1929-1939:
The Roaring Twenties came to a shocking end with the Wall St. Crash of 1929. The Crash began a ripple effect around the world.
For East Africa, things, for the first time in the nation's history, began to look grim. Factories closed, unemployment rose, and a feeling of despair rose and rose. It seemed Trumpledor's 1928 retirement had taken away more than just the everlasting era of good feelings.....
In the elections of 1931, Levi Eshkol's Labour Party swept to power after years in the wilderness. "So they didn't beat Moses," one Conservative MP was heard to have remarked. Eshkol ran on a platform of economic reform and promises of direct government intervention.
That same year also saw the final completion of the Cape-to-Cairo Railway. King George V rode on the first triumphent ride from Cairo to Cape Town, from which he sailed back to London. A major centerpeice of British pride, it proved to be the first uplift to East African morale in years. As the King passed through New Jerusalem and Port Shalom, he was greeted by huge crowds of his cheering Jewish subjects. "You can't say that Zion doesn't love you, your highness," was what Prime Minister Eshkol was rumored to have said to the monarch in his meeting with him in New Jerusalem.
ITO agents were dispatched to New York, where the situation was far more dire. It wasn't hard to find eager recruits for life in East Africa. Some 230,000 American Jews immigrated to Africa during this time period.
Eshkol acted quickly. Meeting with South Africa's Jan Smutts, both East Africa and South Africa signed an accord to end all trade barriers remaining between the two dominions (there were never that many anyways). The two African dominions had been pushing for greater Imperial preference, but faced resistance from London on the issue. Fustratred, they began their "Deep Friendship," which is solidified today as part of the African Federation. Pretty soon, East Africa was supplying South Africa with practical goods, while South Africa began supplying East Africa with luxury items (like wine, for instance) and mineral goods. The Diamond Trade became a centerpeice of this relationship. Pretty soon, unemployment in both South and East Africa was heading south again. Government-sponsered work programs built new irrigation canals, reseeded grazing land (helping out the Massai's extensive cattle heards), and began experimentation with solar power. Jan Smutts, against his instincts, (but then again, the Jews of East Africa had been right on practically everything thus far), copied these moves, and bound his nation closer with East Africa.
In 1933, Great Britain turned over Nysaland to the Dominion of East Africa. Most of the whites in the colony were Jews anyway. And with the Great Depression raging, it seemed like a very good way to save money. The city of Trumpledor (OTL's Lilongue), became the center of this new aquisition. Many German Jewish immigrants settled in small villages along Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyka.
The most ambitious of these new projects was a hydro-electric project, designed to increase electricity for the numerous towns and cities in East Africa. It turned into a joint project with South Africa (as the project was located on the two nations' borders). Completed by 1936, the projects managed to create cheap electricity for South and East Africa, and allowed for new irrigation canals, which increased the arable land substantialy.
In Europe, things were going from bad to worse. In Germany, the perpetually angry Great War veteran Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Worker's Party (Nazi Party) was becoming the dominent government party. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck angrilly denounced the Nazis. Having seen first hand the power of the Jewish fighting man, he attacked Hitler's ideologies fervently. But without his exploits in OTL, there were far fewer people willing to listen to Vorbeck. After several death threats, he fled with his family back to East Africa in 1932, to New Jerusalem. He became the new neighbor to the aging Joseph Trumpledor, who embraced his former foe like a brother.
Hitler became the absolute ruler of Germany in 1933, and soon, anti-Jewish laws began to be passed. ITO agents desperately warned as many Jews as possible to come to East Africa. Despite the fact that Hitler in Mein Kampf had written: "If only twelve million of those Hebrew vultures had been subject to the gas, the Fatherland would still have maintained the wealthy territories of Africa," the German Jews were at first aloof. Why, they had fervently supported Germany in the Great War, and many had served in the Fatherland's defence. How could their nation turn on them so? But slowly but surely, the trickle of Jewish refugees from Germany became a flood, as every last Jew in Germany, and later Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia fled to East Africa. This accelerated after the events of the Nuremburg Laws (1935) and Kristalnacht (1938). East Africa welcomed each and every one. Albert Einstein, before leaving for Port Shalom, told his wife: "Take a good look at this house. You'll never see it again." Over 1.9 million Jews came in this latest wave of refugees. Sigmund Freud, Enrico Fermi (who had a Jewish wife), Leo Salizard, Edward Teller, and countless others soon found employment in the great universities of the Dominion. In 1937, Salizard, with Einstein's signature, drafted a letter to Eskhol warning him on the devastating effects of a hypothetical uranium bomb.....soon, East Africa began importing uranium from the Belgian Congo for Project Sampson. Efforts to gain the attention of the British government were unsuccesful until after the start of World War II.
The thirties also saw a new problem emerge. Benito Mussolini, the pugnacious dictator of Italy, fancied himself as a reincarnation of Augustus. Remembering the humiliating defeat that his nation had suffered at Adua in 1896, he began to plan for the invasion of Ethiopia.
Emperor Haile Salasie, the Lion of Judah, had long admired the Dominion of East Africa. There was a strong and ancient Jewish community in his nation, going back to the days of Saloman and the Queen of Sheba. As Italy's rhetoric became more belligerant, East Africa, backed strongly by South Africa, tried to force the League to do something substantial.
Instead, the League rolled over like a leaky galleon as Italian troops invaded Ethiopia from Italian Somalailand and Eritrea. The British government refused to close the Suez Canal, allowing Mussolini a clear route towards conquest. Oh, they passed an embargo, but left out oil.
Fustrated by the Mother Country's indifference, the East Africans and South Africans began covert gun running operations to aid to Ethiopians. But it was too little, too late. The Lion of Judah fled to New Jerusalem, along with countless refugees, including the entire Jewish community of the mountain kingdom. The Jewish Defence Forces began mobilizing.
Mussolini, for his part, tired of the Jewish state's annoying sermonizing, and began anti-semetic programs of his own (even worse than in OTL). This led to the complete exodus of the Italian Jews. ITO agents in France, the Low Countries, and Iberia began handing out visas. Most accepted, although some just wouldn't budge, which would cost them dearly later.
In 1938, the Dominion held a referendum on a name change. Wether or not to declare their nation the State of Israel. Despite opposition from the Orthodox, the referendum passed. The Dominion of East Africa became the State of Israel, a Dominion of the British Empire. The Jewish Defence Forces became the Israeli Defence Forces, and became open to everyone, including non-Jews. Watching Neville Chamberlain (the son of the great Joseph Chamberlain) throw the Czechs to the wolves, Jan Smutts and Levi Eshkol began preparing their nations for conflict. They weren't fooled when the British PM claimed he had "Peace in our time!" The die was rapidly being cast......
By 1939, Hitler began making demands of Poland. As there were almost no more Jews left in Europe (and none left in Poland), Hitler began his truely dark deeds on September 1, 1939, when German forces smashed into that long-haplass nation.
Great Britain and France declared war on September 3, followed alomst immediently afterwards by the Dominions of Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India.
"We, the people of Israel, and our brothers-in-arms across the British Empire must make ourselves an arsenal of freedom in a world gone rife with the diseases of evil," declared Prime Minister Eshkol in his nation's declaration of War on Germany. "We will not stop until the German mad-dog has been put down for all time."
World War II was on.......
