still others want to remain and moreover many begin to see Labrador as a destination for the population of Jewish DP's that have arrived since the end of the war. I could easily see things going south over the issue of immigration/emigration perhaps leading to a General strike and eventually to negotiations. I think it's feasible that the authorities could overlook the fact that allowing the influx of so many refugees would be a "poison pill" so to speak if the price/opportunity were right.

Given that in my scenario, the majority of the Jews would primarily occupy Western Labrador which was for all intents and purposes empty in 1940 and the original settlers occupy isolated communities on the coast, I think the British would go for a partition as the easiest way to solve the problem of the intransigent refugee problem. Add into this an alliance of convenience between the Native Americans and the Jews and I think you'd see Labrador become a separate British dependency/colony. The pre-existing anglophone communities would stay a part of Newfoundland and perhaps the Labradorians would lose their rights to fish the Grand Banks.

Thoughts?
 
Oh don't get me wrong, I like what you are trying for and the results could be really interesting, I just don't see that it would be possible with a POD later than the 1930s.

Perhaps you could look to adding earlier PODs as well, perhaps smaller, to then make your bigger 1930s POD more likely to be sucessful?

Maybe try and build some sort of larger, integrated, Jewish community into N&L during late colonial times, that would somehow help ease the passage of wider immigration in the depths of the 1930s? Then you would have both an external force (British government/British Jewish socities) cooperating with local Jewish communities to push the change through.

The main problem with an earlier POD is that once in the Empire/New World, Jewish immigrants, like any other are much more able to move about, if the local conditions do not suit. There was massive and ongoing internal migration between the colonies and Dominions right through the period of Empire, largely based on economic conditions and no colony or Dominion that was underperforming was likely to keep recent immigrants if they thought the grass was greener in another colony or country
 
Given that in my scenario, the majority of the Jews would primarily occupy Western Labrador which was for all intents and purposes empty in 1940 and the original settlers occupy isolated communities on the coast, I think the British would go for a partition as the easiest way to solve the problem of the intransigent refugee problem. Add into this an alliance of convenience between the Native Americans and the Jews and I think you'd see Labrador become a separate British dependency/colony. The pre-existing anglophone communities would stay a part of Newfoundland and perhaps the Labradorians would lose their rights to fish the Grand Banks.
Thoughts?

Assuming NL eventualy becomes canadian as in OTL, it would be interesting to see if labrador would request to enter as a province of its own. If so, this would have an interesting repurcussion of having 2 provinces with "distinct" languages and culture which might in some circumstances band together against the rest of "anglo-protestant" canada.
 
The immigration restrictions are part of the reason I thought of Labrador in the first place - they have very little political power; if London wants Jews in Goose Bay, there's not a whole lot the Newfies can do about it, compared to northern Australia or something.

That's only if Newfoundland was under the Commission of Government back in the 1930's - if, for some reason, Newfoundland survived WW1 with lighter casualities (i.e. the Beaumont Hamel POD I mentioned), then Newfoundland would probably control immigration on its own terms. If Whitehall wanted Jews in Labrador, Newfoundland would resist as much as they could. But if St. John's and not Whitehall wanted Jewish immigration (or any post-WW1 immigration for that matter, you know being contrarian and all that), then that would probably be much more acceptable.
 
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