Hierosolyma
Banned
What if, instead of creating a Jewish state in Israel, the victors of WWII chose to turn East Prussia (which had already been ethnically cleansed of most of its Germans at this point) into the Jewish state?
WI: Jewish State in East Prussia
- Thread starter Hierosolyma
- Start date
The fate of East Prussia is not up to "the victors" but to one of them--the Soviet Union. This is a very strategic area for the USSR--an area from which Germany has attacked Russia more than once. There is just no way Stalin is going to agree to create a Jewish state there. It has to go either to the USSR or (in part) to a reliably pro-Soviet Poland. You could of course say that he might establish a Jewish SSR or ASSR there, but this is extremely unlikely--he didn't trust Soviet Jews enough for this. Even the idea of some Soviet Jewish intellectuals to establish a Jewish republic in Crimea would prove to be fatal to those who suggested it...
Hierosolyma
Banned
The fairest thing to do (other than leaving it with Germany, which Stalin would have never considered, because he was a bloodthirsty maniac) would have been to turn it into a "Prussian Soviet Socialist Republic". Basically annex it into the Soviet Union without expelling the Germans, tell them that they are the "Prussian Ethnicity" (like Austrians after WWI in OTL) and make them yet another Soviet ethnicity.
Stalin could have gotten the strategic land without the unjust ethnic cleansings.
You won’t be able to convince 600,000 Jews in Palestine to migrate to the continent where a genocide was committed against their brothers just a couple of years before.
Besides, Zionism is about Jewish self-determination on their ancestral homelands, Eretz Israel. One of the reasons of why Uganda and other places were rejected as possible Jewish homeland.
Besides, Zionism is about Jewish self-determination on their ancestral homelands, Eretz Israel. One of the reasons of why Uganda and other places were rejected as possible Jewish homeland.
Given that the Allies literally set a code to bring about the 'Abolition of Prussia', I doubt the USSR would do that. Even then, logically for the Soviets, the Germans are a potential threat and just now former-Prussia is an excellent strategic position. They wouldn't really want to have a potential fifth column that the West or the Germans could exploit. For the main section of East Germany, that was a part of the main Soviet Occupation Zone and could be reorganized. Also Potsdam literally ceded the part of East Prussia that wouldn't be Polish to the USSR so there wouldn't be any real incentive to keep the Germans in when they could just be replaced.
This would only happen if Stalin is feeling anti-semitic and he decides to deport all the USSR's ethnic Jews to a separate territory, but doesn't send them to Birobidzhan for some reason.
There's no way the Zionist leadership would sign onto this, by the 1940s there was already sizable Jewish settlement in Palestine. There was an earlier movement called Jewish Territorialism (aka we'll accept a refuge for Jews anywhere, Palestine or not) around the turn of the century, but it was long dead by the postwar period.
Why do AH-ers treat Jewish settlement in Palestine as some kind of uncertain, open question as late as the post WW2 period? There was Jewish settlement in Palestine as early as the 1880s (First Aliyah), and the first Zionist Congress was held in 1897. Israeli independence in '48 was the end of decades long process, a Jewish state wasn't just some random thing brainstormed by the Great Powers in the forties.
There's no way the Zionist leadership would sign onto this, by the 1940s there was already sizable Jewish settlement in Palestine. There was an earlier movement called Jewish Territorialism (aka we'll accept a refuge for Jews anywhere, Palestine or not) around the turn of the century, but it was long dead by the postwar period.
Why do AH-ers treat Jewish settlement in Palestine as some kind of uncertain, open question as late as the post WW2 period? There was Jewish settlement in Palestine as early as the 1880s (First Aliyah), and the first Zionist Congress was held in 1897. Israeli independence in '48 was the end of decades long process, a Jewish state wasn't just some random thing brainstormed by the Great Powers in the forties.