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German people were interned in the US following the US entry into the war. Plans were drawn up for more extensive internment of all German Americans but were scrapped since there were too many of them. Redefining things to be a 'country' is irrelevant. Getting down to brass tax it's about people. Everyone understands this when they are forced to act in reality.
Yet, to this very day, many jews harbor resentment towards Germans. Some going as far as they can in upholding the old anti-German boycott.
Maybe I am being too hot tempered and uncharitable here but I really can't fathom what your point of bringing 'countries' into this would be other than to obfuscate things. Jews did not need to be a country to act as a people. They knew of themselves as the jewish people, they grouped up as the jewish people and they made declarations and took actions as a people prior to Israel ever being a thing. In fact, the only way Israel as a country could come to be in the first place was because of jewish people acting as a group.
So to turn your thing on its head a little bit, and to attempt to highlight my issue with it; are jews liable for the creation of the state of Israel?
The difference is precisely that countries are legal units, while peoples are not. A "people" is a mellifluous concept without a fixed definition (and "Jews" certainly demonstrates that better than most peoples, considering how Jews themselves can't agree on who is Jewish and antisemites, as I stated below, have an extremely extensive definition of it); a country is a concrete legal unit.
Who did? Did all the Jewish people in the world take a vote and agree to be bound by its results, or something? Germans did take a vote to elect the Nazis (and parties that had already indicated they'd work with the Nazis, ie. DNPP) into power; that's precisely one of the things Germany being a country allowed them to do.
The country of Israel was very specifically created by one specific movement, the Zionist movement; as you surely know, there were a lot of Jews at the time who explicitly and expressly disagreed with the Zionist movement, its actions and its goals.
I don't really understand the references to "some Jews" continuing to boycott the Germany or whatever. That would just indicate that most don't, no? It just seems to demonstrate the difficulty that talking about "Jews" as a people as an equivalent to a country is; one can just take any combination of (usually negative) actions by some Jews and then assign blame on them to all Jews, generally. Some Jews unfairly boycott Germany to present day. Some Jews founded Israel. Some Jews started communist revolutions in Germany, and other countries. Same Jews? Usually not, but does it matter?
On the contrary, Germany, being a country, can begin a "boycott" of whatever country it desires (ie. the current Russian sanctions, for example), and that boycott immediately becomes legally enforceable and binding on all Germans and German businesses, at least in theory. There's nothing unclear about this, the basic principle does not require interpretation (though of course the details of the actual sanctions might require it).
No, just like not every German in Germany voted in the elections that got Hitler power. But jews did express themselves through thousands of organizations that convened and agreed that they would take action against Germany in 1933. They did not need to be a country to do this. Which displays just how contrived and argumentative your insistence on 'countries' is. As if these people can now not be responsible for their own actions because they don't qualify as a country.
So what is the ratio here that allows one to associate Germans being responsible for the holocaust but not jews with Zionism?
No, what was being demonstrated is that jews see no issue holding a negative opinion of Germans. Which would be equally wrong with regards to your post on what people should do. Demonstrating just how irrelevant your particular pontifications are with regards to my position, which is the same as the jewish position on Germans.
Except no one was talking about Germans as a country except you. If jews could not take collective action unless they were a country you would have an argument. But this is obviously not true, as jews can take actions as individuals and as groups. Like they demonstrated in 1933 and have demonstrated time and time again with collective action through organizations.
What I was commenting on is this:
It's the country of Germany that is paying money to Jews (not all Jews, mind, those who can lay claim to being mistreated by the country of Germany in WW2). This is, in fact, not the same thing as the "Germans", though of course there's a high degree of overlap (most Germans, at least if we go by German citizenship, live in Germany - of course by some other definition one might find most don't, considering the German-Americans and the like, and most people living in Germany are German citizens).
However, if a German citizen moves and starts working elsewhere, he no longer is contributing to German taxes and thus no longer is paying to the Jews, even if he was the grandchild of Amon Göth or Rudolf Höss. On the other hand, if I move to Germany and start working there, I'm now paying taxes that will go for the payment of Holocaust compensations. Hell, presumably I'll be doing that even if I just go to Germany as a tourist and buy a meal, since I'll be paying VAT on it.
Should Germany be paying compensation to Holocaust victims? Probably the direct victims but not their descendants, but that's the decision for the democratically elected German government to make, ultimately. Germany could, in fact, unilaterally decide to stop paying compensations. It might lead to international loss of prestige, but many things do. The reason why Germany doesn't do that is, ultimately, related to the domestic politics of Germany.
The reason why I harp on this is that it's really the crucial difference between talking about Jews being responsible, as a people, for whatever you choose to blame them for and Germans being responsible for Holocaust compensation. It's not, strictly speaking, Germans as a people - it's Germany as a country. Countries can be responsible for their past actions in a wholly different way from peoples, as legal units.
And the point of that paragraph was to give an example of how people think.
The fact that a country existing provides some mechanisms for others to seek recompense does not change the fact that people feel they are owed something from another group. There's no crucial difference. Jews felt the Germans did something to them. Not the country, the people. Cruel acts against individual Germans or people who collaborated with Germans are seen as just. The fact that there exists a mechanism, due to Germany being a country, to seek recompense does not change the fact that there is a motivation behind using that mechanism. That mechanism existing or not is irrelevant to the point being made about how people use language and generalize with regards to groups they do and don't like.
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