WI: East Prussia as Israel

Originally posted by Iori


Ah, you meant the territory of Free City of Danzig, not the town itself. I get it. Poles would be unhappy anyway, since they would prefer to have whole Vistula for themselves as a communication route. OTOH, if Polish-Israeli relations are good, any problems might be solved.
And here I can predict some tensions. What kind of Poland exists exactly ITTL? With OTL 1945 borders or with OTL 1939 borders+Danzig? Or perhaps with western border like OTL 1939 and eastern like OTL 1945? If so, Poles are incredibily pissed off. They lost a big chunk of their territory to the Soviets, they had almost no compensation from the Germans, since the territory Poles were interested in (since 1918) is taken by the Jews. That might create problems. However, in face of Soviet threat it might be forgotten or Poles migth decide the Soviets are to be blamed.

Basically Poland's OTL borders minus East Prussia.
 
Originally posted by Iori
Basically Poland's OTL borders minus East Prussia.

Then Poland can live with it. There is a reasonable chance for quite good Polish-Israeli relations, if Poland is so showered with US money as you say, especially with Soviet threat still looming over Poland. Even Polish nationalists would have been quite happy with that solution - they never wanted to murder all the Jews, they simply wanted them out of Poland.
I already can see Poland and Israel as founding NATO members - or perhaps it would have been called Warsaw Pact?;)
 
or perhaps it would have been called Warsaw Pact?;)

I had to think of an alternate name for the Communist Defence thing for that very reason. :D


I'd like to turn this into an actualy project, I've already done a general Cold War Europe Map with 'New Israel' on it and I'm working on a national map with major cities at the moment.
 
The Anglo-Americans enforcing the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Germans in full sight of their press is politically ASB. Not raising objections when the Soviets do so out of sight on the other side of the Iron Curtain was a wholly different thing. And placing large numbers of resentful Jew survivors among large numbers of surly German Prussians has nasty political implications, too.

I think your scenario could only theoretically work if the Germans evacuate East Prussia on their own in the expectation of a Soviet attack (they did so to some degree IOTL, we neede to be rather thorough), then the Western Allies manage to snatch the area at the last minute. I'm not sure if there is a plausible military sequence of events that would allow to do this.

If incinerating a million civilians in cold blood didn't get the press upset, then I doubt evacuating Prussia would.
 
I posted this on the map thread, but I forgot to post it here, the thread I made it for.

New Israel.png
 
Aren't most of those Hebrew names? I thought official languages were to be Polish, Yiddish and German. BTW, I think German might be out of the question for obvious reason.
 
Aren't most of those Hebrew names? I thought official languages were to be Polish, Yiddish and German. BTW, I think German might be out of the question for obvious reason.

I'm of the opinion Hebrew would have continued to be resurrected, plus, when I was looking into it, their are cities in modern Israel that were
built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with names in Hebrew, so you don't even really need to have it be the national language to
actually use it.

As for German, well notice their are only three cities retaining German names, Konigsberg since it's far to historic to change and I'm thinking
the Germans who chose to stay and become Israeli's would likely congregate their, and Neu Ashkenaz, which would've been built by German
speaking Jews from Germany itself and Marienwerder which, I think would be like Konigsber, in that it would be a place where Germans who
chose to stay would congregate, plus it's name is sort of religious; 'Mary's Island'.
 
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Originally posted by Iori
As for German, well notice their are only three cities retaining German names, Konigsberg since it's far to historic to change and I'm thinking
the Germans who chose to stay and become Israeli's would likely congregate their, and Neu Ashkenaz, which would've been built by German
speaking Jews from Germany itself and Marienwerder which, I think would be like Konigsber, in that it would be a place where Germans who
chose to stay would congregate, plus it's name is sort of religious; 'Mary's Island'.
Do you really think Jews would have let any German stay? Or that any German would have risked to stay among Jews?
 
Aren't most of those Hebrew names? I thought official languages were to be Polish, Yiddish and German. BTW, I think German might be out of the question for obvious reason.

I was the one who proposed Yiddish, Polish, and German, and I stick with my guns - Hebrew ended up getting adopted because of a sense of romanticism associated with returning to the Holy Land. This is why the Sephardic accent was chosen, despite all the people in charge of this business being Ashkenazi. German gets kept because so many of these people are German, and German is an important language in the region. Plus all the signs are in German:p

Similarly, I opposed the name "New Israel". There was never any question of naming the Jewish state in Palestine Israel because the name for that geographic region in Hebrew has always been "Eretz Yisrael" ("Land of Israel", originally in the sense of Israel = Jacob. It's thus the land of Jacob's descendants.) At best, we might see the new place being called Judah (the Jewish kingdom from which almost all modern Jews are thought to be descended).
 
Nobody ever took that seriously, not Stalin, not the Party, and especially not the Jews. The fact that it was created at all was really just a bizarre experiment at "Marixst-Leninist Zionism" that went over like a lead balloon. It was also created partly out of a need to get Soviet Jews to officially meet the USSR's criteria for being considered a legitimate "nationality" (a.k.a. ethnicity), one of which was having a homeland.

The fact that someone as high up as Molotov suggested the Crimea and that Stalin actually entertained the idea is a testament to what the Soviets really thought (or rather, didn't think) of the desolate, tiger-infested backwater they not even halfheartedly tried to turn into a "Soviet Zion."

I've never heard tiger-infested used before lol.
 

The Vulture

Banned
Nice-looking map, Iori.

I think this would be a poor idea, as it would only engender resentment towards the Jews, seeing as Germany loses territory to them and all. And most survivors interested in resettlement probably would not want to be anywhere near Europe.
 
Iori,

I think you're kind of missing something here: Zionism was pretty focused on returning to Palestine/Israel. Even putting aside all the other concerns with the Western allies enforcing this new state and the reprecussions of that, there's still the fact that a pretty large percentage of Zionists simply won't go for it. They'd been going to Palestine for that purpose since Zionism started, and I doubt they're all going to just drop those dreams of reclaiming their promised land. Most likely, the ones who will be going to this (pretty ASB) New Israel will be Yiddish Jews and maybe some Polish and Russian Jews. The rest will probably continue going to Palestine or stay where they are, and if it's not a nation spanning all those different Jewish cultures I doubt that Hebrew will be resurrected. Most likely this is going to be more of a "Yidland" than "New Israel".

I think this was all mentioned in the previous discussion on this topic, though I can't quite remember.
 
Iori,

I think you're kind of missing something here: Zionism was pretty focused on returning to Palestine/Israel. Even putting aside all the other concerns with the Western allies enforcing this new state and the reprecussions of that, there's still the fact that a pretty large percentage of Zionists simply won't go for it.

They'd been going to Palestine for that purpose since Zionism started, and I doubt they're all going to just drop those dreams of reclaiming their promised land.

Not at first, no, which is why their are still Germans and Poles, however, over time as Britain makes it known it won't allow a 'Jewish state' in Palestine and starts enforcing immigration laws, the Zionists will eventually move their as they realize it's the closest thing they're ever gonna get to their goals.


The rest will probably continue going to Palestine or stay where they are, and if it's not a nation spanning all those different Jewish cultures I doubt that Hebrew will be resurrected. Most likely this is going to be more of a "Yidland" than "New Israel".

As I said, you don't have to have Hebrew being a national language to use it for naming cities.

Beyond that I think that it would have been ressurected and become spoken by a dedicated community, though not as a major language.
Actually I think some of it ATL's Hebrew would likely get mixed into the dominant language, similiar to how English is mixed with the Indian language(s).
 
As I said, you don't have to have Hebrew being a national language to use it for naming cities.

Beyond that I think that it would have been ressurected and become spoken by a dedicated community, though not as a major language.
Actually I think some of it ATL's Hebrew would likely get mixed into the dominant language, similiar to how English is mixed with the Indian language(s).

At the very least, make it Ashkenazi-accented Hebrew (e.g. Kiryas instead of Kiryat).

Still, it is, of course, your TL.
 
I was'nt aware Hebrew had accents that changed spelling honestly.

Bute yeah, that seems reasonable.

The big difference between Ashkenazi Hebrew and (now standard) Sephardic Hebrew for here, in Sephardi accent, Tav (ת) is always a "t" sound. In the Ashkenazi, it's an "s" sound unless it's dotted (תּ)

Other good notes: the silent letters Aleph and Ayin are glottal stops in Sephardic, and silent in Ashkenazi. This makes Israel go from "Yisra'el" to "Yisroil", roughly. There's more, many of which will affect transliterations into English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Hebrew
 
Update on this proposal: Possibly debunked.

Source:
In 1941 Lord Moyne suggested to David Ben-Gurion that Jewish refugees could be resettled in East Prussia after Germany was defeated and the area's German inhabitants were expelled. Ben-Gurion responded that "the only way to get Jews to go [to East Prussia] would be with machine guns."
 
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