How do I Create the Largest, most Powerful Israel Possible?

For the purpose of detailing this possibility to aid both myself and other aspiring alternate history writers, I would like to know how to create the largest, most powerful Israel as is possible. Take note, size is more important than power for the purposes of this thread, although both are desirable.

Anything would help, really.
 
Napoleon beats out the British in Egypt in 1797 ??.... can’t remember the exact details....but their was a campaign to take out Jerusalem in a heroic seige led by a British force that held firm....in the process a couple of up and coming French generals died....the French at this time were l think from memory pro the idea of a Jewish Israel??.....Have this amusing idea of a Napoleonic dominated Egypt/Palestine.....Napoleon needing soldiers to garrison Palestine opens up Jewish immigration to any one who will serve ....and so it begins.....ps much smaller population base at the time....so who knows
 
This is in the post1900 forum, so the PoD has to be after 1900.
Some British government takes the Balfour declaration seriously, and allows unrestricted immigration into Palestine. Have the Soviets decide that Jews are, in general, not suited to International Socialism, and encourage, shall we say, Jewish emigration.
Nazis come to power in Germany, and that handing over all their Jews to the Brits, is win win. Much cheaper than shipping them to Madagascar, AND creates chaos for the Brits in the Middle East, and solidifies even more Arab support for them.
So, by the time WWII breaks out there's somewhere between 5 and 10 million Jews in Palestine.
Edit.
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OTL, Israel had about 1M people at independence. Here we're talking 5-10 times more before the war starts. If Britain feels the Arabs are untrustworthy (Grand Mufti, and Iraq writ large), they might arm the Jews as an auxiliary force - especially if some fight in e.g. Crete. Then, after the war, they have a whole pile of arms that they'd assured the Brits had been destroyed in battle, and a large cadre of veterans.

This version of Israel would surely cover all the West Bank and Gaza, and might have a chunk of OTL Jordan
 
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Khanzeer

Banned
1 INcrease migration to israel of European jews .
2 Give them a much highter birth rate than OTL
3 far right militaristic leaders right from the beginning of the state which follow an aggressive foreign policy of conquest and subjugation of surrounding states.
4 No or limited arab oil boom
5 no Soviet patronage of arab cause
6 unquestionable support of USA right from 1948

I can see all of lebanon , most of jordan parts of syria and all of sinai as part of Israel .Anything beyond that is not feasible unless you really want to alienate the world powers.
 
I can see two things:

1 - Immigration
a| Have the British honor the Balfour Declaration and allow much higher - and unlimited - rates of Jewish immigration
b| The Soviets don't create the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (the JAO) and permit Soviet Jews to emigrate to British Palestine in the hopes of strengthening the Yishuv's socialist, democratic-socialist, and communist parties
c| This culminates in a much larger (maybe 1-2 million by 1939, when in OTL there were just over 545k Jews) Jewish population in Mandate Palestine.

2 - Post-war
a| Israel does much better in the War of Independence / 1948 War, overrunning the Jordanians in Jerusalem and chasing them all the way to the Jordan River. Gaza remains under Egyptian control, but the newly independent Israel now controls Jerusalem.
b| With more secure borders, and less fedayeen raiders [in OTL, Arab and Palestinian fedayeen cross-line* raiders would attack Jews in Israel; in TTL it's harder for them to cross the river], Israel is in a more stable position to encourage Jewish-American immigration**. Post-war pogroms in Eastern Europe encourages more Soviet Jews and surviving Warsaw Pact Jews to head for Israel; while West German reparations helps build Israeli industry and economy.
c| Rising tensions lead to war between Egypt and Syria, but Israel defeats them and controls the Sinai and the Golan Heights.

You might - and I mean might - see Israel invade Lebanon but I don't see them annexing any territory unless there's a prewar POD. Sinai I can see Israel retaining, while Jordan is up in the air. Personally I'd say it's more a 60-40 against Israel controlling it. The only part of Syria I can see Israel holding is the Golan Heights, anything outside of that is not plausible.

*They're armistice lines, not borders, which is why I refer to them as cross-line raiders rather than cross-border raiders. Semantics, really.
**If you want, you could have a worse Red Scare in the United States where people like George Koval, the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, Morris Cohen, and Samuel Dickstein are uncovered as Soviet spies. This means the US viewing Jewish Americans as a fifth column, leading to higher Jewish emigration from the United States to Israel.
 
In addition to the above: Canaanism is adopted as the dominant Zionist theory instead of Labour Zionism. This leads to diminished frictions between Jews and local Arabs pre-state, which causes both a decreased Naqba in 1948 and easier integration of Arab areas by Israel. Many, but not all, Arabs who would otherwise begin to adopt Palestinian national identity between the 1930s and 1960s instead "rediscover" their Jewishness and join the new Israeli identity. This also encourages the new state to expand and "reclaim" Levantine land, relying on Canaanist revanchism to attempt integration of Jordanian and Lebanese locals.
 
Sinai I can see Israel retaining, while Jordan is up in the air. Personally I'd say it's more a 60-40 against Israel controlling it. The only part of Syria I can see Israel holding is the Golan Heights, anything outside of that is not plausible.

So, Six-Day War Israel with Jordan as a possibility

You might - and I mean might - see Israel invade Lebanon but I don't see them annexing any territory unless there's a prewar POD.

What kind of POD would be necessary for Israeli annexations in Lebanon?
 
So, Six-Day War Israel with Jordan as a possibility

In a sense. Anything after 1946 (when Jordan became independent) is flat-out impossible, and the British ran Transjordan as a de facto separate Mandate and were flat out in their insistence it would not be part of the future Jewish state. You'd need the British to see the Mandate to include both Mandate Palestine and Transjordan in order for there to be an Israel which controls both sides of the Jordan River.

What kind of POD would be necessary for Israeli annexations in Lebanon?

Hm... maybe the 1958 Lebanese Crisis turns into a full-blown civil war? The WZO (World Zionist Organization) proposed borders in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference which included southern Lebanon (specifically the cities of Tyre and Sidon).

You could also get Émile Eddé's plan for a (albeit rather truncated) more Christian Lebanon by ceding southern Lebanon to Mandate Palestine in the period before WWII. Not sure how plausible it is, but it's a distinct possibility.
 
For the purpose of detailing this possibility to aid both myself and other aspiring alternate history writers, I would like to know how to create the largest, most powerful Israel as is possible. Take note, size is more important than power for the purposes of this thread, although both are desirable.

Anything would help, really.
You might want to ask a moderator for this thread to be moved from post-1900 to Chat, since it's difficult to see current politics not getting brought in at some point, if where current day Israel is in terms of power and influence starts getting discussed.
 

WILDGEESE

Gone Fishin'
To be fair as some of the posters on here have said . . . a pre-1900 thread would be easier.

Off the top of my head.

A greater persecution of Jewish communities in Europe between 1500 and 1800 that leads to greater to emigration to North America. Between 1600 to 1800, an average of 4,000 British & Irish folk emigrated to North American every year leading to around a population (excluding other nationalities from Europe and slaves) of around 2,500,000. This then doubled every 25 years until 1900.

Have the Jewish population in Europe emigrate around 5 times as much to around 20,000 per year and you'd probably end up with around 200 million by 1900.

With this in mind you might have more Jews starting to emigrate to the Middle East (Palestine) in the late 1880's encouraged by the US Govt' to fund an fully independent Israeli state incurring the wrath of the Ottoman Empire. The US Govt' trains and arms an Israeli Army to fight the Ottomans and it's tribal allies. The US Navy sails ships into the Med' and destroys the Ottoman Navy in a series of battles eliminating as a threat. The US Navy then sends it's ships off to the coast of Palestine and allows troop ships to land fully trained Israeli troops to land near Tel Aviv etc and thus starts a 3/4 year war against the Ottomans and it's tribal allies. As more areas get taken by the Israeli Army this causes Arab citizens to flee as refugees to Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. These areas left vacant are repopulated by US based Jews who emigrate from the USA.

At the end of the war, the whole of the Arabia lands East of the Suez canal (apart from Turkey & Iran) have been conquered and colonized.

Around the year 1980, the entire population of Israel would then possibly be around 300 million.

Regards filers.
 
No fall of France (so ww2 is way shorter, propably over around 1942/43, also, with France not being conquered by Third Reich Germans are not able to pull Barbarossa-Jews of Sowiet Union (which after annexation of Eastern Poland, Baltic States and Besarabia had biggest Jewish population in the world) are outside Hitler's reach. That way there are much more potential Jewish immigrants to Palestine.
 
At the end of the war, the whole of Arabian lands East of the Suez canal (apart from Turkey & Iran) have been conquered and colonized.

My apologies, but I have difficulty seeing how a United States-backed Israeli army could carve out almost all of Arabia for themselves without objections from the great powers. The Russians tried to claim sovereign authority over Orthodox Churches in the Ottoman Empire, and so Britain and France invaded the Russian mainland in the Crimean War.
 
In addition to the above: Canaanism is adopted as the dominant Zionist theory instead of Labour Zionism. This leads to diminished frictions between Jews and local Arabs pre-state, which causes both a decreased Naqba in 1948 and easier integration of Arab areas by Israel. Many, but not all, Arabs who would otherwise begin to adopt Palestinian national identity between the 1930s and 1960s instead "rediscover" their Jewishness and join the new Israeli identity. This also encourages the new state to expand and "reclaim" Levantine land, relying on Canaanist revanchism to attempt integration of Jordanian and Lebanese locals.

Respectfully, I disagree. Canaanism was a fringe movement, it didn't even have more than two dozen members. It had no chance of becoming a mainstream Zionist theory or of supplanting Labor Zionism. Labor Zionism, meanwhile, had roots back to the First and the Second Aliyah and the foundations of the Yishuv (the pre-State Jewish leadership and quasi-government).
 
Respectfully, I disagree. Canaanism was a fringe movement, it didn't even have more than two dozen members. It had no chance of becoming a mainstream Zionist theory or of supplanting Labor Zionism. Labor Zionism, meanwhile, had roots back to the First and the Second Aliyah and the foundations of the Yishuv (the pre-State Jewish leadership and quasi-government).
Whether widespread Canaanism was likely or unlikely isn't really the point of the discussion, I think. We're theorycrafting alternate history.

Also: a movement composed primarily of a small group of social elites with outsized cultural and intellectual influence can easily become a widespread political movement. Labour Zionism was once a small group of Jewish intellectuals who had a broad cultural and intellectual influence on the global Jewish population; that movement was able to leverage that influence into political power. It's not inconceivable that Canaanism (which had a few dozen registered members, an unknown number of syhmpathizers, and a known "significant effect on the course of Israeli art, literature and spiritual and political thought") could have leveraged their cultural cachet into political influence.
 
Whether widespread Canaanism was likely or unlikely isn't really the point of the discussion, I think. We're theorycrafting alternate history.

Also: a movement composed primarily of a small group of social elites with outsized cultural and intellectual influence can easily become a widespread political movement. Labour Zionism was once a small group of Jewish intellectuals who had a broad cultural and intellectual influence on the global Jewish population; that movement was able to leverage that influence into political power. It's not inconceivable that Canaanism (which had a few dozen registered members, an unknown number of syhmpathizers, and a known "significant effect on the course of Israeli art, literature and spiritual and political thought") could have leveraged their cultural cachet into political influence.

I'm very aware of that, I didn't mean any disrespect.

It's that Canaanism derived from Revisionist Zionism (which was already not a large movement) in an era when every quasi-government agency in the Yishuv was run by Labor Zionists, an ideology that was largely divorced from both Judaism and Zionism as a whole, which disconnected itself from Jewish history and Jewish culture, and which had very little in terms of actual numbers. While it did have cultural and intellectual influence, it does not have the means to actually enact any policy changes and when most of the people in charge were dyed in the wool socialists, social democrats, or democratic-socialists. While Canaanism had some interesting ideas, I highly doubt they'd turn it into political influence. Plus convincing Arabs in Palestine to join up with the movement would be a highly difficult task for them to do - if the Zionist leadership had trouble, the Canaanists would have an even more trouble.

Artistically you might see a melange of Jewish and Arab work, but politically it's a whole different story.
 
Start with some colossal fuck up during the Arab Revolt which sours the British on the Arabs. Follow up with the nascent arab palestinian movement focusing their violence on British outposts rather than the Yishuv. The Foreign Office then decides to fully support the Balfour declaration as originally intended with near unlimited Jewish immigration. Lenin dies a little earlier and Stalin starts his shit with the Jews earlier. Perhaps a Doctor's plot in 1925. Now the main competition to Zionism for the hearts and souls of eastern Jews, communism, is no longer an option. America's gates are still closed as in OTL. Hitler rises to power. WW2 unfolds as in OTL. The Russians are pushed back even further as Stalin has had more time to purge the army of competent officers. seeing the Russian front in peril and fearing Hitler's ambitions in the near east, the Yishuv petitions the British to become the empire's arsenal/armory in the near east, expanding the industrial base allowing them to absorb even more immigrants. The need for additional armament workers convinces the British to open up immigration to the Jews of Europe even more. No need for a San Remo conference and no need for a Wansee conference either. The Yishuv balloons to 6 million Jews + Druze + Arameans. The cities of Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberas, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Beit Shean and Eilat with many more satellite communities expand and require an expanded police force/border police/haganah. The Arab revolt in Iraq is put down brutally. Vichy Syria and Lebanon are invaded. The Golan and southern Lebanon to the Litani are leveraged away from DeGaulle in return for some support and attached to the mandate. A general mistrust of the Arabs persists among the British functionaries so the Yishuv is permitted to expand into those areas. Montgomery defeats Rommel, General Winter defeats hitler. Torch and Overlord work as in OTL. The Gypsies, homosexuals and Slavs are liberated from the concentration camps. Post war the communists advance as in OTL. The Jews having already experienced the worker's paradise under Stalin flee the advancing Red Army. Many decide to leave Europe altogether. The British realizing that they need the oil more than ever decide to pretend that a when they said national home they never meant an independent state or self rule. King David hotel goes BOOM. The British after a couple of years send the mandate back the UN. Partition is voted on. The Israelis accept, the arabs invade. However, the Israelis now have a local manpower advantage, a committed unified mature political structure, blooded troops from the European theaters and an industrial base for making modern weapons of war. It is a rout. The Israelis capture all the land from the Med to the dead from the Litani to Eilat. They are forced to give back parts of the Sinai as Britain invokes its defense treaty with Farouk. Gaza ends up under Egypts control with a large refugee population. The Hashemite kingdom is ready to accept armistance lines when the arabs now calling themselves palestinians overthrow the monarchy and pursue further war withe Israelis. Without their man on the throne, the British do not care what happens to a desert kingdom without oil. The Israelis take the Yarmouk river, the east bank and Aqaba. Although never formally ordered or endorsed an unoffical plan daled is put into effect by local commanders. Sunni Arab refugees stream into Lebanon, Syria and Iraq destroying the delicate balance of the confessional systems of those countries....
 
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