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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Israel was a fool’s errand. You can’t stand against two billion Muslims forever,

Israel in it's present location might have been. An Israel almost anywhere else, probably including one carved out of a German state as reparations for the war, would have been perfectly fine.

While I enjoy fiction like the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I don’t think an Israel anywhere else would have survived either. There were two very large waves of migration that have given the state the necessary human mass to survive (especially given the workshy chareidi population, which for lack of good alternatives probably would have migrated in large numbers to any Jewish state with religious freedom) - the Mizrachi migration and the Soviet migration.

The former wouldn’t have happened without Israel being located where it is (I don’t think the Jewish population of the Middle East would remain particularly large, but like the Christian one it would slowly have trickled out over time due to persecution, mostly to the West, maybe some to Latin America and Asia). The latter would never have happened, because an Israel located in eg (West) Germany would have been in the more discrete enemy category for the USSR than Israel and so emigration would be much less likely to be allowed (yes, some Soviet Jews went to the US, but they usually pretended they’d go to Israel first).

I also don’t think, even in their anger, any of the allies or even many Jewish leaders would have agreed it was structurally stable to carve out a corner of densely populated West (and it would have been West) Germany, ethnically cleanse the natives and establish some kind of Jewish ethnostate. Yes, the Ostsiedler were ethnically cleansed, but that was behind the Iron Curtain, in the chaos of the postwar period, and by countries with tens of millions of people in an empire with hundreds of millions of people.