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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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As it happened, relatively few of Germany's jews were genocided, because most of them were pressured to leave ("ethnically cleansed") before the war really kicked off. And no, no one did anything about that. In fact, Britain sent boatloads of jewish refugees back to Germany for trying to get into Palestine.

Immediately after 15 May 1948, the majority of the land belonged to the Palestinians.

According to who? Part of sovereignty is deciding who gets to keep what land. Britain held the "mandate" previously, from the Ottomans, and they gave it up. There was no deal in place due to the arabs declining, so sovereignty is a jump ball. Everyone had an even break to form a state, and the arabs were in a much stronger position. But they did not declare a state, and the jews did. Whatever palestinian national aspirations might have proved died when they lost to the Jews at the local level and were occupied by their "allies" in the neighboring arab countries. Part of that whole process was some of those arabs being forcibly moved off their land for any number of good and bad reasons. New borders had to be drawn, and policed, and defended on both sides. A new government had to make a lot of decisions about who gets what, and there's always losers in that process. They tend to come from the losing side, but the fact that arabs remain a significant portion of the Israeli population in a way that jewish residents of arab nations are not is a pretty big clue to how relatively ruthless those groups are.