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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Britain could have rescinded the 1939 White Paper that capped Jewish immigration to the Palestinian Mandate at 75,000 per year.

At the cost of having to deal with endless wars in the Middl... er, never mind.

TBH a Mega!Israel with most/all of pre-WWII European Jewry transplanted there* would probably have colonized out to the historic borders of the old Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at this point just through population pressure, let alone the Jabotinsky's of the world.

*in 1948 the new nation of Israel had about 650k Jews in it, give or take. If we add in appx. 50% of the 1933 Jewish populations of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania (an estimate attempting to allow for for stay-behinds, pogrom-victims, or emigres to other places like the US), we turbocharge that to 3,700,000. For context, Jordan had appx. 500k people in 1948. Syria had about 3.25 million. Lebanon had about 1.3 million. Arabs would have been absolutely swamped all across the Levant, and if it had come to war as it did historically, God alone knows what would have happened. And if we assume the same rate of population growth as historically, in this alternate Mega!Israel, that would mean 50 million Jews running around the holy land today.

The real reason was that Arabist / orientalist sympathies were common in the subset of the British upper class that managed a lot of the foreign/imperial office (the diplomatic service pre-WW2 was, interestingly in both Britain and Germany, and plenty of other European nations besides, a kind of final redoubt for the aristocracy in politics) at the time. They were countered by strong pressure from wealthy and influential British Jews and some Christian Zionists, but there were enough of the orientalists to make allowing massive Jewish settlement in Palestine unpalatable.

No, I think the OP is more correct in this case. The spectre of widespread local Arab opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine and the resulting unrest coinciding with the coming new great war in Europe was rather obviously something the British wanted to avoid, orientalist sympathies or not.

Arabist / orientalist sympathies were common in the subset of the British upper class that managed a lot of the foreign/imperial office

I would be curious to know more. It's hardly a True History, but what I know of T. E. Lawrence is, albeit a decade or two earlier, a story of seeming indifference to Arab priorities and nationalism. Maybe sympathies changed in the interbellum period, but Sykes-Picot wasn't done for the benefit of their Arab WWI allies that fought the Ottomans.

Surely the emergence of significant oil deposits across the Middle East which were largely unexplored during the second World War have to had played a part in how the region was handled.

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