Bulldoggus
Banned
I agree. The ME was gonna be a dysfunctional, war-torn hellhole regardless of weather or not there was an Israel. Israel just served as a massive powder keg in a region that had dozens of others.
[Middle East AH] - Israel loses the '48 War
Admiral Beez
Banned
This is early stages of the American obsessive with and influence of Israel within US politics, so the USA may not be too interested. Those Jews in Israel are dead.
The Soviets supporting pan-Arab socialism is no guarantee it'll work. Best case, you're looking at an oppressive police that's likely socialist only in name; worst case involves hundreds of thousands dead in rioting in Cairo.
One of the reasons why I stopped my speculation there is that I don't know nearly enough about decolonization to give a good opinion. All I can say is that it'll still happen; the Suez War was a desperate last gambit by the French and British to try and hold on for a little longer. The rise of nationalism on a global scale, the rise of Western-educated middle classes of natives in the colonies, the threat of the Warsaw Pact, and the degraded economies and militaries of Britain and France in the 50s and 60s meant that colonialism was going to end sooner or later; Suez was about making it later rather than sooner.
I don't want to speculate too much because most of it involves how murdery the Arabs are feeling, which history suggests starts a flamewar and potential bannings.
All I'll say is: nothing good. No one wanted to take the Jewish DPs until Israel opened the gates; there's every reason to think that any Jews still in Europe by the end of the Palestine War would have nowhere to go. It's possible but unlikely that the UN will browbeat West Germany into taking them in (or, depending on the timeline, the American zone - though the French might shove them into their occupation zone just to screw with the Germans more). But this was never seriously discussed at any level. I strongly doubt an UNWRA equivalent will be started, since no one will push for it. I foresee a large stateless population until the UN starts a refugee commission of some sort, but even then they're probably try to avoid dealing with them well. Again, between 1945 and 1948 almost no countries were willing to accept Jewish refugees; in fact, some countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland basically refused to repatriate Jewish citizens. Some Zionists might find succor as second class citizens in Jordan, but probably won't in Syria or Egypt. Expect displacements/massacres of historical Jewish communities in the region, as happened OTL in places like Jerusalem and Hebron. How Jews will get out of Palestine is any interesting question for which I have no good answer; God knows no one in the West is going to send boats to relieve them; certainly not the British (who are closest in Cyprus but mostly hated the Zionists by 1948). And those who do escape aren't going to find anyone excited to take them in.
Maybe some South American countries will take them in. OTL, Trujillo said he would accept 100,000 Jewish refugees, though less than 100 actually made it. Countries like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay have a track record of fairly unregulated immigration from Europe, though, again, they didn't take anyone in Evian.
Honestly, the fate of 1948's Jews is likely to be very similar to 1938's. Yes, the Holocaust has happened, but I don't think that's enough. The Nuremberg Laws were pretty terrible, too, and we have OTL's DP camps to show how little sentiments had changed.
At least the Mizrahim will probably make out okay.
I've never bought the idea that an Arab victory would result in a bloodbath, no more of a bloodbath than the war was in real life. A smaller rump state of Israel might still exist in the north Mediterranean region, just south of Lebanon, in the parts of Israel's 1948 borders where there was a solid Jewish plurality, and a Jewish majority in some places; if we assume the Arabs act like the Israelis did IRL, and if we assume the UN is somewhat involved like in IRL.
I don't think that follows. Nazi's wanted to exterminate Jews. Palestinian Arabs want and wanted to have an independent state on the land where they live, and, true, to remove people who moved onto the land where they live or lived.
When Britain says you can move to Palestine but not to Britain, they're making an important decision there. It's up to the Allies and the UN what happens to 1948's Jews, in a no Israel or Israel loses 1948 scenario. In 1938, it was up to the Nazi's, and only partly up to states who refused entry to Jewish refugees.
I don't think that follows. Nazi's wanted to exterminate Jews. Palestinian Arabs want and wanted to have an independent state on the land where they live, and, true, to remove people who moved onto the land where they live or lived.
When Britain says you can move to Palestine but not to Britain, they're making an important decision there. It's up to the Allies and the UN what happens to 1948's Jews, in a no Israel or Israel loses 1948 scenario. In 1938, it was up to the Nazi's, and only partly up to states who refused entry to Jewish refugees.
There's no reason to assume that the Arabs act like the Israelis did IRL, as the Israelis' stated objective was to secure a state (and so the ethnic cleansing was, and I hate to say this because I don't want to minimize it, "incidental"), whereas the Arab nations' stated objective was to remove the Jews. The Jordanians expelled all Jews from the territory they held in the West Bank. Ironically, mostly old, "native" communities, and not recent Zionists. The Arab rhetoric was full of "pushing the Jews into the sea", especially on the part of the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was as much the leader of the Palestinians as anyone. Even if there isn't mass murder, I don't see any Jews left at all. Similarly, there's no reason to think there would be a rump Jewish state in the Galilee, considering how unanimously the leadership of Arabs in Palestine and out rejected the Peel Commission plan.
I'm also not sure that we can count on UN involvement, which was almost completely ineffectual anyway.
I was referring to the period after Nuremberg before the invasion of Poland, when Jewish refugees were trying to pour out of Germany and no one would accept them. Note that Germany did not initially want to kill all the Jews, just to get rid of them. Even if the Palestinians don't want to kill all the Jews (which they probably didn't), they still probably want them all gone. That's why I said 1938 and not, say, 1943.
Except that Britain never said that. Britain heavily regulated Jewish immigration to Palestine, even when there were literally hundreds of thousands of Jews trying to get somewhere, anywhere. Yes, Zionists smuggled people in, but the British certainly didn't turn a blind eye.
I don't understand why it's up to the Allies and UN and not the Arabs in 1948, but it's up to the Nazis and not the attendees of the Evian Conference in 1938. This isn't an attack; honestly, please tell me why you consider this situation different.
God knows that the Allies weren't involved in 1948 except by embargoing the combatants (I mean, except for the arms that the British gave Jordan), and the UN was involved only in the calling of a few mostly ignored ceasefires.
If you're talking about the Jews in Europe's DP camps, well, I've already said earlier in the thread how caring and effective the Allies and UN were there.
Pan-Arabism hasn't really worked since the early days of the Prophet and afterwards. All of the Pan-Arab attempts fell apart and an underlying cause for all of them (not the only cause) was the reality that every leader wanted to be THE leader, not sharing leadership or being the #2. On top of this the last thing the Soviets want is a united/Pan-Arab Middle East. Such a united entity could be capable of not being so susceptible to the Soviet plans, whereas a bunch of smaller, weaker, and squabbling states will be much easier to deal with. Divide and conquer works for the Soviets as well as for the Romans, the British Empire, etc.
As far as the Jews go, the "responsibility" will involve a lot of finger pointing. As was pointed out several countries did even want to take their Jewish citizens back, and there were pogroms in Poland when Jews tried to reclaim some of their property. If more Jews are forced back to Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc there will be even more pogroms. As far as the Jews emigrating to South/Central America, who will even pay for them to get there let alone the reality that these folks will have literally only the clothes on their backs. The only source of funding for Jewish refugees, or at least the bulk of it, will be contributions from Jews in the USA, and other countries not occupied during the war. I expect that countries that may accept Jews would decide to institute entry fees...
As far as the Jews go, the "responsibility" will involve a lot of finger pointing. As was pointed out several countries did even want to take their Jewish citizens back, and there were pogroms in Poland when Jews tried to reclaim some of their property. If more Jews are forced back to Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc there will be even more pogroms. As far as the Jews emigrating to South/Central America, who will even pay for them to get there let alone the reality that these folks will have literally only the clothes on their backs. The only source of funding for Jewish refugees, or at least the bulk of it, will be contributions from Jews in the USA, and other countries not occupied during the war. I expect that countries that may accept Jews would decide to institute entry fees...
If your objective is to secure a state from a location that already has a population, ethnic cleansing of that population is not incidental, it's intrinsic.
Both sides had the stated objective of removing the other from the territory they wanted, and they both acted on this. The objective of the Jewish settlers was to remove Arabs from what would be Israel so they could have a Jewish majority state in the region; the objective of the Arabs was to disestablish Israel, after it's establishment involved annexing territory where Arabs already lived.
In OTL they were effective only in establishing the borders, they didn't make sure the various factions kept to them. This might have been different if it were Israel that lost in the war. They didn't protect Palestine from Israeli, Jordanian, and Egyptian annexation, so maybe you're right, they wouldn't have prevented Israel and Palestine being annexed by Jordan and Egypt.
In 1938, the Nazi government was the legitimate government of Germany, the Evian conference could have helped the situation in '38, but Nazi Germany were the ones dictating the bad policy, Evian was in response to that. In 1948 the British government was the legitimate government of the Levant. It was up to the British to decide what would happen in the region west of the Jordan, and they, along with the UN, decided to give some of their Middle Eastern territories to refugees from Europe.
If Israel had lost the war that took place after the foundation of Israel and Palestine, I don't believe they'd be treated worse than they treated Arabs, I believe they'd be gradually removed from the region under UN auspices. Jewish settlers would be removed from territory conquered by Arab armies, just as Arabs were removed from territory conquered by Israeli armies. Israel would not survive this, but the Jewish settlers would survive, some in Palestine, most in the western world.
The boundaries established by the 1947 Partition Plan had a Jewish majority in the region allocated to the Jews (and very few Jews in the region allocated to the Arabs). The Jewish goal was to preserve that state. The Jewish objective was never to remove all Arabs, but rather to establish a state, while I'd argue that that Arab objective was precisely to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state rather than to establish a Palestinian state. The Jewish government was never concerned about having a Jewish majority in their territory, since they already had one, and figured that massive immigration (especially but not only from the DP camps) would give them a comfortable majority anyway - for example, if the Arabs had never attacked and the '47 partition plan enacted, then even without expelling any Arabs at all, Israel would probably have been something like 80% Jewish by the mid-50s from immigration.
While there are some documents from some Jewish leaders discussing how much they'd love to kick all the Arabs out, there's also large numbers of Zionist leaders who wrote extensively about how great it would be to cooperate fully with the native Arabs and build a multicultural society. Ben Gurion himself had an opinion along the lines of that it would be better to get rid of the Arabs, but that involuntary ethnic cleansing would be unthinkable. Yes, there's a gap between what was written and what happened, but then you look at the Arab leadership - both Palestinian and not (though there was barely any Palestinian leadership, and Palestinian militants were a basically negligible portion of the Arab forces), and basically all of them are calling for the expulsion of the Zionists.
It's also worth pointing out that the Jews accepted the partition plan, and had no plans to expel any Arabs, while the Arab response was to start attacking Jewish settlements. Yes, there was a period of general unrest before that, with violence both by and against both Jews and Arabs, but even there you see most of the violence was military action by large groups of Syrian and Egyptian volunteers, oh, and the Arab Legion (Jordan's official army).
Again, look at the results: I'm not going to pretend that there was no massive expulsion of Arabs (though I will point out that it seems to be the case that some left voluntarily on the urging of Arab governments), but actually "only" around 75% of the Arab population within Israeli borders was expelled, while 100% of Jewish populations in Arab held territories were. It would have been very easy for the Israelis to expel those other 700,000, too, if they'd wanted to, and it's well documented that Jewish leaders actually spent a lot of effort convincing Arab populations in places like Jaffa, Haifa, and Nazareth to stay put.
I'm really, really not trying to minimize the Nakba, but there is ample evidence that the Jews never intended to expel all the Arabs, and I really don't think you can defend the claim that ethnic cleansing was intrinsic to their goals. And there was never a stated objective by any of the Jewish factions - not even by the Irgun, which was famously brutal against Arab civilians.
I wouldn't even say that they were "effective" at establishing borders. Have you seen those borders? They're a terrible attempt at some sort of half-assed compromise, and the Negev should never have been allotted to the Jews, nor Jaffa established as an Arab enclave, and the idea of Jerusalem as an international city was laughable...and the Arabs repeatedly stated their refusal to accept them.
They didn't! This is the worst fallacy about the foundation of Israel. The British and the UN at no point intended Israel to be for Jewish refugees. And they certainly didn't "give" the territory to anyone. Basically everything the British did after the issuance of the Churchill White Paper of 1922 was moderately against Zionism. They severely restricted immigration. They worked to restrict the training and equipping of Jewish paramilitary forces, even as they increasingly relied on them to help keep the peace. They arrested many prominent Zionist leaders (more so than prominent Arab ones). And the British had absolutely nothing to do with the Partition itself. They sort of threw up their hands in the air and tried to transfer the Mandate to the US, but the US didn't want it, so it got tossed to the UN, who tried to make a ham-fisted compromise. Jewish immigration to Palestine continued to be heavily restricted up until May 15, when the Mandate officially ended.
In 1947, there were 650,000 Jews in Palestine (about a third of the total population) of which well less than 100,000 arrived as refugees from Nazi Europe.
The 1947 Partition Plan was not in any way about giving land to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, it was about settling the violence and dispute between the Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine at the time.
What do you base this on? Again, I point out the murderous rhetoric of Arab leaders. If the Jews were more violent than their rhetoric, why do you assume that the Arabs wouldn't be at least as violent as theirs? Also, Palestinian refugees were able to flee across land borders, Jewish refugees will not be able to, and I really doubt anyone will be sending a fleet to evacuate them, let alone the UN. And again, I point out that the removal rate of Jews from Arab territory was much, much higher than that of Arabs from Jewish territory. I have literally no idea where the Jews will go physically. And God knows that there's not going to be a Jewish UNWRA since there's not going to be anyone to push for it (unlike the Arab states pushing for UNWRA), and the example of the DP camps in Europe show exactly how much the UN cared about Jewish refugees.
It is an implicit objective when you want to establish an ethnic/religious state in a place with an existing population of different ethnicity/religion.
Then this was a mistake, it granted lands to the Jewish state in places where an Arab population already lived. It didn't settle the violence, and it couldn't have; if anything, the legal establishment of Israel while negotiations were ongoing exacerbated the situation. We don't know what the Arab response would have been to a Jewish state that existed only in Jewish majority areas.
I base it on both sides having the same rhetoric, 'we don't want you in our territory and we will act on this desire', and on both sides being made up of human beings. The UN could decide to evacuate Jewish refugees, or they may not, like you say, we know they didn't help Palestinians during that war IRL. I still don't believe an Arab victory in 1948 results in a genocide of the Jews in the Levant, but just the same level of ethnic cleansing that the Israeli victory resulted in.
Is the assumption in this scenario that the rest of the world will not accept Jewish refugees? They accepted them in real life. They can physically go to North America or Australia, for example. An Arab population saying no to Jewish refugees is not better or worse than an American or European population doing the same thing.
Despite the fact that there are multiple statements before the war saying that there was intent to allow the current population to remain where they were and enjoy full rights? Despite the fact that Arabs constitute a large portion of Israel's population today and enjoy [de jure] equal rights to Jews?
From the earliest Zionist settlements in Palestine, Jewish leaders wrote constantly about cohabiting with the locals; they always intended to have a liberal democracy. Until the rise of organized violence (probably associated with growing Arab nationalism) in the 20s, Zionist and Arab towns traded peacefully and Zionists often hired Arab day laborers (there was always some violence, but that's inherent in a tribal society like the local Arabs were at the time).
That their actions ended up not living up to that rhetoric doesn't mean they didn't mean it.
I reject your statement that ethnic cleansing is an implicit objective when you want to set up a state, and can back my statement up.
We do know what the Arab response would have been to a Jewish state that existed only in Jewish majority areas, because the Arabs also universally rejected the Peel Commission plan. And also, the Jewish state allotted in 1947 was Jewish majority, that's part of the reason the boundaries were so fucked up. Most of the regions in that Jewish state without Jewish majorities were in the Negev, and the Bedouins there didn't have anything to do with Palestinian nationalism anyway (and mostly sat the war out).
As I've explained, though, there was very little such rhetoric on the side of the Jews. You're making a false equivalency.
There's every reason to think that it would be more ethnic cleansing than the Jews did, based on both rhetoric and actual actions in controlled territory. And unlike the Palestinians, they'd have nowhere to escape to, likely resulting in large scale death - say, drowning on ramshackle ships when they get turned away from Cyprus by the British.
But, yes, the Arabs probably wouldn't have intentionally killed all the Jews (though they probably would have killed a proportionally higher number than the Jews did of Arab civilians).
No they didn't. I've already said that like three times in this thread. No one was willing to accept Jewish refugees in 1938, no one was willing to accept Jewish refugees in 1946. Czechoslovakia and Poland didn't even accept their own citizens! Acceptance of Displaced Persons in any numbers only started in 1950...after all the Jews had gone to Israel.
EDIT: also, total number of DP's accepted by places not Israel was about half the total population of Jews in Palestine - even without taking into account those DPs that did move to Israel.
Certainly it's not. I'm not trying to say that the Arabs are bad for not accepting Jewish refugees, just pointing out that they wouldn't, while they did accept the Palestinians.
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Look, I'm done now, this is distracting me from some fairly important studying. No matter what you or anyone else posts, I'm done with this thread - especially since exactly what I said would happen has happened, and I broke my promise to myself not to get sucked in.
But please, please reexamine some of your priors.
And please try to stop applying the fallacy of false equivalence; even without saying that one side was better or worse than the other, they were very different and had very different goals and very different histories and ways of going about their goals, and it's not good to think otherwise. This is true of almost any situation, by the way, not just the Partition.[/quote][/quote]
Syria always saw the area of Palestine belonging to them (as well as Jordan and Lebanon). Expect the long term results would be Syrian-Egyptian rivalry for control or influence of the area. We may see de facto or even later de jure partition (via international treaty among the other Arab powers). If Egypt stays under a monarchy, then Syria likely becomes the anti-monarchy, revolutionary Arab Nationalist leader that Egypt became under Nasser. I still find it doubtful that the Middle East will result in some countries developing stable, democratic rule, but there is some increased chance now.
I don't think the Israelis would be exterminated, but it would be a bad result. I do expect various massacres by soldiers against civilians as the war winds up, and expulsions of later migrants after the war is over. Jewish families will long established ties to the region will be allowed to stay, albeit in inferior status. A lot will need to find new homes. Most will probably end up in the US or the British commonwealth, but some will return to Europe (especially those who left Western Europe - not Germany or in the Soviet Bloc).
I don't think the Israelis would be exterminated, but it would be a bad result. I do expect various massacres by soldiers against civilians as the war winds up, and expulsions of later migrants after the war is over. Jewish families will long established ties to the region will be allowed to stay, albeit in inferior status. A lot will need to find new homes. Most will probably end up in the US or the British commonwealth, but some will return to Europe (especially those who left Western Europe - not Germany or in the Soviet Bloc).
"This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
- Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League. It should be noted that he was predicting the outcome of a war he did not want, not calling for such an outcome. He was a relative moderate (though he blamed the Zionists for the war).
The Arab Legion captured some Jewish positions, notably the Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem and the Gush Etzion settlements. In both cases, the defenders and civilians were taken prisoner and eventually released safely to Israel.
The Egyptian army overran a few Jewish positions near Gaza. In those cases, all civilians had been evacuated, and there were (IIRC) no prisoners taken. Still, it seems likely that if Egyptian troops took some large Zionist settlements or even Tel Aviv, the officers would restrain the troops. Syrian and Palestinian forces would kill everyone they could.
It's an implicit objective when you want to set up a state in a place that already has a population that does not want to be in your state, especially if you are establishing an ethnic/religious state. And it's what actually happened in Israel.
There was different rhetoric. But both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing in the 1948 war, and both sides had their excuses for it. Equally, both sides took civilian prisoners and returned them, at times.
You do seem to be saying that Israel in Palestine was the only option for Displaced Persons until about 1950 (were there many non-Jewish DPs who moved there? since it's the only option?); I'm saying the people who lived in Palestine are no worse than Americans or British, or any members of the UN, who decided not to accept DPs. It so happens that Israel was established by the UN before discussions like these were completed, before any consent or agreement was reached with the locals.
To finish up on topic. I disagree.
They'd be second-class citizens, or citizens of a rump state, until they found that situation intolerable, and would leave for America or Europe in a few years, or they might remain and fight for independence. Maybe half a million, almost all the Jewish population, leaves during the Fifties, and the Jewish DPs in Europe move to America instead of Israel.
The point wasn't to cast Palestinians as bad for not wanting to accept Jewish refugees, I never made anything near that point. The point was to refute your suggestion that Jewish refugees from Palestine would be accepted by anyone. Literally, anyone. You kept saying that the Jewish refugees could go somewhere, my point with the DP camps was to show that, no, they couldn't. If anything, the fact that so many countries started readily accepting DPs as soon as the issue of Jewish DPs was resolved underlines that. For most of the Jews in Palestine and in Europe, there was literally no other option. Those in Palestine wouldn't even have been able to take the Palestinian route of remaining in refugee camps indefinitely because none of the places they could get to would have let them stay, even as stateless refugees.
You're assuming the Jews in Palestine would have nowhere to go, and that this would inevitably mean they would be killed quickly, rather than occupied indefinitely. I just don't believe they'd be killed, and I believe they'd be occupied for only as long as the UN allowed it. If they were left without a resolution for decades, the situation would eventually become a Gaza Strip with Jewish residents north of Tel Aviv, gradually leaving for the west illegally, maybe fighting an insurrection; or if they were evacuated early on, there would be a Jewish minority in the region gradually getting more rights, while most Jews would live in North America.