CaliGuy
Banned
OK; indeed, I could see why a democracy believer could agree to partition--even as a mere necessary tactical move.No so much a moderate but fiercely believed in democracy
OK; indeed, I could see why a democracy believer could agree to partition--even as a mere necessary tactical move.No so much a moderate but fiercely believed in democracy
Who wanted to both have their cake and eat it? The Zionists? The British?
I respectfully disagree with this. These tendencies were on the rise in Europe (and the USA) long before the Nazis came to power or occupied much of Europe. As a reaction to the excesses of the Nazis in things like the T4 program, let alone the Holocaust, antisemitism, anti-Slav and Roma racism (but not racism against Asians or Africans) became unfashionable. More precisely what became unfashionable was the sort of blatant antisemitism you had in Germany and the "KKK style" antisemitism. restrictions on where Jews could live, quotas in Universities and professional schools, refusal to hire or promote Jews and more lasted in the USA until the 1960s quite openly. Absent the "shaming" of the Holocaust I don't see this getting any better at all.
OK; understood.The British as usual were both fickle and promiscuous in their diplomacy, making conflicting and contradictory promises to all sides, they wanted the natives to be good subjects yet had a strong sympathy with the Zionists, they used the Zionists to subdue the natives but wanted it all nicely contained, they simply wanted to have happy Jewish interests at home and contented populaces on the ground, they wanted no threats to their rule, rule done as cheaply and as painlessly as possible for them, it is the usual story of the British Empire and its implosion in the Middle East. Here the Lion found itself with a genuine Tar Baby fighting from the briar patch.
Completely agreed with all of this; without the Holocaust, anti-Semitism would fade away more slowly in the West. However, it would nevertheless still gradually fade away in the West--just over a longer time period.You should disagree, this is a clash of ideas on what might have been, mine is no more clairvoyant than yours. I think it is too tempting to look at the history and assume it had to happen. Although it gives us a grim insight into the true hearts of men, the reality is that Nazism was the extreme end, but my point is that without it the "acceptability" of intolerance does have staying power. The roots of this stretch back to the story on the betrayal of Christ.
Of course we saw anti-Semitism in Poland and Romania post-WWI, but part of this is caused by the re-birth of these nations and sudden influx of peoples in new territories that need to be subsumed, assimilation is in this era rather one-sided. Take that away and I think you get a different outcome. The European Jewish populace speaks Yiddish, to most of these people it sounds German, many times the Jews were lumped in as ethnic Germans by these countries. In a world where Germany is not a vanquished foe one might see a similar mix of fear, envy and suspicion, add to that the age old reality that many Jews were middle class, owned shops and ran banks and operated in cities with trade and money that seemed ill-gotten to the average peasant. We still see it today. We still hear the terms like Gypped.
I suggest that the Jews of Europe are not facing a bright and sunny future, we saw Pogroms in Czarist Russia, violence and discrimination in near on every nation in Europe, we saw the Dreyfus Affair in France, but butterfly the Holocaust and you have millions of European Jews who had not simply left, in fact generations of them had stayed, they will remain and conduct business, live lives, interact, they will earn respect while gaining disdain; but as Europe transitions to higher levels of education, increased urbanization, the lessening of sectarian prejudices, and modernity generally I think see racism equated with atavistic ignorance, nut it still hides because we forget that bias is simply a product of experiences, bias is a tipping point, under enough stress it plunges one to the bowels of violence fed by fear. My arguments are that absent the Holocaust we still have a long history but are not doomed by it.
Indeed, I wonder if the Holocaust and the resulting international sympathy for the Jews in 1946 relative to 1938 is the reason as for why exactly the Jewish Agency demanded a better partition plan in 1946 in comparison to 1938.For the record, here are the partition plans that the (Zionist) Jewish Agency proposed in our TL in 1938 and 1946, respectively:
https://ecf.org.il/maps/563507243f0000debcec1a23?options=ZPBLSF
http://database.ecf.org.il/maps/55b0e32e880000e702367cb8?options=ZPBLSF