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How does Israel make Jews safe?
I've seen it suggested that having a Jewish state creates a refuge that isn't dependent on the goodwill of non-Jews. Yet the past several years have demonstrated that Israel isn't actually self sufficient and that it is, in fact, totally dependent on trade with Europe and aid from America for it's continued existence. Israeli Jews would hardly be any safer than American Jews in a scenario where their primary patron went anti-semitic.
Yet even in a world where America does unconditionally support Israel I can't help but think of anyone who takes Aliyah as a certified moron. Modern Israel is not a safe place for Jews, it's a place where thousands of Jews can be killed or maimed in a day and hundreds kidnapped. If you are kidnapped, the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip. If you survive that then your best hope is that public pressure will eventually force Israel to free some mass killing gigaterrorists in exchange for your life, since Israel has demonstrated that it is incapable of rescuing hostages by force after more than 2 years of intense combat against the weakest militia on it's border.
All this for the low, low price of North Korean taxes, mandatory conscription, reserve service, and getting arrested if you choose to vacation anywhere outside of the US
Even for non-Israeli Jews who don't care about Israel either way, the brutal yet failed campaign to destroy Hamas is a giant anti-semitism producing machine. If the ghost of Hitler possessed Netanyahu with the goal of empowering a new generation of anti-semites then he could hardly have done better. Before 10/7, the slightest hint of anti-semitism was instantly denounced. Today, when the giga-normie Nelk Boys interview Bibi the next day they're forced to go on an apology tour with all the big name internet anti-semites like Nick Fuentes and Sneako. The shift in the public perception of Israelis and Jews is so downright seismic and probably couldn't be replicated in a world without a "Jewish state" soaking up bad press.
"Israel actually makes Jews less safe!" as a statement by itself is almost always concern trolling, and the rest of your comment basically confirms that's what you're doing. But for what it's worth, here's why this is straightforwardly incorrect:
1/ There were hundreds of thousands of Jews living in mandatory Palestine prior to Israel's war of independence that the Arabs tried to slaughter as soon as the Brits moved out. Establishing the state of Israel was the process of not allowing this to happen. On a pure lives saved vs lost basis, this by itself justifies the existence of Israel even considering all Jews killed worldwide since then.
2/ Israel makes Jews unpopular, but Jews have always been unpopular, so once again this is concern trolling. The idea that Jews might have reacted to the holocaust by thinking "maybe we shouldn't establish a sovereign state, because then people will really not like us" is hard to entertain with a straight face.
The idea that the only choices were "no sovereign Jewish state" and "sovereign Jewish state that is approximately akin to the present-day institution", which seems to be the premise of your second point's interpretation, is a false dichotomy.
There's no way Israel could be anything different. They're surrounded by enemies.
They started out with a fairly "European" mindset back when Israel was founded. That's why they didn't just ethnically cleanse the area back when they could've gotten away with it more easily. A cynic would say that that was a mistake. They are becoming Middle-Easterners in order to survive among the Middle-Easterners. Again, a cynic would say they're not adapting fast enough.
The only other option would have been to do it in a different location. Hand them part of defeated Germany after the war, and move the Jews already in Palestine out. But of course, Germany isn't the Holy Land.
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By 1945, about any land suitable for human settlement had a local population, including Madagascar. British Palestine still had a rather low population density (1922: 30/km^2, contrast with Germany 1925 @ 133/km^2). Seasteading just was not an option.
The area around Jerusalem was an obvious Schelling point. Picking another place would have meant splitting the project of a Jewish state into two, because some were likely determined to settle in their ancestral homelands or die trying.
The other alternative would have been North America, but I do not think that a truly sovereign state would have been in the cards there. Even if they had convinced the USG to sell them land, they would still have depended on having good relations with them because the US could have invaded them at leisure at any time.
I think the actual best option, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been to carve out a New Israel US state somewhere around Nevada (1920 population density: 0.27/km^2) or New Mexico. I think the only point where a Jewish state would really require sovereignty by design would be to allow Jewish immigrants from all over the world in, which in the US would be a federal matter. Something along the lines of "Jewish migration is unrestricted, but the migrants will not become full US citizens and are restricted to their state (with birthright citizenship still in effect)", would alleviate most of the concerns the rest of the US might have with allowing immigrants in while also being sufficient to allow refugees shelter.
In short, some similar deal to what the Mormons have in the form of Utah.
Sure, New Israel would have had to keep on the good side of the US for survival. But this is not very different from present day Israel. Only that it is much more popular for the US to leave a desert state like New Israel or Utah to its own devices and rather unpopular to send Israel tons of military aid.
I have argued before that the morally obvious solution after WWII would have been to create the state on the territory of the Axis powers. The Gdansk/NE German corner would have been the obvious choice given how much of a Jewish homeland the South Baltic already had been, and the German population was already getting purged from there either way, but if Soviet buy-in could not be obtained, then Holstein (putting them on the bloc border as a tripwire) or even Swabia (putting them next to neutral Switzerland) would also have been a reasonable option.
(I know @Southkraut hates this idea for obvious reasons, but there is a causal path from Israel in its current borders to US Middle East policy to refugees being generated and from insufficient direct German atonement after WWII to German self-loathing to refugees being accepted. Would giving some clay to the Jews back then really have been worse than slowly giving all the clay to the Arabs now?)
Besides, even for broadly the current location, there would have been better solutions (proper ethnic cleansing followed by the establishment of a firm border, not the current slowly expanding blob with partially incorporated territories).
(Also @ZanarkandAbesFan)
No arguments there.
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Honestly, if we had just donated Berlin or, fuck it, all of Germany north-east of and including Berlin to the Jews and considered ourselves quit of any debt after that, sure, fine, that'd have been a good enough deal in retrospect. Better than the near-century of guilt-mongering we had instead. But I doubt it. The propaganda game has taken on a life of its own even as far back as WW1, and Germany was going to be the villain for some time yet no matter what. With the Soviet propaganda and infiltration machine doing its thing during the cold war on top of the earlier propaganda, the WW2 propaganda, the holocaust narrative and the profound jewish self-interest in maintaining Germany as obliged to pay infinite reparations forever, there was no way in hell Germans could have gotten off with paying no matter how high a one-time price. Too many parties did too much to ensure that we would not be left off the hook. And, yeah, okay, I can kinda see their reasons for it too.
But in the end I stand by this: Giving away German clay to no matter who wasn't worth it, because Land - they're not making it anymore. And once you sell, you're never getting it back. And Germany wasn't going to be buying its way out of German Guilt in any event.
Even if the guilt tripping had happened either way, I think it is plausible that it would not have translated into so many Middle Eastern refugees - both because American entanglement in the region would have been lower, and because admitting them is now also seen as part of our duty towards Israel (I have seen multiple instances of "Israel should expel the Palestinians and we should take them all in" in the deep-green comment sections of German papers at this point).
Also, under some versions of the idea, not that much clay would even have to be taken from Germany - Poland was already shifted far more west than it had to be, at the expense of Germany. It's counterintuitive from a modern perspective just how Jewish the Bloodlands used to be - percentages in the typical larger city ranged from 10 to 40.
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Or Sonora, per the Cooper Plan?
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Thanks for getting me to ask ChatGPT, "how many Jews could survive on South Georgia Island?" which definitely didn't put me on a list somewhere. (The answer is 5-10 thousand btw)
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I feel like this is missing some obvious "thirteenth tribe" joke, maybe in reference to the great Mormon work of literature Battlestar Galactica.
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Not really, unless you want to broaden the scope of the debate to include possibilities that I doubt OP had in mind like the Jews having a sovereign state in Madagascar (which I do think would have been preferable but has not been a viable choice for about a century).
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