But put that aside for a moment, and address the reality of the Holocaust. Just what would you expect the Jews to have done?--the survivors that is. Where were they to go? What were they to do?
the Jews were offered land in Australia and in Canada but refused.
had they taken it, they would have thrived and would have been sure that they wouldn't have this type of problem to begin with.
Theodor Herzl sought support from the great powers for the creation of a Jewish homeland. He turned to Great Britain, and met with Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary and others. The British agreed, in principle, to Jewish settlement in East Africa "on conditions which will enable members to observe their national customs." ... Zangwill became the movement's undisputed leader. After the rejection of the Uganda scheme on the grounds of impracticability by the British, Zangwill turned his attention to settlement in Canada and Australia. But opposition from local residents led him to abandon the scheme. Expeditions were sent to Mesopotamia (Iraq), Cyrenaica (Libya) and Angola but little came of these expeditions. A project that had some concrete success was the Galveston scheme which contemplated the settlement of Jews in the American Southwest, in particular in Texas. The project received the assistance of Jacob Schiff, the American Jewish banker, and some 9,300 Jews arrived in that area between 1907-1914, through the Emigration Bureau of the Territorialist organization.
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Zangwill became the movement's undisputed leader. After the rejection of the Uganda scheme on the grounds of impracticability by the British, Zangwill turned his attention to settlement in Canada and Australia. But opposition from local residents led him to abandon the scheme. Expeditions were sent to Mesopotamia (Iraq), Cyrenaica (Libya) and Angola but little came of these expeditions.
A project that had some concrete success was the Galveston scheme which contemplated the settlement of Jews in the American Southwest, in particular in Texas. The project received the assistance of Jacob Schiff, the American Jewish banker, and some 9,300 Jews arrived in that area between 1907-1914, through the Emigration Bureau of the Territorialist organization.
Other territorialist attempts, meant as counterweights to Zionism, were undertaken in the Soviet Union between the two world wars. The first was in the southern Ukraine and the northern Crimea, where four noncontiguous "national districts" (raiony) were established in the early 1920s and obliterated when the Nazis invaded. The second was in Birobidjan, where a "Jewish Autonomous Region" was proclaimed in 1934. This venture also failed, leaving a small Jewish minority in the region. In 1935, in response to the Nazi accession to power in Germany, Isaac Nachman Steinberg established the Freeland League in the United States. This organization attempted, unsuccessfully, to pursue Jewish autonomy by obtaining a large piece of territory in sparsely populated areas in Ecuador, Australia, or Surinam.
Zangwill turned his attention to settlement in Canada and Australia. But opposition from local residents led him to abandon the scheme.
Simultaneously, a wave of Jews immigrated to Palestine from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq and Turkey. These Jews were unaware of Theodor Herzl's political Zionism or of European pogroms. They were motivated by the centuries-old dream of the "Return to Zion" and a fear of intolerance. Upon hearing that the gates of Palestine were open, they braved the hardships of travel and went to the "Land of Israel." The Zionist ideal of a return to Israel has profound religious roots. Many Jewish prayers speak of Jerusalem, Zion and the Land of Israel. The injunction not to forget Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, is a major tenet of Judaism. The Hebrew language, the Torah, laws in the Talmud, the Jewish calendar and Jewish holidays and festivals such as Shavuot all originated in Israel and revolve around its seasons and conditions. Jews pray toward Jerusalem and recite the words "next year in Jerusalem" every Passover. Jewish religion, culture and history make clear that it is only in the land of Israel that the Jewish commonwealth can be built.
The Zionist ideal of a return to Israel has profound religious roots. Many Jewish prayers speak of Jerusalem, Zion and the Land of Israel. The injunction not to forget Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, is a major tenet of Judaism. The Hebrew language, the Torah, laws in the Talmud, the Jewish calendar and Jewish holidays and festivals such as Shavuot all originated in Israel and revolve around its seasons and conditions. Jews pray toward Jerusalem and recite the words "next year in Jerusalem" every Passover. Jewish religion, culture and history make clear that it is only in the land of Israel that the Jewish commonwealth can be built.
My understanding is that Uganda was proposed by Joseph Chamberlain in 1903. At that time Britain had no control over Palestine. His proposal was turned down because the entire basis of Zionism was a return to the historical land of Israel.
Quite so, but Herzl supported the idea. The world's northernmost desert wind.
Now, a Zionist source claims the Canadian and Australian options foundered because of hostility from local populations... I'd like to have independent confirmation. Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman
well, first of all, claiming a place that your ancestors left 2000 years and has occupants who have lived there for those 2000 years, is a really bad start.
Add to those while the Sephardim and Mizrahim are almost certainly descended from person who lived in Israel, the origins of the greatest antagonists for a "Jewish" state, the Ashkenazi, have disputed orgins, and may be descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in the Ukraine in 9th and 10th centuries.
Regardless, if this 2,000 year old claim is valid, do the descendents of Muslims expelled from Spain have a right to conquer and live in Andalucia (Al-Andalus.) Do Mexicans have the right to retake lands ceded in 1848 in the treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo? Do the descendents of the Canannites have the right to expel Israeli Jews from "their" land? And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
You keep putting it aside all the time, and I have to put it back again and again. Why do you want the Holocaust to explain a string of terror attacks that started before the Holocaust? And by the way, why do you want to make all Holocaust-surviving Jews complicit in Irgun's philosophy? (For your information, not all Holocaust survivors were even Zionists, while revisionists were a minority among them.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Why do you want the Holocaust to explain a string of terror attacks that started before the Holocaust?
and of course not all Holocaust survivors were Zionists,,,,,they were people trying to recover, and find someway to live their lives. What would you have had them do?
There was massive displacement of Poles, Czechs and others during WWII, and their contribution to slave labour and concentration camp statistics is far from negligible.
And yet - none of them used this as an excuse for terrorism after the war. For the most part they integrated successfully into communities in the UK, Canada and the US.
Don't forget too that there have been many examples of tribes or nations reinventing themselves after a move to new territory.
Why is the Middle Eastern types (and it doesn't seem to be exclusively a Jewish problem) who believe that that godforsaken stretch of near desert on the edge of the Mediterranean is the most?
What you don't understand is that there are always choices and options. The creation of Israel was a choice, not a necessity, and certainly not an inevitable outcome of the Holocaust.
Levelling Beirut and using banned phosphorus weapons on civilians is also a choice. Or do you think the Holocaust explains that as well?
Slavs? Ummm... no. Extreme brutality, gratuitous slaughter, mass slavery - but not extermination. He might have gotten around to it eventually but it never actually happened. And Czechs are a really poor example - as Nazi occupations go that one was pretty mild - comparable to France rather than the stuff that occurred in occupied Poland and USSR.
The Roma got the same treatment as the Jews but he wasn't equally into the idea. One was a centerpiece of Nazi ideology the other a throw in. Not that it made any difference to the Roma.
I haven't heard of any terrorism by Jews in US or Canada or the UK either, like the local Slav communities they lobbied and integrated. But at home it was a different story. The Poles and their neighbours indulged in plenty of atrocities against each other while the Germans who had the bad luck to find themselves within what became the Communist Bloc were brutally ethnically cleansed and the Red Army killed, looted and raped everyone in their path, but particularly Germans.
Yup, but an understandable choice under the circumstances.
(A Polish commenter at my blog pointed out that "according to polish Institute of National Memory (IPN) there is no evidence that Solomon Morel - or any close memmber of his family - was in KL Auschwitz. there are strong (i think) suggestions that he was in Stalin's soviet Russia in 1943-45.") The world's northernmost desert wind.
The only difference was that Poles around - say - Oswiecim were considered useful as labour while Jews were fast-tracked for extermination.
From a humanitarian viewpoint, the distinction is subtle - being a slave was not a healthy long-lived occupation - and 400,000 slave labourers passed through Oswiecim alone. The total number in Nazi territories was well into millions.
Once the war was over the plan was always to ethnically cleanse Poland and settle it with Germans. This would have required the extermination of the original inhabitants.
Certainly if Poland had been looking for a justification for violence, it could easily have found one.
I haven't heard of any terrorism by Jews in US or Canada or the UK either, like the local Slav communities they lobbied and integrated.
How is this relevant? The point is the Poles could easily have created a terrorist organisation after Yalta to try to liberate Eastern Europe. It's true the Soviets were tough bastards, but so were the Nazis, and the Polish resistance wasn't shy about taking them on.
One reason this didn't happen is because after Yalta the US and UK saw it as strategically inappropriate.
Aside from all the nonsense about homelands, this is as much about geopolitical strategy as anything else.
No more understandable than some of the alternatives, surely?
The point is you can't - at all - use the Holocaust to justify the creation of Israel. As a talking point it carries no weight when alternatives were available that would have guaranteed peace and very possibly prosperity elsewhere.
Just from a common sense point of view, the idea that a tribe has a claim on land that it came from two millennia ago is irrational at best and unique in history. I can't think of any other culture that uses events from Roman and pre-Roman times to justify political strategy today. It makes as much sense as the UK demanding reparations from Scandinavia for the Viking landings, or from Italy for the Roman conquest.
To be fair the UK has to take some of the blame here, because its diplomatic ineptness before and after WWII helped create today's Middle East.
But the Israeli narrative of a brave homeland surrounded by enemies is straight out the Old Testament, and should really have been put out to grass by now. Using it to justify atrocities isn't going to convince anyone who isn't convinced already.
Militarily it's naive. And diplomatically, the best way to deal with enemies is to avoid creating more of them in the first place.
Throw in the religion stuff, and the claim is comparable to Greece claiming the Turkish Mediterranean coast on the basis of The Illiad. The world's northernmost desert wind.
There were three resistance organizations operating in Poland during WWII - the Communist AL, the fascist NSZ, and the AK which covered the spectrum from semi-fascist right wingers to very left wing socialists, constituted the vast majority of the resistance, and was the official resistance legitimized by the government in exile. For obvious reasons the AL was not into fighting the new order. The AK decided armed struggle had absolutely no chance of success with the West having accepted Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and that therefore it would be wrong to add more death to all that had happened. The NSZ decided to fight on with a mix of guerilla and terrorist tactics. They were joined by some AK veterans, particularly after it became clear that the Communists were imprisoning and killing AK leaders anyways. However, even though most Poles hated their new rulers, they agreed with the AK leadership's decision.
Just from a common sense point of view, the idea that a tribe has a claim on land that it came from two millennia ago is irrational at best and unique in history.
You clearly aren't too familiar with modern Polish history, unless you think that referring to the 1400's rather than the 100's makes all the difference.
Like what? Neither Britain nor the US nor the USSR had been particularly interested in the fate of the Jews before and during WWII. The non-Jewish populations of German occupied Europe had been mostly indifferent to what was going on. The alternatives weren't particularly good from the perspective of the immediate post WWII period - create a state where you can rely on yourself for self-defense but be surrounded by enemies, or rely on people who hadn't defended you but were promising that next time they would. The Holocaust may not justify the creation of Israel, but the rise of antisemitism and what that ideology culminated in certainly explains a lot.
Who said anything about justifying atrocities?
So what are you defending? Have you completely forgotten what ignited your initial comment?
find someway to live their lives. What would you have had them do?
So you think the way to live their lives is to go to another country and join a group there who killed the locals since before the Holocaust?
Don't you think that, say, getting land from Germany would have been more just pay for the Holocaust? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
