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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   5140 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 24, 2023

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Where shall Israeli Jews go?

Let's assume Palestinians win in the end. Maybe it's the BDS movement that succeeds, maybe it's incessant terrorist attacks, but at some point everyone realizes that a single-state solution is the only option that is viable long-term. And this single state (from the river to the sea) is going to democratically become an Islamic state. A state that is unwilling to prosecute any hate crimes against its Jewish citizens (or non-citizen residents, a la Estonia and Latvia).

Will any other country agree to cede some of their land to a sovereign Jewish state? Something incredibly depopulated (to avoid another conflict with the natives), but still suitable for human habitation and with access to the sea.

Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia? Gascoyne in Western Australia (just 9000 people, you could just buy them off)? The Antarctic Peninsula?

I don't understand why, rather than doing some weird moral transference where the Holocaust conveyed a free pass to colonise and gradually displace an unrelated people, they didn't just give them a slice of Germany after WWII instead. It's not too late for that either, if all the German politicians and civil society personalities that want to insert oaths to Israel in citizenship tests and wax poetic about how its survival and well-being is part of Germany's "state raison d'être" ("Staatsräson") put their money where their mouths are. I'd vote for using a chunk of the Southwest for it, say everything starting from Stuttgart; it's maximally far from the capital, there is nothing too important there and it's strategically situated in a corner next to Switzerland and France, at least one of which is unlikely to have any of it if Germany were to somehow try the Hitler thing again. I'd expect such a move to have greatly positive EV for our gastronomy, too.

If it ever occurred to one of them, I could see an AfD member making a similar proposal. Offer to let them have East Prussia and Danzig (the true East Germany) as the new Jewish homeland. It would be a pretty bit of trolling.

Those territories has been now longer under the jurisdiction of Poland (78 years), than a part of modern Germany (united in 1871), so calling them the true East Germany is a bit of overstatement.

I was referring to the minor brouhaha that developed earlier this summer when a prominent AfD leader was accused of referring to East Germany as “Central Germany,” thus implying that East Prussia was the real East Germany. As far as I can tell, this was a smear job, and she was actually using “Central Germany” in its usual, uncontroversial sense. Still, if they’re regularly accused of being revanchist Nazis anyway, why not lean to it and troll? Tacitly accept the revanchist accusation and use it to deflect the Nazi accusation.

If the Berliners want to sacrifice any of Germany for a foreign people, they can damn well do so with their own benighted corner of our country.

I think giving them MVP and perhaps part of Brandenburg would be a fine choice too, if they would actually take that benighted corner. It would even be close to the ancestral-ish lands of many Ashkenazim.

Aren't their ancestral-ish lands located closer to your original suggestion, in Rhineland?

Shapiro means from Speyer, Dreyfus means from Trier, Galperin/Halperin means from Heilbronn, I don't know the names for Mainz and Worms, but they were important centers of Ashkenazim culture as well.

I don't think your scenario is remotely likely, mostly because the more the Palestinians actually start winning, the more support Israel would have. The only reason Palestine has so much support in the West, and even in the Muslim world, is because they're underdogs getting their teeth kicked in. If Israel started getting its teeth kicked in, a lot of international support would swing back them. But for the hypothetical, lets say America and Europe go hyper-isolationist and refuse to do anything remotely military aid related outside their borders no matter how much harm it would avert. Israel is left on its own, and the Muslim world takes the opportunity to all gang up on Israel. I don't think the Israelis would all move to anyone in particular together, they would just be refugees like Syrians or Ukrainians or any other ethnic group in humanitarian trouble. They'd be a bit different because normally such groups would go to their neighbors, but in this case all their neighbors would be participating in ethnic cleansing them. They'd probably end up mostly going to European Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, and a large portion also going to the US and Canada who usually tend to accept lots of refugees/immigrants.

At present Israel could take the rest of the Arab world by itself with little difficulty. It's no longer 1970; they've far outstripped their immediate contemporaries in ways they did not expect. If they had anticipated the economic state of their rivals they would not have ceded all the land they did for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, etc.

This doesn’t sound realistic without nuclear weapons. Israel has much superior technology but relies on America for it almost entirely as senior idf personnel openly and frequently admit. But then they do have nukes (although Iran might have them soon too)

I agree that it's pretty unlikely that the Arab world would commit to the sort of total war and mobilization that it'd take to beat Israel, but there are about 100x more Arabs than Israelis. If they were truly committed, they'd win. Just another thing that makes the scenario OP posited unrealistic though.

If we’re doing hypothetical scenarios I’m voting for Mars. We will eventually build human civilization there, and since nothing else has worked, why not. Either they’ll build a paradise on Mars or not. No one gives up their land, so nobody is put out. The land is nearly infinite as compared to Israel which is pretty small.

Nowhere. Any such situation will only lead to civil war, again - i.e a repeat of ‘47 but with a better armed and trained Jewish population, and a less willing Arab world.

Maximally offensive version: StarCraft-style base trade. They capture Mecca and/or Medina.

Slightly less contentious version: they plop down in a no-man’s land somewhere between the Donbas and the Dnieper to act as a buffer between two countries that both hate them less than they do each other.

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

Judging by the amount of Hebrew real estate ads I see every time I come to Cyprus (often) nowadays that process already started

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

That was the approach taken by Isreal in Dean Ing's novel Systemic Shock, book one of the Quantrell trilogy: when World War IV [1] broke out, America was too busy with other concerns to worry about helping defending Israel from its neighbors, and Israel eventually ended up doing a hurried evacuation to Cyprus as temporary residence while they prepared their ultimate destination colonies at the L-5 points.

[1] What about World War III? Well, that was in somebody else's book,,,

Maybe Bir Tawil, the unclaimed land between Sudan and Egypt?

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

Where will gay Israelis get married if they capture Cyprus?

A big chunk of the world.

Lesbos, obviously.

Latin American genericstan just gives them an autonomous territory with a flat tax rate? They move to Canada and Australia en masse? The Antarctic peninsula is probably too cold for large scale human habitation even under a climate maximalist scenario.

I suggest here. This is mostly federal land at present, there's something poetic about getting the West Bank of Great Salt Lake, and if you can't even get along with the Mormons, I wash myself and my country of any further obligation to help.

How likely do you think it that Jews with a desire for an actual state would be willing to settle for territory that has nothing to do with their holy land?

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