What if Britain had let all the Jews of Europe into Israel in the 30s?

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"The history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel"


It was depopulated many times deliberately and it very depopulated in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Mark Twain visited Israel in 1867, and published his impressions in Innocents Abroad. He described a desolate country – devoid of both vegetation and human population:

“….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”

He was amazed by the smallness of the city of Jerusalem:

“A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is.”

Yes this is the myth of the empty land I referenced earlier, it wasn't true then, even if it's clung to now to try and show how it OK to kick the Palestinians off the land thy had been on it very long or not been interested in tending it so don't deserve it
 
Most of the Jews (and Samaritans, don't forget them) had been dispersed and/or converted to Christianity when the Byzantine Palaestina Prima and Secunda were taken by the Sassanids and their Arab allies, the Lakhmids, briefly retaken, and lost for good under the first Caliphate.

Then some ethnic cleansing as we would call it today, with settlers from the Arabian Tribes filling in and the preexisting population of Christians and Jews converting over the following Centuries.

So have you got cite for teh question I asked?
 
They got a very good deal, many Palestinians I have spoken too have told me they should have taken it. So do most Israeli, I have spoken too.


How did they get a good deal, they had a another state imposed upon them?



The Arabs grabbed most land set aside for the Palestinians, with the Palestinian agreement and help and then the Arab governments kept the land they conquered for themselves. A Palestinian state could have been established anytime up to the 1967 war, without Israel at all. The reasons why it was not are interesting.

What? You seem to have rather ignoring the reality of how things were going form the very start. You also seem rather keen on conflating Egypt and Syria with the Palestinians.

Also you use an interesting turn of phrase here, "land set aside for the Palestinians", as though someone was gracious enough to give them some, but it was their land in the first place.

Which goes back to my earlier point the whole thing started as an imposition and forced compromise for the Palestinians

.


We now have three states Gaza, West Bank and Israel, you could say its worked out not as well as it should have though.

I'd say that yes

Not much of a joke, the Palestinians did not compromise at all, like a gambler in a casino that goes double or nothing, that is why like so many such gamblers they ended out so badly but that is mainly their own fault.

How did they not compromise, they started with a state, they then had another state imposed into their state, that state then grew and pushed them out of the smaller area they had already been pushed into by the creation of that state. How is in the world is that the Palestinians not compromising? On the other hand Israel went from not being there to being there and then took more and more territory and resources from the Palestinians
 
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Try "Native American". I doubt the Apaches, Sioux, Iroquois and what have you feel that they need to "get over" what's been done to them. Especially since they've lost everything in .

Note that adjacent Tribes hadn't 'got over' what the expansionist Iroquois, Apache and Sioux had been doing, long before the White Man showed up.
 
So have you got cite for teh question I asked?
That was with @bernardz I didn't make that claim
As for as religious beliefs,the area was mostly Christian by the 630s when the Rashiduns removed the heavy anti-Jewish efforts of the Byzantines, and started their own slightly lighter oppression on the area. Jews and Christians both were both approved, but tolerated nominally as People of the Book, as long as the Jizya was paid.
 
That was with @bernardz I didn't make that claim
As for as religious beliefs,the area was mostly Christian by the 630s when the Rashiduns removed the heavy anti-Jewish efforts of the Byzantines, and started their own slightly lighter oppression on the area. Jews and Christians both were both approved, but tolerated nominally as People of the Book, as long as the Jizya was paid.

Ok by my point was about this claim that the are was largely Jewish until the arabs arrived. Because this basically goes to support the idea that it should default as being Jewish and that non Jews don't really have roots or a history there i.e. the whole squatters narrative especially with the inference that it was Jewish until the outsider Arab/Muslim conquest, (and that is therefore the "Arab" Palestinians cut out). But the reality is that while the Jews obviously have a very long history in the area waxing and waning over time for the reasons you and others have posted. The area was never wholly Jewish, there have always been plenty of other cultures there for exceptionally long time and there descendants are still there and not squatters

If nothing else that bit of land has been a crossroads between three continents for thousands for years ironically it making it of land which is least likely to have the kind of we dibs it 5 thousand years ago claim.
 
I think we have gotten off track here - the question is what would have happened had the UK not had restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 30s(before the start of WWII). Not "was it right politically or morally", "not who did the land belong to", not "who is right/wrong in the continuing mess" etc, etc. I would suggest all stop this.

Factually assuming unlimited Jewish immigration to the "Palestinian Mandate", let's say from the end of WWI to the beginning of WWII, realistically you have somewhere between 750,000 and 2,000,000 Jews entering. More after 1933 but not all at once. Also the Jews of Western Europe, the Jews of Eastern Europe, and the Jews of the USSR won't be coming in any significant numbers as they either have no specific reason to emigrate or are not allowed (USSR). The immigrants will be those who are dedicated Zionists who can come from anywhere, later joined by German, Austrian, and Czech/Slovak Jews. Jews from Hungary and Romania might come in smaller numbers as antisemitism ramps up there. Italy, as Italian fascism did not really hit the Jews particularly I doubt more than Zionists. Once the war starts, Jewish emigration from Nazi occupied territory and that of the Axis will pretty much dry up. You're never going to see any variation of the "trucks for Jews" deal the Nazis offered late in the war - nobody will go for that. This means Jewish immigration after the war starts is limited to "escapees".

In 1931 the population of Palestine was 760K Muslims, 175K Jews, 89K Christians. If a middle number of Jews arrive, the estimated population in 1939 would be Jews 1.5 million, 900K Muslims, 95K Christians. BTW for Britain, if you say that 20% of a population is males of military age who are fit for service, this means a potential of >250,000 Jews who could serve in British forces.
 
TBH not everyone is going to have the means and desire to go. Poland had anti-Semitism, sure, but it was also home for centuries for its Jewish population. And a lot of that population is poor and rural, and the descendants of the people who didn't up stakes and go to America in the 19th century. Also a lot of the victims of the Holocaust were in the USSR, which isn't going to let anybody emigrate.

So it's not like the whole Jewish population of Europe is going to go to Palestine even if the British allow it. And I'm not sure why they would allow it unless a British politician has some unnatural foresight. Even if they knew Hitler was planning genocide, nobody thought the Nazis would conquer Poland, France, Benelux, the Baltics, until they did.
 
TBH not everyone is going to have the means and desire to go. Poland had anti-Semitism, sure, but it was also home for centuries for its Jewish population. And a lot of that population is poor and rural, and the descendants of the people who didn't up stakes and go to America in the 19th century. Also a lot of the victims of the Holocaust were in the USSR, which isn't going to let anybody emigrate.

So it's not like the whole Jewish population of Europe is going to go to Palestine even if the British allow it. And I'm not sure why they would allow it unless a British politician has some unnatural foresight. Even if they knew Hitler was planning genocide, nobody thought the Nazis would conquer Poland, France, Benelux, the Baltics, until they did.

The Russian Jews after the fall of communism later on in bulk moved to Israel, with the situation people have no choice and in the late 1930s, where most of the Jews were they would have little choice.
 
What makes you say its a myth. Do you have a cite for that?

Looking through your posts on this thread, it seems your only cited evidence that Palestine was desolate is some Twain description of his visit. Nothing against Twain, his anecdotal account is just not sufficient to claim reasonably Palestine was desolate.
 
How did they get a good deal, they had a another state imposed upon them?

The Arabs got over 90% of the land in the deal which they refused. Look what they got from not compromising.


What? You seem to have rather ignoring the reality of how things were going form the very start. You also seem rather keen on conflating Egypt and Syria with the Palestinians.

And Jordanians and in the period we are talking about its fair assessment of the facts.

Also you use an interesting turn of phrase here, "land set aside for the Palestinians", as though someone was gracious enough to give them some, but it was their land in the first place.

No, it was not, it was British land and before that it was Turkish.

Which goes back to my earlier point the whole thing started as an imposition and forced compromise for the Palestinians.

(a)
Let just say your history is correct, which it is not and you have something, how is it compromising to demand all of it?

How did they not compromise, they started with a state, they then had another state imposed into their state, that state then grew and pushed them out of the smaller area they had already been pushed into by the creation of that state. How is in the world is that the Palestinians not compromising? On the other hand Israel went from not being there to being there and then took more and more territory and resources from the Palestinians

see (a) above.

Basically its pretty hard to get over the fact that Palestinians problems are self-inflicted. See my comments earlier about the comparison between German after ww2 and them.
 
Looking through your posts on this thread, it seems your only cited evidence that Palestine was desolate is some Twain description of his visit. Nothing against Twain, his anecdotal account is just not sufficient to claim reasonably Palestine was desolate.

Indeed and no-one has come up with anything to disprove it. Do you want another one, try this one.

Scholch, Alexander (November 1985). "The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850–1882". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 17 (4): 485–505.

Palestine in 1850 had about 350,000 inhabitants.

In comparsion, the current population of the region is about 15 million.
 
Indeed and no-one has come up with anything to disprove it. Do you want another one, try this one.

See Russell's teapot.

Scholch, Alexander (November 1985). "The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850–1882". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 17 (4): 485–505.

Palestine in 1850 had about 350,000 inhabitants.

That's a pretty large time span between 1850 and the relevant time period this thread was created to focus on.
 
See Russell's teapot..

I beg your pardon, I provided a fact, you provided nothing. You also claimed that Twain description is anecdotal which it clearly is not as he is talking directly and systematically on the population that he saw.

That's a pretty large time span between 1850 and the relevant time period this thread was created to focus on.

Indeed but we were talking about Twain's visit. It does not change a lot though, in 1920, the British Government's Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine stated that there were hardly 700,000 people living in Palestine.
 
You're trying to make the argument of "A land with no people for a people with no land" (i.e. that Palestine was effectively uninhabited and ripe for proper colonization) - which is bullshit.

Palestine was a pre-industrial territory with lower medical technology and lower life expectancy compared to, say, Britain at the same time. Those numbers didn't prove the land was empty, it just proves that's how much people were in it at the time. It was a pretty rural area, like Montana or the Dakota - Montana today has barely 1.08 million people, compared to the teeming millions of California or the East Coast. The locals had neither the capital nor the need to turn it into a modern economy, and the circumstances weren't particularly helping, particularly with a very traditionalist-minded Ottoman Empire that was badly dwindling and thus had no cash to spare to modernize the core territory of Turkey, let alone the periphery of Palestine.

Shoving a large number of Europeans there prior to WW2 would be a nightmare, and not just because of mass Arab outrage. There's nowhere to put them; you have to massively expand the infrastructure and develop it quickly, so as to make it suitable for people who have been living in Europe, which had undergone a massive Industrial Revolution over a century ago and now had populations in the hundreds of millions. Israel today had 9 million people, and that's after decades of development, expansion, and growth. Trying to shove those people into a pre-industrial Palestine would be a disaster. You'd need to displace people who lived in the already inhabited territories - which is what happened historically.

Mark Twain may have been as accurate as you claim he is, but the man was living in the USA around 1850-1870, at a time when the population was in the 23-35 million range. Most of it was on the East Coast, and while Mr. Twain lived in Missouri, it wasn't exactly empty territory; on the contrary, it was pretty arable and full of rolling farmlands, and it had the fortune to be part of the American breadbasket, meaning that while it was among the poorest per-capita compared to the more industrialized states like New York and Philadelphia, it still had considerable infrastructure and buildup to feel large but still connected and full. The American states were still growing, but as an industrialized country there was still many ways to move around, making it seem far less empty. Twain could have gone out west to California and written about how staggeringly empty the whole place feels outside of a few cities and towns. He just wrote about Palestine because it was a foreign country and also holy land, so it was better fodder for writing.

While the Ottoman Empire had similar numbers in 1856, it should be noted that the vast majority of the populace lived in the Balkans and Egypt, two very densely populated and very developed parts of the empire. The loss of those territories caused a massive nosedive in population numbers from 35M in 1856 to 17M in 1881-1893. Palestine was effectively the ass end of nowhere by comparison.

While Israel today has made improvements in reclaiming land for farming, most of the reclaimed territory is in northern or central Palestine, which are arable but not traditionally profitable territories, which is why pre-1900 Palestinians never bothered with the land. The traditionally arable territories were Gaza, the Jaffa-Haifa coast, the West Bank, the Sea of Galilee gorge and the Dead Sea gorge, where humidity and year-round warmth in the latter two make them ideal for growing plants. Even then, Israel had the benefit of massive foreign aid and having some of the best agricultural and land reclamation companies worldwide.
 
Many European Jews wanted to move to Israel when Hitler rose to power, but to appease the local Arabs, the Brits didn’t allow many to move.

What if the Brits had allowed it? How would 9 million Jewish migrants in the 1930s change things ?

My guess is that there would be a larger Israel with a smaller Arab population.

Most European Jews were not even Zionists, much less wannabe immigrants. Soviet Jews weren't interested. The traditionalist Hasidim were either theologically opposed to Zionism, or uninterested in leaving their long-established homes to go pioneering with a lot of atheist socialists.

The successful Jewry of central and western Europe was divided. Some were Zionist sypathizers. But just as many regarded Zionism as betrayal of the long struggle for social acceptance and civil equality.

Thus even if Britain had abolished all limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine, only a few hundred thousand additional immigrants would have moved in the 1930s. more would have come during and after the war, so that by 1948 there would be about 1.2M to 1.5M Jews in Palestine, with unconditional support from Britain.

E.g. Britain could form a "Hebrew Legion" to keep order in Palestine in parallel with the OTL Arab Legion. Such a substantial armed force, officially backed by Britain, would deter Palestinian Arabs from forming armed gangs to attack the Jews. The Arabs are unhappy, but submit.

In these conditions the 1948 war never happens; Palestine becomes independent as a single Jewish-majority state with a large Arab minority. If there is no 1948 war, the other Arab states may not expel their Jewish minorities. Even if they did, alt-Israel would be majority Ashkenazim, not majority Mizrachim.

Down the road - OTL, the Arab population of Israel has grown faster than the Jewish population, in spite of an complete ban on Arab immigration. ATL, it seems likely that by 1970, alt-Israel would become majority Arab!
 
Most European Jews were not even Zionists, much less wannabe immigrants. Soviet Jews weren't interested.

There is the push and the pull, originally the Poles and NAZIs were looking at sending the Jews away. The problem the Jews had was there was nowhere for them to go. Now if they have a spot to go, several governments in Eastern Europe would be pushing them to go.

As far as the Soviet Jews, I am sure many would want to go if only to escape Stalin. In the 1990s large numbers of them (61%) voluntarily left to Israel.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah

Pre ww2 USSR Jewish population IN 1933 was 2,525,000 so we are looking from just the USSR about 1.4 million.
 
Looking through your posts on this thread, it seems your only cited evidence that Palestine was desolate is some Twain description of his visit. Nothing against Twain, his anecdotal account is just not sufficient to claim reasonably Palestine was desolate.

There were actually several similar reports, including a New York Times Article and Conder-Kitchener Expedition funded by the British Palestine Exploration Fund (an association of archeologists).

All insist that the land was sparsely populated and poorly developed.

EDIT: I want to clarify that I'm offering this piece of information without a values statement - i.e., the land being sparsely populated and desolate doesn't mean that it should have been open for settlement by outside forces. Just that Mark Twain's description is hardly the only one.
 
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